Beyond School

In the depths of New York City, on top of the Empire State Building, a creature rested. That creature was me….

I’m moved to plug Many Voices, a Twitter creative writing global collaboration (ages 5-13?) created by George Mayo in Washington, D.C.

The more I think about it, the more brilliant it is. [Update: I elaborated on the brilliance in a comment, and decided to post that comment here. See the bottom of this post for the list of things I like about this project.] But I’ve already said that in an email I sent to some K-8 teachers in my school in Seoul, so ctrl + c and ctrl + v:

This is an amazingly low-labor, globally collaborative creative writing activity that I hope we can find someone in Seoul with a K-8 classroom to add to. Each student gets to add only one, 140-character segment to this story. It’s such an engaging idea for doing as much as you can for a story with one idea and a tight restriction on wordiness. So cool! If no can do, please pass to other K-8 teachers!

Here’s how George explains it – and the ease of this project is brilliant – on the Many Voices wiki:

@manyvoices is an ongoing collaborative story being written by 140 different elementary and middle school students across the globe using Twitter.com. Each student will use the same @manyvoices Twitter Account. to contribute their 140 (or less) characters. The story concludes at the 140th entry. At that point, we collectively edit and revise our little Twitter story before publishing it as a small book through Lulu.com.

If you join, you’re in some great company. Here’s the line-up for the coming weeks:

week of January 7th thru Jan. 11th:
@julielindsay Qatar 123elearning.blogspot.com (Jan. 7th & 8th)
@tombarrett England tbarrett.edublogs.org/ (Jan. 10th & 11th)

week of 14th thru 18th:
@todbaker China todbaker.com
@robinellis (Jan. 15th & 16th)
@LParisi (Friday’s Best) 17th & 18th???

week of January 21st thru Jan. 25th:
@mrjarbenne Ontario (24th & 25th)
@deacs84 Atlanta, GA.
@mscofino Always LearningThailand

Want to participate? Looks like George wants about four more global classrooms to join. Here’s his contact info: mrmayo.org [at] gmail.com. Or, twitter him @mrmayo

Check out the story unfolding here for how it works: http://twitter.com/manyvoices
Note: latest entries are on top, so read from the bottom up. Each is written by a different student.

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Chris Craft wanted more input on: Why I Find This Project “Brilliant.” Graham Wegner, Langwitches blog, Susan Sedro, and others have been writing lately about all the reasons that globally collaborative projects can fail. As a veteran of the 1001 Flat World Tales, I’ve always meant to add my dime to that topic. Here’s a few cents’ worth.

1. Many Voices is low-maintenance. Quick-in, quick-out, guarantees success. KISS. The more labor, the more chances of crashing. I learned this with the 1001 Flat World Tales. My own workshop for that project succeeded, but it took sweating buckets of blood. Other teachers often won’t have the time to invest the labor Chris Watson and I had to invest to keep it afloat.

2. The English teacher in me loves it for how it forces participants to consider the elements of fiction when they craft their single tweet contribution: how do I move the plot at this particular point in the story? How do I choose the best words, characterize best, detail the setting, etc?

3. Engagement: participants have to read the entire story tweet by tweet – close reading at its best, in a weird way – and the knowledge that each tweet is by a different author brings in some evaluative higher-order critical thinking about the quality of each tweet. “Why was tweet #122 so good, but #123 so lame?” “How could #125 miss the opportunity set up in the earlier tweets?” “What a brilliant plot twist tweet # 88 added!” That sort of thing.

4. Exposure to Twitter. How to follow that up with encouraging conscious networking is a question worth pursuing.

5. Sheer fun and creativity.

6. The wiki and the Lulu book publishing.

7. The around-the-world telling of an unbroken narrative, with each chapter representing one location for local flavor within the global mix.

8, 9, 10: fun, fun, fun.

That being said, I am a complete bum for not having made the time to look at the project Chris did earlier with digital storytelling – was it “Life Round Here?” I clued in momentarily, but life got in the way. I’ve asked Chris to reply with a link

This isn’t theoretical – necessarily. It could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Given a 1:1 MacBook school, a geeky teacher, no bandwidth or filtering or blocking restrictions, how would you design an elective class to showcase 21st century learning possibilities?

I’ve got an elective “writing seminar” beginning next week, with about ten students from age 15-17. Most have MacBooks.

I’m free to structure this class however I want. And it should be obvious I take “writing” in its communicative (and digital) sense – including multimedia, connectivity, project-based learning, the whole nine yards.

I see this as an opportunity to experiment. And to co-teach with anybody out there with an idea needing a classroom – maybe one of the many administrator, librarian, or academic readers out there who wish they still had a classroom to implement some ideas.

How can we seize this opportunity to do things differently and demonstrate the possibilities?

The conditions: class meets every two days for 75 minutes. There are no issues of filters or bandwidth to worry about: you name the site, from Skype to YouTube, from Twitter to eternity, we have access.

Assessment and grading can be as non-traditional as you please.

So there it is. Sketch your vision(s) below*. And let me know, also, if you want a hand in actually playing “teacher” for this class. You don’t have to be a “schoolyteacher.” Heck, you can be a freelance musician or gonzo entrepreneur for all I care. Socrates didn’t go to teacher certification school.

If I like the idea – and if the students do – we’ll run with it.

Deadline: Tuesday, 8 January 2008.

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*Remember: this is an Open Thread. That means there is no such thing as a comment too long. The thread is the thing. Also: notice your comment is followed by a link, via my CommentLuv plugin, to your last post, by title. [Update: Check out the 30-odd comments on the first Open Thread, "Your Fantasy Alternative School," to see how open threads collect great ideas and invite you to visit the blogs of the contributors.] And finally, if you like your comment that much, of course you can post it on your own blog as well. It’s not an either/or. Both here is better, since the thread adds to conversation, and the posting on your own blog keeps your own developmental archive intact. Thanks!

Photo: peter-noster on Flickr

Reading a post by NJ Tech Teacher (we tweet) that aligned with the Traveler IQ test from the post below prompted me to post my own World 66 maps. A little more yuletide fluff.

I didn’t leave the US until the Army helped me escape in ‘98. But while in the States, I had the Kerouac bug and hitchhiked or drove crosscountry through these states:

(–okay, I’m cheating with Alaska. My first flight to Asia touched down there for a layover.)

The (Clinton) US Army finally got me out of the States when I was in my 30s. So I put these places on my map:

(–I regret not traveling more while there. But I was new at being worldly.)

After the Army years come the teaching years in Asia (if only I’d known you don’t have to join the Army to escape the States – that international school teaching was there all along). Since 2001, I’ve added these places (dark red means “lived there,” light means “visited”):

My favorite places? Tuscany, Shanghai, Christchurch, Serbia, Lisbon, Mallorca, Kuala Lumpur, Prague, Eugene (Oregon), Laos, Sri Lanka, Paris, and a little island off Thailand until the jet-skis invaded.

Places I still want to see: Russia, India, Australia, Greece, the south of France.

An edu-thought: If you want students to know geography, give them a connection to it. I only know the places I’ve been. I’ve studied maps of the other places over the years, but they just don’t stick. My little sermon for simple collaborative activities from world classrooms.

(Speaking of which: I am in Korea. It is a 1:1 laptop school from grades 6-11. We do have access to every site you can think of. Get in touch if you want me to try to hook any classrooms up with yours. But be nice, and do it timely-like.)

Tis the season to be jolly. We only live once, so let’s end this most amazing year with some well-crafted, twitterary prose.

Don’t know what a Twittory is? Yet another amazing OZucator, Mike Seyfang, turned me on to this with his most excellent post today (from his most explosively creative edublog), in which he writes:

The story was underway and it appeared that I might need to write something on Wednesday. I could hardly get to sleep – my mind raced on long complex sentences comprising no more than 140 characters. About 2am I hit on the idea of using the minimum number of words to cause maximum disruption to the plot line. (I have always hated writing, was self branded as slow learner at school because of my hate of serialised text). I thought I could kill off the main character and maybe shift time in a very short sentence.

–and for which you must see his post for the rest of this gripping story.

As things stand at this moment, the roster for Twittory #2 is at about 34 people – a good 106 short of the required 140 for a properly-written twittory.

My new twitterfriends from Australia (@heyjudeonline) and the U.K. (@digitalmaverick), as well as the most excellent Minnesota scrivener Scott “Rip van Edison” Schwister (@sschwister) have all decided to join this Twittory #2.

Please jump in with us! What a fun, creative way to end the year. All you have to do is add your 140-character-maximum tweet to the story when your number comes up, and watch the story grow as others add their own tweets.

One tweet per person for 140 tweets will add up to a very interesting literary experience – maybe something we can find a use for in the classroom (or staff development room) after trying it ourselves.

Seriously: I’m so full of the love for my twitterverse and other networks, it would be a thing to remember. I’d love to see old friends and new jump into that Twittory roster, to usher out one wonderful year.

Photo: “‘Tis the Season” by (nz)dave

I’m still working out the ideas I got from watching Dean Shareski’s “Design Matters” K12 Online Conference presentation. I just applied the idea of quality design principles to an evaluative rubric called, “Why Do We Subscribe to Bloggers’ Blogs? Quality, Quality, Quality – 21st Century Style: A Guide for Secondary and University Bloggers.”

(Brevity was never my strong point.)

Click the screenshot above for a larger image. Better still, go to the Young Writers ‘07 wiki page for the document, and leave suggestions on the discussion page for improvement.

The K12 Online Conference makes me feel a bit like we’ve entered a stage of “Yeah, we’ve got it. We know about enough of the infinite tools and, more importantly, how to discover more of them, learn to use them, and adapt them to our purposes to create all sorts of multimedia and so forth. It’s time to turn the page, and focus on quality.”

Which takes me full circle back to Dean’s presentation.

So I’m presenting this guide to my soon-to-graduate-into-adulthood AP Literature students this week. Their individual blog-writing, based on self-selected, passion-based subscriptions in their RSS readers, will constitute a major part of their writing grade. It won’t be graded until the end of the quarter in ten weeks, and again at the end of the 3rd and 4th quarters. I want them to forget about grades and simply write their way into the connective world.

But they’re going to blog authentically. They’re going to earn their readers, subscribers, comments, and Technorati authority the same way we all do: by writing well, designing well, and connecting well on their blogs. I’ve really got reservations (on the high school level, anyway*) about giving students readers through “teacher-swaps” – “Have your class read my students, and I’ll have my class read yours” – because that’s, again, schooly. In the real world, writers and bloggers get audiences through committed reading, writing, and hyperlinking. The law of averages dictates that, if a student consistently links in his or her writing to writers far and wide with whom they share a passion, some percentage of those writers will respond.

That’s real. That takes the good, honest work of quality reading, thinking, and writing. Underline that: quality.

And as I’ve written before, this is a reason I’m against linking to whole class blogs on Support Blogging and other sites: entire classes do not produce quality. In my view, we should promote only our young writers or multimedia bloggers of quality. Otherwise we’re depriving them of the spotlight their talent deserves by lumping them with the lowest common denominator. We need more meritocracy, and less flabby democracy. Quality should matter.

Anyway.

I’d like to see teachers of the middle and early years take the rubric on the wiki, and adapt it to the skills-level and language of their students.

We’d then have a vertically articulated K-12 series of rubrics (or guides) to spiral students into truly networked, connective writing by the time they graduate high school. In the best cases, they’ll have global networks of kindred spirits in whatever niche of the blogosphere floats their individual boats before even entering college.

And we’ll say “Wow. We really did our job well. These kids have a bigger network before college than I did after college.”

(If you want a link to the current draft, here it is on Google Documents. But I hope some of you will pitch in for some netroots curriculum creation by making those spiraling rubrics on the wiki.

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*And yes, I can see assigning students within a class to read and respond to each others blog-writing with constructive feedback for peer learning and all of that. But that doesn’t mean we should promote them to world readership to equal degrees. Our coaches don’t do that on our sports teams. Why should we writing coaches be different? We want our best stars to make it to the pros.

For more on that classroom blogging grail-quest – it really is my greatest fixation as a teacher – check out these links:

Technorati Tags: k12online07cl09 k12online k12online07

Here’s an 8-minute promo movie I made for my school over the last few hours. I share it in case anyone wants a resource that talks through a couple of class projects we did last year in my grade 9 history and English classes - and shamelessly boasts about how special my school is for being the first 1:1 Laptop School in Korea.

The first project is “A Broken World,” a student-created wiki textbook and companion whole-class reflective blog about world history from World War I to World War II and the outbreak of the Cold War. (There’s lots of frustration in the sphere right now about blocked sites in schools, so this might be a useful demonstration of how valuable YouTube, wikis, and blogs are for enhancing creativity and learning.)

(By the way, I’ve been scratching my head lately about what to do with that Broken World wiki textbook. It’s really good stuff, and I’m proud of my students for making such an impressive resource. It seems a shame to just abandon it like one of Graham Wegner’s “learning jalopies” or some piece of digital flotsam. Anybody have any ideas of how to put it to use? I’m open to others fact-checking, extending, editing, using, donating, whatever. I just feel like there’s some experimentation possible here on how to put the “legacy products” we so easily talk about in the theoretical to the much-harder-to-pull-off practical use. In other words: help?)

The second project shown in the video is the first annual 1001 Flat World Tales flat classroom writing workshop on Wikispaces: 130 students at my school, Chris Watson’s school in Honolulu, and Michele Davis & Karl Fisch’s school in Denver. The promo walks through not only the wiki, but the (damnably) still-under-construction but worth-a-peek anyway 1001 Flat World Tales blog and website, featuring the prize-winning stories selected by our international student editorial board, plus author profiles, author podcast readings, editor profiles, student testimonials, and more.

Those student testimonials are highlighted in subtitle bars on the movie, which might be effective for persuading your admin to unblock these sites, again.

I really went over the top promoting my 1:1 Apple Laptop School as being “on the 21st century map,” since the point of the thing is to entice parents to send their kids to my school. It might produce a motivating jealousy in your own admin or school board to go 1:1 so they have such bragging rights themselves.

Or maybe the thing’s just a piece of junk. You tell me. (If nothing else, I got some iMovie practice out of it. Still trying to hone those skills.)

(And if you click on the video, by the way, it’ll take you to my AP Literature class Ning, which is open to the public. Sylvia Martinez of the Generation YES blog, and Diane Cordell of Journeys have both joined my students for literary discussions in the forums. You’re welcome to come inside yourself. Interesting talks about “schooliness” and literacy in there.)Find more videos like this on KIS AP Lit 07-08

Twitter has definitely shifted my networking and online writing habits. A case in point: Since I’m 14 hours ahead of the American east coast, I mentioned how lonely it was to be awake on Twitter when most of my compatriots are asleep. Graham Wegner in Australia, whom I’m recently enjoyed getting to know, answered my lonely tweet with a private email of New Zealand and Australian twitternames to check out. I did. My Twitbin is awake now when I am.

Two days later, “NZchrissy” tweeted a need for some student blogs to direct her students to visit and comment on. I added a few of mine from last year, but within ten minutes on Twitter we ended up somehow saying, in effect, “Hey, let’s just talk and desktop-share with Skype-Yugma and set up an ‘active student blogs’ wiki.” We did, and here’s the result: Young Writers ‘07 on Wikispaces.

Feel free to add your own student bloggers, and visit those already there. The links are listed by age group. Lots of Australians, New Zealanders, Americans, and Koreans there. (Jeff Wasserman, I hope this fulfills my promise to “flog” your HS English class blog in Connecticut.)

By the way, it occurs to me too late that this might be either redundant or needlessly competitive with the Support Blogging wiki. That wasn’t the intention. Instead, we just wanted to bang out a wiki of student blogs we know are active this year, and keep it free of burial under all the adult edubloggers out there.

So give it a visit, bookmark it, link to it, add your own. One-stop shopping for a student blogosphere only wiki, conveniently labeled with “‘07″ to communicate to all that that means still alive this year.

This time last year I was so new to the edublogosphere, I didn’t know about the K-12 Online Conference, so I missed it.

MISSED IT? What century am I in? I just watched last year’s keynote about an hour ago.

Anyway, this year’s converence goes live in less than an hour, and I’m curious to jump in, watch, converse, create, and learn.

From the Twitterverse: If your access is blocked, try this link: http://tinyurl.com/2dy2d2 .

Technorati Tags: ki2online07

Head on over to Patrick Higgins‘ Voicethread for his staff development workshop to both explore one very nifty educational tool and to have fun helping Patrick at the same time!

(Yes, the W.C. Fields icon is mine.)

Last week, I mentioned reading Jeff Wasserman’s post about how schools teach bad writing (the 5-Paragraph Essay and other abominations). I mentioned how it made me “want to make my AP Lit class Ning public. We’re having forum discussions about Organic Form v. Mechanical.”

The more I thought about atomizing those Ning walls and welcoming the world of people who like to talk about reading, writing, and how schooliness creates lifelong non-readers and non-writers, the more attractive the idea became.

So whoever you are, if conversations such as the one below entice you to share your thoughts with my students about literacy in schools versus the literacy so many of us adults managed to grow into despite them (okay, maybe you were lucky and had good teachers, which would be interesting to hear about), then come on in. My students gave me permission to invite you.

Here’s just a taste from one forum on how practicing the organic essay form for five weeks improved (or didn’t) these students’ writing – I hope you don’t take it as self-congratulatory, because that’s not the point:

Reply by Shim Sep 17:

Well, when I first came into the classroom, I really didn’t know if I belonged in this class or not. After my first mock exam I realized that it was really different from what I expected, it was HARD. But after a couple of classes and more mock exams I guess I found my own way of writing and letting out my thoughts, unlike the schooly ways that education has locked us up in. So far I believe that I’ve started to write faster and think faster, as we practice more and more, and realize more and more. I’ve also found out that, rather thinking to the “educational” way that I’ve been living up with for the past 17 years, just letting out my ideas felt more better and more reasonable (which I guess is organic writing).

Reply by Clay Burell Sep 30:

Jeez, that was nice to read. Schools try, but for some reason, usually fail, to make students love reading great stuff and trying to write great stuff about their own responses. You give me hope that maybe I’m not failing.

Reply by Shim Oct 1:

Yeah, I mean I never knew that I was able to “ENJOY” literature, because of the ideas that schools all over the world put into students like me. Literature is HARD, “Do it this way that way”, “great interpretation, but WRONG”.

I really hope some of you will browse and add your thoughts to those of my students. They’re really interesting people.