Tag Archives: collaboration

Many Voices: A Global Creative Writing Twittory for K-8 Worth Joining

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 :)

Open Thread 2: Your Dream Elective Class for a 1:1 High School?

This isn’t theoretical – necessarily. It could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.casablance by pater-noster

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

My Traveler’s Map at 45

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:

Clay’s US States map

(–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:

Clay’s Visited Euro 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”):

Clay’s World Map

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.)

2007: The Year of Creativity – Let’s End with a Holiday Twittory!

’tis the season by (nz)daveTis 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