Beyond School

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:

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