Tag Archives: creativity

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

’tis the season by (nz)dave 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

Quick Round-Up: Bad Selflessness, Bad Morality, Edublog Awards, and Students 2.0 Blog Countdown

I’m off to Bangkok for the Apple Distinguished Educator 2007 Asia Institute in 24 hours, so I’m crazy rushed: sub plans for 3 missed classes, packing, the usual teachery stuff (gradebooks and other banes), prepping a presentation for how 1:1 is working (and sometimes not working?) at our school. (I really look forward, more than anything Apple, to simply re-uniting with International School of Bangkok’s Kim Cofino and Justin Medved to hone our collaborative visions about the 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling, plus whatever they’re cooking up that I might support from Korea. I’ve missed these two since seeing them in Shanghai for the Learning 2.0 Conference in September.)

But here are a few things on my mind before I go:

The Wrong Kind of Selflessness

I don’t care how wealthy, “elite” (silly word connoting “more shopping power” in today’s age), and conventionally “well-educated” a student body is. If the emphasis is on GPA, SAT, Advanced Placement overload, and hyper-extra-curricularism for the sake of college application bullets (“I was in student council, Model United Nations, Cheerleading, Basketball, Debate Club, and Future Workaholics of America”), the result is often painfully obvious: all of those extrinsically motivated pursuits are a Faustian Bargain.

What is lost in this mad rush for the killer college app is this: the soul itself.

Okay, I don’t believe in this Iron Age concept. Let’s be modern and call it “the self.” It’s every bit as precious, without the theological baggage. I’m talking about the sense of who you are, of what you want to do, and the path of learning and creating based on those two senses – learning about the world the individual self is called to, and creating a worldview on that basis, and creatively contributing to that world at some point. I’m talking about your freaking life story.

It’s an opportunity cost thing. Our time is finite. 24/7 is a reality we so far haven’t transcended. And if you are being force-fed college application steroids every waking moment – classes in school, schooly extracurricular activities after it, SAT prep night classes after school and on weekends, other tutors and AP prep classes ditto – then what is not being fed, again, is the Most Important Thing: the Self, the Essence of your own genetic thumbprint, the special meat-package of who you are as an individual.

You may gain the Ivy League, but you lose your soul. You lose your voice, your creativity, your sense of wellness, wonder, and self-impelled exploration. Outside of that GPA, there’s not much there there. “Bookful blockheads,” to quote Samuel Johnson, with “heads stuffed full of facts” (to tweak Eliot).

My evidence? Try this: 30 students with MacBooks, most of whom are sincerely committed to a Project Global Cooling, but who are bewilderingly unable to produce a single short film about it, a single podcast, etc, in over three months. Let me translate: they have the money, the wealth, the grades, the intelligence; but when it comes to a simple “create something, play, produce, get fertile”? Nada. Too busy outside of our 40 minute/week activity block with all those Faustian pursuits. And, I suspect, too conditioned by a life of “schooling” to relax and create with that true artist’s grip by 96dotsperinch acceptance of failed sketches in pursuit of the successful one. Too success-driven (conventionally defined) to be creative. Too fearful of “failure” to create something that doesn’t work. Too over-scheduled to have time to even try. Shocking, really. And sad.

We celebrate one kind of selflessness, and rightfully so; but this is the wrong kind. It’s a selflessness, ironically, born of selfishness – of the desire (probably more parental, institutional, and cultural than anything) to get into a “top” college. What a devil’s conveyor belt we’ve built with our schools. Sell your soul, go to Harvard.

The Wrong Kind of Morality

Other bloggers know that curious fascination that comes while skimming your sitemeter stats for the search terms that bring visitors to your blog. Me? Since posting my “Teaching the F-Bomb” about my AP Lit students’ modern translations of the constant (but more sublime than today’s) cursing in Shakespeare’s King Lear, I’ve gotten a surprising number of hits from people who apparently consider student cursing a moral issue worth researching.

Again, how Iron Age.

Can’t we aim for a modern moral framework here? Instead of expending energy trying to stamp out certain vowel-consonant combinations that do no harm beyond ruffling a few Victorian sensibilities – and I’m not saying we shouldn’t teach the proper times and places for the use of colorful language – can’t we instead focus on student habits that do much more damage? How about:

the throw-away packaging addiction (bottled water, fast food, etc)
the consumer habits that support socially immoral practices (like buying diamonds, for example, or Nestle products that rely on child slavery in Africa – aren’t these worse than saying “f&#k” a million times?)
driving two-ton pollution machines without a thought to reducing their use

I’m so tired of that hackneyed argument that “science without morality is dangerous.” The problem is more located in our morality itself. Whatever culture you’re in, it’s a safe bet that your moral framework comes from some variation of Iron Age goat-herder or nomadic capiliera goatherd by meeware1 warlord. The moral issues they faced are different from ours. Joseph Campbell said it well:

For a civilization that has sent a man to the moon, it’s absurd to follow moral imperatives written before the invention of the wheel.

Or something like that. I paraphrase.

We’re in dire need of a revised Ten Commandments if we want our species to survive the 21st century at all. Resisting coveting my neighbor’s ass isn’t going to slow global warming or reduce the population explosion. (Actually, if “ass” meant what it means today instead of what it meant in Moses’ time – sorry, King James’ – maybe it would reduce population growth.) (That was a joke.)

But really. We’re educators. The next generation learns from us how to think critically about right and wrong, good and bad. Can’t we think critically about it ourselves? (And if Google brought you here because you’re looking for a way to wash your students’ mouths out with soap, I hope instead you’ll consider a bit of a moral paradigm shift, some soap for your own moral mouthings.)

Students 2.0 Coming Soon

I have a privileged, behind-the-scenes view of the planning going on for the Students 2.0 edublog launch. These young adults – disguised as mere “students” – are so brilliantly fun, smart, and creative, they intimidate me. And I’m learning a lot as I get to know them. (News flash: they’re smarter than me in a good number of ways.)

Watch out, edublogosphere. They won’t be raising their hands and asking for permission to talk here. Stay tuned for more.

Photos: 96dotsperinch and meeware1

K12 Online Conference: Impressions So Far

My 20 Korean won regarding the K-12 Online Conference presentations I’ve watched or listened to so far.

General Impressions:

1. The Need for Classification of Presentations into a “Beginners – Advanced” Continuum

That heading pretty much says it all. K12O has a wildly diverse audience, and apparently an equally diverse group of presenters. Some of the presentations offered little that was new for me, but surely useful for others. A “101 / 201 / 301 / 401 / Post-graduate” type classification scheme might help us navigate more efficiently.

2. A Focus on Creativity in Presentations

I’m as guilty of screencasts and talking-head/endless voiceover as the next person, so this is aimed at me as well as anybody else. (And Dean’s to blame for this wish ) Simply put, it would be nice if we all aimed for more design, style, and production values in our presentations. Since we’re all marching into this new territory together, and since the tools are all new, it’s understandable that we’re trying them all out – screencasts, Voicethreads, Ustreams, Slideshares, video podcasts, whatever. But it would be nice if we elevated the creative aspects of presentation to a higher level of priority, and aimed to entertain as much as to inform. I’m talking structure, visuals, audio, the whole shebang. And again, I’m as guilty as the next guy. You have to agree, don’t you, that more artistry would make us all happier, yes?

Introductory

If All My Classes Did This:

Using Toondo and other comics-making and graphic organizer websites in the classroom.

Learn to Blog: Blog to Learn: Anne Davis

Anne nicely identifies her audience in her first sentence: “This is for those new to the world of blogging.” Like Karen Richardson, Anne also keeps her video short, and simply gives an overview of the companion wiki for this presentation. Well done, Anne!

Intermediate

Crossing the Copyright Boundaries: Karen Richardson

A nice, short overview of a more elaborate wiki walking teachers and students through the current copyright minefield. Looks good, and nice and short – 5 minutes!

Sustained Blogging in the Classroom: Jeff Utecht

Getting beyond the “I have a blog” stage. Similar to Dean’s focus on quality. Jeff argues against blogs as journals (posting about “my cat fluffy,” as one of the Hawaii students said in a Skype talk last year during the 1001 Tales). Jeff and I are on the same page here. I’m setting up my high school English students, school-wide. But Jeff and I differ on this: he focuses on students and teachers conversing on the blogs, while I’m hooking my high school students into claiming their blogs on Technorati, subscribing to real-world blogs based on their interests, and linking to them – with full expectations that those real-world, “open range” bloggers will follow the trackbacks to student blogs, and start connected conversations with the world.

Jeff doesn’t specify what grade levels he has in mind, so maybe he’s not thinking of the secondary level – high school – as I am.

Jeff shares Mark Ahlness’ grade 4 classrooms reading each others’ blogs (and in some cases, adult edublogs!) as Sustained Silent Reading time, and encouraging students to reply. Bravo to Mark for allowing blog-reading during SSR. I’m still pushing that in our own SSR time in the high school.

Jeff moves to discuss Clarence’s redesigning of classroom space to create physical conversation places, but I’m unclear how that connects to sustaining blogging.

The last half of Jeff’s presentation keeps its focus on the elementary level, so I scanned across it. It contains solid ideas for setting up conversational blogging networks globally.

Something I wish we would try more of is not peer-to-peer blog conversations – students reading and writing with their own age group – but more vertical designs. The idea of each age reading the blogs of those one year older, and writing about what they learn on their elders’ blogs to an imaginary audience of readers one year younger, creates a continuous chain of Vygotskian reading in the “zone of proximal development,” and writing-to-teach that produces the best learning. My head is not there right now, but it seems a very pedagogically powerful way to design K-12 blogging.

On a side note, check out the YoungWriters07 wiki “New Zealand Chrissy” and I put up a couple of weeks ago for a currently active and already quite large list of links to blogging classrooms of all ages and grades. Korean, Kiwi, Aussie, Thai, American, and Canadian classrooms (and only my best Korean bloggers, not the whole class – more of Dean Shareski’s influence on quality) are there for the connecting. List your own bloggers there too. It’s open.

Then Jeff shares some blogging rubrics and assessment strategies. Worth a watch for those wanting to get beyond “just blogging.”

Advanced

Design Matters: Dean Shareski

Vital. The focus is not about tools, mercifully, but about standards of aesthetic and conceptual quality. I’ve already written about this in other posts, and haven’t stopped thinking about it in my own daily rounds as teacher, tech integration specialist, and English department head.

Brian Lamb, Alan Levine, and d’Arcy Norman’s “More Than Cool Tools.”

I’ll just say that Brian Lamb’s “remix” section beginning at 22.23 and following was particularly “deep” for me. The companion wiki seems unfinished, unless I missed something. It would be nice if it linked to the avalanche of tools and resources in this presentation.

Highlights for me: Google Co-op: embedding its search window (around 23 minutes)
OER Commons: filters searches for k12 domains (around 27 minutes)

Assessment and Evaluation in the Age of Networked Learning: Konrad Glogowski (focus on blogging)

When Konrad speaks about classroom blogging, the world should listen. He’s one of my guiding lights in my own experiments in Seoul. Highly recommended for his quest, like mine, to remove the “schooliness” from blogging-as-homework and make it an authentic, conversational, connective, writerly experience for our youths.

“Cellphones as Learning Tools” by Liz Kolb:

The Cellphone podcasting section had great ideas if you’re not an American abroad in a non-English-speaking country. But that’s my problem. (Well, I suppose our Korean-speaking students could find local services that allow web-based cellphone recording.) Liz has a great series of project ideas for any interested teachers. See 21 minutes and following.

The Cellphone Photoblogging section is also unexplored territory for me, but again, I need to learn if this is free in Korea. Take photos and send them to Flickr, Blogger, or Bubbleshare. Confession time: I don’t know how to send emails with my cellphone. But it’s a Korean model, so it’s all harder than Greek to me. Is it as simple as entering an email address and hitting “send”?

Video Recording with Cell Phone: eyespot.com, jumpcut.com, youtube.com allow free posting and editing of cellphone videos. Nice set of project ideas for this at 35.18.

General Project Ideas:
- Content-related Ringtones: phonezoo.com
- Logos and Wallpapers for Cellphones: pix2fone.com, pixdrop.com
- Text Messages: textforfree.com, txtdrop.com, reactee.com
- More project ideas for Ringtones, Logos, Text Messaging. Some good stuff here at 52.19.
Cellphones as a Research Tool:
- See ready.mobi.com to see what websites are accessible from cellphones
- Flickr, Wikipedia, Yahoo are accessible to find info on the fly.
- Free reference tools: Google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/sms will answer research questions with text messages?! Text a Librarian at selu.edu/library/askref/index.html is similar. Wow.
- Plusmo sends RSS feeds to your cellphone.
- Mobilequery.com free spellcheck, dictionaries software.
- Mobile-friendly Websites: homeworknow.com (fee), zinadoo.com, winksite.com, mob5.com. Great for homes with no access.
Digital Assignment Notebook: use alerts, voice recording, etc.
Math site: Math4mobile software for cellphones: stats, geometry, can replace graphing calculators?
The future: Cellphones as LCD projectors? Scanners? Zip drives? Solar? Coming soon….!

Release the Hounds: Chris Harbeck on ePortfolios and “Unprojects”

Chris is a middle school math teacher trying some very comprehensive, ambitious stuff by setting up ePortfolios for his students. He ties them into Parent-Student-Teacher conferences.

I wonder as I watch why Chris says an ePortfolio is not a “snapshot” of a learner’s learning, but a narrative of that learning across an entire year. James Linzel, my old colleague at Shanghai American School, spurred the idea of exploding the school-year boundaries by making ePortfolios continuous across the years, not within them. That’s something we’re attempting with our blogging Capstone Project, where students will maintain and sustain their blogs from grades 9 to 12, culminating in their last months in their graduating year with a “My Learning Journey” type summative project reflecting on their four year record of who they have become.

I imagine Chris is in a school without the faculty buy-in to keep his students on the paths he creates for them after they leave them. If it’s true, that’s a shame. Another prophet unknown in his own home.

Interesting use of a student’s individual wiki as an ePortfolio. See Video 1, 2.22 timestamp. Students create math portfolios to teach their parents.

Chris is re-tooling his approach for this year. He links to his releasethehounds wikispace for more on this.

Chris’ third of four short videos had no sound in my iTunes, so I was your typical lazy-fingered browser: I skipped to number four (we bloggers know how rare our readers use their click-muscles by the paucity of outgoing clicks listed in our sitemeters – so I’m no different).

Number four, on “unprojects,” is great, must-watch stuff. It seems Chris used parts one through three as build-ups to what seems to have been a pedagogical epiphany for him. The structure was effective, but if you have no time to watch all four videos, be sure to at least watch number four.

And kudos to Chris for a well-designed presentation. More than screenshots, nice graphics, and one of the most interesting speaking styles – a soft, but at the same time almost breathless, sort of barely-restrained excitement pulses throughout. Really interesting and very effective delivery. Different, original.

For more posts on K12 online, see:

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Dean’s “Design Matters” – to My Walden 2.0 Project

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It’s only natural that the K12 Online Conference presentations feel uneven to some of us. Each presenter has a different background, level of experience, set of priorities, agenda, audience. Some hit me, some don’t.

Dean Shareski hit me on this biting Seoul Saturday morning. If a lot of the more tech-oriented presenters are the Henry Fords of this Digital Revolution, Dean is more of a William Morris. Aesthetics is the focus of his “Design Matters” presentation, and if you only watch one K12 presentation, this is the one I’d recommend. It puts the ghost back into the machine.

Dean asked for feedback from his viewers, so I gave the below on the comments section of his K12 Online presentation page. I’m pasting it here because it’s the beginning of a new project for me: The Campsite Seminars, I’m calling it for now. Or maybe I like this better:

Walden 2.0

Here’s the comment:

Dean asked for feedback as we watched, and I assume that means feedback here, though it’s strange to be first. Anyway, here’s mine.

I like Dean’s opening point: much classroom-created content (the majority?) suffers from poor design – “cheesiness” in the worst sense (think Kraftt).

(Warlick’s keynote touches on the same idea with his “competitive information products,” though the worker-drone connotations of “products” still irks me, as it focuses more than I would like on economics and money-making, more than on aesthetics and character, I would argue – but anyway….)

Christian Long’s interview suffered from poor audio quality, so I couldn’t understand much of it (we’ve all experienced the wrath of the techno gods, so I sympathize). I did catch, though, the exploitation of simple walking distance and space between buildings as a learning opportunity, and that resonated. Our own campus is very restricted by its hilltop, woods-surrounded setting, which is the opposite of the example Christian used of having to walk a mile between buildings: we’re too cramped. But WE DO HAVE THOSE SURROUNDING WOODS. That’s fascinating in this new light. I’m picturing possibilities of assigning students – in small groups, so the discussions are not diluted by too many voices and not enough time – to take voice or video recorders of whatever sort into the woods to record conversations in that setting – I can’t help but hope that the setting would influence the discussions in interesting and more thoughtful ways. Have them discuss a theme from our reading of King Lear, for example, or whatever topic might benefit from the meditative openness of a wooded setting. Recording these discussions – video seems more desirable, when I think about it – would allay most fears of “unsupervised” students in the woods. Take the footage back into the classroom and quick-edit these “campsite seminars” into short films. I’ll have to try this. It’s literally “Beyond School”

Dr. Schwier: “Does it work? Is it beautiful? Is it powerful? Is it inspiring?” This is refining my “campsite seminars” idea above. I said “quick-edit” those seminars just now. Why rush? That way Velveeta lies.

Why not assign them to be voice-overs for iMovie projects that add BEAUTY and FORCE via film, stills, music, titles? Yes, yes, yes: let’s aim for brie and camembert.

In fact, I’m seeing now that two or three class sessions of this new mode of “class discussion” – sitting on the pine needles under the autumn trees – might be best, to give students time to adapt to talking in natural surroundings, in “nature’s temple.” Talk about “educational architecture” – how about the dome of the sky over a canopy of pine?

(I’m liking this very much, Dean. Thanks for this very innovative angle. Much of the K12 conference so far has been school-2.0-as-usual, if you get what I mean.)

At 12:00 now: Planning. I’ll play along with my Campsite Seminars whim above, and apply the rest of your presentation, when possible, to it. Consider this a “teacher think-aloud.”

So the Seminars – I think they’ll actually work better for something more relevant to my students than Shakespeaere (which they and I love). I think, instead, it will work for the classroom blogging “Capstone Project” I’m currently launching with them.

The idea of that project for my high school seniors – so close to the end of their 12 year sentence of infantilization in schools – is to help them learn about whatever their passion, and their possible future (a)vocation, is, by reading real-world bloggers who share their passion(s), and writing about what they read on their own blogs.

They’ve already created their blogs, and this weekend, are composing their “about” pages and searching for feeds about their passion(s)/interest(s) on Bloglines (I still haven’t found a better feed-searching engine than Bloglines’). They’ve claimed their blogs on Technorati, embedded Sitemeter and Clustrmaps. Now they’re ready to connect.

The problem I think I’m fighting, though, is that they don’t understand the magical potential this project offers them to make connections with people in the world of kindred passions. They’ve never linked to a writer in a blog post, and seen that writer turn up a day or two later in comments.

They’ve been too busy writing 5-paragraph essays – or homework-assignments-as-blog-posts, which is the New Abomination – about irrelevant subjects to tired teachers all their lives to write about what they love to real-world readers – so they just don’t get it. They don’t know how to dream, how to let themselves be visionary; and they don’t know how dreams and visions can become realities through connective writing.

So, in short, I’m trying to introduce them to the world beyond school, but they’re so “studentified” they seem unable to see this as anything but homework because, after all, I’m a “teacher,” and they are “students,” and all of this is happening in a “school.”

Sheesh.

So I think these Campsite Seminars are better suited to serving as a “retreat from school” in both the spatial and the psychological senses. I want them to think – possibly for the first time, since so many of them are so constantly addled by the pressures of “schooliness,” the homework, the SAT’s, the college applications, the school spirit jive, on and on – about which world they want to enter when they leave school forever – in seven short months.

So back to you, Dean: How do I plan for these 70-minute retreats into the woods to bear fruit? [Clicks “play”….]

“What’s the purpose of your movie?”
–Hm. In an attempted nutshell, to figure out:
1. What makes you tick.
2. What you want to become.
3. Which is what you will read about on blogs and other sites.
4. And what you will write about…
5. For an audience you want to attract.

Okay, that’s about as far as I’m going to take this here. I see Dean asks for feedback on his blog, and on the wiki he made for this, etc, and suddenly feel like my students when they’re dealing with my tendency to have a million sites for classwork

Dean, it was a very valuable presentation. You got beyond the tools and beyond the generic edublog talk.

Thanks for that.

For more on the quest for the student blogging grail, see these posts:

Photo credits:
Cheese Wrap by chrissam42
French Cheese by Zeetz Jones
Tokei-ji by Raiden256
Art Nouveau by Face It

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Beyond School

Dispatches from the War on Schooliness