Beyond School

[Update: Ouch, that title bit me when I revisited this post after moving more boxes into my new apartment. I want to make it so clear (and try to below) that, as I've said before, I admire Karl immensely. Not only is he brilliant, he's also one of the few giants in this field who did more than look on with interest when I was trying to turn the 1001 Flat World Tales idea into a flat classroom reality. He helped turn "talk to action," to quote one of my favorite blogs, by lining me up with Michele in Denver, my first flat classroom collaborative partner. Quite possibly, that project would have remained an idea without Karl's contribution.

So the focus here is on ideas, and on extending them. To allude to "Did You Know?" is just shorthand - and I know that Karl knows that it's more than just economics. I hope the post below makes it clear that this is about ideas, and about one more unintended consequence of the dizzying effects Karl's "viral" video.]

Diane posts a thoughtful extension of the “student voices” conversation taking place (and here) lately on her new-ish (and worthwhile) blog, Journeys. She starts with this definition of “student voice” from Wikipedia:

“the individual and collective perspective and actions of young people within the context of learning and education.”

After summarizing the conversation amongst Karl Fisch, me, Scott Schwister, and Carolyn Foote, Diane reflects:

All of these conversations have led me to reconsider some of my plans and strategies for next school year. I had intended to encourage students in my class to share their projects with our Board of Education, both to demonstrate what they’ve accomplished and to advocate for more technology tools being made available in the district. But if I, as teacher, choose what they present, is this truly “student voice”? Should I let them decide what to request and how to do so?

Diane then closes with one very pregnant, very relevant (my new shibboleth for education) quote from Piaget:

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.

Diane concludes, “Our students need to find their voice, and we need to learn how to listen to it.”

I left a lengthy comment on Diane’s post that readers on aggregators won’t see on my CoComment widget, so I’m going to paste it here (I’m getting more and more frustrated with this and other shortcomings of blogging). It concerns the proper role of teachers and educators in relation to “student voices,” and argues that “student voices” are, without teachers as “futurist guides,” simply the voices of the status quo cultural forces, and the opposite of what Piaget envisions. Here it is:

What jumps out at me in your post are, first, the inclusion of the word actions in the Wikipedia definition of “student voice.” I’m currently ambivalent about creating more blog-talkers as the ultimate goal of this initiative. Talking and writing aren’t enough, though schools typically seem to think so. No wonder citizenship is dead. We have to change that.

The second thing is your closing quote by Piaget. The next generation, which we’re teaching now to be replicants of our own problematic lifestyles, are damned if they’re not equipped - or even conscious of - the world of their future. It’s been said a million times: “Our past is not their future.”

The one wrinkle I see in letting students decide what to present is this: they are only aware of what their community - parents, teachers, preachers - make them aware of. And that community is generally not cognizant of the shape of the future, busy as it is with its own daily round and daily diet of soft news.

So I still see a role for adult educators to serve as sort of “futurist guides” to the next generation of adults.

Karl Fisch is already an example of someone playing that role, however unintentionally, by virtue of the viral reach of his “Did You Know?” video. According to that vision, largely a condensation of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, the future to prepare for is one of economic competition with China and India.

But there’s more to our young people’s future than economics - especially when most of those economic practices are unsustainable. All this talk about “21st century workplace skills” disturbs me to no end for its trancelike oblivion to the unsustainability of that workplace.

Friedman actually mentions “green innovation” as one of those skills, incidentally, but that’s not mentioned in “Did You Know?”, so educators are largely not thinking of it. This isn’t Karl’s fault, since that video wasn’t intended to be anything more than a district edtech professional development presentation. But it’s taken a life of its own, and educators are so wowed by the flash of the animation they don’t seem to think beyond it to what else awaits in the future.

There are other futures we need to alert this generation to that are more fundamental, in my view. Global Warming and Climate Change, combined with the Peak Oil situation, top the list.

If we adults don’t use our capacity for being more informed, beyond the media, about the future we’re creating for our young, they have nobody to educate them in what is relevant to their future. We’ve surrendered our role to the larger forces of culture and media that are stuck in the status quo.

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[This is Part 4 in a series. Click here for Part 1, here for Part 2, and here for Part 3. Part 5 is a 5-minute video invitation to global teens that lays out the simple steps to making this happen by Earth Day 2008. Please simply forward this to high school students in your area. It doesn't require teachers or classrooms (though part 4 argues it could be a powerful Understanding by Design thematic year in all classroom disciplines).]

Dana Huff at huffenglish motivated me to dust off my unread copy of Grant Wiggins’ and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design (UbD) (and here). I’ve read the intro and first two chapters, and Dana’s reflections on them on her blog (she’s also set up a wiki for anybody to join her–I’ll be there eventually), and the ideas in it are playing in the background of my thoughts as I do other things.

The essential concept of UbD is understanding. The authors illustrate how students can “learn” math without “understanding” it through the example of a math question which asked, “How many buses does the army need to transport 1,128 soldiers if each bus holds 36 soldiers?” One third of students tested answered, “31 remainder 12″ (Schoenfeld, cited in Wiggins and McTighe, UbD, first ed., p. 2). Those students had “learned” division without understanding it. Because the right answer is 32, in the real world — unless you want the “remainder 12″ (who seem to be anything but real soldiers to these students) to walk.

UbD then goes on to outline a cross-curricular unit based on the theme of “apples” which is a hilarious example of what they later term “hands-on, minds-off” project-based learning. In their English lesson, the students read Johnny Appleseed, and write and illustrate a story about apples; in their art lesson, they make a hallway collage of leaves they collected from apple trees; they sing songs about apples in music; they classify apples in science; they do math to convert an applesauce recipe that feeds two so that it will feed fifty (pp. 1-2).

Wiggins and McTighe rightly credit the teachers of this apple unit for trying to make interdisciplinary connections, but go on to point out that, unfortunately, there’s not much worth understanding here (my bluntness, not theirs). If I were Bart Simpson in that classroom, I’d ask Ms. Crabapple, “Who gives a damn about Johnny Appleseed, man?”

I look forward to more time with UbD in the coming weeks. But I’m reading it with an eye toward a blind spot in their book (so far, anyway — and maybe the 2d edition remedies this) that only edtech geeks would notice: there’s no attention paid to how digital literacies can promote the types of understanding and unit design they so brilliantly advocate.

Later, I read Patrick Higgins’ latest post on Chalkdust (Patrick’s one of my favorite bloggers, if you couldn’t tell). It discusses his campaign to get classroom teachers on board for the 1:1 laptop move his school is making (I hope I’m getting this right) next year. Since I’m tech coordinator/part-time AP Lit teacher for my high school next year, as it rolls out its own 1:1 program, I’m reading Patrick closely these days.

I left a comment on Patrick’s post that, I later realized, was shot through with the ideas of UbD. I’m sharing parts of that comment here, because it adds curricular, instructional, digital literacies, UbD elements to the “Community Service 2.o: global teen concerts against global warming” project I’m so actively hawking on this blog lately. (I’ve got to come up with a name for that. Any suggestions?)

Here’s the comment:

I’m pushing my admin to buy into a school wide HS theme to start the year: “The Year of Global Warming.”

I’ve already asked math, statistics, economics, and English teachers to mull the idea, over the summer, of devoting a 2.0 activity or project related to the theme from their different disciplines (clearly Global Warming is a magnet for science, health, math, economics, history, multimedia, and persuasive writing applications–even foreign languages could jump in with PSA’s in their FL).

Every teacher said they would.

We’ll post the digital products on a Global Warming consciousness-raising AND concert-promoting website for a community service 2.0 music festival project for next May [update: I'm thinking Earth Day is the obvious date--April 19 is the Saturday of Earth Day week next year].

I’m excited.

I am excited. Think about it: Global warming is relevant to our students; they want to do something about it. It’s relevant to us, our children, and grandchildren too. It’s relevant to animals, orphans, widows, the poor, the environment, and every other cause you can think of.

And it is a “magnet” for project-based learning across the curriculum that, because it is relevant to students, will be “minds-on” activity promoting “understanding.” Examples:

• Our AP Statistics teacher told me he could see a million applications for his class. He was concerned about a digital project eating into his “coverage time” before the AP exam–evidence that half the battle for tech coordinators is battling the misconception that a digital project has to be huge, when it obviously could be as small as a podcasted Skype interview with a professor or other expert about whatever topic is being studied. But then he saw a possibility: our AP exams are over about three weeks before school is, leaving AP teachers at odds for something to do with that time. He was open to the idea of students making multimedia charts and graphics of statistical analyses of various energy-reducing approaches to reducing carbon emissions at home, school, and the workplace, which would be real products embedded on the “Rock for Global Cooling” website’s “Things You Should Know” or “Steps You Can Take” page. (Patrick’s site turned me on to a cool little graphics 2.0 site called Swivel that I’m embedding here as an example. Very cool for it’s interactive charts and graphs:

–picture that in an AP Statistics student’s hands, applied to global warming, and published on a real-world project website.

• Our AP Economics teacher is a very socially conscious young man who was very interested in this “more than Johnny Appleseed” unit idea. Podcast interviews with “green economists”? He wasn’t worried about coverage. He’s in.
• Our American Literature teacher, a technophobe willing to change, said yes. “It might be something we can apply our Native American literature unit to,” she said. And she found out this year, when she assigned a free-choice presentation project to her students, that she didn’t need to teach digital storytelling to her students. Many of them just did it without asking. So she’s in.
• Another math teacher I asked — also the student council advisor, who in that capacity too I invited to contribute to the “Year of Global Warming” project (”Year of Global Cooling”?) — said she was game.
  
• I’ll find a way, I hope, to get my AP Literature students on board.
• I haven’t asked the science, music, art, PE, and drama teachers yet. I had all these conversations on the last day of school, as teachers were packing up their classrooms for the summer, and I couldn’t get to everybody.
  

Here’s the thing: Our school is aware that our rollout of the 1:1 program in the high school in August will be under the microscope. Parents will not be happy if their kids are just using them as word processors and Google machines — and they shouldn’t be. Teachers are nervous because they’re not trained to teach this way, are not edublogging edtech geeks like some of us, but — want ideas so they don’t get flack from parents.

Added bonus: they — as I hope is true for you, dear reader, as well –are authentically concerned about this issue, and do guiltily wish they could take action on it. So this “Year of Global Cooling” (I’m starting to like that title) theme is an umbrella under which authentic 2.0 projects can be carried out, the school can more successfully launch its 1:1 program, and the teachers can feel good about making a difference in the classroom.

All that’s lacking — except, so far, from Kevin in Massachusetts (Kevin, who the heck are you, anyway? We should talk on Skype and get to know each other a bit) — are the thousand other points of light to join in this project.

If this were a flat classroom — flat schools — project, the classroom 2.0 naysayers would soon enough have some evidence to chew on to the contrary. But that means we need you.

(Or maybe the students will do it without the adults, I keep reminding myself, in the worst case scenario. Another disturbing reason for the silence in response to this idea is that I changed my RSS feed settings to feedburner, and I’m wondering if my posts are even going out to my old subscribers. Could somebody out there let me know?)

The last piece needed for this project to take off also worries me: administrative support. It’s funny how people in my own school get a faraway look in their eyes when I try to share this vision, say the easy supportive comment, but don’t take the crucial step of asking, “How can I support this?”

Clearly, no “Year of Global Cooling,” no grand inter-disciplinary authentic project 2.0, no successful 1:1 launch as I’m suggesting here, is going to happen if my school’s owner, director, and principal don’t back it.

Since I only had the idea two days before school let out, the timing was horrible for pitching the idea to them. So there’s still hope there. I guess I’ll find out in August, before school starts. I’d like them to say yes to a school assembly on the first day that announces this year-long theme with all the fanfare it so direly deserves.

And . . . I’ll close with these just-in pieces of evidence: in reply to my invitation to students to take the lead on this. Patrick N., age 15, wrote, in its entirety, this email:

I’m in. This is truly the most amazing project I have heard of in years. And I mean that.

Just being asked to be a part of this project is an honour and privilege.

Patrick N.

And Kyongmin, same age, wrote this:

mr. burell i really want to help out on this concert
but i am not sure how to start this…
do u want me to just spread the word and the idea to my friends
in other countries or actually get band in Seattle (where i’m going) and
make a concert…
i’m not really clear on this idea…
can you explain a bit more?
thank you~

I’ve invited Kyongmin to ask for clarification in a Skype conversation, so we can podcast the discussion for other students with questions about all this.

Patrick just came to Korea from New Zealand, so I’m sure he can spread the hope in that direction, and get students on board there. (And check out Patrick’s Yahoo Project digital story here. It’s quite beautiful — and created by him and his girlfriend, I think.)

They want to help. They want to learn. They need collaborators from your area. So I want you to help.

Please?

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Unknown News | Lies from the Bush-Cheney administration

• Partisan? Yes. But also supported by documentary evidence. Could be a resource for Animal Farm, etc. Squealer doesn’t only symbolize Stalinist distorters of the truth, after all.–Clay
  

Political News, Blogs, Humor featuring Republicans, Democrats, Independents and More

• For social studies and contemporary issues teachers looking for a site representing a wide spectrum of positions on US political issues. I can see students using Scenemaker to clip segments from the videos on this site for “quotes” in essays they write about contemporary political issues.Useful for teachers who find one-stop shopping for balancing viewpoints a hassle.
  –Clay
  

Nag Hammadi Library

• It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Nag Hammadi Library for an understanding of the many interpretations of Jesus and Christianity before the Roman Catholic Church–and Imperial Roman police–violently destroyed them. Many of these original Christian texts bear more resemblance to Buddhism than to contemporary Christian belief.

  This website has translations of the early Christian texts that were buried in the 4th Century CE to preserve them from the destruction of the first great book-burning in European history. Essential for religious studies, European history, and informed religious discourse today.

  From the website:

• The Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of thirteen ancient codices containing over fifty texts, was discovered in upper Egypt in 1945. This immensely important discovery includes a large number of primary Gnostic scriptures — texts once thought to have been entirely destroyed during the early Christian struggle to define “orthodoxy” – scriptures such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth.

  The discovery and translation of the Nag Hammadi
  library, completed in the 1970’s, has provided impetus to a major re-evaluation of early Christian history and the nature of Gnosticism. Readers unfamiliar with this history may wish to review the brief Introduction to Gnosticism and the Nag Hammadi Library provided here, as well as an excerpt from Elaine Pagels’ excellent popular introduction to the Nag Hammadi texts, The Gnostic Gospels.
  

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Sick of students embedding full-length videos on their blogs and calling that “active learning”?

Scenemaker is one answer to upping the bar for “video commentaries.”

Here’s an example from the middle of a YouTube clip I love about the joys of bachelorhood:

And here’s another about its follies:

I wonder how easy it is to create mashups of these? If anybody knows, I’d love to hear.

In any case, for media studies blogging, for social studies current events or politics foci, and, the more you think about it, for a million more possible units, the freedom to selectively quote moments from much longer videos, and write about and around them, sounds very engaging. I’d like to read student works along those lines: “Watch this” followed by “I showed it to you because” elaborations and insights from the students.

And just imagine them embedding a spoken, rather than written, analysis and reflection of such clips using Flixn.

I can’t wait to play more with classroom blogging next year. I learned a lot in my first six months of trying it in the English and history classroom, but am still a rookie. Summer is already opening up a nice, quiet space for six weeks of “think-alouds.”

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Chris in Honolulu and I just finished a Skype conversation about improving the 1001 Flat World Tales flat classroom project for next year. We’re not finished with our talks, but one thing that came up, and warrants immediate public mention, is this:

Our student reflections were overwhelmingly positive (and helpfully constructive when not), so we do want to continue the project next year. And here’s the “big but”: we want to do it first semester. And we want to plan with all partnering teachers–including newcomers–for a couple of sessions before launching the project in ‘07-’08.

So consider this an invitation to any grade 9-12 (15-18 year-old) classrooms: my students in Seoul, Chris’ students in Honolulu, and Christina’s students in Kuwait are so far on the “in” list for next year. If you’d like to add your students to the list, joining Koreans, Kuwaitis, and Americans, leave a comment.

While not required, ideal candidates for next year’s workshop will be teachers who:

• are active edubloggers
• intend to assign individual student blogging in their classrooms
• able to commit to a weekly communication schedule with the project teaching team for approximately six weeks (two weeks pre-launch, four weeks during)

We’ve sketched out a rough “team planning” checklist to make next year’s road is smoother, so any newcomers will benefit from this.

If you need evidence that students will find this project engaging, here are excerpts* from the anonymous feedback my Korean students gave to this question: “What did you like best about this project?” I include every reply, so there’s no cherry-picking here. In their own words:

• I was able to learn their cultures just through their stories. I liked how I could.
• I especially liked about how we were able to define ourselves, using stories.
• We were able to have fun writing stories which we wanted to write.
• The project was kind of free in a way of writing a story of your own choice.
• What I liked best about this project is that many people around the world participated in the project.
• We got to interact with other people from different parts of the world.
• The thing that I like the best about this project was the opportunity to share ideas abroad.
• I realized that we have so many differences but we have as many similarities. I was honored and glad to view the world from a different perspective.
• We were actually able to connect with students our age in different countries. These types of projects that we’ve only been thinking about came possible in reality through this project–learning that just because we’re in different countries, that doesn’t mean we can’t do work together.
• We came to read and understand about the different writing style and culture of each other (Hawaii, Denver, and Seoul), and that we were able to interact and give feedback to their story. By doing so, we socialized and changed different opinions, which I thought was unique. It’s clearly different from projects that we do in school, because international projects allow students to interact with each other to learn things that they won’t from their fellow students at their own schools.
• Through this project I was able to learn about different cultures. Also I think I was able to provide information about my own culture to other students.
• I liked about peer works and editing processes online. Students from different regions of world got together online on internet and did project internationally. It was new and interesting to get to know each other.
• I honestly didn’t like writing this piece, but the best thing about the project I liked was that we got to know people from other countries. I could know how other people in the states wrote compared to me.
• I got to grow as a “writer” and push myself to use my creativity to write and revise my story.
• By helping each other—by having different cultures—helped me learn more. Sometimes, I didn’t know what I did bad in my writing and wanted to know how I should improve, but the only way that actually helped me improve my writing is the people from other countries that helped me learn more about my writing.
• I thought it was inventive and original. And it was good to see how other people wrote about their own cultures.
• Of course, I liked writing my own story and getting it read by people from all the world the best. It was my first time publishing my story on the internet, and I liked it.
• It made me think about writing more carefully and accurately. Also taught me the importance of editing my work and other people’s work.
• I could read various stories and it was interesting to read other students’ stories.
• I got peer help from them. Without this help my flat world story could’ve been much worse.
• The most impressive thing was to talk and reply to the foreign students. In the first semester, we had to exchange our stories or essays to one of our classmates. But then during this project, we were able to reply to the other school students, and whom we don’t know anything about.
• It was also a good idea to read the stories of students who were in different countries.
• I like how students all over the world are interacting with each other and how we can discuss things. It’s very interesting and cool at the same time. We can see how good everybody is at writing and what good writing looks like. American style writing and Korean style writing.
• My favorite part about this project was the fact that we, as writers can make up stories from our own head instead of reading a story someone else invented.
• What I like the best is that we were able to actually make up a story of our own because I thought we wouldn’t do such things like creating stories when we would come up to high school. I think it was a good experience to have. Also, by this “Peer Editing” things we did I think I was able to somehow improve my reading skills and how I should respond to another person’s story.
• The best thing I liked about this project was that we could contact other school students and read their stories. They were some great stories that I enjoyed reading. It was interesting to read students’ stories who lived in other part of the world.
• It feels good when you write good stories and others read yours and they know that you wrote the story. So it’s like if I tell you one story, then I’ll listen one story from other students. It is also like exchanging stories.
• Because we’re from different schools, and different countries, it’s exciting to hear what others have to say about your story.
• I was able to think back about the Korean culture and make story out of it. It was also interesting to see other people from the US, how they write and what they like. Most of all I enjoyed what people wrote and tasting their creativity.
• I liked the whole idea of this project because it was a certain way for us to connect to students in other countries, and realize how either far off we are behind or front we are then them
• I liked the fact that we were working with people living outside our country, the fact that we were working on a same project, with a same goal, communicating and supporting each other through internet.
• I just liked the fact that we are working on such a massive project with so many other students with diverse backgrounds.
• This project was the best at the point we can express our ideas in terms our cultures and share it with other students from around the world. It was also a good experience to see how others wrote their stories.
• I really liked how we were able to work with students our age all around the world for this writing assignment. Even though we didn’t get to meet the participating classes face to face, I feel we really got to know each other. We learned the other people’s hobbies, culture, and even their level of writing.

*a link to all Hawaii and Korea reflections to the same six questions is coming soon.

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