Beyond School

I think this question would make either a good meme or a good open thread:

What new routines have worked their way into your teaching-and-learning life as a result of the digital revolution?

I’ll share a couple of mine. I think history teachers will find the first one valuable, but teachers of any discipline can find and do similar things in their subjects.

1. Annotating Open Courseware University Lectures on Academic Earth, YouTube, Yale:

I’ve been watching UCLA Professor Lynn Hunt’s European Civilization from 1750 to the Present course lectures on Academic Earth to review modern European history before teaching it in the semester beginning next month.¹ I’m also watching Yale Professor John Merriman’s course on the same subject.

Here’s the rub: Yale’s courses are better watched at Yale’s Open Yale site, where you can find transcripts, video downloads for iPods, and all sorts of supplemental goodies for each lecture. But I haven’t been able to find the UCLA course on any UCLA-hosted site, so all we have for Prof. Hunt’s course is Academic Earth’s video. That means no transcripts or text of any sort. [Update: UCLA has a YouTube channel that allows downloads of the lectures -- something Academic Earth doesn't do. I'm putting my floating stickies on the YouTube lectures too. Here's the Modern Western Civ course playlist.]

Dr. Hunt’s a fine lecturer. She opens each class with a musical or artistic piece from the period covered, for example, and discusses its significance in the wider historical context. Her lectures are also well-organized, tight, and interesting. So my new routine, as the screenshot below shows, is a simple one: While I watch a lecture, I have a Diigo floating sticky-note open on the page, and simply outline the lecture with time-stamps. You can see it live here, if you have Diigo [Update: And here on YouTube]. Obvious uses:

• I — or anybody else — can use the time-stamp to show exactly the segments wanted in class.
• I can also adapt and/or condense the entire lecture for my own presentations in my classes. Simply extract the time-stamp and notes on my Diigo page, print them out if needed, and voila — an outline for a lecture, presentation, or discussion.

Again, this is simple and no big deal. It’s just taking notes while watching a video. But the cool thing is, other teachers worldwide (if they use Diigo) can share mine and add their own. (Among other possibilities.)

Here’s the screenshot:

Dr Hunt's UCLA lecture, my Diigo floating sticky-note (click for larger image)

2. Planning Classes While Walking to School with iPod/iPhone Voice Memo

Talking to Yourself is Good

I love Voice Memo. My daily routine in Singapore is an hour metro ride to school, then a 10-minute walk from the metro station to my classroom. I use it as planning time, and my best tool is my iPod Touch’s Voice Memo app. My iPod earbuds have a mic in the wire, so all I have to do is spend five minutes or so thinking about how I want to structure the day’s classes, and talk it into my iPod. When I get to school, I listen to the voice memo to write my lesson plan on the board.

I know some people can plan classes weeks in advance, but I’m not one of them. Too many ideas worth incorporating come in the days,  even the hours, before the class. So this has been a godsend for me. I don’t forget my best ideas, and don’t have to write them down. I literally talk to myself as I walk to class about the best ideas I have for the day.

Again, no big deal. A drunk could do this in his worst hangover. And that’s the beauty: low-labor, high-leverage changes in routine, thanks to new tools.

What about you? Any to share?

And Happy New Year, by the way. May the five-fingered fist of fate always smash the mean person next to you, and pet you like a kitten until 2011.

1. Be warned: the audio is sometimes bad, but the lectures are quite good. Dr. Hunt’s a trooper for not tearing off the microphone and telling the tech crew she’s mad as hell and not going to take it any more. [↩]

I’m a 21st Century Education Rip Van Winkle with a twist: I only went to sleep for a single year’s sabbatical, but the changes over that year make 2008 seem like 1808. This post is long, but I hope some of you will plod through it and advise me on what helpful solutions I’ve slept through. I put my pleas along those lines in red.

Feel free to skip to section three for what’s really the meat of this post. I’d love feedback there especially.

I told my students in the just-concluded semester-long Chinese History course that I gave myself a B/B- for the way I taught it this first time out (call it the Beta version). This post will return to my early “teacher think-aloud” habit on this blog to reflect on ways to raise that grade for the second semester

Since a B supposedly signifies “above average” without signifying “excellent,” I’ll justify that grade first by listing what I thought were the course’s strengths and weaknesses. Then I hope I’ll have enough steam left to dump the brainstorm of how to re-figure the course — using Diigo to heighten the academic rigor, and an “in medias res” narrative structure to heighten the engagement and provide the essential purpose for studying Chinese (or any) history at all¹ — that’s been brewing in my mind over the last (typically post-midnight) hour.

Strengths, Weaknesses, and Future Improvements

1. Replaced the textbook

Strengths: A week before the course began, the returning teachers arrived to work and I was finally able to see the resources and scope of the course. The textbook, to put it generously, was great for 12-year-olds, but not my 16-year-olds in this supposedly “rigor”-driven school — so I tossed it and replaced it with the China chapters from an introductory Asian History college textbook (Rhoades Murphey’s excellent A History of Asia).

Weaknesses: Murphey’s text led to an embarrassment of riches: there was simply too much information in it for a brief survey course. I was also concerned that its readability level was too challenging for some students, but I did a Poll-Daddy poll and found 33 of 36 responded from “It’s a bit challenging, but I can handle it” (my definition of the Zone of Proximal Development for reading) to “It’s just right for my reading level” to “It’s easy.” Still, for the three who couldn’t handle it, alternate texts or resources were necessary, and I didn’t have them.

Another weakness was in the photocopied packet I made of the Murphey readings. I didn’t include the Index in the copies, so it was surely difficult for students to be able to locate information from the text for review purposes.

A final weakness: It had been four years since I’d used the text, which means I’d forgotten most of it, and spent the semester “two days ahead of the students” in terms of content mastery. (Students seem to think teachers remember everything they’ve ever known, which is interesting, since a brief reflection on their own forgetting of content from courses from prior years should demolish that idea. They seem to think the adult brain is of an entirely different model, some new design inserted in the skull upon college graduation or something. So here’s a dirty teacher secret, kids: Our brains are at least as limited as yours.)

Future Improvements: I’ve ordered The Cambridge Illustrated History of China to be the textbook next year. An Amazon “Reader Reviews” and “Look Inside” perusal satisfied me that this is a reasonably solid high school China history text. (We’re looking at ABC-CLIO database as a possible digital replacement for paper textbooks altogether for next year, when we go 1:1. Anybody know how feasible this is?)

2. Replaced Blackboard with Ning

Strengths: I haven’t written about it yet because I’m waiting for the video to be released, but I gave a keynote speech at the Learning Technologies Conference in Australia last month, and during it I declared a “pox on Blackboard.” I meant it. It made my first month trying to get to know my students’ backgrounds, preferences, and literacy skills utter hell. First I assigned an “About Me” forum that most students put a lot of effort into, apparently….. “Apparently” because I never saw it. Some glitch in Blackboard didn’t save the things, so I never got to read them. That damned me to fogginess about the general skills of my class for the first couple of weeks. Later attempts to use the forums, once the glitches were ironed out, were still clunky due to Blackboard’s horrible user interface (in all fairness, my school is using an old version, and I think later ones have copied enough from Moodle to be more intuitive). Example: answering a forum in Blackboard confused most of my students because of the language of the User Interface. Instead of hitting “reply” after my prompt — no “reply” link existed — they had to somehow just know that to simply reply they had to click on “Start New Thread.” Talk about unintuitive.

Then there was Blackboard’s use of Frames, so cutting-edge in 1995, and its general “why click once when you can click ten times for the same task” workflow. The tool was as schooly as its name. It took way more of my time than necessary on Moodle to deliver a look, feel, and functionality less satisfactory than Moodle’s. A month into the course I’d had it. I left Blackboard for Ning. (I wasn’t about to install and manage my own Moodle. Been there, suffered that. Anybody have solutions along these lines I don’t know about?)

The strengths of Ning: It’s way more straightforward. The Main Page is a one-stop overview and link-list for all necessary tasks and documents for the week. Videos, photo slideshows, forums, blogs, RSS feeds of China News from Google News and from my Diigo China bookmarks in widgets on the sidebars for any advanced student wanting to read more. Hell, even student birthdays announced on the sidebar (it never hurts so sing Happy Birthday in class). So good riddance, Blackboard.

I kept things pretty minimal, as far as assignments went. Rotating groups of four or five students had to blog each week on the prior week’s content — open, whatever idea struck their fancy — and the others had to reply to two that appealed to them (authentic audience response awards students with the best ideas, hopefully stirs those whose posts elicited cricket chirps to reflect on how to do better next time). It was hard for me to participate in the blogs and forums as much as I’d have liked because of the afore-mentioned “two days ahead of the students” reading the textbook.

Weaknesses: Organization. I’m not going to beat myself up for this one, because I had to design the airplane while I was mid-flight in the semester. But I need to set all forums so that replies are threaded under the comments replied to, which isn’t the default, for one thing. Also, having 36 students on a single forum got unwieldy. I didn’t want to use groups because I wanted richer conversations between the two class sections, but this made navigation of forums difficult. I also need to figure out how to instruct students to subscribe to email notifications when somebody replies to their comment or post. I’m not sure this finely-tuned of an option is even available. If not, that means students are getting 40-odd notifications every time somebody replies to the forum they replied to — which means they understandably delete them all, as I do, without looking at them. Clunky. (Help?)

Future Improvements: Frankly, I’m still puzzling over this one. I‘d love to have students use Diigo to comment on other students Ning blogs and forum readings, but since the site is locked and the content is dynamic, I’m not sure Diigo highlights would be visible to other students visiting the pages. Anybody know? [Update: Well that was easy. Diigo told me on Twitter, while I was writing this, that the highlights will indeed show. They also set me up with an Education Account within 20 minutes of my applying for it, which will make class registration much easier. So cool.)

3. Content Organization: From "From the Beginning" to "In Medias Res" (or, "Teaching History Backwards")

Strengths: Covering the 4,000 years of Chinese history from the semi-legendary Xia Dynasty of 2,000 BCE to the present in a semester course was no easy task -- especially since China, unlike Europe, doesn't have any gaping 1,000-year Dark Age through which to conveniently fast-forward, but instead boasts an unbroken string of literate centuries across four millennia. Survey though it was, the students did receive an education in the broad (and with Murphey's text, often impressively deep) flow of Chinese history from the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, and on into the 20th century's Nationalist and Communist regimes -- right up to the present day. (And though I know they couldn't know how skinny their "education" in Chinese history would have been had I just used the old textbook, and thus didn't have the perspective to appreciate just how superior their introduction to that history was in terms of depth and scope, I'm still pouting over the lack of a single expression of appreciation for the bang they got for their semester's buck. I know, I know: Cry me a river. Then send me to a shrink for expecting gratitude from teenagers.)

Weaknesses: The pacing was too fast. Again, I'm not beating myself up on this one because the textbook was new and I'd never used it as the primary text for teaching Chinese history before.

But more importantly, despite the oomph of knowing the highlights of all of China's major dynasties, at a certain point it starts feeling like a stuck record. Most of China's classical dynasties follow very similar "Dynastic Cycle" patterns in which a new dynasty begins, implements some impressive reforms in its first century or so, and over the next century or two becomes complacent and corrupt, and finally loses "the Mandate of Heaven" in the eyes of its subjects, and falls to whichever rebel or neighbor state emerges triumphant in Ye Olde and Verye Predictable Ende-of-Cycle Civille Warre or Forynne Invasionne. It brings to mind the title of an old Bowie song: "Always Crashing in the Same Car."

Most importantly, that almost-never-ending 3,000 years of dynastic cycles becomes, without a purpose for knowing it, an exercise in what Jared Diamond calls "history as one damn fact after another." Diamond insists on what most history buffs would assent to: that there are patterns in history that point towards essential understandings of who and what we are -- and those understandings, of course, separate the naive and ignorant from the educated. More importantly, they separate the citizen who you pray, for the sake of democracy, will not vote, from the one you pray will always vote.

Future Improvements: The course fell into the One Damn Fact Trap because I covered it chronologically: "In the beginning....." Tonight I think I arrived at a better approach.

I'm going to start the next course with the end of the dynastic era in 1911, when the Nationalists threw out the Qing -- more accurately, when the Qing just collapsed due to its own decrepitude -- and went through a painful and practically literal "crash course" in modern governance: nationalism, socialism, dictatorship, fascism, and democracy all in a stew from 1911 until 1949, and then totalitarianism and various shades of communism from 1949 to the present.

But before doing any of that, I'm going to assign the final exam essay questions in the first week of class, and have the students Diigo the hell out of our readings and forums on Ning for the rest of the course in order to arrive at their "answers." Here are the questions:

Essay Questions:

1.  Western Liberal Democracies in Europe and (especially) the USA typically criticize the PRC for its lack of human rights – freedom of speech, religion, and assembly – as well as for its one-party dictatorship. Based on your knowledge of Chinese history in the “long view,” how valid do you think these criticisms are? Give as many specific examples from Chinese history as you can to support your arguments.

2.  Mao Zedong waged the Cultural Revolution as a last-ditch attempt to prevent party Moderates (Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and others) from implementing capitalist reforms to China’s economic system; Mao believed instead that a planned economy relying on the social spirit of the people was the path to prosperity and justice for all.  Based on your understanding of the effects of the Moderates’ reforms from the rise of Deng Xiaoping around 1980 to the present day, to what degree do you think Mao’s resistance was justified? Use as many specific details from the successes and failures of the planned economy during the ‘50s and early ‘60s (the First Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward), and from the successes and failures of the Four Modernizations to the present, to support your argument.

Why Diigo highlights and sticky-notes (online, on-site, on specific segments of text annotations) instead of simple forum and blog responses? A discussion on a Diigo forum last year that Cliff Mims started -- see my highlights on it here -- sold me. Diigo's Maggie Tsai said it most succintly:

Fundamentally there is a difference between Diigo's annotation and traditional blog commenting. Diigo in-situ highlight and sticky note allows fine-grained discussion to specific part of a webpage - which opens up the possibility for more meaningful exchanges...

So in a nutshell, as students read, they'll be highlighting and bookmarking the evidence to answer our semester-long "essential questions" that traditionally I would have sprung on them as "surprise" cram-questions at the end of the course. This will very much raise the "rigor" bar, and provide a similar routine for individual research projects. But uh-oh: what about pdf files? How can students highlight, bookmark, annotate those? Any work-arounds, dear teacher-geeks? (Much of our content is in pdf format.) [Update: Re: highlighting and annotating pdf files: http://a.nnotate.com does with pdf’s what Diigo does for websites. A good find. (They tweeted after I called for help on Twitter.)]

The Beauty of a Real Project: Interpreting Modern “Communist” China, from an Historically-Informed Perspective, to China’s Historically Uninformed Western Critics

Wordy, I know, but that says it. China might not have made the finals for George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” award, but I’ve no doubt it made the short-list. Add to that the endless refrain, from at least the days of Ronald Reagan, of the evils of “godless Communism” and the blessings, historical and contemporary evidence aside (Iraq anyone? Or Afghanistan? or or or?) of one-size-fits-all “Democracy” and “Capitalism,” and you’ve got all sorts of articles of Western ideological faith to complicate with those lovely things called facts.

And please notice I said “complicate.” That’s the beauty of the idea: easy answers to the above essay questions, if pursued across a semester, with all evidence nicely aggregated on a simply-tagged Diigo page, will surely give way very quickly to the type of answers our future adults should have when considering modern China: and I mean nuanced answers.

Now my last two questions:

1. Assuming students will be able to offer valuable evidence and insight into the questions above — questions I’m convinced are relevant enough to the real world to deserve an audience — what’s the best way to present their findings to the world via the web?

2. How can I keep the project alive after its first iteration? Different questions for each successive class?

A million thanks for any who took the time to read and respond. If you see any beautiful ways to extend or enhance the idea further — Skypecast interviews from my students in Singapore with American students about their stereotypes of China and its government, for example? More? — please pitch those in the mix too.

1. it reminds me of David Warlick’s occasional pitch to “teach history backwards,” though my approach is a little more complicated [↩]

Even if my recent “Politics Around the Web” posts have turned you off, I hope you noticed that they are a model of a very simple activity for any number of classes – current events, politics, science and math news, more – that want students to read and exhibit critical thinking about what they read. I say “simple” because all it takes is a Google News account, a Diigo account, and a blog.

This screencast shows you how it works, compliments of screencast-o-matic and Blip.tv:

First, a mini-photo essay on my own point of view about privileging writing over speaking when grading in the collaborative, networking, multimedia century:

Three weeks after the Diigo stampede, I’ve been concerned that the new trend of putting Diigo annotations on posts instead of leaving comments in the thread was a negative thing. Only Diigo users would see the conversation, and the post’s comment thread would be left poorer for that.

But after a wild four-hour storm of 74-and-counting comments on my Muhammed Ali post about privileging writing over other communication strands when we grade, it occurs to me that Diigo might come in handy here. There are so many incredibly insightful comments there, and the issue is so relevant to the futures of our students, that I fear the sheer bulk of comments might dissuade new readers from discovering the gold shining here and there.

Diigo highlights and annotations of the thread might help. If you want to take part in this experiment, go at it. It could be a great way to demonstrate the value of Diigo highlights and annotations as a complement to, instead of a substitute for, blog comments. Because the debate – particularly the one between Benjamin Baxter, who maintains that writing should constitute the bulk of a student’s grade in English/Language Arts and history classes, and opposing viewpoints that grades should more equally credit speaking, graphic language, and more, as articulated by Arthus Erea, Adrienne Michetti, Kirstin “Keamac,” Dean Shareski, Claire Thompson, Sylvia Martinez, Carolyn Foote, and many others – that debate never seemed to reach any resolution.

It sounds like I’m piling on Benjamin here, but I don’t mean to. Fifty million people saying something is true doesn’t make it so. Moreover, Benjamin works in an inner city school, and his arguments are rooted in his perception of what best helps his students’ futures. It differs with mine, but I’m in a different context. And we’re all running on varying assumptions about things like the future of work, the purpose of schooling, and more.

But that thread drifts into so many tangents – the high school freshman Arthus v. high school teacher Benjamin debates are priceless, but sometimes distracting (or am I wrong?) – that I see Diigo, again, as possibly helpful here. Highlight and annotate the strong assertions, the weak rebuttals, the evasions of direct questions and the red herrings, and let others add comments to those annotations.

(This connects, by the way, to a conversation with “Uninspired Teacher” Tom and Charlie A. Roy on the “Schooly Speeches versus Real Talks” post, about using juries instead of judges in mock trials – or better, real ones – to improve that old practice.)

Peter Rock said it took him an hour to read that post and thread (but he also said he read it slowly). That scares me. So many comments in that thread don’t deserve burial in the noise.

So head on over to that thread, if you’re a Diigo convert – especially if there’s a Diigo group on assessment - and have at it.

At the same time, far be it from me to dictate rules. If you want to just comment instead, of course that’s okay.

—

Photos:Toksik by The Sizemore McCabe Project, Continental Paper Grading Company by quinn.anya, Spring Branding Near Crane Oregon 1982 by mharrsch

Here’s one more tutorial, 4 minutes, on using Diigo on Scribe blogs as test review sheets, with students as members of a Diigo Group. I just trained my students today in AP Lit, set them up on the class Diigo Group, and “shared” my highlights and annotations of the class scribe posts (it only works on permalinks, not on main blog pages) with the kisAP07 group. They use that as “test reviw.”

Here it is:

I use the term blog-writer advisedly.

I’m catching up on responding to all my learners’ blogs, using Diigo to leave “teacher-y” comments on sticky-notes that only they can see–which also makes for a great collection of sentence-correction examples on my teacher Diigo bookmarks page–and I come across this post from Lynn:

Quiet Souls: the Living Dead

All Quiet on the Western Front, otherwise known as “the greatest war novel of all time,” is a notably bitter book. I found [myself] making sour smiles as I read–the book had hit the bull’s eye. All Quiet on the Western Front demonstrates the war from the soldiers’ point of view. The book shows how war can take out the souls of human beings and leave them only with their “animal instincts.”

“By the animal instinct that is awakened in us we are led and protected. It is not conscious; it is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness. One cannot explain it….It is this other, this second sight in us, that has thrown us to the ground and saved us, without our knowing how. If it were no so, there would not be one man alive from Flandres to the Vosges” (56, Remarque).

This second instinct seems to be a key element for survival, but it is also destroying them as well. Men step away from their emotions and rely on their immediate needs, just as Muller does.

“They would fit me perfectly. In these boots I get blister after blister. Do you think he will last till tomorrow after drill? If he passes out in the night, we know where the boots–” (18, Remarque)

Muller, in this passage, sounds very cold hearted: he asks his friends when his comrade would probably die. But it is understandable, because civility is not a major concern in war. It is blind killing, without any reasons whatsoever, that matters; it is the soldiers’ paramount responsibility to simply kill the enemies. Thus, the soldiers becoming the living dead–a soul without a soul. They become completely senseless to what civilization has taught them. Instead, they listen to the inner primitive instincts: the strive for dominance, the strive for power, the strive to survive, and mostly, the strive to kill.

Ironically, the authorities glorify this tragedy into what is known as “essprit de corps (26, Remarque)”.

“We became hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough–and that was good; for these attributes were just what we lacked. Had we gone into the trenches without this period of training, most of us would certainly have gone mad….But by far the most important result was that it awakened in us a strong, practical sense of esprit de corps, which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war–comradeship” (26,27, Remarque)

As these soldiers become empty shells with no souls, the war goes on. The post-war trauma, the in-war trauma is maybe just enough to take the life out of someone.

Image from Flickr

The quality of Lynn’s writing is obvious, but what isn’t obvious is how she has applied so much of the sentence styling that I’ve been urging my learners to experiment with–with predictably mixed results. (To see the also-mixed student-produced mini-lessons on the sentence patterns I’m trying to make them use, see this link on the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki.)

I’m sharing this as an example of how student blogging can be used as a way to teach writing skills, a la the 6 Traits of Effective Writing and The Art of Styling Sentences, while still avoiding the “blogging as homework” pitfall that comes with assigning the content of the blog-posts. It’s part of the on-going quest to find that magical combination that transforms homework into authentic writing, while at the same time prevents that freedom from being sloppy, non-developmental free-writing.

Earlier in the year, I think I erred in giving students too much freedom to choose their topic. I’d hoped they would rise to my exhortations for them to find one idea from a week’s worth of schooling–in any subject area classroom–to write about and make meaningful. Most of them didn’t, which is a sad reflection on the relevance they find in the ideas at school–and on the students’ intellectual maturity level as well. But I don’t want to let this preference to “write about [the pop culture equivalent of] their cat, Fluffy” (to quote one of Chris Watson’s students in Honolulu) push me into assigning teacher-directed “answer my question” homework.

Starting the whole-class blog for my history class’ World War I to World War II unit, in which they were assigned to write about whatever topic from the week’s student lectures on a reflective, reader-response level, showed me the light. Their posts on this blog were instantly of a higher order of thought than my English classes’, in general, after four months of blogging.

So for the rest of the year (we end in about four weeks), I’m having my English students write about whatever scenes, passages, or lines from our novels that they want (though sometimes within thematic limits that I set). And I’m having them apply new skills–quotation integration and close reading commentary–in these posts.

Actually, come to think of it, Lynn’s post was in response to one of those more teacher-directed assignments. But still, she chose her passage, and she applied those skills.

Go to her blog, and judge for yourself whether her writing was better before I changed the rules and made her write about literature-related topics, or whether this post marks a leap in the general quality of her blog-writing. I’d be curious to hear what you think: could she handle freedom, or did the teacher limits help her grow?

And to “think-aloud” a bit more, I’ll add one more thing I’ve noticed as I’ve read my students’ blogs tonight: though they weren’t, as a rule, choosing to write about Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, or All Quiet on the Western Front, the few students who did write about these works unanimously found them enjoyable, and their sentiments were echoed in other students’ comments to these posts.

Which means two things to me: first, if they like what they’re reading in the English class, then assigning them to write about these works could be enjoyable for them–as long as I don’t kill that joy with stultifying requirements to write the dreaded 5-paragraph essay; and second, it’s really important to select readings that they will enjoy. I know this latter point sounds obvious, but I’ve seen too many teachers assign novels and plays that I can’t stand to teach any more than students can stand reading. But that’s a different topic. For what it’s worth, in any case, 15-year-olds in Korea–many of them fluent but first-generation English speakers–not only could handle Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, and All Quiet on the Western Front; they also enjoyed handling them.

Which strengthens my opinion that we deprive kids the experience of great literature because we insist they can’t handle it (or, if we’re moralists of the Puritanical stamp, shouldn’t handle it). And we teach them kiddie-literature instead.

You are a young writer trying to experience what being a real writer is, because…your teacher is making you: sore spot one (but I can live with this one, for obvious reasons).

You are a young writer trying to have that experience by writing on a web-log (I’ve decided to outlaw the term “blogging” with students, and substitute the correct, grand old word: “Writing”), so that you can experience real audience, real feedback, real conversation based on your writing: blessing one.

You are a young writer who sees that someone has left a comment on one or your writings on your web-log (the word “blog” is a blighted thing as well, in the Language Arts classroom. From now on, we use “web-log”). What a delight–and a new one. You click the link, curious and expectant–how is the world responding to me as a writer?

But you see this:

You misspelled “frustrated.”
Is this a strong introduction?
Nice use of the appositive in Sentence Pattern 4, but your compound sentence in SP 3 is a comma splice because you forgot to include a coordinating conjunction after the comma.
B+.

Your teacher.

“Well,” you say, “It was interesting. Thanks, but no thanks. Back to MySpace for some real conversation.”

Luckily, Chris Watson sparked an idea in one of our podcasted conversations about this problem: Somehow find a way to use Diigo to assess student web-log writing without defacing the students’ “intellectual property” and turning writing into “schooliness.”

So here’s my latest experiment, with thanks to Chris (and to Diane Quirk, who suggested this much earlier): using Diigo Groups (with a separate Diigo login for me, to keep my own bookmarks separate from my classroom bookmarks).

My students have joined the Group. Now when they go to their web-logs, after logging in to their Diigo account and setting “Show Annotations > Show Group Annotations” on their Diigo toolbar, they will see the highlights of specific passages from their writing that I have left (and I can start students doing this too, it occurs to me in a very attractive flash), and my annotations will pop up on their screen when they hover their mouse over the highlights.

Also good, our Diigo Groups Bookmarks page records all highlights and annotations I have made on one page. Students can use that to see all feedback I have given to specific strengths and weaknesses on all students writings.

And since they’re using anagrams instead of first-name usernames on their blogs, there’s less of a chance of any embarrassment resulting from this “public feedback”–with “invisible ink.”

The screenshot below is an example of what one student will see when she visits her blog with Diigo turned on.

An invitation to you to snoop in my new history class website’s pages laying out step-by-step instructions for how to set up and use all the tools listed above to do research.

All feedback is welcome. I’m especially keen to hear if anybody can suggest improvements in the process I use to subscribe to del.icio.us tagged searches. I’m new at it. It seems cumbersome to me.

Hm. Diigo’s “Daily Diigo” auto-blog digest below just surprised me! Looks like the folks at Diigo have re-enabled it as they continue to add muscle to the beta 2.0 release.

I just started a Diigo Community called “1001teachers” for social annotation-sharing between teachers involved in our project. If anybody wants to join to explore this, and learn-by-doing how we might increase student info-management power by sharing Diigo with them, click here to join.

More from the Diigo homepage:

Share your online findings with your friends and colleagues

• Complete with highlights and sticky notes
• As lists, as blogs, as albums, as feeds, or via email
• New! In groups
• Collect and compile your research findings

  By N2H

  Best of Beyond School

  • 00 What is Schooliness?
  • 01 A Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist
  • 01 On Leaving Teaching to Become a Teacher (great comment thread)
  • 01 Unsucky English Lectures: Touching Taboos in Gilgamesh (series)
  • 02 Beyond “Did You Know?” to “Did You Ever Wonder?”: Education for Well-Being
  • 02 When Corrupting the Youth is Good
  • 03 Beyond “Schooly” Global Collaboration to “Natural” Networked Learning (podcast)
  • 03 Schooliness Sonnet (a Twitter-Inspired Tragedy)
  • 04 Lessons Learned from the Students 2.0 Launch
  • 05 Truly Critical: Thinking about Science, Religion, and Goodness
  • 05 Wikispaces in Education Webinar: 4 Wiki Projects for English and History Classrooms
  • 06 My Suicidal High School Years: A Happy Ending Bullying Story (podcast)
  • 07 Four Convergences, Two Views of Education, One Future to Choose
  • 08 I’m Nobody. Goodbye to All of That
  • 08 Teaching Grammar on the Titanic: On Fear and Irrelevance in Education
  • 10 Why We Should Teach “Lolita”
  • 11 Muhammad Ali: D- Student? Or F- School? (read comments!)
  • 12 Of Jocks and Faggots
  • 13 The Web Legacies Series: An Edu-Autobiography
  • 14 An Enchanted Place: In Which We Say Goodbye to School-teaching (2 Parts)
  • 15 On the Meaningful, in Quantum Contexts
  • 16 For the Roses: My Latest Position on Classroom Blogging
  • 17 Taking Back Teaching: A Forgotten History

  My PD Resources

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  Recent Comments

  • Clay Burell on Video Presentation: A 1:1 Laptop School Baby Book: How It Looks at Four Months Old
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  • Bill Farren on My Australia Keynote Speech: A Serious Farce, in One Thousand Acts
  • Clay Burell on Unsucky English Lecture 7: Gilgamesh: A Goddess Prays
  • Steve on Unsucky English Lecture 7: Gilgamesh: A Goddess Prays

  Recent Posts

  • My Australia Keynote Speech: A Serious Farce, in One Thousand Acts
  • A Starter Kit of China Studies RSS Feeds
  • Sunday – a Story
  • Photoshop Help Wanted: Banner Needed for New Website
  • Students with Eyes, Let Them See: 27-Year-Old Chinese Blogs His Way to Fame

  Archives

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  Beyond School by Clay Burell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.