Beyond School

Lesson one of semester two after a three-week holiday for both English and history classes consisted of this:

1. assigning semester-long laptops to students in each class
2. projecting this blog onto the LCD screen and discussing the phrase from its subtitle, “Gutenberg is dead,” with students
1. they just studied the Gutenberg Literacy Revolution last semester, so the sense of “living in an epochal moment in the history of reading and writing” was easy to impart by this analogy
1. this blog’s Cluster-Map widget, the instant and global readership, the connectedness, the reader-writer meaning-making via comments, the supplanting of the “expert writer” dominating the text by the writer-reader negotiations of meaning and truth via comments, the end of the commercial publishing monopoly, ad infinitum (literally)–the students got it, and the power that comes from producing with these new tools
2. projecting Karl Fisch’s “Did You Know?”–just three minutes of it–as an example of how text, for the first time in history, now sings, moves, paces itself, replicates itself and multiplies, changes color and size, says more with less words, etc etc again ad infinitum
1. quick poll on how many students thought “Did You Know?” as text on a page would have the same impact to the reader as the slideshow did (results: zero percent)
   
3. installing Firefox and banishing Internet Explorer
1. introducing simple things:
1. ctrl + and ctrl - to enlarge and shrink font
2. showing auto-spell-check
3. showing tabbed browsing
4. exploiting a fortunate Firefox crash, while projected for demonstration of its strengths, by showing the “auto-return to pre-crash tabs” feature (class applause) [Note: Diigo's latest toolbar version, once installed, fixes this bug]
4. installing Diigo and creating Diigo accounts (for the millionth time, infinitely better, for academic purposes–research, annotation, highlighting, tagging, social bookmarking of websites–than Del.icio.us; and it forwards all bookmarks to your del.icio.us account anyway)
5. quick poll of “computer-haters” among students (about one eighth of the class), followed by a reasoned apology for my refusal to not insist anyway, supported by “Flat World” competition statistics bearing on students’ futures
6. closing rhapsody on how exciting it is to be a teacher of Language Arts at a new era of literacy.

Was there any content in any of these classes? Outside of a “Fishbowl Quiz” on The Arabian Nights for 20 minutes in English class, zilch.

Content can–must–wait. First, we’re souping up our computers for an entire semester of a different way of demonstrating understandings of that content.

And we’re not finished yet. We’ve still got to subscribe to Bloglines and make self-selected subscriptions, install Audacity, receive one microphone headset and mouse per laptop, subscribe to Flickr, get our heads around “RSS,” “feeds,” “aggregators,” “social bookmarking,” and “podcasts.” And, since we’re already blogging, we have to learn to drive our wikis.

Give us a couple more hours to enter the 21st century–it’s not too much to catch up on six years of revolutions in literacy.

Then we’ll get back to content–with a difference.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Another in a series. I discuss how Bloglines is a 21st century “read-write web” tool that can provide literally endless, self-selected reading for students.

A brief intro to what Bloglines does, and ideas for how to use it in the classroom. (Again, sorry for the quality. I’m still learning, and still looking for better tools. Stay tuned for a social screencast with my colleague Jonathan in Shanghai that should make these screencasts better–”live, from two countries”!)

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Scroll down and look at the right-hand column of this blog, and you’ll see two powerful new features that are themselves examples of the digital literacy we should be learning and teaching our kids.

I just learned them today. It took ten minutes.

The first is my del.icio.us online bookmark linkroll. It’s a list of all web articles and sites I’ve found noteworthy enough to save on my del.icio.us (online bookmarking tool) for future reference. Click on any link and you’ll read what I’ve found. Discerning, reflective readers will notice this leaves the 20th century “Let me lend you a book/copy an article/send you and email with the link of something worth reading” method of sharing ideas in the dust. This is called “social networking” and is a simple form of professional sharing that is here to stay. Those that don’t use it are far less informed than those who do–and this gives them advantages in the competitive 21st century employment world. Knowledge is power.

The second is my Diigo linkroll. It’s similar to the more popular del.icio.us, but has this added value: not only do you read web articles I’ve read, you also read selections from those articles that I’ve highlighted and annotated–and can add your own annotations as well.

These linkrolls will update daily as I add bookmarks; but you can always click on the del.icio.us or Diigo heading links to see my entire library of online bookmarks at my homepages on the respective sites. Again, discerning readers will see that this leaves the 20th century equivalent of printing web articles and putting them in a file (or, more likely, losing them in a paper mountain) in the dustbin of history as well.

This is the tip of the iceberg of how 21st century productivity differs from even five years ago. It demands the “fearless courage”–and reflective honesty–mentioned in my last post to face the obvious: a good school will equip its students with the most powerful literacy skills to compete in the 21st century. Most of these skills are no longer paper-and-ink–or even “My Documents”–based. Gutenberg is dying, and his was the paradigm in which we learned and competed. This won’t be the case for our students.

They need digital literacy skills–and literacy means not just reading the web, but producing with it.

The question is: If we teachers are not digitally literate ourselves, how can we become so? If we don’t, we’re not serving our students.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Diigo deserves all the press it can get. Google and other big names are releasing similar tools with a bigger budget, but far smaller value and power.

I made this new tutorial after spending a couple of hours preparing lessons for the French Revolution, using Diigo to annotate and highlight the online “textbooks” I’m using instead of our waste-of-paper corporate textbooks (all the American bias American dollars can buy!).

I also wanted to play with the settings on my SnapzPro. I’m still looking for something better for screencasting.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Here is an updated version of the Diigo tutorial. Your students will love you (not immediately, but only after they’re gone–they’re students, after all) for teaching them this great research tool!

And you’ll love being able to access your online notes of every website you’ve researched yourself, too–from any computer in the world.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)