Beyond School

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.

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

(right-click and “save as” to download the enhanced podcast here)

Life as science fiction continues.

Here in Korea on a Friday night, close to midnight, I hop onto Twitter, see Chris Craft is there in South Carolina, USA, and tweet him an invitation to talk on Skype. He kindly obliges (and it’s just a free international computer phone call now, so that ain’t hard).

I record it, edit it, and an hour later, self-publish it for anybody in the world who is interested in lessons learned from two humble pioneers of global classroom collaboration.

Our topic? We take up the question of how to refine our approach to global collaborative projects so that they are less prone to fail, or to wear out all parties involved (teachers and students) when they succeed.

I’m most excited by the last 5 minutes or so. Chris and I fell into a spontaneous “pedagogical jam session” in which we riffed on the idea that the best projects are - not projects at all*. Instead, they are authentic uses - and modelings - of Personal Learning Networks (PLN’s) via Twitter, Skype, Facebook, etc: “quick in and quick out.”

Good background reading from the edublogs:

• Sylvia Tolesano’s Collaboration Projects - Doomed to Fail? (USA)
• Graham Wegner’s Parable 2.0 (Australia)
• Susan Sedro’s Learning from My Online Project Mistakes (Singapore)
• My own enthusiastic post on George Mayo’s “Many Voices” Global Twittory project, and my own lessons learned from the 1001 Flat World Tales (S. Korea)
• My “Freshman Arthus Invades Korea to Co-Teach with Me” post

It’s only 15 minutes. It’s enhanced, if you download to iTunes, with chapter markers for quick navigation. And notice, if you play it from this post, you can still see links to URL’s we discuss along the way in the embedded player.

Enjoy! And better still - extend or challenge in comments

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*I owe a debt to Chris Harbeck’s K-12 Online Conference 2007 presentation “Release the Hounds, Part 4” for planting this seed a couple of months ago. It’s sprouting some healthy shoots now.

This isn’t theoretical - necessarily. It could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Given a 1:1 MacBook school, a geeky teacher, no bandwidth or filtering or blocking restrictions, how would you design an elective class to showcase 21st century learning possibilities?

I’ve got an elective “writing seminar” beginning next week, with about ten students from age 15-17. Most have MacBooks.

I’m free to structure this class however I want. And it should be obvious I take “writing” in its communicative (and digital) sense - including multimedia, connectivity, project-based learning, the whole nine yards.

I see this as an opportunity to experiment. And to co-teach with anybody out there with an idea needing a classroom - maybe one of the many administrator, librarian, or academic readers out there who wish they still had a classroom to implement some ideas.

How can we seize this opportunity to do things differently and demonstrate the possibilities?

The conditions: class meets every two days for 75 minutes. There are no issues of filters or bandwidth to worry about: you name the site, from Skype to YouTube, from Twitter to eternity, we have access.

Assessment and grading can be as non-traditional as you please.

So there it is. Sketch your vision(s) below*. And let me know, also, if you want a hand in actually playing “teacher” for this class. You don’t have to be a “schoolyteacher.” Heck, you can be a freelance musician or gonzo entrepreneur for all I care. Socrates didn’t go to teacher certification school.

If I like the idea - and if the students do - we’ll run with it.

Deadline: Tuesday, 8 January 2008.

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*Remember: this is an Open Thread. That means there is no such thing as a comment too long. The thread is the thing. Also: notice your comment is followed by a link, via my CommentLuv plugin, to your last post, by title. [Update: Check out the 30-odd comments on the first Open Thread, "Your Fantasy Alternative School," to see how open threads collect great ideas and invite you to visit the blogs of the contributors.] And finally, if you like your comment that much, of course you can post it on your own blog as well. It’s not an either/or. Both here is better, since the thread adds to conversation, and the posting on your own blog keeps your own developmental archive intact. Thanks!

Photo: peter-noster on Flickr

If I’ve learned anything in this year of blogging, it’s that good ideas need ritual repetition before they gain traction, find support, and become realities. So here goes (and the second point is far more important than the first):

Scott McLeod just wrote a very nice post about the launch, and the future, of Students 2.0 at Dangerously Irrelevant. I replied there, but want to paste a snippet here, since I’d planned to put these ideas out here anyway.

They concern two things: finding more writers for Students 2.0, and applying the same Twitter-social bookmark PR tactics used in the s20h launch to generate political pressure concerning educational issues.

1. Seeking More Students 2.0 Writers

From the comment to Scott, slightly edited:

Getting more staff writers for s2oh is a high priority. (Sylvia Martinez, by the way, already helped me find the first batch of writers, along with Diane Cordell (http://dmcordell.blogspot.com) Carolyn Foote (http://futura.edublogs.org), and Chris Watson (http://watsoncommon.blogspot.com).)

Any readers of any age who know a student already blogging with regularity - and quality - are invited to contact us on the “Contribute” page of Students 2.0. They don’t have to be “edubloggers” per se, just good writers (or multimedia)/ bloggers with the ability to reflect about their experiences in education. They can also contact me [here].

2. One-Click Political Activism via Social Networking: Twitter, Ning, and the e-Blogosphere as a Potential Political Force

On a side note, the launch itself was a learning experience about network marketing, and how it can be used to generate a message. I’m hoping to find a few others who see that this can be duplicated for political/educational purposes aimed at influencing politicians, voters, and the “education industrial complex” (to quote Jim Walker’s brilliant comment on Will Richardson’s recent “End of Year Dreaming” post).

So far, my post about it has been met with silence. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong, to me; it just means either the right people haven’t read it or, if they have, they read it at the wrong time

I’m convinced we can hold a few feet to the fire re: NCLB, the textbook industry, the ETS and College Board, and more, in a series of regular campaigns requiring little more than bookmarking a post to del.icio.us, digg, stumbleupon, etc, in a short time-frame.

You saw the potential of s2oh, Scott. Do you see what I’m saying about the potential political power of the educational networks of Twitterers, Ning-ers (Steve Hargadon, I’ll be in touch again soon, because the numbers in Classroom 2.0 can generate quite a message!), and similar networks to create pressure for change?

Come back soon for more ritual repetition. This can be so easy if we all work together, and at the same time, so powerful. We’ve shown with Students 2.0 that Twitter can be about more than the latest cool tool you found. It can be about creating the changes we all want to see - or at least raising a fun bit of low-effort hell in the attempt.

Photo credit: “see him?” by laihiu

It’s 12 minutes from 2008 here in Seoul. It’s also 12 minutes from the One Year Anniversary of Beyond School. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I’m spending New Year’s Eve with my beloved B.S. (I do have an uncharacteristic glass of wine next to me as I write.)

I want to steal a trick from my favorite political video blog, Crooks and Liars (whose link to my “Truly Critical: Thinking about Science, Religion, and Goodness” post last week opened this blog to readership beyond edubloggers - to the tune of almost 1,000 visits to that post - in what I hope becomes a wedding of educational and political blogging, and another escape, like Students 2.0, from the echo chamber), by creating a regular “Open Thread” feature.

The idea of an Open Thread is to pose an issue, and then let the comments come. The thread - and that means the conversations in the comments - is the thing, not the post. It’s crowd wisdom - it’s blogging - at its best.

The question I propose for this thread comes in response to the following recent posts in the ’sphere:

• The 33-and-counting comments to my “On Leaving Teaching to Become a Teacher“
• Will Richardson’s “Some New Year’s Dreaming” from Weblogg-ed, and its 24-and-counting comments
• Graham Wegner’s “Parable 2.0,” and its 11-and-counting comments
• Jeff Utecht’s “One Door Closes….Where Does That Leave You?” (Jeff announces he’s leaving his job here, without a new one to go to), and its 25 comments
• Taylor the Teacher’s “You Got Punk’d: An Open Letter to American Parents” and its 11-and-counting comments.

And the question is this:

If you dream of starting a new school, what are the reasons you don’t try?

If you’d prefer a positive framing of the question, how about:

How would your dream school look, and how would you make it a reality?

or, to get really outside the box:

If you believe it’s time for schools to end, how would you replace them?

Happy New Year, everybody. Since realities begin in dreams, maybe this thread will make it really happy.

(Stay tuned for the next thread: “What are the biggest obstacles to education reform that you would like to campaign against?” - But again, that’s next time. Just priming the pump.)

Photo credit: …utopiacere… on Flickr