Beyond School

In the depths of New York City, on top of the Empire State Building, a creature rested. That creature was me….

I’m moved to plug Many Voices, a Twitter creative writing global collaboration (ages 5-13?) created by George Mayo in Washington, D.C.

The more I think about it, the more brilliant it is. [Update: I elaborated on the brilliance in a comment, and decided to post that comment here. See the bottom of this post for the list of things I like about this project.] But I’ve already said that in an email I sent to some K-8 teachers in my school in Seoul, so ctrl + c and ctrl + v:

This is an amazingly low-labor, globally collaborative creative writing activity that I hope we can find someone in Seoul with a K-8 classroom to add to. Each student gets to add only one, 140-character segment to this story. It’s such an engaging idea for doing as much as you can for a story with one idea and a tight restriction on wordiness. So cool! If no can do, please pass to other K-8 teachers!

Here’s how George explains it – and the ease of this project is brilliant – on the Many Voices wiki:

@manyvoices is an ongoing collaborative story being written by 140 different elementary and middle school students across the globe using Twitter.com. Each student will use the same @manyvoices Twitter Account. to contribute their 140 (or less) characters. The story concludes at the 140th entry. At that point, we collectively edit and revise our little Twitter story before publishing it as a small book through Lulu.com.

If you join, you’re in some great company. Here’s the line-up for the coming weeks:

week of January 7th thru Jan. 11th:
@julielindsay Qatar 123elearning.blogspot.com (Jan. 7th & 8th)
@tombarrett England tbarrett.edublogs.org/ (Jan. 10th & 11th)

week of 14th thru 18th:
@todbaker China todbaker.com
@robinellis (Jan. 15th & 16th)
@LParisi (Friday’s Best) 17th & 18th???

week of January 21st thru Jan. 25th:
@mrjarbenne Ontario (24th & 25th)
@deacs84 Atlanta, GA.
@mscofino Always LearningThailand

Want to participate? Looks like George wants about four more global classrooms to join. Here’s his contact info: mrmayo.org [at] gmail.com. Or, twitter him @mrmayo

Check out the story unfolding here for how it works: http://twitter.com/manyvoices
Note: latest entries are on top, so read from the bottom up. Each is written by a different student.

–

Chris Craft wanted more input on: Why I Find This Project “Brilliant.” Graham Wegner, Langwitches blog, Susan Sedro, and others have been writing lately about all the reasons that globally collaborative projects can fail. As a veteran of the 1001 Flat World Tales, I’ve always meant to add my dime to that topic. Here’s a few cents’ worth.

1. Many Voices is low-maintenance. Quick-in, quick-out, guarantees success. KISS. The more labor, the more chances of crashing. I learned this with the 1001 Flat World Tales. My own workshop for that project succeeded, but it took sweating buckets of blood. Other teachers often won’t have the time to invest the labor Chris Watson and I had to invest to keep it afloat.

2. The English teacher in me loves it for how it forces participants to consider the elements of fiction when they craft their single tweet contribution: how do I move the plot at this particular point in the story? How do I choose the best words, characterize best, detail the setting, etc?

3. Engagement: participants have to read the entire story tweet by tweet – close reading at its best, in a weird way – and the knowledge that each tweet is by a different author brings in some evaluative higher-order critical thinking about the quality of each tweet. “Why was tweet #122 so good, but #123 so lame?” “How could #125 miss the opportunity set up in the earlier tweets?” “What a brilliant plot twist tweet # 88 added!” That sort of thing.

4. Exposure to Twitter. How to follow that up with encouraging conscious networking is a question worth pursuing.

5. Sheer fun and creativity.

6. The wiki and the Lulu book publishing.

7. The around-the-world telling of an unbroken narrative, with each chapter representing one location for local flavor within the global mix.

8, 9, 10: fun, fun, fun.

That being said, I am a complete bum for not having made the time to look at the project Chris did earlier with digital storytelling – was it “Life Round Here?” I clued in momentarily, but life got in the way. I’ve asked Chris to reply with a link

Head on over to Patrick Higgins‘ Voicethread for his staff development workshop to both explore one very nifty educational tool and to have fun helping Patrick at the same time!

(Yes, the W.C. Fields icon is mine.)

The only thing worth quitting is smoking. (I’m on day 4, by the way.) This project is not worth quitting. It’s growing in a really fun, easy, fascinating way.

Here’s an update about developments on the planning Ning (the “Global Cooling Collective,” which is again now open for easy membership or lurking), in our school in Seoul, and – thanks to two other people on this planet – oh, but I explain all that in this update from the Ning:

Just a quick update: one educator at an international school in Kazakhstan is getting active, and working his network in Bangladesh and Qatar to get active and make things happen as well. So we’ll see how that evolves. His name is Gary. Gary and I have emailed a good bit over the last week, and he’s serious about doing fun stuff for real-world change.

Chris in Honolulu and I skyped this morning, and he’s presenting the project on the community level at his private school, and as an activity club. He’s also got an IB Economics class interested in producing work for publication on the website. That class might be able to do some interesting collaboration with Mr. Ski’s AP Econ class here in Seoul, since Ski likes the idea of real-world project-based learning for his classrooms too.

So keep the faith, Seoul. There are a few movers and shakers out there starting to come to life like you have

Other news (local): we got the okay for the pro-level video camera for our documentary about this project (and about the psychology of schools).

We’re sort of competing to see who can get a response first from Al Gore.

We’re working on building the PCG website and blog (it’s on WordPress, with a static page as the home page, and the blog on a navbar link). 30 students contributing to the blog would be too unfocused. We’re working on a way to blog our progress in a more orderly way, but still inclusive of everyone.

There are now 35 students in our high school (total population: 235 or so) participating in two separate club blocks – one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday. Each block only meets once a week, for forty minutes, but we’re talking about voluntary weekend or after school meetings as well.

Despite our school’s “No Cell Phones” policy, in our club, we use them to call corporations, music club owners, and other contacts to request appointments and propose ideas.

We’ve started filming the documentary. It’s already interesting.

Finally, OUR NATURAL NETWORK IN SEOUL IS AMAZING. We have parents in the film industry, in the major corporations, in television, in universities, and more. Ideas are exploding about how to tap these community members to help us make this movement grow and spread.

And we’re only two weeks into the school year. We have about 30 weeks left before the Earth Day PGC Concert in April ‘08.

We will do it this year. Several bands are already saying they want to perform.

And we will do it better next year.

And our futures will be better for it.

Seoul members, so many of you are already inspiring. You’re outside of the school “box” and connecting to the real world for a real good cause.

You make life worth living.

Thanks for that.

Clay

P.S. The rest of you out there? Aren’t you the least bit interested in joining us? Hurry now, so you don’t hurry later

Photo on Flickr by snowriderguy

Who is the audience for this post? AudienceS is more accurate. They are people who are interested in:

1. Expanding the Global Cooling Project – I’ve never been so excited about anything, and an update is overdue;
2. Notes from the trenches of a teachergeek in his first weeks as tech coordinator at a new Apple 1:1 school (it’s been a hellish but fertile path so far);
3. Joining the second year of the 1001 Flat World Tales project (another overdue update);
4. How edublogger posts are stealthily replacing textbook readings in my AP Literature classroom.

In short, it’s a report from underneath the many different hats I’ve added to my wardrobe. I’m astonished by what my life has become after 7 short months of edublogging and edtech experimentation. I would never have predicted wearing any of these hats this time last year. So here goes:

1. Project Global Cooling / Citizenship 2.0: Real-world Learning without Grades or Homework – We’re Public

I think I learned a lesson about timing this summer: don’t try to generate collaborative ideas during vacation, because most people are very sensibly signing out for some downtime. And by the time they sign back in, all the blog posts will be buried in the archives.

In June and July, I wrote my way into a project idea that has taken root here in Seoul, and that wants to take root around the world as well. It’s more ambitious than the 1001 Flat World Tales – and far more relevant – but it’s also far less labor-intensive for teachers. Best of both worlds.

If you’re aware of the Live Earth Concerts that took place this summer in eight cities around the world, all web-hosted as the “festive” slice of the far more serious challenge of raising consciousness and creating sane lifestyle changes in response to the looming challenge of climate change and global warming, then the Project Global Cooling idea will make sense to you. Change the high-profile celebrities and professional web designers, computer graphics artists, journalists, filmmakers, etc to the young adults in our schools, and you have Project Global Cooling.

In a nutshell: around the world on Earth Day ‘08 (April 19, Saturday), student-organized “downtown music festivals” will take place. The performers will be local musicians – student bands, college bands, local bands. The concerts will be filmed, uploaded to YouTube or whatever, and embedded on the Project Global Cooling website, to form a gallery of world music featuring the next generation of world musicians.

Again, this is precisely what Live Earth did. Bands in the US, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia (?) performed on the same day. They filmed the concerts and streamed them on a central website – one that included MUCH MORE THAN MUSIC.

Our website will also feature much more: a collaborative blog authored by students involved in organizing this project in their locales around the world, documenting their successes and failures as they attempt to be taken seriously as citizens, not students; young adults, not children; community members, not disenfranchised “kids.”

It will also feature short, student-made promotional videos aimed at going “viral,” addressing Global Warming and the small things we can do to forestall it, with a style modeled after real-world videographers a la MTV, not “schooly” homework videos. Like the world music gallery, the PSA video gallery will accentuate the local culture while addressing the global problem. They’ll be as varied as the imaginations of our young contributors: comic, hip, sexy, ironic, brooding, whatever they decide. The goal, again, is to make videos so attractive that they become viral – with a purpose. My Seoul students have some great scripts already, aimed at projecting the Korean look and attitude onto the world stage.

Other categories on the website include (but are not limited to):

• “Student-powered”: gallery featuring the most remarkable accomplishments by students around the world in making this thing happen by April
• “Earth News”: student summaries and reflections on the latest updates from the scientific community about issues related to climate change
• “Green Entrepreneurship”: reports from the business-oriented about commercial opportunities to reap profit while at the same time benefiting society
• “Skeptic’s Corner”: a page devoted to any controversies about the science its challengers
• Podcasts and radio shows are obviously easy to include on any and all of these pages.

Finally, all banners, graphics, flash animations, slideshows, graphs, charts, etc, will be contributed by the students wanting to do more with the skills they learn in their computer classes than turn a product in to teacher for a grade.

The beauty: 28 students in my high school have signed up for this project as an activity block – a club – at school. There are no grades, no homework, no lesson plans involved. But there is much learning to come. Students at my school will be involved in real-world learning as they:

• propose to school administrators that the school adopt and adhere to a “Carbon-neutral Pledge,” with short- and long-term steps to reduce our school’s carbon footprint permanently. (Buying different lightbulbs, for example, is a simple, concrete, and consequential step the school can take. And it’s win-win: lower energy bills for the school, less emissions for the future from our school forevermore. Many more such steps are easy enough to take.)
• plan and execute proposals for corporate and community sponsorship, donation of a live music club’s performance space, etc.
• make films.
• coordinate and network with other students worldwide working toward the same goal.
• manage the funds using real-world accounting skills.
• promote the concert using real-world marketing and promotion skills.
• discover that you can “have fun doing good,” and that citizenship doesn’t have to be boring.
• learn real-world web 2.o power.
• make a documentary film of the whole year’s project.
• on and on.

Best of all: like the 1001 Tales, this is an endless project, to be grown, improved, repeated annually. Picture the archives of the PGC website as more and more content is added to each of its galleries over the years. Picture the learning of each new year of students as they learn from the prior year’s successes, and improve upon its weaknesses. And picture, finally, the fact that world-changing habits of mind and action will be instituted in the culture of each school and community that joins this project. (And don’t forget to picture the proud fun when the music is playing on a fine April day, thanks to the power and energy of students who decided to branch out and become people too.)

If this isn’t enough, click the “world citizenship” label on this blog to see all the posts related to this project since its inception.

Many adults expressed interest when I announced this, so I’m hoping that they’ll remember, get in touch, and pass the project idea on to their student network locally. Any interested adults and students can join the PGC’s planning Ning at The Global Cooling Collective (http://globallycool.ning.com). I recently switched the Ning from private, members-only, to public. I hope that makes it easier to get involved.

And I’d like to link to the PGC blog itself – it’s already got some nice banners and graphics from my Seoul students, and credited to them. But I can’t make that link because….

2. My Techno Life is Cursed: On “Breaking” Skype, Ning, WordPressMU, Moodle, and Other Joys of a Noob Tech Coordinator

Westley Fields in Australia cracked me up in an email last week, the day after my 1:1 Parent Presentation with Google Earth and Skype crashed and burned with Skype’s global outage, 10 minutes before I presented.

“YOU BROKE SKYPE!” he wrote.

As it turns out, that was just a warm-up. Since then, I have broken:

Ning. Twice:

First, I was locked out of my AP Literature class Ning for two days. More bad timing (more of Somebody Up There’s wrath): on the same day I sent a support request to the folks at Ning, who are always stellar with prompt responses and fixes, they disabled their “support@ning.com” address to switch to a web-based help-ticket form on their site. So they didn’t see my help requests. And I didn’t read their auto-generated response to my email requests, because I figured they’d say the same old “Thanks we’ll be in contact soon.” Instead, they said (I discovered two hours ago), “WE WON’T READ THIS. GO TO THE NEW SUPPORT PAGE AND MAKE YOUR REQUEST THERE.”

So for three or four days, I sat on my hands, locked out of my own virtual classroom, waiting. My students, meanwhile, had full access to the site. They must have laughed at the idea of a teacher unable to enter his own class.

Anyway, Ning fixed it when I emailed Gina, and we discovered the breakdown. I love Ning.

Second, Ning recently upgraded their service so that network creators can switch private sites to public, and vice versa. I’d made the Global Cooling Collective private, but wanted to switch that for easier growth, so I pushed all the right buttons. A Ning bug, though, made it shut down the site altogether. So PGC visitors from this blog reached a “closed” message.

Ning fixed it today. We’re open now. (Check out the Seoul group. It’s active and interesting.)

Moodle and WordPressMU:

Short version: I tried to upgrade Moodle on our remote server. I still don’t speak PHP or MySQL database, am not a whiz at cPanel and WebHost Manager, and all this website admin biz. But I tried anyway. Failure. I dinked, deleting this file and that on the Moodle server, trusting instinct and vague hypotheses.

By the end, I’d screwed things up so royally, I just admitted defeat and sent a request to the server support to wipe the Moodle site clean. I had a back-up, so I would just reinstall the whole thing.

Pop quiz: Mr. Burell requested WHAT to be wiped clean?

If you answered “the Moodle site,” you’re a better reader than the server support guy (may he burn in hell).

He didn’t only nuke Moodle. He nuked my school’s entire WordPressMU site.

So I’m back where I started last year: a blank server.

Luckily, I backed up the school blogs a day or two earlier, so they’re not lost. I just don’t know how to put them back. The support staff for my server offered to reinstall for me, but dammit, I want to learn this stuff, so I said no. I’ll learn and succeed, or die trying. Once I have this down, the future is golden. How hard can it be to figure out how to change code in a PHP file, to create a MySQL database? Trained monkey stuff.

Then, serendipity: I posted about Lyceum yesterday as a possible alternative to the slow WPMU (their support forums can be frustrating and unkind as well, depending on the day). Lyceum’s creator replied to that post, and I invited him to collaborate on a screencast demonstrating how to install Lyceum using WebHost Manager and cPanel. He’s going to talk me through the process on Skype tonight, using Vyew to see my Seoul desktop on his in New York, and we’ll have a screencast for all sorry bastards like me who can’t decipher the tech-head gobbledygook as they try to simply put a blogging software on a server.

So stay tuned on more about Lyceum for student blogging. Think “WordPress MU, but faster and nicer.”

Other errata as tech coordinator: Lessons learned:

1. Teachers don’t like being learners: I made screencasts for MacBook and Firefox setup before the teachers received their laptops. I anticipated every difficulty and need. I made a support blog for the teachers to see these screencasts. Two weeks later, almost none of them have taken the 20 minutes to save themselves a year of headaches. Instead, they’re emailing me requests for personal visits to “teach” them 1 on 1. “Did you watch the tutorial?” “No….”
2. IT Managers kill me: It’s really hard to get the IT Manager to allow the school server to be useful to teachers. Or to ask this teacher for input before making decisions that will affect all us teachers. For example, the student email setup: Here is an exhaustive list of all the family names in Korean society: Kim, Park, Choi, Hong, Lee, Kang. I may have left two or three out. When you’ve got ten Lees, Parks, and Chois at each grade level, and dozens 9-12, creating school email accounts using a familyname+first initial doesn’t cut it. I had to fight ten objections to simply adding a two-digit graduation year suffix to each name (lpark09) to at least tell teachers if this LPark was the freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior LPark. When that didn’t work, I told the principal. He pulled rank, so it’s happening. Lesson: be pushy and proactive. Probe the IT staff for any news on what they’re doing that will affect the classroom before they finish it. Don’t expect them to ask for your input; don’t expect to be happy if you don’t give that input while there’s time.

That’s enough for now.

3. 1001 Flat World Tales, Year 2:

I’m behind on contacting Dana, Cindy, Jo, somebody in Kazakhstan, Chris, Michele, and others about this year’s 1001 Flat World Tales – 2.0. I’ll be in touch soon. Lots of room for new ideas and synergy. I’m excited to incorporate others’ ideas into this iteration.

Chris and Michele are working on the final touches for the website, eBook, “blook,” and paperback version of the first edition of published tales. Stay tuned.

4. Edublogs as Textbooks?

As for using edublogs to replace lessons in textbooks, I’ll only say this: I’ve assigned students to read Christian Long’s post about “what an A paper is,” and to watch Wes Fryer’s “Engage, Don’t Enthrall” video podcast, and will soon add Carolyn Foote’s post on how to search online smartly, all in the first three classes of the year. This is interesting to me. My Bloglines edublogs folders are morphing into textbook replacements.

Sorry for the length. I just wanted to get a few monkeys off my back.

We expect my presentation to start around 7.30 p.m. That would make it:

• Thursday 11 a.m. in London
• Thursday 12.30 a.m. (ouch) in Hawaii (sorry, Chris! I owe you! Or you can send me a YackPack voice message?)
• Thursday 4.30 a.m. (carrumba) in Denver (Karl, how about a YackPack message?)
• Thursday 5.30 p.m. in Bangkok
• Thursday 8.30 p.m. in NSW, Australia
• Thursday 6.30 a.m. in New Jersey
• Hey Vivek in India – you game?

The actual Skype talk itself would probably come about 15 minutes later, but I’ll give you a heads-up call at the times above. Please confirm I got your times right?

I can’t keep a secret. I promised Chris in Honolulu and Michele in Arapahoe that I wouldn’t announce the launch of the 1001 Flat World Tales website until we did some clean-up. But – wait, wait – oh, heck, I’ll keep my promise. I’ll hold off on announcing the website for a day or two. We need to put the bios of the authors and editors, link to their blogs, upload their podcasts, and otherwise prepare for the launch party.

I’ll just say that the site includes the first 15 or 16 stories from the 130 written in the first high school workshop.

Since our goal really is 1001 student writings, and several new and returning schools are on board for the coming school year (and you’re always invited too), I’m still going to embed this screencast-o-matic tutorial about the wiki workshop itself, and the publication of the winning stories on the soon-to-be-unveiled website. It’s 9 minutes walking and talking you through the idea, the process, the set-up. (If you click on the embed, it will take you to the much larger screencast at my Screencast-o-matic channel):

A caveat: I chose to host the website on Wordpress instead of Edublogs because the image editor was giving me trouble there. I may regret that later, but didn’t have time to wrestle with it. I had to get this monkey off my back before going back to school on Monday!

Update: Wordpress.com is even more restrictive with Java and Flash embeds than Edublogs is. That’s what drives me crazy about Wordpress, and keeps me with Blogger. Anyway, I went back to Edublogs and solved the problem of image editing – a very un-intuitive place to enable the Rich Text Editor hiding in the “My Profile” page.

More later.

bettySeptember005.jpg
Originally uploaded by digitalteacupdotcom.

Who hit fast-forward?

On Monday, it’s back to school for teachers at Korea International School.

Since I’ll be 3/4 tech coordinator, and since the high school is making its debut as a 1:1 Apple laptop school, the field is fertile for connecting classrooms. Blogs, wikis, Skype conferences, webcam, film, podcast: you name it, we should have teachers willing to try. (We also have many laptop carts for k-8, so this is totally open.)

So if you have a project that’s looking for people, either leave a comment soon, or email me at clayburell [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll try to help make it happen.

“See, Hear, Speak No Evil” by AndyRamdin on Flickr

[Update: This post is extends a critique of my own teaching, and typical schooling in general, that I wrote last week in "I'm Nobody. Goodbye to All of That." Makes sense to start there, if you haven't read it already.]

I have a headache and a neck-and-shoulder ache, but we all know how thoughts wing away if we don’t snare them on take-off. This might be clumsy, but here goes.

I think I’m figuring out a way to make school more relevant – at least in my classroom. And how to liberate the young adults in my high school classroom from the diapers the classroom makes these infantilized physics-, calculus-, and Shakespeare-capable young adults wear and, worse yet, find natural, in the first place. I think I’m figuring out a way to give them the initiation into the world of adult citizenship, adult community, adult participation, adult empowerment, which they wish I’d invite them to enter.

You remember how angry you were, when you were in high school, to be treated like a kid by the adults, don’t you? How you knew you were capable of more than the adults allowed you to show? I think I’m figuring out how to stop being one of those adults myself, now. And how to stop being one of those teachers.

It occurs to me that this should be easy for a high school language arts teacher who has managed one Big Project – albeit it an ultimately trivial one – on web 2.0. I’ve already written about that, and have students in Seoul actually acting on it, with the year-long Global Cooling Project. That’s step one: re-design my fay little web 2.0 student showcase from the merry-go-round blue-print of last year – gee, kiddies, isn’t this fun? – to something modeled after the real-world campaigns in the adult world. Need examples? Check out the presidential campaigns in the US using YouTube, check out Live Earth’s website and its actions, praise goodness, beyond the “producing informational products” fetish of the current stage of our “school 2.0″ visionaries (that’s not aimed at you, Will). As if going from text only verbiage to multimedia verbiage is going to change anything.

Going back to Suzie Boss and the WorldChanging.com article, and back to the talismanic power the tagline of her forthcoming book holds on me now – “Real World Project-Based Learning in the Digital Age” – it’s clear that the notion of school should evaporate as much as possible when designing projects for my young adults. John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary, Giuliani, even Bush (if he ever learns to email and use “The Google”), Gore, Micheal Moore: all these adults use the media and the read-write web to “produce informational constructions of meaning” (as we so clumsily put it) for real world, relevant, important purposes. And here’s the rub: these world-changing adults are all still “learners” engaged in their own, adult, versions of “real world project-based learning.” It’s not like web 2.0 is old hat to them, either. You can bet your last dollar they’re learning up a storm on a minute-by-minute basis in all these campaigns.

Again, the difference: they’re applying that learning with a real-world purpose that can produce real-world change, for problems that matter. In school, our projects are usually lacking that vital element. Again, they’re just nice little diversions that for some tragically unfathomable reason we, as teachers, generally cannot think beyond. (Maybe it’s very fathomable, this shackling force. Maybe it’s simply fear of parents, administrators, community leaders, or the fear of being uncommon generally – though why trying to make engaged citizens out of young adults is a controversial issue among educators, of all people, is indeed tragic.)

So: the problem with me, as a teacher, is that I design units that don’t address anything important. I’ve been trained to think that my job is to stuff the headpieces of the next generation with such irrelevant things as the definition of litotes and onomatopoeia, to write cute little stories about nothing, to know Stratford-upon-Avon. To be able, paradoxically, to think critically about safe subjects. And above all, not to think about anything that might, god forbid, rankle the status quo. And let’s not even start to think about taking any sort of action.

Again, so: As soon as I stop thinking like a teacher, designing units derived from an institutional culture that defines me as a teacher, and subconsciously makes me far more traditional in my teaching than my progressively-posing ego likes to acknowledge….as soon as I re-define myself as a community leader – as that once-upon-a-time American thing called a citizen – instead, maybe the young adults of my community might have an opportunity to learn how to function in the world they’ll inherit from and manage for us all-too-soon.

I know. Wordy. I have a headache. I’ll move on.

The task of last year’s 1001 Flat World Tales “project”? (For those of you who don’t know it, it actually managed to get over a dozen schools from four or five continents writing together on a wiki in self-contained k-12 collaborative workshops, though some of those workshops crashed and burned. The one my students participated in with Arapahoe¹ and Honolulu made it to the end of the two-month unit.) That task was something like, “Write a story that reveals your local culture for readers from other cultures.”

Cindy Barnsley, who worked on the project in Australia (with Shanghai and Serbia – it crashed, but not without lessons learned, so it wasn’t a failure), has taken me to task for damning my own baby, and she’s partly justified. The conceptual objective of the project was a more conscious, more critical, understanding of the students’ own, and their global peers’ “Other,” cultures. The skills? To use process writing coupled with the 6 Traits of Effective Writing to refine those writing skills, giving and receiving peer feedback from across the globe.

I’m not saying it’s garbage, Cindy. I’m saying that, when all is said and done, and all that energy in bringing together, in my workshop alone, 130 students from the Korean peninsula, the mid-Pacific Ocean, and the Rocky Mountains – when all that energy has been expended, what’s the result? Students have written a story for their English class. And it’s been published in a little e-Book (sorry, but I still think it’s true in the grand scheme of things, though I loved some of the writing that happened there).

Couldn’t that immense amount of energy have been expended on something more consequential?

Yes. And how it could, by the way, is the idea that spurred me to sit down and write this post now. Here’s how:

Real-world literature - the great works we tame in our classrooms – invariably consists of precisely the critical thinking and literacy skills we aimed to develop in the 1001 Tales. But that project was fatally flawed by it’s lack of real-world literature’s concomitant element: a social problem worth criticizing.

“Reveal your culture” is so pathetically fay and schooly by that standard.

These young adults are screaming their critical attitude toward the roles we’ve limited them to in our culture in everything they do, from their attitudes to their music, fashions, and past-times. They live in passive revolt against what schools, parents, communities at large are doing to them. And having no constructive outlet, they either self-destruct or seek solace in the trivial.

So why not let them write about that?

A bit more: They’re also woefully oblivious to the burning issues of their futures (and that pun, though pregnant, was not intended). Doug has commented about the fear in (American) schools of teaching anything controversial, god help us (and this does not mean Doug’s complicit in that). That’s a screaming admission that schools fear relevance.

The logical corollary? Fear makes schools irrelevant.

Etymology time: “Educate” – “to lead out.” If we’re afraid, as educators, to lead our students “out” to anything important in the real world, what exactly are we doing? I mean, besides paying the bills and perpetuating worldly ignorance?

So back to those “burning issues”: Diane got me thinking about the need for educators to serve as “futurist guides” to remedy the “soft news diet” of mainstream media and community ignorance of what scientists of all stripes, social as well as natural, are unable to get us to notice. (Another etymology check: “science” – “knowledge”; one hopes schools would defend science, especially in the anti-scientific US, against its detractors, but I’m not seeing it. I’m seeing more cowed, fearful, silent educators.)

Again: “Our past is not their future.” If the international community of scientists is dismissed as crank Cassandras by the Bush administration, by fundamentalist churches, and by all the followers in our communities of the information campaigns so powerfully managed by both of those camps, how do our children stand a chance of meeting future challenges if we’re afraid to talk about them? We’re like the current Democratic congress: we have the power, but we fail our constituents by fearing to wield it for the best interests, scientifically-grounded, of that community and of the globe.

So instead of a writing project that limits students to expressing what they already know too well – that they’re subtly ticked off and passively rebellious over their infantilization and the irrelevance of schools – why can’t we, as “futurist guides,” “lead them out” to questions posed by science about their futures?

That’s another “problem worth criticizing via literature.” Students around the globe comparing artfully-crafted, critically-observed notes in story form of the “consensus trance” of their local community as it trashes their futures with nary a thought. Students being encouraged to authentically express whatever satirical, lyrical, tragic, comic, or utopian variation on this theme suits them. Or to challenge the premise. This is not indoctrination, but “teaching the controversy,” as Doug so sharply frames it.

Or are we so afraid to educate (instead of merely teach) that we can’t even ask open questions like: “Is global warming a problem?”

If so, isn’t school kind of like studying for the SAT on the deck of the Titanic – post-iceburg?

Parting shot. On July 9, I mentioned in my little “personal commencement” post, which announced my graduation from the web 2.0 church and conversion to the church of relevance, that one of my new goals is to become “less of a teacher and more of a community leader, and to expand my relationship with the young adults in my community beyond the 9-month term.” Something like that, anyway.

One of the things that has disturbed me in that respect is this: I’ve had expressions of interest from surely more than 30 adults about the “Year of Global Cooling” and “Concerts for Global Chilling” project targeted to culminate, “flat world community service” style, on Earth Day of next year. I’m literate enough in the science to think it’s worth continuing to “flog” this idea on this blog, as Jeff Wasserman so pricelessly (and accurately) put it. I’m trying to be the change I want to see, and I insist that the time to get young adults involved in starting the “real-world project-based learning” so historically relevant to their futures is now, in the summer – before school swallows them back into homework and SAT-world for nine fallow months beginning soon. These young adults are free right now to be relevant. And if I’m right, some of them would like the opportunity to be invited into that relevance and treated like they could have some fun doing something good.

So here’s what’s bothering me: If 30 educators have expressed interest and even joined the project Ning, but only one has managed to produce a single young adult – while over 20 students here in Seoul are working on it, during summer, with no grades involved – does that indicate something troublesome about our relationships, as youth leaders (we are youth leaders, like it or not), with our youth? And is that troubling thing possibly rooted in some strange perversion of adult-youth community relations caused by the fact that schools make teachers “want vacations from the kids” because . . . beyond assigning them work, disciplining them, and branding them with grades, we don’t have human relationships to them?

I fear the answer is too often yes. If not, why are no world youths being told about this by their educators during the summer? Is it that hard to pass an email invitation to a few young adults in our communities, when we spend nine months a year with them? What’s going on there?

Finally: Cindy Barnsley’s blog has a great conversation going right now about “dissenting voices” and the need for them. (See cocomments in the sidebar too.) I hope it goes without saying that I shouldn’t have to apologize for any statements critical of the status quo. I’m here to field comments and learn from those that teach me. (And Dana, did this help you understand what I’m getting at?)

–
Photo 2: “The Ghosts of No Evil” by lindes on Flickr.
Photo 3: “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” by Auntie P on Flickr.
Photo 4: “Fear Squared” by seetwist on Flickr.
Photo 5: “Fear Limited Edition Tee” by spcoon on Flickr.

1. Denver [↩]

[This post is a watershed for me, stuffy as that may sound. Many loose threads needed weaving. I apologize for the tone, which I fear is typically more self-important and more harsh than I would like. I also apologize for the length. I hope you'll read it through, and thank you if you do. Update 13 July 07: Be sure to read the conversation with Doug and others in the comments following the post. And the thinking extends in this "Teaching Grammar on the Titanic: on Fear and Irrelevance in Education" post.]

* * *

1. I’m Nobody

Suzie Boss, writer of the upcoming Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age, to be published by ISTE this fall, interviewed me via Skype* (thanks to a referral by the ever-helpful Jeff Whipple of Whip Blog) for an article recently published on the Worldchanging.com website entitled “Education: Connecting the Lonely Profession.” It goes without saying that it was an honor to be mentioned in the same paragraph with Wes Fryer, Julie Lindsay, and Vicki Davis. It was Julie and Vicki’s Flat Classroom Project, after all, that inspired my idea to take the traditional language arts writing workshop onto a flat classroom collaborative wiki, and make it a never-ending global project: the 1001 Flat World Tales**. It was also an honor to appear at all on Worldchanging.com, which I’d subscribed to in Bloglines many months earlier. There are few more important blogs out there for real-world problem-solving in the Age of Mindless Waste and Warming.

That being said, though, that interview with Ms. Boss came at a pregnant moment in my own journey not just as a teacher, but as an earthling. I had just taught a unit of satire in which Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels – and the multimedia Yahoo Project we finished that unit with – probably changed my thinking more than it did my students’. Swift’s novel nailed human folly with the timelessness that makes it the classic it is. The Yahoos he pillories in the novel are alive and well today, inside us all. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were most painfully present in our schools, in my classroom – in my teaching.

Here I was, assigning four dozen 15-year-olds to take action addressing whatever “Yahoo-caused” problem in the world disturbed them via a digital storytelling product and a plan involving the use of web 2.o to create positive change about their chosen issue, and thinking I’d done my job at inculcating a sense of citizenship and agency in them. “Think big,” I told them. “Look at the Flat World Tales: it was an idea in January, and by May more than a dozen countries were participating in the project. Use that as a lesson to see how possible it is to use web 2.0 to create real change.” I was pretty proud of that. Until.

I started listening to my students talk about how bothered they were about The Big Issue affecting their futures: global warming (and I’d love any deniers out there to comment so we can debate this). They were bothered about it because “Nobody’s doing anything about it, and we know it’s a problem.”

That set off my 5-alarm Hypocrisy Detector. Sure, the attempt to be “Classroom 2.0″ with the 1001 Flat World Tales was not your run-of-the-mill way to deliver a lesson – it was inventive, it was fresh, and it had pedagogical potential to improve both engagement and literacy. But. In terms of its content, its basic objectives, it was nothing new at all. Just a traditionally irrelevant and arbitrary, teacher-dictated little exercise in writing a nice little story for school with other nice little students stuck in their classrooms around the world.

It wasn’t “Beyond School” at all. It was Classroom 1.0 with web 2.o bells and whistles. In terms of vision, it was still “school-y.”

“Nobody’s doing anything about it.” It kept on echoing. My pride in the 1001 Flat World Tales collapsed as a result. I wasn’t “teacher 2.0.” I was one of the “Nobodies” that frustrated students by my complicity in schoolhouse irrelevance.

The rest is history, unless you were at NECC or Disneyland while I was writing a dozen posts in Korea that you didn’t read upon your return. Here’s the short version:

1. I read that over 200 universities in the US had signed a “carbon neutral” pledge in recognition that they, as educational institutions, had a responsibility to set an example in responding to the overwhelming scientific evidence that human activity was the key factor in global warming.

2. I blogged about that pledge, asking why K-12 schools aren’t following suit, and Jeff Wasserman blogged about that post in a Very Strange Coincidence that set the Global Cooling / Community Service 2.0 project in motion. (Were I superstitious, I would have thought that coincidence a sign. I suppose I did see it that way, somewhat.)

3. In the intervening 3 weeks, I’ve written a dozen or more posts developing the idea. In the midst of that, Suzie Boss interviewed me about her WorldChanging.com article (ironically, her interest was in the 1001 Flat World Tales, which I’d come to view as too “school-as-usual”). But the title, or, more precisely, the tagline of Suzie’s forthcoming book – “Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age” – worked a spell on me. Real World. My world, the students’ world, the students’ future. Projects that were relevant to that. That was key.

And the title of the website Suzie’s article appeared on: WorldChanging. That too was key. As a teacher, I’d been “World-Ignoring,” creating nice little exercises to connect students with other classrooms around the world, but not to connect with the world itself. Harnessing the power of Web 2.0 to reinforce the disempowerment and infantilization of adolescents around the world. School-y. “Beyond School”? Again, a joke.

Yeah, the students thought it was more interesting than most of the stuff they have to put up with in schoolhouses. But it was still just homework. Nothing WorldChanging, nothing that taught them that they have the potential to affect this world for the better. Nothing that encouraged their empowerment. Nothing that gave them the opportunity to apply their learning to something that mattered to them, or to discover that, if only schools would let them, they could learn about the limits of their own power to make change in the world.

I was keeping these young adults in diapers, checking their homework, teaching them that changing the world was something to leave to others. Our purpose was to teach them what a metaphor is, and a synecdoche. Leave the fate of the planet to politicians and prayers, and other such time-tested solutions. Depend on anything but your own skills and agency to avert catastrophe.

4. I invited my AP Literature students, strangers I’m getting to know on our AP Lit Summer Reading Ning, to begin organizing the “Year of Global Cooling” and “Concerts for Global Chilling” here in Seoul, so it can all come off by Earth Day next April. Over 20 of these young adults are active on it now, and a dozen met me yesterday for a Sunday afternoon planning session at a downtown cafe. I left early, because they were so all over it, they didn’t need me – which was what I’d hoped would happen.

On the Global Cooling Collective Ning I started, another member I’d invited sent out over 100 invitations to other “Classroom 2.0″ adult types. About 20 of them joined. 20 of my students also joined. So far, the students are active, while the adults are, with a couple of exceptions, pictures on the “Members” box. But maybe they’ll contribute at some point.

That’s about it, on that front.

* * *

2. Goodbye to All of That

On New Year’s Day, 2007, I started this blog. I named it “Beyond School” and, in the months that followed, thought I was being true to the aspiration so vaguely adumbrated in that title. A lot has happened in the seven months since that time that has energized my professional life beyond my wildest expectations, and none if it would have occurred if I hadn’t started participating in the edublogosphere.

But I see now that my personal journey to get Beyond School is only now starting to crystallize. It’s not about web 2.0 for me anymore (though that is a tool I’ll continue using). And it’s definitely not about “Classroom 2.0,” since I dislike the realities of schools and classrooms as much now, as a teacher, as I did when I was a very miserable high school student.

Putting “what it is about” in positive terms is more difficult, but here are a few stabs. It’s about not being “a Nobody doing anything” when my students are looking for “Somebody doing something” about what they care about. It’s about inviting them to discover that they have the power to do something too. It’s about being a community leader more, and a teacher less. It’s about extending my relationship with these young adults beyond the nine-month term (if church youth group leaders can do it, so can teachers). It’s about re-conceptualizing schools as community action centers instead of walled gardens (or day-care centers, or juvenile detention centers). It’s about designing relevant experiences and projects in which any metaphors or synecdoches that, god help us, they learn, will have a purpose and meaning beyond an alphanumeric grade.

It’s about trying to be World-Changing instead of World-Ignoring and World-Ignorant.

That’s the best I can do right now. Does anybody out there want to talk about ways to collaborate on “real-world project-based learning” along these lines?

—

*I podcasted part of that conversation, in which Ms. Boss was kind enough to indulge a 15-minute “think-aloud” about the Year of Global Cooling project, which was then a four-day-old (obsessive) idea, in an earlier post.

**I’m incredibly excited, by the way, to report that Dana Huff of huffenglish, one of my favorite English teacher blogs, dropped me a message on Wikispaces saying she wants to participate in the ‘07-’08 iteration of the 1001 Flat World Tales – talk about “connecting the loneliest profession” with a vengeance! Dana’s the kind of English teacher I dream of having in the classroom next door. And now I will, virtually. Too cool for words. More on that later, I’m sure. With Dana on board, and the logistical lessons learned about flat classroom projects under our belt from the first run last year, this year will surely see a focus on improving the project’s pedagogy. Dana’s been studying Wiggins’ and McTighe’s Understanding by Design for her summer vacation, and has inspired me to do the same. So this looks like fun. You’re invited too, by the way. See the 1001 Teachers wiki to sign on.

But it should be clear that I’m ambivalent now about the value of the 1001 Flat World Tales. I wonder how it can be modified to make it more relevant, and less school-y.