Beyond School

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It’s only natural that the K12 Online Conference presentations feel uneven to some of us. Each presenter has a different background, level of experience, set of priorities, agenda, audience. Some hit me, some don’t.

Dean Shareski hit me on this biting Seoul Saturday morning. If a lot of the more tech-oriented presenters are the Henry Fords of this Digital Revolution, Dean is more of a William Morris. Aesthetics is the focus of his “Design Matters” presentation, and if you only watch one K12 presentation, this is the one I’d recommend. It puts the ghost back into the machine.

Dean asked for feedback from his viewers, so I gave the below on the comments section of his K12 Online presentation page. I’m pasting it here because it’s the beginning of a new project for me: The Campsite Seminars, I’m calling it for now. Or maybe I like this better:

Walden 2.0

Here’s the comment:

Dean asked for feedback as we watched, and I assume that means feedback here, though it’s strange to be first. Anyway, here’s mine.

I like Dean’s opening point: much classroom-created content (the majority?) suffers from poor design – “cheesiness” in the worst sense (think Kraftt).

(Warlick’s keynote touches on the same idea with his “competitive information products,” though the worker-drone connotations of “products” still irks me, as it focuses more than I would like on economics and money-making, more than on aesthetics and character, I would argue – but anyway….)

Christian Long’s interview suffered from poor audio quality, so I couldn’t understand much of it (we’ve all experienced the wrath of the techno gods, so I sympathize). I did catch, though, the exploitation of simple walking distance and space between buildings as a learning opportunity, and that resonated. Our own campus is very restricted by its hilltop, woods-surrounded setting, which is the opposite of the example Christian used of having to walk a mile between buildings: we’re too cramped. But WE DO HAVE THOSE SURROUNDING WOODS. That’s fascinating in this new light. I’m picturing possibilities of assigning students – in small groups, so the discussions are not diluted by too many voices and not enough time – to take voice or video recorders of whatever sort into the woods to record conversations in that setting – I can’t help but hope that the setting would influence the discussions in interesting and more thoughtful ways. Have them discuss a theme from our reading of King Lear, for example, or whatever topic might benefit from the meditative openness of a wooded setting. Recording these discussions – video seems more desirable, when I think about it – would allay most fears of “unsupervised” students in the woods. Take the footage back into the classroom and quick-edit these “campsite seminars” into short films. I’ll have to try this. It’s literally “Beyond School”

Dr. Schwier: “Does it work? Is it beautiful? Is it powerful? Is it inspiring?” This is refining my “campsite seminars” idea above. I said “quick-edit” those seminars just now. Why rush? That way Velveeta lies.

Why not assign them to be voice-overs for iMovie projects that add BEAUTY and FORCE via film, stills, music, titles? Yes, yes, yes: let’s aim for brie and camembert.

In fact, I’m seeing now that two or three class sessions of this new mode of “class discussion” – sitting on the pine needles under the autumn trees – might be best, to give students time to adapt to talking in natural surroundings, in “nature’s temple.” Talk about “educational architecture” – how about the dome of the sky over a canopy of pine?

(I’m liking this very much, Dean. Thanks for this very innovative angle. Much of the K12 conference so far has been school-2.0-as-usual, if you get what I mean.)

At 12:00 now: Planning. I’ll play along with my Campsite Seminars whim above, and apply the rest of your presentation, when possible, to it. Consider this a “teacher think-aloud.”

So the Seminars – I think they’ll actually work better for something more relevant to my students than Shakespeaere (which they and I love). I think, instead, it will work for the classroom blogging “Capstone Project” I’m currently launching with them.

The idea of that project for my high school seniors – so close to the end of their 12 year sentence of infantilization in schools – is to help them learn about whatever their passion, and their possible future (a)vocation, is, by reading real-world bloggers who share their passion(s), and writing about what they read on their own blogs.

They’ve already created their blogs, and this weekend, are composing their “about” pages and searching for feeds about their passion(s)/interest(s) on Bloglines (I still haven’t found a better feed-searching engine than Bloglines’). They’ve claimed their blogs on Technorati, embedded Sitemeter and Clustrmaps. Now they’re ready to connect.

The problem I think I’m fighting, though, is that they don’t understand the magical potential this project offers them to make connections with people in the world of kindred passions. They’ve never linked to a writer in a blog post, and seen that writer turn up a day or two later in comments.

They’ve been too busy writing 5-paragraph essays – or homework-assignments-as-blog-posts, which is the New Abomination – about irrelevant subjects to tired teachers all their lives to write about what they love to real-world readers – so they just don’t get it. They don’t know how to dream, how to let themselves be visionary; and they don’t know how dreams and visions can become realities through connective writing.

So, in short, I’m trying to introduce them to the world beyond school, but they’re so “studentified” they seem unable to see this as anything but homework because, after all, I’m a “teacher,” and they are “students,” and all of this is happening in a “school.”

Sheesh.

So I think these Campsite Seminars are better suited to serving as a “retreat from school” in both the spatial and the psychological senses. I want them to think – possibly for the first time, since so many of them are so constantly addled by the pressures of “schooliness,” the homework, the SAT’s, the college applications, the school spirit jive, on and on – about which world they want to enter when they leave school forever – in seven short months.

So back to you, Dean: How do I plan for these 70-minute retreats into the woods to bear fruit? [Clicks “play”….]

“What’s the purpose of your movie?”
–Hm. In an attempted nutshell, to figure out:
1. What makes you tick.
2. What you want to become.
3. Which is what you will read about on blogs and other sites.
4. And what you will write about…
5. For an audience you want to attract.

Okay, that’s about as far as I’m going to take this here. I see Dean asks for feedback on his blog, and on the wiki he made for this, etc, and suddenly feel like my students when they’re dealing with my tendency to have a million sites for classwork

Dean, it was a very valuable presentation. You got beyond the tools and beyond the generic edublog talk.

Thanks for that.

For more on the quest for the student blogging grail, see these posts:

Photo credits:
Cheese Wrap by chrissam42
French Cheese by Zeetz Jones
Tokei-ji by Raiden256
Art Nouveau by Face It

Technorati Tags: k12online07cl09

[Update: I notice that I could have saved money by getting a FREE domain name when signing up with PowWeb, instead of paying $20 for two years with GoDaddy. Live and learn. Also, PowWeb needs 24 hours to set up my account before I can install WordPress MU, so hold tight. More: you can’t hear my students on this screencast – it didn’t record the Yugma-Skype conference audio. Even more: you’ll see Diigo website highlighting and annotating at work when you watch the screencast. If you don’t use it, you’re missing out. It auto-forwards your bookmarks and tags to del.icio.us (if you set it up to in preferences), and gives you annotating and highlighting and sharing power that del.icio.us itself doesn’t give. Finally *pant* – thanks to Wesley Fryer for the PowWeb tip and other advice he gave in Shanghai.)

If you’re interested in how to buy your own domain name (web address), and buy a webhost server package so you can run your own website, here’s the first of two screencasts walking Christina and Daniel, two of the Project Global Cooling members at my school, through setting up our Project Global Cooling website with WordPress MU at http://projectglobalcooling.org. The site won’t be up until we install WPMU, which we’re about to do. (Do yourself a favor and watch the large size on the Screencast-o-matic.com channel. Much easier on the eyes, and you can leave comments.)

Way past bedtime, but it’s Chusok – Korean Thanksgiving holiday – and I have the week off. And I want to share this link to the prototype of the Project Global Cooling website, which we’ll migrate to its own URL next week, and permanently open up to global, student-created content for annual contributions.

I share it for two reasons: first, the theme design is an example of WordPress at its aesthetic and functional best. Refresh the page and watch the header change, for a taste of the aesthetic. And click the flags on the left, and watch – this is just magic to me – watch the language change, within the theme. This is ideal for a global collaborative project, though more than Euro-languages would be “more perfect.”

Second, a few minutes noodling around on the site should clarify the project idea for anyone unclear on it, or wanting a link to forward to others.

April 19 – Earth Day Saturday, 2008 – is still comfortably far away. Plenty of time to find a place for a concert in your area, book a few bands, and hook a few of your more visionary and creative citizen-students up with others like them around the world. Here’s the badge for our planning Ning – we’d love it if some of you could embed it on your own blogs, Facebooks, what have you. Just click for the embed code, and if you do – thanks

Visit The Global Cooling Collective

A message to all members of The Global Cooling Collective

Visit The Global Cooling Collective

This is Mr. Burell in Seoul. I just bought the projectglobalcooling.org web address (“domain”) from godaddy.com, and am going to teach any students – in any participating country – the process of creating and administering that website. (That site will be empty until we install everything to get it running next week.)

It’s a real-world skill for the 21st century.

We’ll use Yugma.com’s free desktop-sharing to let you learn this. You’ll be able to watch the process, and talk with the rest of us on Skype, as we go through the steps of:

1. Renting a host server for the site.
2. Installing WordPress blogging software on the server.
3. Adding plugins and other add-ons to WordPress to make it do more cool stuff.
4. Being the website administrator.

If you want to learn, just reply soon – like, by this Saturday, 29 September.

While I have you: thanks to all of you who are in. It’s only natural, since the school year has just started, and what we’re trying to do has never been done before, for there to be “messiness” right now. Hang in there, and don’t hesitate to contact me, the Seoul students, or anybody else with questions or ideas.

Finally, a cool update: Timothy Stott, a student in Kazakhstan, is visiting Paris right now, and seems to have succeeded in getting a “Paris” group on the Global Cooling Collective Ning.

Timothy, whether France comes through or doesn’t, you’re already a star for doing your part to give them a start.

Get in touch if you want to host your country’s PGC website – and do it soon!

Thanks,

Clay Burell

About The Global Cooling Collective
The “Year of Global Cooling” network in cities worldwide, planning student-organized and -promoted global Earth Day concerts. A “live earth” movement for local bands and green-minded students. All concerts streamed online. Join!

Click here to visit The Global Cooling Collective!
http://globallycool.ning.com

Oof. 1.42 a.m., not through my first cup of coffee after sleeping off the return flight from the Learning 2.0 Conference in my old home and Favorite City in the World, Shanghai, and so probably ill-advised to attempt this post right now. But it’s back to class in 6 hours, and we all know how fast the life train moves. So here goes:

Jeff Utecht (his blog The Thinking Stick here), my old guru from my days at Shanghai American School, deserves a Geeky Award for the work he put into organizing this (and if we don’t have Geeky Awards, we need to invent them). It was an amazing experience, and if you know Jeff, you know it was surely due in no small part to his endless energy. The amazing thing about Jeff is that he always looks rested, when you know he can’t be. I suspect he has a make-up artist. Great job, Jeff! My evidence is that the “uninitiated” teachers who came down from my school were exploding with insights that I couldn’t successfully impart locally at my school in Seoul (“a prophet in his own land” and all of that) – particularly Wade Hopkin, science teacher, who jumped into the Twitter conversation within ten minutes of arriving and never looked back, and Jason Spivey, history teacher and my first “flat classroom” wiki collaborator last year with the French Revolution Ant Farm Diaries, and who was ready to move beyond new tools to questions about new pedagogy.

To be clear, here’s The Thing about conferences like this: after physically participating in the conference and seeing and hearing the thinkers and ideas of this new world, Wade and Jason now have a list of people they want to stay connected with – and that need has made them understand the power of RSS subscriptions in feed aggregators. They want me to walk them through setting up a Google Reader account this week so they can follow these ideas now. (Hidden agenda: I want to get them blogging as well.)

Kim Cofino and Justin Medved at International School of Bangkok and I finally got to meet in person. It’s funny how I can’t remember how Kim (her Always Learning blog here) and I first came to know each other last year. All I know is that Kim was one of the first non-high school educators to jump in to the 1001 Flat World Tales globally collaborative wiki writing workshop I blogged so incessantly about when trying to find willing partner schools. She has since become one of my top-shelf edublog inspirers. Meeting her over beverages at the Night One social was such a pleasure. Even more pleasurable was being able to inform those in her school who also came that they had what I don’t hesitate to call an educational genius as a colleague, with a world following – another prophet (and one whose feet I’m unworthy to wash). Coolest moment: watching one of Kim’s colleagues, whom I’d told the night before about my Cofino Fan Club membership, come up to Kim the next day and say, “Kim, I just want to tell you that I’ve discovered that You are The Bomb.” Helping that realization sink in at Kim’s school can only make her more effective in pushing The Shift more widely with teachers at her school.

Justin Medved (here for his blog MEDagogy) appeared out of nowhere during the social hour at the end of Day One to perform one of the nicest Random Acts of Kindness I’ve received in my life. After introducing himself, he said, “Clay, I know that you’ve been frustrated by the lack of response to your Project Global Cooling in the last few months. I just want to say that at International School of Bangkok, we’re concerned about global warming too, and want to help prepare our students to deal with its challenges when they become world leaders. We love your project idea, and we’re in. So that’s a verbal commitment that ISB will be on board. School just started, so give us time to settle in, and we’ll be in touch.” He didn’t have to do that.

I took a walk right after that to clear my head and digest everything in the swirl, and realized during that walk how huge our movement is. Justin was one of the NextGenTeachers who interviewed me last year about the French Revolution Ant Farm Diaries and the 1001 Flat World Tales for a podcast, but there were seven or eight NextGenTeachers on that conference call, and I was too new to the edublogosphere to have discovered all their blogs and gotten to know them that way. And life was just too fast at that time to follow up on that podcast and explore all those NextGenTeachers’ blogs to get to know them. Like Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, whose keynote discussion comments made me an instant fan, but whom I had somehow managed to remain ignorant of after 9 months of edublogging, Justin was someone I hadn’t found and subscribed too. That’s remedied now, far later than it should have been. It was so great talking to Justin, comparing our roles at school and learning from each others’ local experiences, and simply discovering what a Good (and Sharp) Human Being he was. That’s another take-away that only comes from attending a conference in the flesh, and getting to know the virtual community face to face. (Thanks, Justin, for the encouragement. FYI, Kazakhstan and Hawaii have joined Seoul already in Project Global Cooling, and Amy Jussel of the San Francisco non-profit Shaping Youth is a good samaritan working overtime to support and spread the project, so we’re off to a promising start!)

The Big Leagues: Wes Fryer, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, and Will Richardson

Wes Fryer: Because my high school is in its second month as a 1:1 Laptop school, I had high hopes that Wes Fryer’s “I’ve Created a Podcast – Now What?” workshop would answer more technical questions about bandwidth issues, storage, file compression, and so forth about podcasting. Another example of how hard it is to keep abreast of the galaxy of expertise in Learning 2.0, I had lost contact with Wes’ blog (Moving at the Speed of Creativity – one of the most resource-rich blogs I know of) over the last school year – there are only so many hours in a day, and when you’re a full-time classroom teacher and edublogger, one of the first casualties is time to keep up with the avalanche of posts in your feed reader. But Cindy Barnsley, Australia’s brilliant Thinking 2.0 edublogger, had recently brought Wes’ blog back into focus for me in several posts featuring his thoughts and (masterful) podcasts.

At that workshop, I thought it would be a good idea to share that globally-connected anecdote about how I had re-discovered Wes in Kansas via Cindy in Australia and assigned Wes’ podcast “Strive to Engage, not to Enthrall” to my AP Literature class on the first day of school in Seoul, just in case any of the workshop members were so new they didn’t understand the literal magic of this new world. I loved noticing how Wes was still open to the wonder of that magic when he heard that anecdote: it seems like the magic never fades for us, no matter how experienced we are or how long our participation in this world.

Anyway, I took away from Wes’ workshop such a helpful list of resources and tools that delivered what I needed and then some, so it was a brilliant way to start the day. And as was the case in meeting Kim and Justin, so with Wes: the virtual acquaintance through the edublogosphere made the face-to-face acquaintance seem more like a re-union than an introduction. It’s been said a million times re: NECC and other conferences, and it’s true: we already know each other before we ever meet each other, which makes that first meeting a strangely easy and wonderful thing.

The second of Wes’ workshops that I attended was on how to compose music on GarageBand, and how to find copyright-free music with 2.0 tools like CreativeCommons search and other resources. It was amazing how, in a 40-minute session, Wes was able to teach me how easy it is to use GarageBand to create original music through both its loops library and its “real intstruments” function. I hadn’t been able to make the time to learn this myself by using AtomicLearning or even the GarageBand “help” menu, so 40 minutes with Wes took care of that and, again, “then some.”

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach: Watching and listening to Sheryl (her 21st Century Collaborative blog here) on-stage during the round-table keynote discussion was my first real introduction to her, and I experienced one of those instant bonds with a person in a hard-to-pin-down, holistic way. Her passion was pure, her personality wonderfully playful, her ideas infectious. It was Sheryl’s sharing of an epiphany she had during a K12 Online Conference 24-hour, around-the-world-by-timezones Skypecast, that especially hooked me. Sheryl shared how she was asked by the Skypecast participants to repeat something she’d said three or four or five times, until she asked, “What, is this Skype-connection breaking up? Why can’t you all understand me?” Her epiphany came when she, this American woman, heard the answer: “No, it’s your accent. We’re having a hard time understanding your English.” Hearing this simple story was a Moment for me. Maybe it was that Sheryl was not sharing some “credentialed moment” as a “2.0 expert” in which others learned from her, but instead shared a moment in which she learned from 2.0 a valuable lesson; or maybe it was that what she shared was a lesson in American humility in our community of nations that all Americans could stand to learn (and I say this as an American more and more aghast at the disastrous consequences of the American influence on the world not only politically, economically, socially, and environmentally, but also educationally) – but whatever it was, I’ll carry the memory of that moment to the grave.

I met Sheryl later and – for some reason I’m laughing to myself as I type this alone at 3.30 a.m. in my apartment – I Just Like Her So Much. I can’t wait to plumb her blog, start commenting, and extending our acquaintance.

And here’s a cool bonus: Sheryl brought her son Noah to the conference. Noah’s a junior in college and an IT worker for a telecommunications company in Virginia (and who Sheryl home-schooled, which I more and more think I will do if/when my fiancee and I have a child, unless Things Shift in our schools). Noah is also a techy with a knowledge base I don’t have, and need to gain to fulfill some duties at my school. So I persuaded Noah to become my Tech Support Consultant on an as-needed basis, with pay. I foresee some very cool applications of Yugma-Skype desktop sharing over my cPanel and WebHost Manager as Noah teaches this old dog how to do stuff smarter. (And like his mom, Noah was one of those people who is just instantly cool and easy to talk to.)

Finally, there’s Will Richardson (his Weblogg-ed blog here). Because I have a possible personality disorder of sorts (don’t take that literally), and just don’t do well in crowded spaces – physical or virtual – I’ve always been intimidated by Will’s blog (same with Jeff Utecht’s). Their comment pages are just too crowded for me to be any more comfortable than I am at crowded social functions. And that has kept me from availing myself of the opportunity to converse with Will on his Weblogg-ed by leaving comments, which is so idiotically self-defeating. (Maybe it’s a fear of rejection, I dunno). I tend to follow newer and lesser-known bloggers, and comment more actively on their blogs, because of this “disorder.”

But as was the case with Wes, so with Will. I’d managed to wise up and return to regular readership of Will’s blog over the past few months, and in so doing to develop one of those strange “one-way connections” with him that comes from maintaining a “lurker” status on someone’s blog. That connection came from gleaning from Will’s blog that, beyond the 2.0 stuff, Will shares with me a concern that the edublogosphere may have a blind spot, a myopia, that I don’t hesitate to call tragic: namely, its refusal to come to terms with the imperative to elevate issues of ecology and citizenship to our discourse about what education should be. I’m sorry, but no matter how much you Twitter, blog, wiki, or podcast, if you’re not facing the realities of our unique historical situation as inheritors of an Industrial Age Gone Mad, and our unique educational imperative to face the consequences of that in our schools in order to seek “radically sane” Shifts in response – while there’s still (hopefully) time – then in my book, you’re still somewhat Irrelevant 1.0.

Will is the only top-tier edublogger I know of who doesn’t skirt this issue. And that made me look forward to meeting him to get more of a sense of who he is, and hopefully make a connection.

It’s now 4 a.m., and I’ve got lesson-planning to do before school starts, so I’ll have to give Will short shrift for the moment by saying that a) when I finally went to one of his workshops, he did an excellent job of facilitating conversation instead of saging on the stage with a lecture – and that conversation was pregnant with solutions; b) like Sheryl and Wes, he was easy and enjoyable to talk with from the start; and c) because I had to leave the conference early, due to a monumental muck-up by my school’s faculty support office that scheduled our return flight to depart before the conference was over, I never had the opportunity to talk with Will the way I did with Sheryl and Wes. I wanted to pick his brain about ways to more effectively launch, promote, and extend Project Global Cooling, and point out to him that in the same week I blogged about how the Big Names in edublogging were not promoting citizenship, climate change, and “beyond school” relevance in their posts, Will had distinguished himself in my book by his post about Live Earth (of which our Project Global Cooling is essentially a global schools version, student-led instead of celebrity-led) entitled, “Before We Get Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Blogging. . .Let’s Save the World.” But, damn, damn, damn, that conversation didn’t happen. I sought Will out and sat down with him to seek an opening for that conversation, but it was right as he had to leave for a tour of Shanghai with Jeff, Sheryl, and the rest. (But this is web 2.0, so there are ways.)

No time for a fitting conclusion – and in this world, conclusion is not a fitting word anyway – so I’ll just end by saying stay tuned. I’ll follow up with my conference notes, links, and more.

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

After my semi-literate support technician nuked my entire VPS server – Moodle and Wordpress MU, including a year of student blogs from last year – I managed to restore a backup after several scares.

So the blogs are saved. Moodle is back.

And so is a prototype of the Project Global Cooling website.

We’ll give the site its own url, independent of my school’s blogging site. I just want that to be done by a student who wants to learn the whole process of buying a URL, hosting it on a server, installing the software, and managing the website.

That’s part of what PGC is about: letting them learn to do what I’ve learned to do for my school. When they hit the real world, these skills should come in handy.

Prison Exercise Yard: Photo by Jon’s pics

Student: “Ms. Stucco says I have to quit Project Global Cooling to go to the Class Council Representative meetings every week.”

Me: “And you explained to her you’d been volunteering on this project all summer, that you’re an important player in it, and that it’s community service in a big way?”

Student: “Yeah.”

Me: “And she said ‘No,’ pure and simple?”

Student: “Yeah.”

Me: “So what are you guys going to be planning in the Student Council that’s so important she’s forcing you to drop all other activities?”

Student: “The Haunted House for Halloween. And the next Student Assembly.”

Me: “The Haunted House….so, like, getting the pumpkins and doing some Halloween thing in the gym?”

Student: “Yeah.”

Me: “And the Student Assembly: what are you planning for that?”

Student: “Introducing the Sports teams. And raising school spirit.”

Me: “And how many people do you have meeting twice a week to plan a Haunted House and a 40-minute assembly to introduce the basketball players and give a few speeches and such?”

Student: “Seventeen.”

Me: “Seventeen?”

Student: “Yeah.”

Me: “Seventeen people meeting twice a week for the next 20 weeks to plan a haunted house in the gym, and an assembly to introduce sports teams? How long can it take to come up with a plan to introduce sports teams?”

Student: “I know.”

Me: “I hate school. Look at how trivial it makes you, even when you want to make a difference in the real world.”

Student: “I don’t have any choice. Ms. Stucco won’t let me out.”

Me: “And look how powerless you suddenly are. You’re 17. You’re a young adult. You know physics, calculus, and history far more than most of your teachers, but have zero power in school despite that. ‘She won’t let me.’ I hate school.”

So, your advice: I want to suggest he quit Student Council, since it’s clearly one very school-blindered, trivial waste of time for all these poor students seeking election in order to show they can handle power effectively – like adults do.

Another idea is to instead advise him to wage a bit of a rebellion inside the Student Council, by asking the very sensible question – “Is this the best we can do? Jack-o-lanterns and basketballs? Can we give the StuCo some teeth? Extend it into the real world? Isn’t it pathetically fay right now? Trivial? Irrelevant? Infantile?”

The sad thing is, it’s institutionalized. The Rat-Race for college admissions puts a high premium on silly bullets like holding a class office. College counselors, administrators, parents, students, teachers – the whole school culture – treat the Student Council like it’s an honorable thing. In reality, it limits the horizons of the 17 most motivated leaders from each grade level to the paltry world of the schoolhouse. It’s outrageously trivial and infantile.

I don’t know if it’s “consensus trance,” blind traditionalism, or winking condescension (“Let the kids play like they have power”), but it smells really bad to me.

(Luckily, we’re filming for a documentary of “Project Global Cooling.” The student above is going to interview next week as the first casualty in a conflict between “real worldliness” and “schooliness.” The documentary is shaping up to be about the psychology of schools as much as anything else.)

And I can’t help but think: if I were a college admissions officer, and I read a college application essay about how a student chose to sacrifice a prestigious but trivial office for the sake of one less prestigious but more substantial?

I would like that applicant. A real person, with real principles, instead of a budding careerist: what a concept.

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.

[Update: A fuller discussion of Peak Oil and the A Crude Awakening documentary is taking place at Crooks and Liars. Skeptics and believers are listening and debating there.]

I wonder if Cassandra, as the Greeks approached Troy, got more silent indifference from those she tried to warn, or instead argumentation and debate? My guess is the former.

I wonder how people in education – the institution that holds the minds and characters of the next generation captive for 12+ years of molding – react to Cassandras like the international scientific community about global warming.

And about its cousin, the Oil Crash.

Curriculum as usual, anyone?

Or is anyone designing inquiry-based learning into the claims of these experts? I’m no expert, but I’ve got ears that Apollo hasn’t plugged. Seems we should give these warnings a listen now. And free our students to listen to them too, and hone their info-literacy skills on something, oh, maybe a bit relevant.

And remember: the tragedy was, Cassandra was right. But Trojans were bewitched (call it consensus trance) – and Troy fell.