Beyond School

It’s been a heck of a week, and it’s only Wednesday morning. So here are some updates about 1) attempting to inspire a visionary foundation in my students’ approach to blogging (via the “Campsite Seminars” in the woods around our school, as posted about earlier after watching Christian Long’s segment of Dean Shareski’s “Design Matters” K12 Online presentation); 2) shifting Project Global Cooling - our globally collaborative, never-ending “citizenship 2.0″ project - into second gear with a self-hosted website, a Ustream tv channel, and more; and 3) gearing up for the second annual 1001 Flat World Tales creative writing workshop with new classrooms from new countries joining this year.

In Dreams Begin Realities: Seeking a Vision for Blogging via the Walden 2.0 / Campsite Seminars

“Digital Natives” my bright white…board. My seniors have no idea about weblogs, connective writing, Technorati, embedding html, tagging, RSS, and so forth. It’s been a struggle teaching them these nuts and bolts, but those mechanical tasks are done. For the record, that was Stage One of my re-tooled attempt to integrate writing instruction via blogging in my high school (as the English department head, I was able to push through a four-year plan in which students would write from grade 9 to 12 on the same blog, and write a sort of biographical reflection their senior year based on the evidence in those blogs).

So to recap:

Stage One: “The Machine”

1. Create a blog on our hosted WordPress MU
2. Claim it on Technorati
3. Claim it on Clustrmaps
4. Claim it on Sitemeter
5. Install all these in your sidebar
6. Install the Oddiophile Technorati Tag Generator in your Firefox bookmarks toolbar, and tag all entries aplit and aplit07
7. Choose a theme (I’ve installed over 100 in our server)
8. Choose a name, tagline, etc
9. Write an “About” page introducing yourself to your readers and telling them what they can expect on your space
10. Create a Bloglines account
11. Create Bloglines folders for each category of reading you think a “well-rounded, cultured person” should do
12. Find at least three blogs in each category that you like, and subscribe to them
13. Embed your Bloglines blogroll in your sidebar

They’ve done all that, with a few digitally-challenged exceptions.

Next, I wrote a “Guide to Quality Weblogs” for students to use as a rubric to critique each others’ blogs. It addresed every trait I could think of that goes into a quality blog, from theme design to post design, from content on the levels of the whole blog to content of individual posts, from connectivism via links to conversationalism via invitational conclusions in posts, prompt responses to comments, and more. I assigned each student to critique three other students’ blogs using this rubric, and leave their critiques not in the comments - who wants a comment for all to see that says “Your theme is boring and so are your ideas”? - but as Diigo annotations that only members of our class Diigo group can see.

Again, “Digital Natives” my patootie: many students left good comments that rightly belonged in the “comments” section as Diigo stickynotes, again showing they have no idea of the very basics of this world. But they did it. We’ll keep returning to these criteria over the coming seven months.

I told the students that I will be grading their blogs only in the beginning, and only based on this criterion: “Are you writing regularly?” If they’re not, they’ve got trouble on their hands. Otherwise, any content is okay. After all, it took me a month or more to find my own feet in my own blog. Let them stumble about for a while, and trust in time. I’ll only grade them again at the end of the quarter, as a major writing project grade (this is AP Literature and Composition, after all.)

So: the machine is assembled. Now for the soul - “the Ghost”:

Stage Two: Putting the Ghost in the Machine by Dreaming Your Blog’s Future

I had four camcorders charged, tapes re-wound and ready for a shoot, when students entered the class today. The timing was perfect: both classes were after lunch, on a golden autumn afternoon. The woods around us were ablaze with color, as were the mountain ridges surrounding our horizon. Sunny, beautiful. Perfect temperature. A perfect day for “Walden 2.0″.

I assigned the poetry readings for the next class’ seminars and got that out of the way.

Then I gave them a handout and talked them through the rationale behind it: trying, for once in their schooly lives, to become visionary - to imagine where they want connective blog-writing to have taken them at the end of the next seven months. And to articulate that vision for a brief video interview that they will embed in their about page (if they want to extract the audio and only use that, or combine it with a slideshow or whatever, to protect their identity, etc, that’s okay too).

The handout is nothing special, but it’s linked here on Google docs, public, if you want to use it. This is what it says:

The Campsite Seminars

No. 1: Dreaming Your Future into Being

“In dreams begin realities.”

–anonymous

“Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.”

–Anais Nin (20th c. French writer, mistress of Henry Miller)

Directions: Real simple. Gather your thoughts about the following questions. Bullet points are best. You want to only glance at these as you talk spontaneously during your filming. (And don’t worry, we can always re-shoot. Just be you, and you’ll be fine.)

1. What I want you (my readers and visitors) to know about me is….
2. My thoughts and feelings — positive and negative — about connective writing via weblogs are….
3. If I were free to study or apprentice in anything in the world — to sit at the feet of the best talents in the field, and learn from them — they would be people in the field(s) of….
4. What you can expect to see me exploring on my blog — sharing what I’ve read, what I think, who I like who also explores this subject(s) — is the subject of …..
5. What I hope visitors to my web-log will do is …..
6. Beyond my wildest dreams, after seven more months of writing for, to, and in the world, my efforts will lead to these results (personally, socially, professionally)…..

I gave them ten minutes or so of quiet time to create that vision (oh, you factory school bell schedule), then gave them a quick lesson on how to frame shots in the camera with quality.

Then we went to the woods.

The groups of four filmed each other discussing their vision in this beautiful setting, while I laid down and watched the sky and trees for twenty minutes. Ochre, russet, azure, gold: an eyes-open power-nap. (And don’t we notice autumn differently as we age?) I heard snippets of their talks, and liked what I heard.

Then we returned to the brick walls, and called it a day.

I’m going to be late for school if I keep writing this, so I’ll stop here, after adding the Murphy’s Law postscript: I’m trying to capture the footage from our Canon ZR800’s into iMovie, and iMovie doesn’t recognize the camcorder. It did last week. I’ve spent hours troubleshooting with no luck. Pray for me.

I’ll have to save those 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling updates for a later post, probably today.

(I’m still having trouble padding images. Sorry. Working on it.)

For more on classroom blogging, see these posts:

Photo credits (via search.creativecommons.org):
Liquid Silver Melts the Surface by .supernova.
il mio punto di vista by fabrizio
Zero Gravity by [auro]ra

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[Welcome to Beyond School's new home, by the way. This is my first post since leaving Blogger. If you subscribed to the old "BS," please update your feed by subscribing to this new home on my own WordPress install. I'm excited to learn more about customizing WordPress by administering my own blog. You can expect to see many new things in the coming weeks.]

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

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