Beyond School

Scott McLeod from Dangerously Irrelevant tagged me with this interesting meme, so here are the rules, followed by the last five educational podcasts I listened to and/or watched:

Meme guidelines

1. Choose five of your favorite education podcasts. Any kind of education podcast is okay – students, teachers, administrators, professors, etc. – feel free to pick ones that you’ve made yourself! Try and pick specific podcasts, not podcast feeds.
2. Tag others for the meme. Feel free to participate even if you haven’t been ‘tagged.’
3. Please use a Technorati tag of educationpodcast or podcasteducation.
4. Please add your selections to the Moving Forward podcasts wiki page (and create categories as needed) so that others can benefit too!

My Last Five Podcasts or Videopodcasts:
1. David Warlick’s K12 Online Preconference Keynote, 2007: More on that in a later post, as a follow-up to this immediate take-aways post (just a k12 chatroom copy-paste) from a few days ago. You can also read the conversation about the keynote in the comments to the K12 page linked above.

2. David Warlick’s K12 Online Keynote, 2006: I loved watching last year’s keynote right before watching this year’s. I’m so new to the edublogosphere (only 10 months old), I didn’t know about last year’s event. Doesn’t matter: I went back in time 12 months and caught myself up on the K12 website.

3. Jessica Yun’s “audiobook” of “Roots,” her published 1001 Flat World Tales story: (from last year’s first edition – more to come from new schools and writers at the end of this school year, and every school year following). Jessica was 15 when she wrote this story, and podcasted it. She tells her stories as well as she writes them. Watch out for this one – she’s got a future as a writer, if she wants it. (And check out her blog, and tell her to get back to writing. Actually, she won’t have a choice: we’re launching our re-tooled schoolwide student blogging program in two weeks.)

4. Wesley Fryer interviewing Scott McLeod: Podcast 151: Dr. Scott McLeod on Administrator Idea-Sharing on Blogs, [etc], and Educating Others for the Transition to 21st Century Schools: on school 2.0 and school administrators 1.0: I sent this one to my admin. Wonder if they listened to it. Interesting on many levels, from Scott’s perspective on ivory tower educator-leaders’ oblivion and/or resistance to the edublogosphere’s vibrant and up-to-date discourse, to Scott’s own thoughts about the growing – but by no means new – irrelevance and inconsequentiality of much peer-reviewed academic publishing. (Lucky you, Scott: I’m not making this up. A free plug )

5. Robert Green Ingersoll: “Improved Man”: (Ingersoll podcasts channel on iTunes): Ingersoll was a late 19th century secular humanist – a better word than that strange “atheist” word (am I also an “a-horoscopist”?) who wrote powerfully and elegantly about all the ways in which religion is most often a tragically misguided attempt to “be and do good.” It’s frustrating to think that America and much of the rest of the world have only gone backwards in their heroic “March into the Middle Ages” since Ingersoll wrote his passionate, erudite, and “radically sane” critiques and visions a century and a quarter ago. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Friedrich Nietzsche readers really should subscribe to these podcasts. My favorite educational quote from Ingersoll:

“Schools should be today’s churches, and teachers, today’s preachers.”

He wrote this around 1890, and today I’m watching America’s Intelligent Design proponents attempting to expand their virulent attacks on science and reason around the globe – including here in Korean international schools. So I can’t say I’m hopeful about the future of reason in education. It seems America – the majority of its people and its disastrous political leadership – is intent on praying for an end to Global Warming (or indifferent to it, since heaven is the real world anyway), while at the same time continuing to ignore or attack science – and good, hardworking, life-saving, true miracle-working scientists.

It’s not easy, and certainly not fun, risking alienating my religious readers out there. But a commitment to science, enlightenment, education, and the fate of our planet make me feel it’s a duty. As a former Baptist and lifelong student of religious texts and religious history (see my LibraryThing widget in sidebar), I feel more qualified than most to confidently take on that duty. I’m just trying to do good by my own lights, not tradition’s.

More on Ingersoll from James Carr’s Ingersoll Podcasts page on Podcast Directory – a magnificent resource, with dozens of Ingersoll’s works, which Carr delivers with sterling quality:

Robert Green Ingersoll was an eloquent spokesman for free thinking, reason, and science in 19th century America. His intelligence, logic, humor, and clear thinking still speaks to us today. This podcast will include readings from his speeches and writings. Robert Ingersoll has an important place in American history, although, due to the weakness and politicization of our educational system, most of us have never heard of him. [emphasis added]

I tag (and apologize to, if inopportune):

Darren Kuropatwa (nice to talk to Darren for the first time in Warlick’s Fireside Chat)
Stephen Downes
Wesley Fryer
Will Richardson
Kim Cofino
Vicki Davis
Clarence Fisher
Doug Noon
Graham Wegner

Scott, this meme is a good idea. I’ll be checking out that wiki for human-filtered podcasts by the minds I admire the most. Thanks for the opportunity.

Technorati Tags: educationpodcast, podcasteducation, k12online, k12online07

(click for larger image)

I have to wake up in five hours to run this conference tomorrow, so I’ll probably be worthless. But the opening session – an hour-and-a-half warmer – will consist largely of this competition, in four-person faculty teams led by one captain each, to race through this wiki page and be first to equip their MacBooks with the “Eleven Essential Accounts for the Read-Write Web.” Each member of the winning team gets a $10 gift certificate for Starbucks. (Politically, I’m not sure how I feel about that. But it was my idea.)

Note: they’ll have already joined our Twitter group and taken the Multiple Intelligences questionnaire, plus had a brief opening “Why Web 2.0?” presentation, before starting this activity. (That Twitter slice explains the inclusion of TinyURL as an “essential tool.”)

I talked with my principal, and we arrived at this post-workshop reflective “assignment”: create a digital expression, using whatever multimedia mode you’re pulled to play with, of your most valuable take-away from this conference – this could be simple creative play, since “unlocking teacher creativity” is a primary goal here. Post it on the Ning, and we’ll rank entries as a staff. The winning entry receives the grand prize: an iPod Nano. They have a week. I look forward to seeing, reading, hearing, watching all the various forms of creative digital expression from our staff.

But we’ll see how the reality shakes out.

Anyway, the wiki was text-only, and murderously intimidating for that. So I spent a couple or three hours adding graphics.

You’re welcome to take a look. Feedback in the comments section are welcome. Please don’t edit it, though! (And the Diigo activity will not work until I add the magic touches right before the workshop starts.)

I’d love it if anybody would visit our twitter account and make an appearance on our Twitter Badge. You can find it by searching for “create21” or “KIS Staff.” (Twitter was acting up tonight, though.) We’re at GMT +9, and will go live from 8a. to 3p.

I’ll have Skype up, too, so if you’re available for a casual “call-in” appearance, I would both enjoy and appreciate that. Send me a chat message at cburell on Skype if you’re open to an appearance in Seoul!

‘Night, Tweets.

That has to be the geekiest title I’ve ever written. I promise it’s English. Anyway:

Just a little tutorial share about one of the million reasons I love Firefox web-browser (and curse at my students lovingly when they open things in Internet Explorer, or even Safari). I’m talking about Firefox Addons.

This 4 minute tutorial simply shows people a handy little addon called “MeasureIt,” which is a ruler for quick pixel-measurements of screen areas. I use it to embed a Group Twitter Badge for our school’s professional development Ning (and yes, I’m flattering Jeff Utecht by stealing his use of this handy idea at the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference last month. He’s still my guru now and then, without even realizing it).

So here it is. Enjoy (and by the way, use the “embed” code, not the “html” code that I use in the tutorial – or try both and choose the one that’s best for you).

I really shouldn’t do this, being ham-strung for time, but I really should do this regardless. The feedback to my last post deserves a better fate than staying hidden from feed subscribers.

So down and dirty time. First, for context, here’s the brief original post. The basic questions were:

1. Should we approach workshops as how to teach with this stuff as a teacher? Or instead, as I want to try, as how to explore and tap into the teachers’ own individual creativity as a human being?

2. Should blogging be assigned to teachers? If so, is Ning the same thing as “open range” blogging?

I closed with an appeal for help, since this is my first time doing a staff development day.

Kelly Christopherson pitched in first with these nuggets:

What to do? I guess, if I were attending a development day, I’d like to see some structure that would give me some information and then allow me to explore various things that I find interesting. I’m now at a stage where I believe that the first thing I would do is introduce teachers to an online desktop idea, like igoogle, netvibe or pageflakes. Why? Because you can build up various areas of interest from there. You can add RSS feeds, showing them how they work, introduce them to a few organizational tools like icalendar or google documents and show them the whole idea of a blog they can place on their desktop.

“As for Ning,” Kelly continued,

I think it is a starting point but one must go beyond it to show teachers the power of blogging. You’re so right about an open blog being so much more than what you find in Ning. I like the discussion there but I usually end up pointing people to ideas and information outside of the ning environment where people are exploring ideas and concepts in a much different manner and the audience is a bit more diverse. Hope your projects are going well!

I replied,

Kelly, this is such excellent advice. Thanks much for taking the time. I think the iGoogle approach (or Pageflakes, which I fear might be overwhelming – and I’ve never tried Netvibes) is right on. I’d originally planned to do Bloglines, since I haven’t found a better service for finding feeds; and I like its simplicity. But maybe you’re on to something otherwise.

And added this question (nudge), which I hope Kelly sees and acts on, so we can all learn more about/from this voice (though I just re-found Kelly through a Technorati search):

You know your Blogger profile is blocked, right? Doesn’t lead to any way to connect back to you via your comment link. Intentional?

Patrick Higgins answered my shout-out link to him (Technorati is such a great shout-out tool;):

I love being called out like this! Kelly speaks of giving them something like iGoogle or Pageflakes to begin with, but it sounds like you have inroad already with Anthony [a teacher at my school who has taken off with speedy and impressive results over the last year] and with another teacher whose name escapes me at the moment, which can be to your advantage when presenting a new idea to a staff that is slightly hesitant.Base it may be, but envy has always been something that I have used to my advantage when presenting to staff. I make it a point to present the work of teachers that are leading the charge, creating digital content with their students. What I have found is that other teachers want to do what this teacher or that teacher did. Like I said, it may not reside on the ethical high-road, but when it comes to initiating change, I’ll take anything I can get.

Concerning the walled garden idea, my belief lies along the same lines as using emotion to trigger buy in; you need to assess the comfort level your staff has with these social applications. Asking someone who has not written for a non-student audience in 10 years to do so will paralyze them. As much as you may want to blow them away with what is possible, you run the risk of losing them if you go too far above where they are comfortable.

Then Wesley Fryer added this wonderful piece of “disruptive” advice:

I’m very interested in your thoughts along these lines as well as the thoughts of others. I think Kelly’s use of the word “stage” is really important. ACOT showed us that teachers go through different stages when they are in a supportive environment for creative technology use, and doubtless you’ll have teachers all over the board at your workshop Wednesday. I like Ning because I think it provides a more accessible way for teachers to readily join in conversations, but I agree that the “open range” of blogging and tagging is far richer, and those are fields we want to both show and invite our teachers to explore. I have found that del.icio.us social bookmarking is an ideal way to help teachers understand the power of social networking, tagging, and working on the web. About a month ago when I was in Goodland, Kansas, I spent all the workshop time with about 50 teachers, who each had their own laptops, in the morning and afternoon on social bookmarking. I think helping teachers save, access, and locate “good stuff” online is an enduring need, so social bookmarking SHOULD fit into everyone’s “what’s in it for me” perspectives. I agree forcing everyone to blog won’t light the fire of inspired creativity within all teachers, but I certainly DO think it is reasonable to expect/require all teachers to be reflecting on their practices. I would advocate giving teachers choices about how they reflect, perhaps on the entire day, in posts to a Ning, in their own blog they setup on blogger or elsewhere, in a VoiceThread or series of VoiceThreads, etc. The key is that everyone is EXPECTED to reflect, and that reflective pieces will be made PUBLIC. That is radically different and potentially disruptive, but the interactive aspect of this perhaps has the most “energy potential” to engage and “hook” some teachers on the value of these tools. I haven’t been to or participated in many PD events which had this as an expectation, and I think it’s a great idea.I agree with Papert that “uniformity” really is a major evil in formalized education, so the degree to which we can provide differentiated pathways of learning and assessment for teachers in PD sessions as well as students in their classes, the better off we are in avoiding the dangers “uniformity” presents to authentic learning.

Good luck with your workshop! I’ll look forward to hearing what you all end up doing and how things go!

Sue Waters added her voice with this defense of Ning:

Clay – interesting thoughts on Ning and I have to say until I saw this community modeled effectively I was never that fussed. Last week I had to run an 1 hour online session on Video in Elearning for the Australian Flexible Learning Framework. I had to target it at beginners but was asked to make it interactive. Tough requests considering it was all online using Elluminate.

So I decided to set up a Ning community so that participants could discuss the topics before and after the session plus use it for practicing embedding videos. You can check out more about the session and how it went here.

What I found was that participants are slowly starting to use Ning. I have a much greater understanding of who they are and what assistance I can provide them compared to what I and they would have gained from a 1 hour online presentation. If all this interaction was based only on my blog I would not have achieved the same outcome.

Most of these participants are not using Feed Readers and do not know what RSS is. So to see that several individuals are achieving what they see as first is for me the greatest reward and the Ning community gives me the ability to gradually increase their skills (those that want to) to get them to the point where they can be moved out into other parts of Web 2.0.

I suggest you check out my page at etools and tips for educators to see what the participants are saying.

(I did follow her links, and wasn’t surprised – but was impressed – by the enthusiasm bubbling off the pages of her Ning.)

Then I found Graham’s post through Technorati’s link to his “reaction” to my prior post – it’s long, it’s his, it’s an excellent investment of your three minutes to follow and read – and I answered his post there, and following Sue (who copied her reply here there, round and round), copied that answer here:

Your post – and Sue’s comment on both of our posts – extended my thinking and enlarged my network (I’ll be checking out your links to Darren and Keving shortly!). And it all happened through Technorati.And that sort of underlines what I think we’re both trying to get at, without at all disagreeing with Sue’s point that Ning is clearly powerful. It underlines that the whole blogosphere produces pathways in a different way than Ning does. Again, both have their uses and relative strengths (Ning’s media players are incredible, for example, and I embed them in my blog posts on Blogger, though I wonder how easy that is on WordPress – have you tried?).

One distinction seems safe – Ning’s population seems comprised more of newcomers, and it would be interesting to track how often they peer over the walls, and how often and soon they establish their own blogs, their own connections through non-Ning RSS feeds, etc.

Again, I don’t think we’re disagreeing with Sue. I’d even hazard the guess that’s Sue’s ultimate goal is for her Ning members to go “open range” once they’re in deep enough.

Tribes v. Nomads comes to mind, I’m not sure how fairly or validly.

And your point about the pleasures of creating your own unique fingerprint in this world is the one that really seems possible only in the open range.

I’m glad we’ve connected, by the way. It’s been instructive and, as importantly, good for some chuckles

And finally, I replied to Wes with an update of how the workshop idea has progressed to this point – and I still have 36 hours to tweak it, and invite all of you to tweak its wiki here (put a link to your blog at the credits on the bottom of the page, please, to model the collaborative wow of wikis!):

Wes, thanks for the thoughtful input. I’d arrived at something similar with the help of my Twitter network as I processed more after this post. As things stand now, we’re going to invite the fearless to create their own blog, and encourage the less comfortable to feel fine about using their staff Ning blog to reflect.We’re going to start the morning by signing all staff up with a “baker’s dozen” of must-have 2.0 accounts and bookmarks – Google, Diigo/del.icio.us, Flickr, Bloglines (they can OPML to something more complex like Pageflakes or iGoogle later), and other things (all on this wiki).

Then we’re going into breakaway sessions led by the early adopters at our school – 11 separate workshops from which teachers choose three, and are required to take my “Digital Arts Menu for Multiple Intelligences,” in which the goal is to let them choose a mode of digital expression suited to their learning style and creative bent.

By the end of the week, they’ll be “encouraged” (okay, required) to reflect on their blog or Ning, in whatever medium they choose.

And I’m trying to figure out how to set up an auto tag-aggregator to suck all those posts onto one page. Never done that before! Tips?

Thanks, all – you’re making this exhausting process an exhilarating one at the same time

That ending really says it all! In Shanghai last month, Wes used the noun “magic” to describe this world. It’s a word I often use too (though science is the proper word, and scientists the true magicians). The magic still amazes.

And that’s why I want the focus of Wednesday’s workshop to be on the participants’ creativity, again. The magic of this world can’t be taught; I’m seeking ways to open them to learning it through experiencing the creation of that magic, to becoming digital magicians themselves.

Or at least Sorcerer’s Apprentices.

I’d love to hear thoughts from any and all, on any and all of this.

Images:
“Mickey in the Hood” by undergroundbastard

I just left this comment on Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog post entitled “How can we help shape teacher attitudes toward technology?”

Before you read it, don’t get me wrong. I think Ning is a great thing – but, at the risk of sounding like a prig and a purist, I don’t think it’s in the same ballpark as open blogging. And I worry that teachers who mistake these walled blogs (or social blogworks?) for “open range” blogging will never learn the crucial role that Technorati, tagging, hyperlinking, and such play as the “ligaments” of the connectivity that is real blogging. And thus never be able to introduce their students to that experience.

Ning and 21classes and so forth just seem isolated, and isolating, by comparison.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this. Our in-house staff development day is Wednesday – only four days away – and I’m not yet decided on how I’m going to run my mandatory training session. The Old School instinct says “Direct their learning, decide what they need to know, and make them learn it.” But another impulse says the idea to let them choose the pathway based on their own multiple intelligences, and toward the goal of unlocking their creativity, is the better way.

And a third voice says, “Maybe there’s a Middle Way.” (Can I really lose this opportunity to introduce them to RSS and social bookmarking?)

So here’s that comment:

This is a timely post for me to read, as we’re giving an in-house “Learning 2.0″ conference at my high school in Korea to present what four of us department heads learned at the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference.

Since I’m 1/4 teacher, 3/4 tech coordinator for the HS, all teachers have to attend my session. I’m leaning towards the WIIFM ["What's In It For Me?"] approach, but with this twist: I want to test the hypothesis that, if teachers discovered their own creativity, based on the strengths of their “multiple intelligences” profiles, by learning to express that creativity through some “digital art” they don’t know about with iLife or the read/write web, then my hope/hunch is this: their excitement at unlocking their own creativity will gradually trickle down into their instruction.

This is partly influenced by my own discovery of how easy it is, after 20 years of fantasizing about it, to actually do music composition using GarageBand (we just went 1:1 as an Apple Laptop School, so all teachers have MacBooks).

There is talk at my school of “assigning” all teachers to blog on Ning or 21classes, but I’m ambivalent about that. It treats teachers as “students” (or as mere “teachers” instead of humans with unlocked potential), it treats web 2.0 as “homework” (or simply “work”), and worse still, it treats forced blogging on a walled garden as the real thing (those of us who blog know that it goes beyond writing posts on Ning). It also forces writing, when there are so many other modes of expression that some teachers might be more comfortable with. All of that is a recipe for aversion, it seems to me.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts, though I know you’re enjoying Manhattan right now.

I made a staff development wiki that sorts “digital arts” (activities) into separate “menus” based on the different multiple intelligences that is open to all for editing and using. I’d be curious, again, to hear any feedback on any of the above ramble

Enjoyed the post.

Thoughts? (And Patrick and Anthony, I’m particularly interested to hear your views.)

Photo: Eduardo Amorim

More from the previous posts. I’m having a lot of fun creating that staff development wiki. The “Digital Arts for Multiple Intelligences” pages are coming along nicely, but unevenly, so your input would be great (thanks, Patrick and Diane!).

I’ve also got a page called “Links to Real World Examples of 21st Century Educators.” I’ve added links myself, but…

…as my high-speed middle school colleague Anthony Armstrong suggests in his recent post, the best way to compile examples of 21st c. classrooms and educators is to invite you all to collaborate and share.

I updated the wiki to include the password (“welcome,” w/o quotation marks), so come on over and add your own classes (or favorite examples from others), and your favorite digital tools for the various multiple intelligences. (And while you’re there, why not take the Multiple Intelligences questionnaire and learn your alleged strengths? 40 quick questions and a cool little graphic is yours. I’d love to hear your profiles in comments

It’s good for all – drives traffic and readership to the classrooms that want them, and gives us all food for thought on how we might approach The Next Thing.

And while you’re at it: there are so many great staff development wikis already out there. Feel free to start a page and add your own, and/or others, for a master list. Why not?

Photo credit: Flickr Tag Network by toby maloy

That last post was supposed to report this:

1. Since those first two fragments I composed on GarageBand, I spent a couple or three hours watching Atomic Learning’s GarageBand screencast tutorials (paid subscription required), and they taught me a few things. Most importantly, they taught me how to change the key of different loops and parts of the song so you’re not stuck on one chord the whole time. (You can only go so far on the tonic.) Hint: “Tracks > Master Track.” That’s where you can take that C major tonic chord to the F sub-dominant (the “IV”) and the G dominant (“V”), and voila, instant blues or rock songs. You can do more than that, of course.

2. Wes Fryer showed us his midi keyboard, an M-Audio Axiom 29 model, in Shanghai. I found a dealer here in Seoul, chose to get the 5-octave Axiom 49 plus an Axiom SP-2 sustain pedal (total cost: USD $380 or so), and my soon-to-be better half helped me order it on the phone, and it’s going to be delivered tomorrow. That’s a picture of it, above. See those square black pads on the upper right? They can each be programmed as a different percussion instrument (probably other things too), and are touch-sensitive.

I can’t wait to play with this baby. If any of you are fans of Leonard Cohen’s later works – say, I’m Your Man and on – you know that he has done some beautiful stuff setting voice and lyrics to very simple music tracks. I’d bet money that he didn’t use much more than GarageBand (or something as simple) and a keyboard like mine to make his Ten New Songs cd in 2001.

OMG. I hope the manual isn’t in Korean.

I posted recently about learning from Wes Fryer’s Shanghai workshop how easy it is to compose original music on Apple’s GarageBand. I posted my first two fragments (one funk, one trance), both of which I made in less than 20 minutes, and made in front of a student audience during a demo. More interestingly, that post includes what Jason, a teacher down the hall, strutted into my classroom the next day to show off – his own very first composition, a catchy little hip-hop piece.

Carolyn Foote put a tweet out on my Twitbin yesterday

If anyone wants to twitter “One trait of a good staff development workshop” for my teachers, that’d be great–doing this workshop all day!

Remembering Patrick Higgins‘ typically innovative approach a few weeks back of rounding up any edublogger volunteers to join his teachers in New Jersey on a Skypecast, in which teachers asked the questions and led us (Carolyn, Konrad Glogowski, and me) into discussions about classroom blogging – and remembering Will Richardson’s “unconference” approach to a workshop he led in Shanghai this month – I replied to Carolyn with this: “Interactive, unconference – let them guide (like Patrick’s Skype session with us and Konrad).”

Now, I know this requires a Mac with GarageBand, but I’m going to pass this little anecdote on, anyway, because you may be able to adapt it with cross-platform things. Here it is: I put an “allstaff” email out labeled something like “Be a Songwriter in 20 minutes with GarageBand.” In the email, I attached the mp3 of my first composition, and shared that anybody could learn to create a song on GarageBand in a flash. And I invited all-comers to let me know if they wanted me to show them how.

I got six replies (out of 30 teachers, not bad) the first day. And again, Jason had already started composing within 24 hours of seeing how easy it is now.

So my gut says – and I’m repeating my previous post here, because I think it bears repeating: Workshops that present technology as a teaching tool – something “schooly” – might be less effective, as Wes Fryer and Gary Stager would probably agree, than presenting it as a creativity tool.

We’ve read a million times (and should write it a million more) that teachers cannot understand blogging, much less use it effectively in their classrooms, if they haven’t experienced doing blogging themselves (and even that’s too simple, since they need to do more than just write online to really understand blogging – but that’s a later post). That’s a similar sermon to what I’m preaching here. But anybody who has tried to persuade teachers to begin blogging knows it’s an up-cliff battle almost all the time. All the teachers (and administrators) I’ve encouraged to begin blogging have resisted with such claims as, “But I don’t have time to write every day” (rebuttal: Moses included no Law saying “Thou Shalt Blog Daily”), or “I’m not a good writer” (a response worth its own post, later, or addressed sort of at the end of my last one), or “I don’t have anything to say” (a cause for weeping).

These are all responses we have to respect, because well, there they are: cold hard realities.

But the easy seduction of six teachers into creating their own music with GarageBand suggests that maybe we should remember that, like our students, our teachers and admin too possess multiple intelligences (and check out this great interview with Howard Gardner at Edge.com, my favorite science/philosophy/culture online mag).

And maybe we should approach Staff Development Workshops by having a menu of “digitally creative activities” grouped under headings for all those multiple intelligences.

So: a sketch of the process that I might try out next week for our own workshop:

Step One: Take a multiple intelligences inventory and discover your strongest intelligence.
Step Two: On the “Digital Arts” menu, select an activity you want to learn under your specific intelligence type.
Step Three: Alone or in groups, go at it, and ask for help whenever you need it.

Uh-oh. This calls for a wiki to host that menu.

Often when I have ideas, I tend to stall and falter, out of some perfectionistic strain that says, “Don’t commit to trying this until it’s perfect.” But somebody’s remark recently – Doug Noon’s, maybe? who has some great thoughts and comment-resources about staff development on this post, by the way – that learning and teaching are “always in beta” helps. I’ll make the wiki and invite all-comers to comment and contribute.

Has anyone else tried the “personal creativity” intro, instead of the “classroom tool” one, for staff workshops? Anybody have anything to report on that?

Because I can’t help but say it: Even if we love our jobs, the word “job” is still aversive – especially in comparison with the word “creativity.” Don’t we all have creative yearnings? And isn’t satisfying them more possible now than ever before?

And wouldn’t discovering that possibility by unlocking your own creativity be a much more powerful motivator than being told you’re expected to use this stuff in your class?

I can’t help but think that, once teachers find themselves making music, films, photo-collages, whatever, creatively, then the creative classroom use of these tools will follow.

Photo Credits:
Photos 1 and 3 by Darwin Bell
Photo 2 by Auntie P
Photo 4 by Robby Garbett
Photo 5 by urban penguin

I’ve been up all night catching up on my reading, which these days means feed-reading, more than anything.

Two that struck a chord:

1. That LearnerBlogosphere Idea

Sylvia Martinez on the red-hot GenYES blog writes several posts about getting teens to use Web 2.0 independently – like we adult edubloggers do – to develop their literacy skills in ways that classrooms typically cannot match.

One reason I love Sylvia’s posts is that she references reports and data that I don’t have the will or temperament to seek out, but which speak almost always to my own priorities as an educator. A case in point: the goal of creating a “LearnerTalk” (but that sounds schooly) of student edubloggers to give us teachers lessons on how our Classroom 2.0 attempts measure up. Sylvia writes that this is already happening spontaneously, which encourages me to seek ways to harness and shepherd that trend into this arena. Here’s Sylvia:

Students report that one of the most common topics of conversation on the social networking scene is education. Nearly 60 percent of online students report discussing education-related topics such as college or college planning, learning outside of school, and careers. And 50 percent of online students say they talk specifically about schoolwork. (Read her “Web 2.0 – share the adventure with students” post as well)

Does anybody else read into this that the students are stuck, like we adults are, in their own separate echo-chamber? And that combining the student and teacher discourses in one truly universal “edublogosphere” has the potential to steer our shared enterprise into fertile territory sooner than the current “parallel echo-chambers” situation we seem to have right now?

Scott McCleod’s offer to host a “LearnerTalk” type thing a month or so ago has not been forgotten.* Life and work have been too fast to focus on generating interest in that. Last week, before we began our week-long Chusok holiday, I pitched blogging to my Web 2.0 activity club, and many of my students seemed to get a glimmer from that sermon of the power of real-world blogging. I think a few will bite.

2. The War on Teaching Bad Writing

Anybody who’s taught high school English should know why most students hate to write in schools. It’s because they’re taught to write badly.

If I assigned any of you to write about ideas that aren’t self-selected, in forms that aren’t self-expressive, for an over-worked audience of one that puts two or three words, random red hieroglyphs, and a permanently-branded number into a ledger that threatens to determine your fate, face it: you would learn to hate writing (and school) too.

Like Sylvia, Jeff Wasserman of When the Hurly-Burly’s Done shares some hard data and classroom anecdotes to help us teachers of real writing wage the war against teachers of the poisonously schooly 5-Paragraph Essay [*jeers and hisses*]. I replied to Jeff’s post,

Jeff, this makes me want to make my AP Lit class Ning public. We’re having forum discussions about Organic Form v. Mechanical (5PE and all that garbage).

I’ve been making them write timed essays without outlining, trusting that an organic form will come from simply responding to the prompt and writing from there.

I modeled it for them by writing an old AP Lit exam essay about a poem, under timed conditions, in a screencast here, for what it’s worth. Interesting to be able to let them into my interior writer’s monologue as I read, annotate, and write a response, recording voiceover all the while, to the same exercise they did.

My best student responded to watching it by saying, among other things, “I didn’t think you could make a one-sentence paragraph in the body of an essay.”

One last tidbit: I took an AP Lit workshop from UCLA this summer – a waste of time, mostly – but got this from the College Board/APL celebrity who taught it: AP Lit exam graders appreciate organic form, “as long as it has a beginning, middle, and end.”

I like that: beginning, middle, end. None of this “introductory paragraph, body, conclusion paragraph” drivel.

Then, instead of sleeping as I’d intended, my mind shifted into overdrive. Sylvia’s and Jeff’s post led to these fantasies of how we can teach real writing (based on real reading in this “infinite book” we call the internet) with web 2.0:

First, students would write self-directed blogs. No homework assignments allowed in terms of subject matter, though standards of style and conventions would be set;

Second, assessment would be based on readership, comments, subscriptions, visitor stats, Technorati authority ranking (with safeguards against fraudulent links, which are easy enough to spot), self-assessment, and other non-authoritarian, teacher-gives-grades assessment styles. (And yes, as usual, it’s the institutional but otherwise counter-educational imperative to grade everything that presents the biggest obstacle to this approach to learning.)

–Wait, you say. That’s not fair. Some students who are not blessed with verbal intelligence will not attract subscribers, visitors, comments, and so forth. But not so fast: the art of compensation with other intelligences is so much more possible on blogs. Not a great writer? Then compensate by communicating through images (see Diane Cordell’s blog), podcasts (see Wes Fryer), films (see Marco Torres and Mabry Middle School), graphic novels and comic strips (see ToonDo). Carve out a niche doing Google Earth productions (see Google Lit Trips) as your blog’s specialty. Find some skill you have, or some passion you want to extend, and adapt your blog to exploit that.

Really: What form of multiple intelligences does blogging exclude?

Third, grades would be weighted toward the end of the year or term, to allow for experiment, dead ends, learning – through – failure, and other writerly discoveries afforded by real-world blogging. (I’m more and more fascinated by the fact that my own blogging has been a real-world case of what we call “project-based learning” in school, and more and more convinced it’s the way to engage young writers to naturally want to hone their skills and excel.)

I shouldn’t have tried to write this right now. Too tired. But these holidays are short, and I love them for allowing this type of reflection.

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*I’ll probably just buy the domain and host it alongside the Project Global Cooling site anyway, since I’m already adminstering WordPress MU for my school – and soon will train students to administer these sites themselves. It’s so hard to let go of the reins and give them to the young, and so easy to forget that they’re more than capable. But I will ask Scott to boost, support, read, seed, reply

Photo credits:
Writing by oskay
Borg Drones by Dunechaser
Bible 2.0 by jeff w brooktree
Looking by eskimoblood
Fusion Festival 2005 by Udo Herzog

I’m catching up on grading and assessing on my AP Literature Ning – that’s where most assignments are posted, so student-people can see each others’ work, and my replies to everybody, not just to them – and was wowed by JungHee.

How? I assigned Keats‘ stunning last sonnet, “Bright Star, Would I were Stedfast as Thou Art,” as a four-stage response exercise. Those stages were in four forums:

1. Read the poem and journal your first impressions.
2. Draw the poem’s imagery, then journal how your first impression changed.
3. Record and upload an mp3 of yourself reciting the poem – and read it as well as you can.
4. Journal how reciting and listening to your recital further changed your impressions of the poem.

In short: read it with the switched-off laziness that is par for the course with homework; SEE the imagery (and if you’re really sharp, discover that you can touch those images, hear them, smell them, taste them, too); sing the poem’s sounds (albeit atonally); and connect those sounds to the sense of the poem by hearing them.*

I’m really enjoying reading and replying to these forums. The reflections are so revealing of each student’s level of accomplishment in savoring poetry.

But JungHee threw me for a loop. He recorded his mp3 on a music editor, noticed the patterns of the “p” phonemes in his reading, and seemed to be able to notice sound more by seeing it in the digital soundwaves – doing a spectrographic analysis, basically – than by hearing it unaided by technology. So he shared by uploading his discovery, which I do here as well:

Here’s what JungHee said in his forum about this:

What I noticed in my sound wave was that there were frequent “high peaks”.
I posted the picture of this as attachment below for clarification..
All the “mountain looking” ones are the places where the “P” sound made the air go into the mic with too much force. So we can tell that there were some… “edged” words throughout the poem (?)

I don’t know what to make of this, but thought it was interesting to share.

Back to branding my student-people with tattoos for their permanent records….(*grrrr…*)

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*This is all based on the conviction that one drawback of our multimedia age is that it has led to the atrophying of that mental muscle we call the imagination. That is not a good thing for our experience of the sublime and beautiful. And I love my student-people too much to deprive them of the opportunity to make the ascent to that plane.