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

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Dana Huff tagged me for this Teaching Meme.

1. I am a good teacher because… (sez who???) if this is true, it would be because I’m an “anti-teacher.” I pity students for being stuck in school, for too often being treated like inmates, and having to sit through what they have to sit through for 12 critical years. I try to mitigate this by a) re-naming myself “learner,” and them “learner” too; b) trying to make them conscious that they’re young adults who deserve to be treated as such, despite the infantilization they’re subjected to by school, family, society, custom; c) not shying away from controversial issues; d) emphasizing problem-solving and frustration-tolerance as key real-world virtues; e) giving them an anonymous feedback forum year-round to criticize anything they don’t like in our classroom, and responding to it; f) replacing homework with relevant projects. (I really should get my students to address this question.)
2. If I weren’t a teacher I would be a… I have no idea. A starving filmmaker? Writer? Singer-songwriter? Founder of an unschool? Full-time blogger?
3. My teaching style is… relaxed, non-authoritarian, relevant, high-energy, philosophical, wonder-aimed, and encourages principled non-comformity and laughter.
4. My classroom is… a complete mess, with most of my favorite books from home on classroom shelves for students to check out, desks in different arrangements every day and, if I had my way, no desks at all.
5. My lesson plans are… open, loose, often thrown out the window in favor of spontaneous ideas, constant revisions, and/or student input. I’ve never understood how people can follow lesson plans made more than a couple days in advance. “The map is not the territory.” And I tend to get creative in the midst of units in ways I can’t when they’re at abstract distances.
6. One of my teaching goals is… to create space for self-discovery and self-direction in my classroom, so my learners may become writers, and find both themselves and a self-selected expertise through long-term classroom blogging.
7. The toughest part of teaching is… resisting institutional pressures. And resisting an all-consuming love for the world of “teaching.” I’m totally unbalanced, but love it. So it’s not a problem for me.
8. The thing I love about teaching is… my job is to share my love of literature, history, writing, learning, questioning young minds, and self-discovery. And to be teaching in the most revolutionary moment in the history of literacy since Gutenberg 500 years ago.
9. A common misconception about teaching is… that it’s easy. Another, possibly, is that it’s effective. I more and more wonder what young people would learn over 12 years if they were free to choose their own pathways in life, instead of being coercively incarcerated in schools. Schools are not natural, so they may not be healthy.
10. The most important thing I’ve learning since I started teaching is… without projects and creativity, learning is probably temporary. And to trust my nose: if it smells boring or schooly, it probably is.

You’re it: Anthony, Cindy, Jo, Vivek, Doug, James, Christian. (And no hard feelings if you opt out. This one’s tough, the timing is tougher, and I wonder how much I’ll agree with what I wrote when I read it tomorrow

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