Beyond School

(right-click and “save as” to download the enhanced podcast here)

Life as science fiction continues.

Here in Korea on a Friday night, close to midnight, I hop onto Twitter, see Chris Craft is there in South Carolina, USA, and tweet him an invitation to talk on Skype. He kindly obliges (and it’s just a free international computer phone call now, so that ain’t hard).

I record it, edit it, and an hour later, self-publish it for anybody in the world who is interested in lessons learned from two humble pioneers of global classroom collaboration.

Our topic? We take up the question of how to refine our approach to global collaborative projects so that they are less prone to fail, or to wear out all parties involved (teachers and students) when they succeed.

I’m most excited by the last 5 minutes or so. Chris and I fell into a spontaneous “pedagogical jam session” in which we riffed on the idea that the best projects are – not projects at all*. Instead, they are authentic uses – and modelings – of Personal Learning Networks (PLN’s) via Twitter, Skype, Facebook, etc: “quick in and quick out.”

Good background reading from the edublogs:

• Sylvia Tolesano’s Collaboration Projects – Doomed to Fail? (USA)
• Graham Wegner’s Parable 2.0 (Australia)
• Susan Sedro’s Learning from My Online Project Mistakes (Singapore)
• My own enthusiastic post on George Mayo’s “Many Voices” Global Twittory project, and my own lessons learned from the 1001 Flat World Tales (S. Korea)
• My “Freshman Arthus Invades Korea to Co-Teach with Me” post

It’s only 15 minutes. It’s enhanced, if you download to iTunes, with chapter markers for quick navigation. And notice, if you play it from this post, you can still see links to URL’s we discuss along the way in the embedded player.

Enjoy! And better still – extend or challenge in comments

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*I owe a debt to Chris Harbeck’s K-12 Online Conference 2007 presentation “Release the Hounds, Part 4” for planting this seed a couple of months ago. It’s sprouting some healthy shoots now.

[Update 3 August 2008: If you want a written version of the same story, I did my best here.]

[Update 2: I've copied Stephen Downes' comments about this post, and my own response to them, in the comments, if anybody is interested.]

[Update: I've added the podcast to my Teaching Gallery page, in case you come across a student who might benefit by listening in the future.]

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I was bullied for two years in high school. Every day.

I told the story to my grade 9 class last year – there was some stuff going on in the hallways that made me hope it might help – and recorded it as I told them.

And I thought, in the spirit of this season of good will, that I would share that story here. Here’s the enhanced podcast for download, with chapters for quick navigation.

But if you want to listen without downloading first, see the bottom of this post.

Most of the bullying content we see online tries to make bullying stop. It’s a nice goal. But this story does things differently.

It’s to the bullied.

It tells them that, for me, over 700 consecutive days of bullying in high school was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. It just took me a couple decades to realize that. This does not mean those two decades were bad.

The audio quality is bad. Sorry about that. But I think you can hear it anyway.

It’s about 30 minutes long. My students still talk about it, a year later. And I’ve shared it with a few new acquaintances of mine recently – you may be reading some of them – and one of them said it was “as worth sharing as all the other drivel you read on edublogs out there.” (I loved that. And relax – it was a joke.)

It is a story. I tried to tell it well. And there are more than a few laughs along the way.

Call it my “Christmas Carol.” And tuck it away somewhere for that possibly tortured, possibly suicidal student we worry about here and there as teachers, as community leaders, as human beings. It’s really for them, again.

Here it is. Enjoy:

Photo credit: “the bully” by O Pish Posh