Beyond School

[Series: Preface: The Seed--an Idea; Part 1: The Bud--a Concept; Part 2: The Blossom--a Project; Part 3: The Pollen--a Call; Part 4: The Honey--a Pedagogy; Part 5: The Bees--a Community]

Big ideas start small, and will grow unless you quit. And we’re not going to quit. To do so in the Web 2.0 Age (and the Age of Global Warming) would be too blind. It’s all too possible with the tools we have now.

My guest on this podcast: Suzie Boss, a founding director of the Learning Innovation and Technology Consortium, a nonprofit organization that promotes sustainable community change.

Ms. Boss is also the co-author of Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age (to be published by ISTE, November 2007).

The topic? Our “real-world project for the digital age”: a global “Concerts for Global Cooling 2008″ Earth Day campaign, organized, promoted, and executed by students around the world–and web-hosted with the best student rock bands all on the same website for “streaming concerts,” and student-produced digital works explaining global warming’s causes, challenges, and solutions. (Yes, I’m now totally willing to use “Live Earth” as a model. You should check out its website — and students should learn values, both human and digital, from it by imitation.)

The podcast is a 15-minute enhanced m4a file with “chapters” for easy navigation, images, and links to all the ideas and resources we discuss. These features only work if you download it to iTunes, and select “View > Artwork”. The images are shoddy, I admit, but I mainly did this at all to model enhanced podcasting for the students involved in this project, since they’ll all have MacBooks when we go 1:1 next fall. I want them to see some possibilities.

Many thanks to Ms. Boss for her permission to podcast this excerpt of our conversation. And read the subtitle of her forthcoming book again. Love it.

Click here to get your own player.

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On Sunday, 11 March 2007 (oh wait–that’s Korea time. It was Saturday in Hawaii), Chris Watson was nice enough to invite three of his students in Hawaii to join us in a Skype conference call/podcast. And Lindsay, Eddie, and Blake were nice enough to accept.

His two sophomores and one freshman did most of the talking, and Chris and I listened. What they had to say (and the relaxed, intelligent way they said it) was, I hope you’ll agree, worth the listen. The talk was long and wide-ranging, but focused mainly on their experience of writing on blogs and wikis in the Language Arts classroom.

I have to add this: class discussions inside classroom walls–and tyrannized by classroom “factory bells”–don’t hold a candle to what we did on Skype. There was no clock-watching, no hierarchy, no policing. We were just five people talking about writing and learning in this new world.

It was enough to make me consider getting a Ph.D. in administration–something I’ve never been interested in–simply to have the credentials to find funding to create a school without bells and factory rules, and with more conversations like this.

The podcast, if downloaded to iTunes, is extended with a time-stamped Table of Contents. For your convenience (I know I never have time to listen to hour-long podcasts), I’ve copied it below the podcast player.

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00:00:00.000 Intro
00:01:31.000 Opening Questions on Student Blogging
00:02:31.484 Lindsay on Student Blogging
00:03:16.326 Chris’ approach (Lindsay) and privacy
00:04:49.000 Frequency Eddie
00:05:27.333 Content Eddie and Lindsay EssenQs
00:06:25.000 Pitfalls: Rambling diaries
00:06:42.000 Reading other sts blogs
00:07:42.250 Lindsay: Reading Adult blogs for inspiration
00:09:47.375 Blake joins: reading blog habits
00:11:57.000 Lindsay’s blog recommendations
00:12:26.250 Assigned to read/comment on others?
00:13:37.625 The Art of the Title
00:14:46.625 edit and revise, or just post?
00:19:34.875 Finding ideas
00:20:42.375 On sts who DON’T like blogging
00:26:35.625 Will you keep it after class is over?
00:26:59.875 Blake on 1001: Don’t want it to end
00:27:52.375 Permissions and School restrictions
00:31:12.750 My school’s “fresh start”: anagrams and anonymity change writing?
00:34:49.375 On MySpace writing v. blogging
00:38:38.139 Does Blogging Feel like Homework?
00:42:20.526 How Teachers Can Ruin Blogging
00:44:37.838 Blogging Across the Curriculum
00:47:15.750 Students on Best Assessing
00:52:39.500 Flat World Time Management
00:54:01.969

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Tomorrow (Sunday) morning, some of my students want to give their views on how blogging feels for them so far. They’ve been blogging for three or four months now.

I know I’ve been less than perfect in trying to set up blogging to make it seem real and valuable for them. So I look forward to hearing them sound off–and sharing it with you on a podcast.

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[Cross-posted from 1001 Reflections]

Terry Smith of Hannibal, Missouri, USA, Jeff Dungan of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and I (in Seoul, Rep. of Korea), have a “virtual faculty meeting” to plan the first elementary school writing workshop for the 1001 Flat World Tales Project.

It was the most efficient team meeting I think I’ve ever had. Length: 20 minutes.

(Download to iTunes to see extended podcast Chapter Markings.)

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[Cross-posted from 1001 Reflections blog.]

Chris Watson, HS English teacher at Punahoe High School in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, and Clay Burell of Korea International School in Seoul, Rep. of Korea, discuss the following topics in relation to their cross-world classroom collaboration on the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki world-wide writing workshop:

• Student publishing process
• Effective student blogging
• Diigo
• “This I Believe” podcast project
• Informal Prof Devt through Skype
• Using Library Thing for English classes

1001teachers: Chris Watson, part 2: Language Arts and the Read-Write Web

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