Beyond School

It’s 12 minutes from 2008 here in Seoul. It’s also 12 minutes from the One Year Anniversary of Beyond School. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I’m spending New Year’s Eve with my beloved B.S. (I do have an uncharacteristic glass of wine next to me as I write.)

I want to steal a trick from my favorite political video blog, Crooks and Liars (whose link to my “Truly Critical: Thinking about Science, Religion, and Goodness” post last week opened this blog to readership beyond edubloggers – to the tune of almost 1,000 visits to that post – in what I hope becomes a wedding of educational and political blogging, and another escape, like Students 2.0, from the echo chamber), by creating a regular “Open Thread” feature.

The idea of an Open Thread is to pose an issue, and then let the comments come. The thread – and that means the conversations in the comments – is the thing, not the post. It’s crowd wisdom – it’s blogging – at its best.

The question I propose for this thread comes in response to the following recent posts in the ’sphere:

• The 33-and-counting comments to my “On Leaving Teaching to Become a Teacher“
• Will Richardson’s “Some New Year’s Dreaming” from Weblogg-ed, and its 24-and-counting comments
• Graham Wegner’s “Parable 2.0,” and its 11-and-counting comments
• Jeff Utecht’s “One Door Closes….Where Does That Leave You?” (Jeff announces he’s leaving his job here, without a new one to go to), and its 25 comments
• Taylor the Teacher’s “You Got Punk’d: An Open Letter to American Parents” and its 11-and-counting comments.

And the question is this:

If you dream of starting a new school, what are the reasons you don’t try?

If you’d prefer a positive framing of the question, how about:

How would your dream school look, and how would you make it a reality?

or, to get really outside the box:

If you believe it’s time for schools to end, how would you replace them?

Happy New Year, everybody. Since realities begin in dreams, maybe this thread will make it really happy.

(Stay tuned for the next thread: “What are the biggest obstacles to education reform that you would like to campaign against?” – But again, that’s next time. Just priming the pump.)

Photo credit: …utopiacere… on Flickr

In my last post, I made a couple sins of omission when giving thanks and measuring the success of Students 2.0.

Sin 1: Thanks to Stephen Downes for supporting the launch by featuring it in his (very influential, and rightfully so) OLDaily.

Sin 2: I didn’t mention what is, to me, the most valuable aspect of the Students 2.0 blog: the comments. Without them, we’d have a handful of students writing to the void. With them, we have the type of peer-to-peer, “student” to “adult” conversation on equal footing, that I dreamed would happen if this thing was done right. One more comparative stat:

• Number of posts:comments ratio: Students 2.0: 13 posts: 310 comments = 1:23 ratio. Beyond School: 424 posts: 995 comments = 1:2.3 ratio.

(–it’s enough to make me simultaneously weep with joy and gnash my envious teeth. It says so much for the educators who are leaving their own soapboxes to converse in the s2oh comment salons. Gives me hope, really.)

A delicious postscript / tempting call to action

I’m learning so much simply browsing my RSS feed for s2oh comments.

I’m also gaining occasional inspiration. To wit: Bill Fitzgerald’s idea about taking on the College Board for its hijacking of education and perverting it into a competition for points on SATs, AP Exams, and so forth. Here’s Bill’s comment, in response to Lindsea’s “One Sweet Dream” post:

The test prep companies drive a lot of the hype behind college pressure, as their profits depend on your parents getting worried enough to shell out mucho greenbacks so you can sit through classes designed to get you extra points on the SATs/APs.

(As an aside, I would love to see an entire high school class, nationwide, boycott the SATs/APs. The Educational Testing Service would suffer an enormous loss of revenue, as they would not take in the testing fees from a few million students (aka, the captive audience, aka, you). If enough students boycotted the exam to affect the statistical significance of the test, colleges would need to find a different way to evaluate students — and colleges would find a way to evaluate and admit students, because, while they also don’t want you to know this, colleges need you — and your tuition dollars — to continue to exist.)

Whether the specific tactic Bill envisions is the most effective is secondary to the idea of simply putting pressure on the College Board and the educational system to change. We’ve seen what an educators’ Twitter – del.icio.us marketing blitz could do with s2oh. Why stop there? Why not “man the tweets” again?

Anybody want to play with this idea? It could be powerful, seems to me.

If you haven’t read Ryan Bretag’s and Steve Hargadon’s posts on TechLearning about Students 2.0, they’re worth a read. And Steve’s podcast interview with Kevin, Sean, and Lindsey shows them at their wonderful best, in terms of both intelligence and personality.

I haven’t really written any reflections here since launching Students 2.0 back on December 8 – those of you in my Twitterverse may have noticed I’m feeling a bit burned out right now – so I want to do that now.

I’ll start with saying thank you to the educators out there who helped it happen: Scott Schwister and Scott McLeod for simple moral and conceptual support back when I was blogging about the idea in June; Diane Cordell, Chris Watson, Carolyn Foote, Sylvia Martinez, and Elizabeth Helfant for answering my twitter request for good student bloggers out there; Christian Long and Steve Hargadon for blogging about Sean “The Bassplayer” and Arthus Erea (that’s how I learned about these two s2oh contributors); and Mr. Winton for turning Sean on to learning 2.0 in his Scotland classroom.

Then there’s everybody who helped with the marketing. Thanks to Arthus for the idea (and creation) of the splash page, and for creating the countdown badge with his coding skills; thanks to Sean the Bassplayer and the entire s2oh team for creating the promotional YouTube video and original soundtrack; thanks to readers of this blog for playing along with the request to push the launch onto the del.icio.us hotlist, for blogging about the project and embedding the badge, and for the concerted Twitter-burst of del.icio.us bookmarks that pushed s2oh onto the hotlist in less than three hours.

Re: that Twitter marketing campaign, I said it then and I’ll say it again: it was fairly spontaneous, it unapologetically manipulated del.icio.us for a good cause, and it worked. It showed the power of a network of educators who can bother to take a couple of minutes of action to create a fairly impressive marketing sensation. For the skeptics and naysayers about this move, the question I ask is: Without this audience and this buzz, how excited and motivated would the s20h writers be to deliver a quality product and make this project a success?

Let me illustrate how effective this collaborative effort of everyone above was by comparing some basic stats about Students 2.0 – after only three weeks – with my own blog’s stats after one year:

• Del.icio.us bookmarks: Students 2.0: 450; Beyond School, 65 (for the main page only; I don’t know how to get a total that includes permalink pages);
• Technorati ranking (links from individual blogs): Students 2.0 150; Beyond School, 85 (new site, since Oct. 20) + 70 (old site, Jan. 1 – Oct. 20) = 155;
• RSS Subscribers: Students 2.0: 405; Beyond School: 401;
• Unique Visits for December: Students 2.0: over 12,500 unique visits (since December 8); Beyond School: 5,069.

Kevin Walter playfully accuses me of being a “stats whore” when I talk about readership, and I always reply that self-publishing is still publishing, and to publishers, readership matters.

So what am I trying to say here? I’ll quote from a comment I left on Steve Hargadon’s post on TechLearning:

[It all points to] the need to create more authentic publication spaces, with more authentic audiences for students that, like Students 2.0, require quality to reach that audience.

There are obviously other possibilities for such spaces, besides a student edublog, that might motivate students to “embrace the revolution” in their own education.

Music, film, photography, and writings on a broader range of subjects than education are a case in point.

In my own senior classroom, I’ve been pursuing an “authentic blogging pedagogy” that throws out prescribed curriculum altogether, and requires only that my students identify a passion-based path of inquiry and/or production, and pursue that through connective reading-and-writing, and through showcasing their own creative pursuits on their blogs.

After a few frustrating months of watching them flounder, I’m finally seeing signs that give me hope. One student had a “mission moment” in which he identified that his blog would henceforth be the space in which he published and discussed his own musical compositions, with the aim of producing a full CD by the end of the senior year.

Others have similarly chosen photography and design as their missions, and are advancing down their own paths in those directions.

I started Students 2.0 out of frustration with all the excuses we read for not pushing authentic learning with web 2.0 forward in education. Sean’s old English teacher in Scotland, “Mr. Winton,” put his finger on my ultimate hope for this enterprise when he wrote,

“This attempt to give students a genuine forum where they can give an end-users view of Education2.0 is, I hope, the thin end of the wedge.”

The “thin end of the wedge” indeed. We can, all of us, create more spaces that students want to earn their way into. The less “schooly” and egalitarian, the better – because maybe those unmotivated students Diane mentions are not motivated precisely because the types of publication they are offered online, in the end, still feel as inauthentic as the hallway displays of yore.

Thanks for taking these young people seriously, and not just giving them a pat on the head. I know I’ve been snarky on a couple occasions in comments on other posts about s2oh, but it’s precisely because those posts seemed to both miss the weight of the moment, and to coopt the revolution by taming it into a lower level of status in the edublogging caste system. It’s nice to see you and Ryan Bretag (he wrote about s2oh on TL first, as far as I know) avoiding that tone.

It’s early days for s2oh, and they have a learning curve ahead of them, but trust me: for engagement and motivation, and care for their work, they get an A+ for their work so far.

Or would, if this had anything at all to do with grades. The amazing thing, of course, is that it doesn’t.

To sum up, a few propositions:

1. We can create more spaces like this, with similar visibility to motivate quality, through similar means. You come up with the idea, and I’ll certainly return the favor you’ve given s2oh by blogging about it, helping you push it to del.ico.us’ hotlist, etc.

2. It doesn’t take a lot of work to make things happen. It does take doing, though.

3. We shouldn’t forget what this whole enterprise taught about the power of network marketing for education.

Thanks again to everyone. I’m pooped, so I’m signing off.

More and more I wonder: is school a good place for teachers who want to make a difference in the lives of their students, and to the future of the world? Is there a way to leave the daily farce of gradebooks, attendance sheets, tests, corporate and nationalist curriculum, homework assignments, grade-licking college careerist “students” (and parents), fear of parents and administrators, and fear of inconvenient socio-political truths – and at the same time, to make a far more meaningful impact on the lives of the young?

I’m thinking yes. I’m thinking, moreover, obviously. I’m not sure how much longer I want to work for schools. I’d so much rather teach.

Lesson learned: if you start a digital video, finish it quickly.

I started this months ago as part of the “Visionary Student Blogging” project for my AP Literature seniors. Some crazy introductory idea that I hoped would help them see how blogging could be an escape from school-as-usual.

I didn’t finish it the way I wanted to, and life got in the way. I spent a bit of time this morning making the attribution titles at the end so I could post it. A couple of people had seen it on our AP Lit Ning and told me they liked it.

I think it’s kind of vague, myself, and imperfect in more ways than one. But educational fantasies are always a bit vague, aren’t they?

(I used Zamzar to convert YouTube videos for import into iMovie, by the way.)

(If anybody can tell me how to make my YouTube videos show up in RSS readers, by the way, I’d be so appreciative. I know it can be done because I see others do it.)

I’m off to Bangkok for the Apple Distinguished Educator 2007 Asia Institute in 24 hours, so I’m crazy rushed: sub plans for 3 missed classes, packing, the usual teachery stuff (gradebooks and other banes), prepping a presentation for how 1:1 is working (and sometimes not working?) at our school. (I really look forward, more than anything Apple, to simply re-uniting with International School of Bangkok’s Kim Cofino and Justin Medved to hone our collaborative visions about the 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling, plus whatever they’re cooking up that I might support from Korea. I’ve missed these two since seeing them in Shanghai for the Learning 2.0 Conference in September.)

But here are a few things on my mind before I go:

The Wrong Kind of Selflessness

I don’t care how wealthy, “elite” (silly word connoting “more shopping power” in today’s age), and conventionally “well-educated” a student body is. If the emphasis is on GPA, SAT, Advanced Placement overload, and hyper-extra-curricularism for the sake of college application bullets (“I was in student council, Model United Nations, Cheerleading, Basketball, Debate Club, and Future Workaholics of America”), the result is often painfully obvious: all of those extrinsically motivated pursuits are a Faustian Bargain.

What is lost in this mad rush for the killer college app is this: the soul itself.

Okay, I don’t believe in this Iron Age concept. Let’s be modern and call it “the self.” It’s every bit as precious, without the theological baggage. I’m talking about the sense of who you are, of what you want to do, and the path of learning and creating based on those two senses – learning about the world the individual self is called to, and creating a worldview on that basis, and creatively contributing to that world at some point. I’m talking about your freaking life story.

It’s an opportunity cost thing. Our time is finite. 24/7 is a reality we so far haven’t transcended. And if you are being force-fed college application steroids every waking moment – classes in school, schooly extracurricular activities after it, SAT prep night classes after school and on weekends, other tutors and AP prep classes ditto – then what is not being fed, again, is the Most Important Thing: the Self, the Essence of your own genetic thumbprint, the special meat-package of who you are as an individual.

You may gain the Ivy League, but you lose your soul. You lose your voice, your creativity, your sense of wellness, wonder, and self-impelled exploration. Outside of that GPA, there’s not much there there. “Bookful blockheads,” to quote Samuel Johnson, with “heads stuffed full of facts” (to tweak Eliot).

My evidence? Try this: 30 students with MacBooks, most of whom are sincerely committed to a Project Global Cooling, but who are bewilderingly unable to produce a single short film about it, a single podcast, etc, in over three months. Let me translate: they have the money, the wealth, the grades, the intelligence; but when it comes to a simple “create something, play, produce, get fertile”? Nada. Too busy outside of our 40 minute/week activity block with all those Faustian pursuits. And, I suspect, too conditioned by a life of “schooling” to relax and create with that true artist’s acceptance of failed sketches in pursuit of the successful one. Too success-driven (conventionally defined) to be creative. Too fearful of “failure” to create something that doesn’t work. Too over-scheduled to have time to even try. Shocking, really. And sad.

We celebrate one kind of selflessness, and rightfully so; but this is the wrong kind. It’s a selflessness, ironically, born of selfishness – of the desire (probably more parental, institutional, and cultural than anything) to get into a “top” college. What a devil’s conveyor belt we’ve built with our schools. Sell your soul, go to Harvard.

The Wrong Kind of Morality

Other bloggers know that curious fascination that comes while skimming your sitemeter stats for the search terms that bring visitors to your blog. Me? Since posting my “Teaching the F-Bomb” about my AP Lit students’ modern translations of the constant (but more sublime than today’s) cursing in Shakespeare’s King Lear, I’ve gotten a surprising number of hits from people who apparently consider student cursing a moral issue worth researching.

Again, how Iron Age.

Can’t we aim for a modern moral framework here? Instead of expending energy trying to stamp out certain vowel-consonant combinations that do no harm beyond ruffling a few Victorian sensibilities – and I’m not saying we shouldn’t teach the proper times and places for the use of colorful language – can’t we instead focus on student habits that do much more damage? How about:

• the throw-away packaging addiction (bottled water, fast food, etc)
• the consumer habits that support socially immoral practices (like buying diamonds, for example, or Nestle products that rely on child slavery in Africa – aren’t these worse than saying “f&#k” a million times?)
• driving two-ton pollution machines without a thought to reducing their use

I’m so tired of that hackneyed argument that “science without morality is dangerous.” The problem is more located in our morality itself. Whatever culture you’re in, it’s a safe bet that your moral framework comes from some variation of Iron Age goat-herder or nomadic warlord. The moral issues they faced are different from ours. Joseph Campbell said it well:

For a civilization that has sent a man to the moon, it’s absurd to follow moral imperatives written before the invention of the wheel.

Or something like that. I paraphrase.

We’re in dire need of a revised Ten Commandments if we want our species to survive the 21st century at all. Resisting coveting my neighbor’s ass isn’t going to slow global warming or reduce the population explosion. (Actually, if “ass” meant what it means today instead of what it meant in Moses’ time – sorry, King James’ – maybe it would reduce population growth.) (That was a joke.)

But really. We’re educators. The next generation learns from us how to think critically about right and wrong, good and bad. Can’t we think critically about it ourselves? (And if Google brought you here because you’re looking for a way to wash your students’ mouths out with soap, I hope instead you’ll consider a bit of a moral paradigm shift, some soap for your own moral mouthings.)

More on the Edublogs Award Question

Darren Draper has an interesting comment thread about the value of the Edublogs Awards. I’m learning from it, and enjoying the debate. Worth a look. There’s constructive discussion about how the e-b folks can improve this shindig in future years.

Students 2.0 Coming Soon

I have a privileged, behind-the-scenes view of the planning going on for the Students 2.0 edublog launch. These young adults – disguised as mere “students” – are so brilliantly fun, smart, and creative, they intimidate me. And I’m learning a lot as I get to know them. (News flash: they’re smarter than me in a good number of ways.)

Watch out, edublogosphere. They won’t be raising their hands and asking for permission to talk here. Stay tuned for more.

Photos: 96dotsperinch and meeware1

Sometimes you just want to give up. Instead, I’ll go transparent and see what ideas, counsels, or commiserations come from sharing.

It’s about the “Visionary Student Blogging” connective writing project.

The problem? Little vision, little connective writing.

It’s partly senioritis, I think. College applications, SAT’s, too many commitments to too many extra-curricular activities (got to have those bullets for the college application, even if they come at the cost of destroying both my learning and my GPA), too many week-long sports trips, too many AP classes that were chosen not for interest but again for careerist reasons.

It’s partly Korean culture: parents sending students to night and weekend schools for SAT prep, AP prep, tutors. Students confusing memorization skills with academic excellence, trained to “be instructed” rather than to “construct” meaning themselves. Having no time to be, reflect, explore, wonder (or having no energy, rather).

And it’s partly my own fault: all the macho posturing of Advanced Placement courses as “college-level, rigorous,” etc – and Wes Fryer’s etymolological connection, in Shanghai back in September, of “rigor” with “rigid” and “rigor mortis” echoes here – led me to buy in to what now seems a sadistic and pedagogically pathetic imperative to overload AP students with A Mountain Of Homework. I’ve stopped that and changed courses after seeing that Paradise Lost was over most of my seniors’ heads. Instead, I’m now trying to save Milton from being Hated by Association with AP by simply playing the Bard and reciting my favorite parts to them, with full bardic savoring of Milton’s high style, and then gushing explicative about those heights as if I was talking about it on a summer road trip with friends. Call it modeling the Oral Tradition. They’ll be given the wheel for the later books, and expected to do the same. (See Carolyn Foote’s “How Long Does It Have to Be?” post about homework load for more on this, and read Alfie Kohn’s The Truth About Homework for some research data.)

And it’s partly they don’t know how to be writers. They’ve ever only written what teacher tells them in school, by and large.

So. Again, the result: little vision, little effort, little connective writing. Little writing at all. (There are exceptions, blessedly.)

So they’ve pulled me back from Beyond Schooliness into Threatening Teacher mode. I don’t like it. Below is my schooly post to them. Tell me what you would do? Here it is:

You’ve seen the “What Makes a Quality Weblog” guide. It’s the one you used to give feedback on each others’ blogs a few weeks ago. Click here if you need to see it again.

I’ll use it to assess your blogs for two “test” grades – the “Composition” part of this “Literature and Composition” course. Writing schooly essay assignments is only one form of writing (and the least authentic one, at that. You’ll never write literary analyses in the real world).

Connective reading and writing is the other half of your writing development in this class.

This project started on September 18-ish. You just finished your eighth week since starting it. The finish date will be Friday, December 7. That’s 11 weeks of writing you need to show you were doing.

The “Quality Weblog” guide is meant to be just that: your guide. It tells you how to make an A (”mastery” on the guide), a B (”above average”), a C (”average”), or lower.

Biggest factors for your grade: frequency, connectivism (linking to and discussing BLOGS that match your interests), writing quality (titles, ideas, style, voice, presentation – photos, font, links correct, etc), and tags (organization). There should be evidence of “self-directed learning” – call it your chosen, interest- or passion-based research project – in your writings.

So here’s the math, with a bit of generosity*:

If you want an A for these two test grades: by December 7, you should have

• 45 posts; 10 “long-ish”; 22 “connected” (linking to posts you’ve found interesting, but more importantly, discussing WHY you found them interesting); 44 “short-ish”.
• for examples of “longish,” see JoonPyo’s post (good, but not connective at all, so nobody will find it in the real world), Nicole’s post 1 and post 2 (both good AND connective – Nicole seems to “get it” more than most students, and is a real pleasure to read – much more pleasant than her schoolwork), Shim’s post (good, but connects to a website instead of blog, so nobody will visit and form a network relationship). Or for a non-student example, see this post on “Have Fun – Do Good” about “How to Get Someone Other than Your Mom to Read Your Blog” – connective, fun, informative, useful (you don’t need that many links in your “connective” posts – one or two is fine).
• for examples of “short-ish AND connective,” see Jane’s post.
• finally, too many 1- or 2- sentence posts really makes you look lazy Think a paragraph or two.

If you’ve been writing regularly, you’re okay. If not, you’ve got some catching up to do. Or you can aim for a C by using the guide.

Finally: if you still haven’t found feeds to match your interests, I’ll say it one last time: see me and I’ll help. Or don’t, and get what you deserve for not having your act together enough to problem-solve.

Note: I will help you write more by scaling back the Paradise Lost reading load. But you must yourself make the time – key word, make – to write regularly. You won’t go anywhere if you never start, in writing or in life.

—
*the “generosity,” for those who didn’t do the math, is that I reduced 11 weeks x 5 posts/week = 55 posts to only 45; I also reduced “11 long-ish” to “10″.

It just occurred to me I’ve been using my Twitterverse to solicit student blogger recommendations for the upcoming student edublog launch on December 1. See this post and especially the conversation thread below it for an idea how this project is taking shape.

Some very exciting contributors have already signed on, but if you know of any high-quality student bloggers out there who can add a new dimension to our adult echo-chamber through some quality writing, please send them this link and urge them to consider.

All available staff writers so far will be planning the launch this weekend on a Skype conference call – many states in the USA, a UK student, one or more in Korea. More are welcome.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more.

I’ve wanted to help this happen for the last five months. And I need your help to launch it with quality and good aim. Just a thoughtful comment consisting of a short list is all we ask.

First, a recap. Why re-write what was already obsessively written since May? So:

What would happen if we educators encouraged volunteer students to create a niche of learner edubloggers? That could be enlightening indeed.
– post from 6 May 2007

[Giving student presentations at education conferences] means less (next to nothing, I would guess) to students compared to their daily school experience, and their participation in the larger world generally. They should be participating in our edublogger conversations on an equal footing, as equal partners.
– post from 7 July 2007

[L]et the star student-writers with forward-thinking parents be the first members of the type of “LearnerVoices” [blog] Scott Schwister is envisioning. And make it pay off, for both the students and the edublogosphere, by inviting those young writers into our dialogue, and not only commenting on their blogs, but asking them to comment on ours. That’s a reality check worth inviting. . . . Because we need to get beyond this stage of adult-centered edutalk. It’s time to bring in the silent – and silenced – majority: our students.
– post from 8 July 2007

[W]e seem to be seeing a new milestone in the edublogosphere: the beginnings of democracy with the inclusion of our student Silent Majority. How freakin’ cool is that.
– post from 5 August 2007

The URL is bought, the WordPress is installed, and several student bloggers from different countries have agreed to contribute and serve as editors (feel free to pass an invitation along to any student edublogger you know to contact me here, by the way). We’re going to Skype this weekend to clarify the approach.

And that’s where you adult edubloggers can help. Since you’re the intended audience, it would be great if you could take a minute to look at this wonderfully tight list of categories from the aptly named A List Apart blog, and distill a list of the six categories you’d most like to read about in a collective student edublog.

Again, we’ll be laying the foundations this Saturday. You can help assure those foundations will be solid by leaving a thoughtful “list apart” of your own.

Comments beyond that list, of course, are welcome. If you were me, what other concerns would you have, what policies (if any) would you insist upon?

The target launch date is December 1. They’ll be reading you. I’m sure they hope you’ll be reading them too.
–

A special thanks to Scott Schwister and Scott McLeod here, by the way. His offer to support this idea back in August was somehow a tipping point for me.

(Apologies for the style. I’m overdue some sleep, but wanted to put the request out as soon as possible.)

–Image credit: “Megaphone Tank on a Barcode” by lyers on Flickr

The conversation about managing real student blogging – public, connective, prudent, real-world network-seeking – continues in the comments to my last post. Again, for RSS folks, not to be missed if this is a concern of yours. So I’m again posting the latest round of comments here. Doug Noon starts with a good challenging question, I return serve somewhat weakly, then (let’s mangle the metaphors) Diane Cordell knocks the tennis ball out of the park for a home run with this idea: blogging should be treated like driving. You have to take a “Driver Training” course before you’re “licensed.”

I think that’s brilliant. So the next step: how do we design that “blogger training course” most effectively?

Here’s the thread:

Doug Noon // Nov 11, 2007 at 4:18 am

I agree with you that the big issue for working with kids in a public forum is prudence. This would be no different than if we were preparing them to “go public” in any medium. We want to help them look their best, make a good impression, etc. Too much prudence, of course, can kill good writing.

The problem in evaluating how much, and where, prudence should be applied is that it’s a question of values, and there could be wide variation in terms of the audience the student wants to address. I can imagine some cases in which I’d be at a complete loss to help a student with the issues that might arise if they were trying to reach an audience that I didn’t understand at all. The coaching metaphor is useful since there might be a need for exploratory discussions about a student’s intentions. Blogging, as I’ve said before, is a social practice. If the subject matter is left wide open, the teacher’s role would shift from technical expert to something more like mentor, I suppose.

I really like the idea of putting the kids onto the idea of connecting with other bloggers and to identify a focus for a blog. Doing that is key to making blogging work. So what do you do when a student chooses a topic area with an audience whose social norms you might find objectionable? As you say, the issues would differ with the students’ ages, as well as their interests.

2 Clay Burell // Nov 11, 2007 at 8:28 pm

Hi Doug,

Your question: “So what do you do when a student chooses a topic area with an audience whose social norms you might find objectionable? ”

It’s an interesting one, and thanks for bringing it up. I expect you know things like this will be as rare as any other problematic event in student blogging – in my experience students show good judgment about their blogging and commenting 99% of the time – so you’re probably tossing that question in because we also all know that that 1% of poor student judgment threatens the whole enterprise. That’s why it’s worth finding these questions, to me – not because they will be common occurrences, but because even single occurrences can be damaging.

So if a student chooses “a topic area with an audience whose social norms [I] might find objectionable,” what should I do?

FIrst, I’m having a hard time thinking of an objectionable social norm. I guess a classroom blog for neo-Nazis, bigots, and other hate-groups fits the bill. (Is that what you had in mind?)

So if that happens – if Bobby decides to “blog for Hitler,” for example, and attract an audience of world-wide neo-Nazi bloggers – what an interesting situation. Seems like more of a “teachable year” than a “teachable moment.”

I’ve got a less extreme case (sorry for the meandering): teenagers can get awfully revealing about their private issues – eating disorders, suicidal tendencies, etc. Things we adult self-publishers typically have the good sense to keep to ourselves (I’ve never, for example, posted about my taste for pet-food*).

So suppose a student writes about wanting commit suicide. You’d think simply deleting the post from the blog, when you (the teacher) find it, solves the problem. But that’s not true, is it? My earlier comment about WayBack Machine not caching most sites failed to account for this fact: any RSS aggregator will have that post permanently, even if it was deleted from the original blog.

So where does that leave us?

What do you (anybody) think of an idea I’ve kicked around now and then: a “probationary” period of blogging in which all posts are submitted “private” – viewable only to “friends”, basically – until the individual blogger has shown he/she has the good sense to keep dirty laundry and damning information private?

I don’t like it – it’s based on mistrust. The opposite approach, like a hockey game, would be to allow all to play, but put any offenders in the “penalty box” if they show poor judgment.

No more time for the moment – have to prep for school tomorrow – but do want to add that in the extreme cases (the neo-Nazi, e.g.), that “teachable year” would involve asking the parents to be involved, and the school admin.

Which points to the conversations about the “social nature” of blogging both you and Diane mention. Mature students should understand the affiliation of their own blogs with their school, their family, their teachers, their classmates. Or they should understand it once it has been discussed and digested in the classroom.

Thanks for the input. Helped. Have to run now.

*obviously a joke — isn’t it?

3 diane // Nov 11, 2007 at 10:28 pm
Clay,
There are many activities that come with age and maturity prerequisites. Given the age of my Current Events students, getting a driver’s license immediately springs to mind!

The new driver must be at least 16 (in my state), take a mandated course about the dangers and responsibilities of driving, pass a general knowledge test, practice, then receive a license with limited privileges.

For the blogging analogy, I would keep the instruction and maybe some initial guided practice. Since your students are older – almost legal adults, I think you could probably “grant” them full blogging rights after that.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if blogging became as desirable as drinking (a lame but vivid analogy, suggested by my recent PowerPoint experiences!) and students did it with or without our “permission” because they wanted to!

–I think I see one high-value wiki worth making here: “Blogger Training School.” How to make it short and to the point? Toward key “courses”:

1. Prevent Theft: Lock Your Identity!
Do not reveal:
full name (unless parents okay it)
birthday
SSN or non-US equivalent
home or school address
phone number
[YOUR SUGGESTIONS HERE])

2. Buckle Up: Don’t Hurt Yourself!
Do not reveal, in words or images:
your mental illnesses (suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, bigotry, racism)
your hateful side
your rude side
your spoiled side
your immature side
your criminal record
your craziest party stories
your sex life
your sexual fantasies
your high-level cursing skills
your grammar and spelling weaknesses
your inability to distinguish self-publishing from a chatroom
–anything else that would knock you out of a job or college. DON’T LET YOUR BLOGGING HURT YOU! WEAR A “MATURITY BELT.”

3. DANGEROUS DRIVING: DON’T HURT OTHERS!
Do not:
attack others by name (attacking ideas can be okay, but not people – especially by name. What if someone did that to you?)
attack others generally
post images that could hurt others
reveal information that could embarrass you, your family, your school, your friends, or anybody else in the community (again, criticizing ideas is possible without embarrassing people)
leave hateful comments
bully
spread rumors
slander people

That’s as much as I have time for right now.

Diane Cordell adds these tweets from Twitter, before I close:

Driving out of lanes: loss of focus in writing. Failure to observe signs: blog courtesy violations!

What about “improper signaling” or “failure to signal” when posts are improperly tagged or not tagged at all.

Your additions?

Photo: Entering Hyperspace by Eole on Flickr