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.