Beyond School

EyePod (Revised)
Originally uploaded by LeggNet.

Real quick: for the 1001 Flat World Tales project, we had each writer record and podcast him/herself reading the first draft for an audience of one: him/herself (gender pronouns stink).

Podcasting for self-criticism. I know it’s not new, but it’s so easy now. And it seemed to help the young writers hear the parts of their writing that needed improvement. Here’s one student reflection:

The first thing came to my mind was that I had extremely simple and frequent grammar mistakes. I was kind of embarrassed when I heard it. Also, ideas and details sound incomplete and insights are shallow in depth; it was just shallow that proves not much thinking and brainstorming. I should work on ’showing’ since my second draft ‘told’ everything. It sounded like a lecture about Korean cultures. Well, it was embarrassing to listen to my own podcast anyways.

It’s all so easy now. Odeo, Podomatic. Students pick it up quickly, often without needing the teacher to know anything about it at all. How many teachers realize how easy it is to do this sort of thing?

Just thought it was worth a share.

(Photo credit: “EyePod (Revised)” by LeggNet on Flickr.)

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This is a revised email I just sent to Jeff Whipple in New Brunswick, Canada, and Karl Fisch in Colorado, about the Flat Classroom collaborative writing project I’ve been cooking up for the last few weeks. (Jeff has become a co-chef with a few fantastic suggestions, the most exciting of which is to invite students of more visual than verbal intelligence to submit their original illustrations for inclusion in the final project. Brilliant. And to take it further, there’s no reason to exclude podcasts of gifted oral interpretations of the published stories–and any other digital product showing any other of the “multiple intelligences.”)

My students decided to call the “blog-book” something fittingly new: a “blook.” (Rhymes with “book.”)

Here’s the update on the project (and see this post for more, including links to other posts and to the wiki itself)–which I’m trying to stall a bit so others can jump in (though it can still work if they jump in late, and actually has different benefits–namely, watching the story spread after we’ve finished in Korea):

Since each individual student’s story will serve as a “tale,” a la the Arabian Nights, told by a frame narrative, I had my students brainstorm for a frame narrative to tie all the individual tales together–the “Scheherazade and King Shahryar” element.

They’re doing that this weekend. There are some excellent ideas brewing.

Next week, they’ll seek personal stories (their own, or ones their parents or friends tell them) to write. As the Arabian Nights stories don’t only please the audience, but also inform it of Arab culture, our own stories will have to reveal insights into Korean culture while they delight. (Partner schools in other countries will, of course, reveal their own local culture in their stories, while delighting us all the while.)

We’ll use our class Wikispace for the writing / revising process for these stories. That writing workshop phase will probably last for a good week or two.

The next phase will be evaluation: students will evaluate each others’ stories, playing the role of King Shahryar to each storyteller-”Scheherazade”, and only nominate the high-quality stories to be published on their individual blogs. Each published story will link to the next one on the next student’s blog, ad infinitum.

But what about the students whose stories were denied publication in the blook? They can always seek student criticism on their stories’ “discussion” tabs on their wikipage, and revise and revise and revise. The wiki is like a Farm League–keep honing your skills there, and one day you may be called up to storytell with the Pro’s. On the blook.

This is where other students and classrooms around the world can still be included in the never-ending Flat World Nights. And if/when other students are promoted from the Flat World Wiki (where all students write) to the “blook,” the last student to be published will just add a hyperlink to the newly published storyteller’s blog. On and on. New classes can always join whenever they like–next week, month, year, or decade.

We’re hoping to top the original 1001 Nights.

That way, readership of each student blog is provided–more dots for each student’s ClustrMap, more sense of audience, more motivation to keep writing, and writing well.

I’m about to hit e-Pals with an announcement. It’s just so annoying to fill out forms when your address is Korean!

Photo credits: Arabian Nights illustration: Scheherazade Telling the Tales, by Kay Nielsen (1922) here; Friedman book cover here.

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Below are some videos of the first meeting with teachers at my school who volunteered to join our “21st Century Literacy Cadre”–and note the intentional omission of the word “technology” from this title, since it’s not about the technology, which is only the means.

My Audacity recording didn’t work, so no podcast. (”Learning is messy,” he hummed. “Next time.”)

So all we’ve got is video, and the quality even there should have been better (tighter camera zoom on LCD screen, e.g.). But the audio is fine. Listen to it like a podcast and forget the video part.

I’ll embed the rest of the meeting as I make time to capture and upload it. A day or two. The meeting lasted an hour and 45 minutes. I’ll post it in 30 minute clips.

Besides the bad hair–who has time for a haircut?–the most embarrassing thing about this meeting is how much I talked. All I can say is that it seemed a necessary evil, until these new possibilities, tools, and buzzwords are a common knowledge base for the whole cadre. Then the collaborative dialogs will start!

As usual, comments are welcome and collaboration from educators outside of my school begged

Part 1, below: Welcome. Positivity vital for a cadre. Demystifying the jargon: RSS, feeds, aggregators, blogs, podcasts, wikis. (28 minutes)

More to come–check back soon (or subscribe with Bloglines and save yourself the trouble) for more video.

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Still thinking about educational computer gaming….and this idea is forming. It’s not about making a video game, but about how to use wikis to create a “creative writing game” unit. Like so:

My students in 9 English are reading The Arabian Nights–100 pages from it, anyway–over winter break right now. When they come back, I want the summative assessment to be a creative writing/storytelling project connected to Scheherezade and company.

The selection they’re reading, “The Hunchback’s Tale,” is a typically dizzying example of the narrative frame-within-a-frame wizardry of the Nights. But it has an element of “gaming” in it that I want to transfer to the final project. Let me explain.

In “The Hunchback’s Tale,” a hunchback is invited home by a drunken Muslim tailor and his wife for entertainment. Once home, the wife accidentally kills the hunchback by choking him while shoving too much food into his mouth for fun. The couple panic and decide to get rid of the body by leaving it at a Jewish doctor’s house and running away. They prop the hunchback’s body at the top of the staircase in the Jewish doctor’s house, and the Jewish doctor accidentally knocks the body down the stairs–and panics because he thinks that he killed the hunchback. So the Jewish doctor lowers the hunchback’s body over a wall into the yard of his neighbor, a Muslim steward and chef for the sultan. When the steward sees the hunchback against the wall, he mistakes him for a food-thief and gives him a solid hammer-blow to the chest–and then panics when he discovers that he “killed” the hunchback. So the Steward, under cover of night, takes the body to the nearest bazaar and props it against the wall. There, a drunk Christian broker mistakes the hunchback for a thief who’d stolen his scarf earlier in the night, and starts throttling him. A Muslim policeman breaks up the “fight,” discovers the hunchback is dead, and arrests the broker.

The broker is about to be hung for murder when the steward happens by and confesses: “Hang me instead,” he says. But the Jewish doctor happens by and says, “No, hang me.” Then the steward shows up and confesses, and says, “Hang me.” (What a harmonious multicultural world!)

At this point, we learn that the hunchback was the favorite jester of the “King of China,” who happens to be in town. The King arrives, is amazed by the story, and says he will pardon all the “murderers” if they can tell a story more wonderful than that of his hunchback’s being “murdered” four times in one night!

So–and here’s the gaming part–the four “murderers” take turns telling stories that they claim are more wondrous than the hunchback’s. They are telling stories like their survival depends on it (just like Scheherezade, who is, of course, telling all of these stories in the “master frame”).

If their stories please the King of China, they survive. If not, they die….

Does this sound like any television game shows you can think of? Survivor, for instance? Or American Idol? (Or, for the long of tooth, The Gong Show?)

The King of China is the audience/jury. The contestants live or die by the merits of their performance.

One final detail that’s beautiful for teaching/learning the elements of a good short story: The King listens to the four storytellers, and rejects each one of their stories as being “less wondrous” than the hunchback’s! Why do the stories fail? The King doesn’t explain, but his literary judgment/critical thinking is solid–these stories are unsatisfying.

So let the students give presentations of their criticisms of the failed stories! Out of this can come a class-created rubric of what makes a “winning” short story. “What was missing from the stories that made the King dislike them?”

So here’s the unit idea, and the reason a wiki is a better writing tool for it than any traditional classroom method I know of:

1. Whole Class:

• Create that class short story rubric based on evaluation of the failed tales in Arabian Nights. (Give a Six Traits organizer to students so they categorize their findings under these headings–incidental learning of the common critical language we’ll use for writing in the second semester will come from this.)
  

2. Teacher/Students:

• Assign a partner for each student.

3. Pairs:

• Have each student tell their partner the story of the most amazing thing that ever happened to them (if they don’t have one, they interview a parent for the parent’s “most amazing story”).

4. Individual:

• Each partner summarizes the story as the “pre-write/first draft” on their own wiki page (wikis save every version and revision of a document as separate documents in the “history” tab of that document).

5a. Individual:

• Students then revise their summary with successive edits using the Six Traits of Effective Writing.
  
• Revision 1: Ideas, content, images, details;
  
• Revision 2: Organization (good intro, different chronological order, etc);
  
• Revision 3: Voice;
  
• Revision 4: Word choice;
  
• Revision 5: Sentence Fluency;
  
• Revision 6: Conventions and Mechanics (especially dialog conventions);
  
• Revision 6: Presentation (add images, formatting and font style).

5b. Pairs (Peer editing on wiki):

• As individuals write their partners’ stories, the partner will serve as peer editor. (The idea is that the partner will have an emotional investment in the success of his/her story, which will motivate engaged feedback to the person that’s writing it.) That feedback will take place in the “discussion” tab of that story’s wiki page.

6. Groups?:

• Assign groups of four to collaboratively create a narrative frame device similar to Scheherezade or the King of China on a new wiki page.
• Each group of four copies and pastes the stories written by four other students into their frame device–and collaboratively writes the critical reaction of their “frame audience” to each of these stories as part of the frame story, deciding whether each storyteller “survives” by pleasing his/her audience with his/her story.
• Each “survivor” is finished, but any story that does NOT survive is allowed a final revision (open to all?)–one last chance to please his/her audience and survive after all.

7. Groups: Publish Group Wiki:

• Each group publishes its own 4-story-with-frame-narrative wiki.

8. Whole Class: Publish Class Wiki:

• Combine all group wikis (from BOTH classes) into a single wiki page and give it a title (The Korean Nights?).

9. Individual:

• Orally perform your own story and record it as a podcast, using Audacity, and embed it on the wiki.

That’s the idea….so far. Comments, Jonathan? Prof. Groom? Anybody?

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