Beyond School

If I’ve learned anything in this year of blogging, it’s that good ideas need ritual repetition before they gain traction, find support, and become realities. So here goes (and the second point is far more important than the first):

Scott McLeod just wrote a very nice post about the launch, and the future, of Students 2.0 at Dangerously Irrelevant. I replied there, but want to paste a snippet here, since I’d planned to put these ideas out here anyway.

They concern two things: finding more writers for Students 2.0, and applying the same Twitter-social bookmark PR tactics used in the s20h launch to generate political pressure concerning educational issues.

1. Seeking More Students 2.0 Writers

From the comment to Scott, slightly edited:

Getting more staff writers for s2oh is a high priority. (Sylvia Martinez, by the way, already helped me find the first batch of writers, along with Diane Cordell (http://dmcordell.blogspot.com) Carolyn Foote (http://futura.edublogs.org), and Chris Watson (http://watsoncommon.blogspot.com).)

Any readers of any age who know a student already blogging with regularity – and quality – are invited to contact us on the “Contribute” page of Students 2.0. They don’t have to be “edubloggers” per se, just good writers (or multimedia)/ bloggers with the ability to reflect about their experiences in education. They can also contact me [here].

2. One-Click Political Activism via Social Networking: Twitter, Ning, and the e-Blogosphere as a Potential Political Force

On a side note, the launch itself was a learning experience about network marketing, and how it can be used to generate a message. I’m hoping to find a few others who see that this can be duplicated for political/educational purposes aimed at influencing politicians, voters, and the “education industrial complex” (to quote Jim Walker’s brilliant comment on Will Richardson’s recent “End of Year Dreaming” post).

So far, my post about it has been met with silence. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong, to me; it just means either the right people haven’t read it or, if they have, they read it at the wrong time

I’m convinced we can hold a few feet to the fire re: NCLB, the textbook industry, the ETS and College Board, and more, in a series of regular campaigns requiring little more than bookmarking a post to del.icio.us, digg, stumbleupon, etc, in a short time-frame.

You saw the potential of s2oh, Scott. Do you see what I’m saying about the potential political power of the educational networks of Twitterers, Ning-ers (Steve Hargadon, I’ll be in touch again soon, because the numbers in Classroom 2.0 can generate quite a message!), and similar networks to create pressure for change?

Come back soon for more ritual repetition. This can be so easy if we all work together, and at the same time, so powerful. We’ve shown with Students 2.0 that Twitter can be about more than the latest cool tool you found. It can be about creating the changes we all want to see – or at least raising a fun bit of low-effort hell in the attempt.

Photo credit: “see him?” by laihiu

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.