Beyond School

I expect to be soundly whipped for this post, but in this age of “failure being free,” I don’t mind. I hope to learn from teachers who can offer specific examples, or research, that give evidence that digital learning is superior to traditional. (Or who can contest my framing of the issue, and improve on it.)

I’m having a conversation with Nathan Lowell and Monika Hardy — it’s too long to post in its entirety, but it starts here — on the “Using Technology Without Understanding It” post.

It started with Nathan saying,

Does the challenge become one of changing the politics so that learning is more important than coverage? If you can take away the opportunity cost of floundering and instead *use* that floundering as the lesson, then this is no longer an obstacle but an advantage.

Monika seconds that claim, and adds:

The focus needs to be on the connections web access allows – to knowledge via people. People aren’t buying in because we’re missing the point. Learning how to learn.

And I just replied to Monika with this — which I hope some of you, again, will chime in on to show me the error of my ways:

I’ll start with saying I’m still uncomfortable with the opportunity cost notion. As a history teacher — which to me means “preparation for informed citizenship” teacher — I’m not sure I want to sacrifice time that could be used learning and drawing conclusions from human history on the altar of failed web 2.0 experimentation.

I see the value of both, though. I’m thinking a separate course — a sort of “Intro to Web 2.0″ — might be more useful than teachers across the curriculum failing and flailing about with the tools when their primary job is teaching content.

And I’m still traditional in thinking content is more important. Without it, we risk churning out what I’ve recently been calling, in my internal monologues, “barbarians with laptops.”¹

Teachers and philosophers across the centuries have taught successfully without the new tools (to whatever degree we can certainly debate, and could also debate whether the percentage of students who don’t learn well under traditional methods would learn any better via digital means).

And the new tools also enable “connections to knowledge via people” that can be unreliable, which opens a new can of worms.

I think it helps to fine-tune the discussion a bit: “content” breaks down into your “core” disciplines — maths, sciences, social studies, language arts — plus your electives in arts, technology, languages, and so forth. Am I wrong to think some disciplines deserve more emphasis on coverage than others? Maths, for example, and science? Isn’t time lost on digital experimentation in these classes a costly thing, since it may cost students a deeper focus on, say, evolution, or advanced calculus, or whatever?

And if the answer is “yes” — notice the “if” and be nice, readers — then doesn’t it follow that web experimentation in some classrooms should be treated with extreme caution?

Open Thread: School Me

Whatever your subject matter, I’d love to see specific examples of digital tools and practices that, either through research-based evidence or your own direct observation, you think enhance the learning of content or the development of skills in the classroom.

1. I think this whole post is influenced by my recent viewing of the film, Idiocracy. If you haven’t seen it, it presents a future world in which everybody is hi-tech, but their favorite TV show is called “Ow! My Balls!”, and their language and lifestyle have degenerated to a pastiche of FOX Tea-Baggers and Live Wrestling aficionados. It’s hilarious, if you haven’t seen it. [↩]

wrote Mark Twain, “have been greatly exaggerated.”

True here as well, but only slightly.

Autopsy

The lines from Nick Cave’s song, “Hallelujah,” sum it up:

My typewriter had turned mute as a tomb
And my piano crouched in the corner of my room
With all its teeth bared

Change “piano” to “Gilgamesh” and there’s not much more to add.

Since moving here to Singapore from Seoul in July I haven’t written a word on this space. This is due to many factors: enervating humidity (we’re about 1 degree from the equator here), an hour-long (and offline) subway commute to and from my new teaching job each day, the time demands of familiarizing myself with a new curriculum and school (the “two days ahead of the students” syndrome), on and on.

And then there’s the burn-out from the writing job last year, when two posts a day on US education policy taught me that mandatory writing on a prescribed topic grows toxic — a lesson that has informed my classroom blogging policy this year, which is so minimal as to be almost non-existent.

Also — and students, skip this part — I’ve been suffering a health issue that reminds me, to compare a worm to a dragon, of Keats being told by his physician not to write any more poetry because his health was too fragile to withstand the excitement. For Keats, tuberculosis was the issue. For me, it’s merely smoking. Since college, coffee and tobacco have been my study-and-writing enablers, and successfully kicking the habit months ago coincided with an inability to sit still, focus, and write. I can’t help but suspect Keats was tempted to decide, “Screw it, life without writing is no life at all,” and I’ve fallen to that temptation myself. To push the Keats trope further, my own

…fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain

have prompted me to choose an early death with a higher word-count, if that’s the choice. I’m hoping I’ll be as lucky as my Scots-Irish grandmother, who puffed her corncob pipe well into her eighties, thus having her vices and beating them too. Sure, those last few emphysemic years were no fun, but a life should be judged by more than its feeble final years. So yes, I’m enjoying this writing because I’m enjoying a smoldering clove-stick and cup of coffee as I write. Let the bodies fall where they may. (And though I know the logic is flawed, I’m still compelled to add that yes, I smoke, but I’m constitutionally and philosophically disinclined to those just-as-deadly but socially-sanctioned killers known as alcohol and junk food, so before you condemn my lungs, dear moralists, check your livers and your waist sizes.)

Then there’s this blog itself.

First, my RSS feed was, and may still be, broken because of a WordPress plugin I was using. I couldn’t fix it, and the plugin developer’s offer to fix it for me may or may not have been carried through on, I’m not sure. (If any kind soul out there can reply and tell me if they got this post in their feed-reader, I’d appreciate it.)

Second, I’ve been conflicted over the evolution of this blog from teacher-geek stuff to personal narrative writings to “unsucky” literary lectures. It’s become such a hodgepodge I’m probably going to make a couple of new sites: one for the unsucky lectures, one for the personal narrative, and keep this one as the ramblings of a teacher-geek. I don’t know.

So that’s the dreary side.

“The Bright Side of Life”

(Yes, that’s Monty Python’s Life of Brian on the right. My Wordpress captions aren’t working, blast it.)

1. Rediscovering the Book

On the upside, my hiatus from the web has turned me on to the beauties of something I’d almost forgotten: books. My reading habits before my web-hiatus were almost totally dominated by my Google Reader. And while the subscriptions to blogs and newspapers and magazines and journals and whatnot were certainly enjoyable, I can’t say I’ve missed them as I’ve enjoyed the flow through hundreds of physically-bound pages of this writer or that: Gwendolyn Leick’s fascinating study of the first Sumerian and Babylonian cities in Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (yes, dear Unsucky readers, I’m burrowing into the scholarship of the worlds of Gilgamesh), Richard E. Rubenstein’s Aristotle’s Children, a magnificent story of the rebirth of Aristotelian philosophy and natural science in the theology and liberal arts departments of late Medieval universities, and, currently, John Gribbin’s gripping Science: A History: 1534-2001, which picks up admirably where Aristotle’s Children leaves off.

2. The Mental Party of Teaching Chinese and European History

I’ve also had the intellectual joy-ride of my life this semester in my teaching duties, where I teach a survey of Western Civilization on one day, and a survey of Chinese Civilization on the alternating day. Since I began both courses where all histories of civilization should start — with Adam and Eve dropping from the sky (–oops, wrong century) Ardi and Lucy evolving from earlier forms, and their descendants migrating out of Africa and into Eurasia — each course stayed pretty much in sync, chronologically, with the other. This means that Monday would pull my head into the Roman Empire, and Tuesday into the roughly contemporaneous Han Dynasty. I can’t tell you how hilariously this mental tour pricked European pretensions to “high civilization” compared to China — particularly in the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, when Europe was a disgrace fully deserving the “barbarian” label the Chinese affixed to it. (In fairness, though, while China wins the “long view” award, Europe wins the Palm for the brief miracle from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. That China couldn’t discover over its 3,000 years of fairly stable and unbroken civilization what Europe did discover in a mere couple of centuries says something precious, its Mephistophelian implications aside, about Western culture.)

3. Notes on the New School (and a Teacher-Geek Heresy)

Teaching itself has been somewhat interesting. The students at my new school are generally the most literate of any school in which I’ve taught. The ninth-graders (14 and 15 years old) write uncommonly well, and the boys are especially delightful for being, in general, more mature and mentally turned-on than the girls (it’s usually the other way around at this age, in my experience). The school is going mandatory laptop for each student next year, but this year it’s only optional, requiring laptop cart check-out and other aversions. So I’ve avoided any ambitious digital projects, for the most part. (I’ll be sharing a couple of exceptions soon enough, and launching a new website I’m very excited about that bubbled up with the help of my best students.) Some of you will cringe to hear that I’m leaning toward traditional teaching anyway, simply because I don’t have the energy to try to de-program students who want school to remain traditional, and can’t be bothered to notice their future won’t be the paper-based world of their school — in other words, I’m tired of casting digital pearls before the lovable young piglets who just want worksheets, and to heck with all this Diigo nonsense. Maybe that will change next year, when they all bring laptops to school. Right now, the web is too beautiful to waste on the young. (Go ahead, teacher-geeks, set up your stakes, gather your faggots, and send your Inquisitors for this heretic. Ecce homo! But I’m using Ning for both classes, if that will soften your ire at all.)

Shocking Crisis of Classroom Faith: “Google is Dead!”

(or, “No, Virginia, There is no Santa Claus”)

Speaking of Ning and my “minimal classroom blogging,” I may as well add this tidbit. To ameliorate the misery of having to grade millions of heartlessly perfunctory blogposts by students only doing it for the grade, another teacher and I worked out a rotating “four bloggers per week” routine. All the other students not blogging that week only have to reply a couple of times to the posts of the week that caught their fancy. Long story short, one very bright student decided he would investigate the glowing characterization of Mao Zedong during the Long March in a PBS documentary we’re watching in class. He wrote a post with all sorts of questionable claims and characterizations that made Mao out to be far less impressive than even Western historians and academics admit him to have been in this period. And he didn’t cite or link to his source.

I found the source easily enough, and was aghast at its quality: riddled with weasel-words, blazing with bias belying its “FactsandDetails.com” title, a train-wrecked “Works Cited”, red-stained with cherry-picking the bads and omitting the goods. It would take a page to count the ways this site failed as a credible source. Turns out it was written by a guy with no authority, either academic or algorithmic (have you seen Shirky’s latest on this?). So I assigned all the students to read and reply to two student posts: one, a good exemplar that would play Trojan Horse for the second one, the uncited Mao smear piece. I wanted to see how many students would read the smear and reply skeptically.

Almost none did. Even the best students, with very few exceptions, swallowed it whole: “Wow! Your post shows how biased the PBS documentary we’re watching in class, and the textbook, are! Now I realize what a monster Mao was.” Et cetera and ad infinitum. A perfect “teachable moment” about media literacy.

Or so I thought.

Long story short, when I showed this class everything dubious about this site, they pushed back something fierce: the “A” students fiercest of all. I opened it up for debate on a Ning forum, saying “persuade me this source is valid for academic research,” and the push-back continued.

Discussing that second debate in class, I was gob-smacked to hear, again, the “A” students draw conclusions that if this site was not credible, it logically followed that no site was. “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” One student pushed back against my example of peer reviewed academic journals with an alleged case of the tobacco industry publishing “smoking is healthy” research in peer-reviewed journals, and seemed to glower at my request that she substantiate that claim — I had no doubt that the tobacco industry funded and published “scientific” studies of this sort, but did doubt whether she was correct about them being published in peer-reviewed journals — and also at my response that she was only confirming, if correct, my position that several evaluative criteria must be satisfied in order to judge a website credible.

I can only hope the quick demo of the “link:url” Google search, which showed that no site linked to this page but other pages on the same site, by the same author, brought home to some students that there’s something to be learned. But they’re at that dangerous age, and due to the imperative to cover the content, I can’t spend time taking this lesson any further. I can only hope the seed was planted and they’ll remember it differently in the future — hopefully not after a professor reams them for using a website written by a dog in its underwear.

Anyway, the take-away: students shouldn’t reach age 16 or 17 and still be shocked that Google can be wrong. It seems to have hit them worse than the news that there is no Santa Claus.

Piano image by poportis
Life of Brian image by tnarik

(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

—

*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.

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.

[Update 3 August 2008: If you want a written version of the same story, I did my best here.]

[Update 2: I've copied Stephen Downes' comments about this post, and my own response to them, in the comments, if anybody is interested.]

[Update: I've added the podcast to my Teaching Gallery page, in case you come across a student who might benefit by listening in the future.]

~  ~  ~

I was bullied for two years in high school. Every day.

I told the story to my grade 9 class last year – there was some stuff going on in the hallways that made me hope it might help – and recorded it as I told them.

And I thought, in the spirit of this season of good will, that I would share that story here. Here’s the enhanced podcast for download, with chapters for quick navigation.

But if you want to listen without downloading first, see the bottom of this post.

Most of the bullying content we see online tries to make bullying stop. It’s a nice goal. But this story does things differently.

It’s to the bullied.

It tells them that, for me, over 700 consecutive days of bullying in high school was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. It just took me a couple decades to realize that. This does not mean those two decades were bad.

The audio quality is bad. Sorry about that. But I think you can hear it anyway.

It’s about 30 minutes long. My students still talk about it, a year later. And I’ve shared it with a few new acquaintances of mine recently – you may be reading some of them – and one of them said it was “as worth sharing as all the other drivel you read on edublogs out there.” (I loved that. And relax – it was a joke.)

It is a story. I tried to tell it well. And there are more than a few laughs along the way.

Call it my “Christmas Carol.” And tuck it away somewhere for that possibly tortured, possibly suicidal student we worry about here and there as teachers, as community leaders, as human beings. It’s really for them, again.

Here it is. Enjoy:

Photo credit: “the bully” by O Pish Posh

This post has been sitting in draft form for a couple weeks, and in that time I think I can condense my thoughts about David’s keynote into this brief list:

1. A True Southerner: I’m a USA Southerner (from Chattanooga, Tennessee), and recognized a fellow traveller in Dave. Yes, he likes to tell a story, and take his sweet time in the telling – a Southerner to the bone. I’m no different. So I actually enjoyed listening to him, overall. I’d always found Dave’s blog posts too long for my own time-strapped tastes, so the difference between reading Dave and watching/listening to him was pleasantly interesting to note. Maybe I’ll start listening to his podcasts on my drive to work.

2. Dave as “Storyteller”: Warts and all, Dave still did a commendable job of attempting to create a complex design and structure in his presentation. The links to his keynote last year, the play with the same “modes of travel” motif, the three-generational personal anecdote structure: I enjoyed all of these things. Less talking head – perhaps less talking generally – and more imagery from the world would enhance Dave’s story (and I don’t buy his “I’m not good at visuals” excuse in his presentation – do your homework, Dave – you can learn and experiment ). And why so little music, etc?

3. Was there much new? I can’t say there was for me, but for others to whom “the story” is new, Dave’s telling of that story – with a bit of an edit, perhaps, of the Ender’s Game metaphor – might entertain as it edifies.

4. A Distressing Blind Spot: I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it: I find the omission of citizenship and pragmatic action in Dave’s thinking distressing. Whenever I check into his blog, I rarely see more than economic (workforce) and “informational” aspects of education as the focus. Since Dave has so much influence on our tribe, I wish this fetishism of knowledge and vocational training in Dave’s thinking (as I see it – please prove me wrong) would branch out into areas of citizenship and political engagement. Otherwise, what’s the point?

For the rest, here are my old notes:

For more on K12 Online Conference, check out these posts:

Many of the traditional boundaries – the walls, the textbooks, the desks in a straight row – these borders, these boundaries, are going away. And we’re in a position right now where we need to be resourcefully inventing, creating – along with our students – creating new boundaries, new places through which we can get traction…to move forward, to move in whatever direction we need to move in. (12.00)

Ender’s Game bit too long, yes.

Starbucks 13.00 – 16.50
What’s the point of Starbucks cities? Self-indulgent? Maybe – or maybe you have to understand Southerners in the USA. We also need to remember David’s “telling a new story” thrust – he’s trying to do this. The structure is more thoughtful on second watch than on first. 1.00 to get to “father getting ready for work” story. But he is setting up how different his job is from his father’s, through the Starbucks-as-office metaphor. Clerks in rows, etc: David’s future was not, as he and his father thought, “his father’s past.” Not new, not concise, but a good story. And only 4 minutes.

16.50-20.25

transition to basement office and job description: last generation message. Free agency. Yes, it’s in Did You Know, but it’s worth repeating.

20.25 – 27.50 Natives are networked
Back yard, children’s swingset. Native landscape is “not stable” – they’re adapting to the new constantly too. They’re shifting with the shifts too. Son’s video as hs jr. “He learned because he’s connected.” Can find people who can teach him to do what it is he wants to learn to do.

Redefining “digital divide” into networked and solitaries. “These kids aren’t human….” Magic. Social networks as “tentacles.” Classrooms chop them off. Great line about us not teaching the children who they are.

28.00 – Grollier’s as Information Landscape 1.0
Information flows and moves differently now: networked, digital, participatory, reader-directed, unmediated, no gate-keepers: critical to teach kids to find, evaluate, organize it into “personal digital libraries.”

Arithmetic: all numbers in digital world – how does that change math? Not sure I get this.

Producing “competitive information product” – information COMPETES now. (I still want to push beyond information, or hear more connection with non-informational activism to produce change, agency, citizenship in our young.) In fairness, David’s focus is literacy, not activism. I’ll keep playing Cassandra and warning that we have more urgent matters than digital library maintenance to educate our young about.

31.50 – 33.40
10 years from now. Personal physical health: an interesting aside. How many of us are laptop-potatoes now? Implicitly, a lot. I certainly am. But again, David, can’t we expand our concern beyond information and our own individual health to more citizenship-oriented foci?

33.40 – 35.43
how much info is independent of time and space. greenway. remixing space and time.

35.43
rambling? there is an order.
first: gravity in ’60s classrooms.
our classrooms are flat – 57% of students in US “are more literate, from the perspective of their literacy, than their teachers.”

3 converging conditions: can become new boundaries to “gain traction’”

1. Info-savvy students: “they know how to play the information, but they don’t know how to _work_ it. They need us to help them learn to work the information.” But their info-experience is far richer, deeper, more personal than what we can duplicate in the classroom. It has an energy we need to tap into, since “gravity-driven curriculum” is arguably obsolete. That energy requires:
a. Responsive information environments
b. Communication and sharing of personal experiences and identities
c. form and participate in communities
d ask questions, accomplish things, invest themselves
e. safely make mistakes
f. to EARN AUDIENCE AND ATTENTION

2. New Information Landscape:
overwhelming
networked
participatory
flows, unflows, connects, unconnects
opportunities to create energy in the classroom

3. Unpredictable future:
best to teach them how to teach themselves

Close:
“We are not afraid” blog.
anyone can publish to it.
asked for pictures.
got 2,500 in first 3 days, from all over the world – when, in history, has this been possible?

Technorati Tags: k12online07pc, k12online07, k12online

Long presentations are great and all, but maybe quickies have their place as well. I can see the need.

Here’s a 2-minute snippet from a presentation I gave to parents to launch our 1:1 Apple Laptop initiative back in August. I simply explain Clustrmaps by showing it on a blog with world-wide readers….written by a 15-year-old.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRmGmzSAJLA[/youtube]

This and many other multimedia resources I’ve made will be posted on the “Teaching Gallery” page of my new WordPress home. I’ll be adding things there regularly in the coming weeks.

For more on classroom blogging, see:

I just left this comment on Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog post entitled “How can we help shape teacher attitudes toward technology?”

Before you read it, don’t get me wrong. I think Ning is a great thing – but, at the risk of sounding like a prig and a purist, I don’t think it’s in the same ballpark as open blogging. And I worry that teachers who mistake these walled blogs (or social blogworks?) for “open range” blogging will never learn the crucial role that Technorati, tagging, hyperlinking, and such play as the “ligaments” of the connectivity that is real blogging. And thus never be able to introduce their students to that experience.

Ning and 21classes and so forth just seem isolated, and isolating, by comparison.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this. Our in-house staff development day is Wednesday – only four days away – and I’m not yet decided on how I’m going to run my mandatory training session. The Old School instinct says “Direct their learning, decide what they need to know, and make them learn it.” But another impulse says the idea to let them choose the pathway based on their own multiple intelligences, and toward the goal of unlocking their creativity, is the better way.

And a third voice says, “Maybe there’s a Middle Way.” (Can I really lose this opportunity to introduce them to RSS and social bookmarking?)

So here’s that comment:

This is a timely post for me to read, as we’re giving an in-house “Learning 2.0″ conference at my high school in Korea to present what four of us department heads learned at the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference.

Since I’m 1/4 teacher, 3/4 tech coordinator for the HS, all teachers have to attend my session. I’m leaning towards the WIIFM ["What's In It For Me?"] approach, but with this twist: I want to test the hypothesis that, if teachers discovered their own creativity, based on the strengths of their “multiple intelligences” profiles, by learning to express that creativity through some “digital art” they don’t know about with iLife or the read/write web, then my hope/hunch is this: their excitement at unlocking their own creativity will gradually trickle down into their instruction.

This is partly influenced by my own discovery of how easy it is, after 20 years of fantasizing about it, to actually do music composition using GarageBand (we just went 1:1 as an Apple Laptop School, so all teachers have MacBooks).

There is talk at my school of “assigning” all teachers to blog on Ning or 21classes, but I’m ambivalent about that. It treats teachers as “students” (or as mere “teachers” instead of humans with unlocked potential), it treats web 2.0 as “homework” (or simply “work”), and worse still, it treats forced blogging on a walled garden as the real thing (those of us who blog know that it goes beyond writing posts on Ning). It also forces writing, when there are so many other modes of expression that some teachers might be more comfortable with. All of that is a recipe for aversion, it seems to me.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts, though I know you’re enjoying Manhattan right now.

I made a staff development wiki that sorts “digital arts” (activities) into separate “menus” based on the different multiple intelligences that is open to all for editing and using. I’d be curious, again, to hear any feedback on any of the above ramble

Enjoyed the post.

Thoughts? (And Patrick and Anthony, I’m particularly interested to hear your views.)

Photo: Eduardo Amorim

UPDATE: The wiki password is: welcome

As promised in an earlier post tonight, I set up the staff development workshop wiki with pages dedicated to web 2.0 and other digital tools best suited to each of Gardner’s eight multiple intelligences.

I hope you’ll agree to two things:

1. This type of organization for web 2.0 / digital literacies and creativities will be useful for teachers and students alike; and
2. There’s no way I can do it better than we can. (C’mon – it’s a wiki. That means it’s open to collaboration!)

It’s straightforward enough: If you know any iLife (okay, or PC) or web-based tool that would be most attractive and fun for the eight multiple intelligences, click on the link for that intelligence and add it! I’ve already started with the Musical Intelligence page, but would love to see your additions to it and all the others.

Need a refresher on those intelligences? They are (with links to their wiki page):

1. Kinesthetic (Body Smart)
2. Logical (Number Smart)
3. Intrapersonal (Myself Smart)
4. Visual – Spatial (Picture Smart)
5. Linguistic (Word Smart)
6. Interpersonal (People Smart)
7. Musical (Music Smart)
8. Naturalistic (Nature Smart)

I really hope some of you will play here!

I posted recently about learning from Wes Fryer’s Shanghai workshop how easy it is to compose original music on Apple’s GarageBand. I posted my first two fragments (one funk, one trance), both of which I made in less than 20 minutes, and made in front of a student audience during a demo. More interestingly, that post includes what Jason, a teacher down the hall, strutted into my classroom the next day to show off – his own very first composition, a catchy little hip-hop piece.

Carolyn Foote put a tweet out on my Twitbin yesterday

If anyone wants to twitter “One trait of a good staff development workshop” for my teachers, that’d be great–doing this workshop all day!

Remembering Patrick Higgins‘ typically innovative approach a few weeks back of rounding up any edublogger volunteers to join his teachers in New Jersey on a Skypecast, in which teachers asked the questions and led us (Carolyn, Konrad Glogowski, and me) into discussions about classroom blogging – and remembering Will Richardson’s “unconference” approach to a workshop he led in Shanghai this month – I replied to Carolyn with this: “Interactive, unconference – let them guide (like Patrick’s Skype session with us and Konrad).”

Now, I know this requires a Mac with GarageBand, but I’m going to pass this little anecdote on, anyway, because you may be able to adapt it with cross-platform things. Here it is: I put an “allstaff” email out labeled something like “Be a Songwriter in 20 minutes with GarageBand.” In the email, I attached the mp3 of my first composition, and shared that anybody could learn to create a song on GarageBand in a flash. And I invited all-comers to let me know if they wanted me to show them how.

I got six replies (out of 30 teachers, not bad) the first day. And again, Jason had already started composing within 24 hours of seeing how easy it is now.

So my gut says – and I’m repeating my previous post here, because I think it bears repeating: Workshops that present technology as a teaching tool – something “schooly” – might be less effective, as Wes Fryer and Gary Stager would probably agree, than presenting it as a creativity tool.

We’ve read a million times (and should write it a million more) that teachers cannot understand blogging, much less use it effectively in their classrooms, if they haven’t experienced doing blogging themselves (and even that’s too simple, since they need to do more than just write online to really understand blogging – but that’s a later post). That’s a similar sermon to what I’m preaching here. But anybody who has tried to persuade teachers to begin blogging knows it’s an up-cliff battle almost all the time. All the teachers (and administrators) I’ve encouraged to begin blogging have resisted with such claims as, “But I don’t have time to write every day” (rebuttal: Moses included no Law saying “Thou Shalt Blog Daily”), or “I’m not a good writer” (a response worth its own post, later, or addressed sort of at the end of my last one), or “I don’t have anything to say” (a cause for weeping).

These are all responses we have to respect, because well, there they are: cold hard realities.

But the easy seduction of six teachers into creating their own music with GarageBand suggests that maybe we should remember that, like our students, our teachers and admin too possess multiple intelligences (and check out this great interview with Howard Gardner at Edge.com, my favorite science/philosophy/culture online mag).

And maybe we should approach Staff Development Workshops by having a menu of “digitally creative activities” grouped under headings for all those multiple intelligences.

So: a sketch of the process that I might try out next week for our own workshop:

Step One: Take a multiple intelligences inventory and discover your strongest intelligence.
Step Two: On the “Digital Arts” menu, select an activity you want to learn under your specific intelligence type.
Step Three: Alone or in groups, go at it, and ask for help whenever you need it.

Uh-oh. This calls for a wiki to host that menu.

Often when I have ideas, I tend to stall and falter, out of some perfectionistic strain that says, “Don’t commit to trying this until it’s perfect.” But somebody’s remark recently – Doug Noon’s, maybe? who has some great thoughts and comment-resources about staff development on this post, by the way – that learning and teaching are “always in beta” helps. I’ll make the wiki and invite all-comers to comment and contribute.

Has anyone else tried the “personal creativity” intro, instead of the “classroom tool” one, for staff workshops? Anybody have anything to report on that?

Because I can’t help but say it: Even if we love our jobs, the word “job” is still aversive – especially in comparison with the word “creativity.” Don’t we all have creative yearnings? And isn’t satisfying them more possible now than ever before?

And wouldn’t discovering that possibility by unlocking your own creativity be a much more powerful motivator than being told you’re expected to use this stuff in your class?

I can’t help but think that, once teachers find themselves making music, films, photo-collages, whatever, creatively, then the creative classroom use of these tools will follow.

Photo Credits:
Photos 1 and 3 by Darwin Bell
Photo 2 by Auntie P
Photo 4 by Robby Garbett
Photo 5 by urban penguin