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

—

*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 statist 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 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.

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: