Beyond School

Here’s an 8-minute promo movie I made for my school over the last few hours. I share it in case anyone wants a resource that talks through a couple of class projects we did last year in my grade 9 history and English classes - and shamelessly boasts about how special my school is for being the first 1:1 Laptop School in Korea.

The first project is “A Broken World,” a student-created wiki textbook and companion whole-class reflective blog about world history from World War I to World War II and the outbreak of the Cold War. (There’s lots of frustration in the sphere right now about blocked sites in schools, so this might be a useful demonstration of how valuable YouTube, wikis, and blogs are for enhancing creativity and learning.)

(By the way, I’ve been scratching my head lately about what to do with that Broken World wiki textbook. It’s really good stuff, and I’m proud of my students for making such an impressive resource. It seems a shame to just abandon it like one of Graham Wegner’s “learning jalopies” or some piece of digital flotsam. Anybody have any ideas of how to put it to use? I’m open to others fact-checking, extending, editing, using, donating, whatever. I just feel like there’s some experimentation possible here on how to put the “legacy products” we so easily talk about in the theoretical to the much-harder-to-pull-off practical use. In other words: help?)

The second project shown in the video is the first annual 1001 Flat World Tales flat classroom writing workshop on Wikispaces: 130 students at my school, Chris Watson’s school in Honolulu, and Michele Davis & Karl Fisch’s school in Denver. The promo walks through not only the wiki, but the (damnably) still-under-construction but worth-a-peek anyway 1001 Flat World Tales blog and website, featuring the prize-winning stories selected by our international student editorial board, plus author profiles, author podcast readings, editor profiles, student testimonials, and more.

Those student testimonials are highlighted in subtitle bars on the movie, which might be effective for persuading your admin to unblock these sites, again.

I really went over the top promoting my 1:1 Apple Laptop School as being “on the 21st century map,” since the point of the thing is to entice parents to send their kids to my school. It might produce a motivating jealousy in your own admin or school board to go 1:1 so they have such bragging rights themselves.

Or maybe the thing’s just a piece of junk. You tell me. (If nothing else, I got some iMovie practice out of it. Still trying to hone those skills.)

(And if you click on the video, by the way, it’ll take you to my AP Literature class Ning, which is open to the public. Sylvia Martinez of the Generation YES blog, and Diane Cordell of Journeys have both joined my students for literary discussions in the forums. You’re welcome to come inside yourself. Interesting talks about “schooliness” and literacy in there.)Find more videos like this on KIS AP Lit 07-08

Twitter has definitely shifted my networking and online writing habits. A case in point: Since I’m 14 hours ahead of the American east coast, I mentioned how lonely it was to be awake on Twitter when most of my compatriots are asleep. Graham Wegner in Australia, whom I’m recently enjoyed getting to know, answered my lonely tweet with a private email of New Zealand and Australian twitternames to check out. I did. My Twitbin is awake now when I am.

Two days later, “NZchrissy” tweeted a need for some student blogs to direct her students to visit and comment on. I added a few of mine from last year, but within ten minutes on Twitter we ended up somehow saying, in effect, “Hey, let’s just talk and desktop-share with Skype-Yugma and set up an ‘active student blogs’ wiki.” We did, and here’s the result: Young Writers ‘07 on Wikispaces.

Feel free to add your own student bloggers, and visit those already there. The links are listed by age group. Lots of Australians, New Zealanders, Americans, and Koreans there. (Jeff Wasserman, I hope this fulfills my promise to “flog” your HS English class blog in Connecticut.)

By the way, it occurs to me too late that this might be either redundant or needlessly competitive with the Support Blogging wiki. That wasn’t the intention. Instead, we just wanted to bang out a wiki of student blogs we know are active this year, and keep it free of burial under all the adult edubloggers out there.

So give it a visit, bookmark it, link to it, add your own. One-stop shopping for a student blogosphere only wiki, conveniently labeled with “‘07″ to communicate to all that that means still alive this year.

This time last year I was so new to the edublogosphere, I didn’t know about the K-12 Online Conference, so I missed it.

MISSED IT? What century am I in? I just watched last year’s keynote about an hour ago.

Anyway, this year’s converence goes live in less than an hour, and I’m curious to jump in, watch, converse, create, and learn.

From the Twitterverse: If your access is blocked, try this link: http://tinyurl.com/2dy2d2 .

Technorati Tags: ki2online07

Ignore this, or if you see “Technorati Links: litjourneys” at the bottom of this post and want the same for your Blogger or WordPress (MU included) blog, go drag Oddiophile’s Technorati Bookmarklet into your bookmarks toolbar (at least on Firefox 2.0).

I don’t know if this is redundant or not, but it doesn’t hurt.

Technorati Tags: litjourneys

[Update: I notice that I could have saved money by getting a FREE domain name when signing up with PowWeb, instead of paying $20 for two years with GoDaddy. Live and learn. Also, PowWeb needs 24 hours to set up my account before I can install WordPress MU, so hold tight. More: you can’t hear my students on this screencast – it didn’t record the Yugma-Skype conference audio. Even more: you’ll see Diigo website highlighting and annotating at work when you watch the screencast. If you don’t use it, you’re missing out. It auto-forwards your bookmarks and tags to del.icio.us (if you set it up to in preferences), and gives you annotating and highlighting and sharing power that del.icio.us itself doesn’t give. Finally *pant* – thanks to Wesley Fryer for the PowWeb tip and other advice he gave in Shanghai.)

If you’re interested in how to buy your own domain name (web address), and buy a webhost server package so you can run your own website, here’s the first of two screencasts walking Christina and Daniel, two of the Project Global Cooling members at my school, through setting up our Project Global Cooling website with WordPress MU at http://projectglobalcooling.org. The site won’t be up until we install WPMU, which we’re about to do. (Do yourself a favor and watch the large size on the Screencast-o-matic.com channel. Much easier on the eyes, and you can leave comments.)

Head on over to Patrick Higgins‘ Voicethread for his staff development workshop to both explore one very nifty educational tool and to have fun helping Patrick at the same time!

(Yes, the W.C. Fields icon is mine.)

Kent: Now, banish’d Kent,
If thou canst serve where thou dost stand condemn’d,
…Thy master, whom thou lovest,
Shall find thee full of labours.
–King Lear I.iv.5-8

Photo Credit: “Iron Team” by 3blindmice on Flickr (via Everystockphoto.com)

What. an. intense. week. or two.My last post was a rant against what I perceived to be the beginning of the end for our fledgling 1:1 program: filtering and blocking websites due to the possibility of finding sexual content.

I would (and will) fight the same battle, and as passionately, every time that Filtering Foe draws near. But in this instance, I regret one thing: I didn’t first speak to my admin privately to advise them to re-think their directive.

There’s much to be learned here on all sides, so I’ll share it.

First, my admin didn’t first ask my advice before broadcasting that directive in an all-faculty email. Had that happened – had I been included in the conversation about Everystockphoto.com (which is a similar service to Creative Commons Search) – then the policy directive might have been different. Even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t have blindsided me with such force, because I would have known and been prepared for it.

And I would have written with less heat.

In fairness, it must be hard for administrators to make the shift, since it’s happening too fast to be taught in college M.Ed. programs and such. This will take time.

Second, I should have had a cup of coffee and taken some quiet time before writing my reply. I wrote it as forcefully as I could for a reason: I wanted to soundly thrash the idea that content-filtering and site-blocking is a good idea. Similarly, I sent my email “all faculty” in order to de-stabilize the idea’s acceptance by the faculty. In other words, I wanted to re-frame our initial picture of “school 2.0″ and its possibilities.

But fatigue, shock, and disappointment that I hadn’t been included in this decision – an example of a bigger question concerning vagueness about my role in our 1:1 launch – eclipsed what my better judgment should have remembered, and it’s this: as I’ve said many times in these pages, my high school principal really is first-rate. Without his advocacy over six long months of negotiations, debates, and never-saying-die about becoming an Apple school, we’d all be suffering with PCs right now.

And in my passion to attack an idea, my language could too easily be construed as an attack on him as well. That I regret.

So I’ll let the follow-up email I sent to the faculty speak for itself: it couldn’t be more sincere, and it should have been labeled, “The Iron Team Lives” ~

Dear All,A real quick clarification in case anyone mistook my argument _for_ school policy as, instead, an attack _against_ anyone: that wasn’t the intent.

This _is_ a crucial issue, and deserves “passionate” debate. In my desire to keep one point of view from settling too firmly about it, I chose to “reply all” when articulating a different viewpoint – but I did it upon waking from an overdue nap after the workshop, which robbed me of much sleep, and reading that email first thing, before coffee. I wrote and hit “send” before doing an e-tone check.

I can’t un-ring that bell – but I can add this: I should have known Rich meant his email to be a temporary guideline pending further discussion and debate, which we all know is (thank goodness) Rich’s leadership style.

So for the record, two things:

1) The day before the workshop, I happened to tell Rich in a meeting with Jason and Wade that I didn’t think I’d ever find a better principal to work with (and I told him I wasn’t “blowing smoke up his whatever,” which was true); and because that’s true, I want to make sure that that’s public knowledge;

and 2) Rich didn’t ask me to write this. I offered to do so willingly. We’ve done amazing things together over the past few months. Most of the credit is his.

So here’s to more discussions about the high seas we’re sailing

Thanks all,

Clay

So what does this all come down to? Careful communication, it seems to me. And it’s noteworthy that the whole teapot tempest occurred in that worst of web 1.0’s communication tools: email.

One more post for my “apologies” tag. But a good one to post as an epilogue and denouement.

(click for larger image)

I have to wake up in five hours to run this conference tomorrow, so I’ll probably be worthless. But the opening session – an hour-and-a-half warmer – will consist largely of this competition, in four-person faculty teams led by one captain each, to race through this wiki page and be first to equip their MacBooks with the “Eleven Essential Accounts for the Read-Write Web.” Each member of the winning team gets a $10 gift certificate for Starbucks. (Politically, I’m not sure how I feel about that. But it was my idea.)

Note: they’ll have already joined our Twitter group and taken the Multiple Intelligences questionnaire, plus had a brief opening “Why Web 2.0?” presentation, before starting this activity. (That Twitter slice explains the inclusion of TinyURL as an “essential tool.”)

I talked with my principal, and we arrived at this post-workshop reflective “assignment”: create a digital expression, using whatever multimedia mode you’re pulled to play with, of your most valuable take-away from this conference – this could be simple creative play, since “unlocking teacher creativity” is a primary goal here. Post it on the Ning, and we’ll rank entries as a staff. The winning entry receives the grand prize: an iPod Nano. They have a week. I look forward to seeing, reading, hearing, watching all the various forms of creative digital expression from our staff.

But we’ll see how the reality shakes out.

Anyway, the wiki was text-only, and murderously intimidating for that. So I spent a couple or three hours adding graphics.

You’re welcome to take a look. Feedback in the comments section are welcome. Please don’t edit it, though! (And the Diigo activity will not work until I add the magic touches right before the workshop starts.)

I’d love it if anybody would visit our twitter account and make an appearance on our Twitter Badge. You can find it by searching for “create21” or “KIS Staff.” (Twitter was acting up tonight, though.) We’re at GMT +9, and will go live from 8a. to 3p.

I’ll have Skype up, too, so if you’re available for a casual “call-in” appearance, I would both enjoy and appreciate that. Send me a chat message at cburell on Skype if you’re open to an appearance in Seoul!

‘Night, Tweets.

That has to be the geekiest title I’ve ever written. I promise it’s English. Anyway:

Just a little tutorial share about one of the million reasons I love Firefox web-browser (and curse at my students lovingly when they open things in Internet Explorer, or even Safari). I’m talking about Firefox Addons.

This 4 minute tutorial simply shows people a handy little addon called “MeasureIt,” which is a ruler for quick pixel-measurements of screen areas. I use it to embed a Group Twitter Badge for our school’s professional development Ning (and yes, I’m flattering Jeff Utecht by stealing his use of this handy idea at the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference last month. He’s still my guru now and then, without even realizing it).

So here it is. Enjoy (and by the way, use the “embed” code, not the “html” code that I use in the tutorial – or try both and choose the one that’s best for you).

I really shouldn’t do this, being ham-strung for time, but I really should do this regardless. The feedback to my last post deserves a better fate than staying hidden from feed subscribers.

So down and dirty time. First, for context, here’s the brief original post. The basic questions were:

1. Should we approach workshops as how to teach with this stuff as a teacher? Or instead, as I want to try, as how to explore and tap into the teachers’ own individual creativity as a human being?

2. Should blogging be assigned to teachers? If so, is Ning the same thing as “open range” blogging?

I closed with an appeal for help, since this is my first time doing a staff development day.

Kelly Christopherson pitched in first with these nuggets:

What to do? I guess, if I were attending a development day, I’d like to see some structure that would give me some information and then allow me to explore various things that I find interesting. I’m now at a stage where I believe that the first thing I would do is introduce teachers to an online desktop idea, like igoogle, netvibe or pageflakes. Why? Because you can build up various areas of interest from there. You can add RSS feeds, showing them how they work, introduce them to a few organizational tools like icalendar or google documents and show them the whole idea of a blog they can place on their desktop.

“As for Ning,” Kelly continued,

I think it is a starting point but one must go beyond it to show teachers the power of blogging. You’re so right about an open blog being so much more than what you find in Ning. I like the discussion there but I usually end up pointing people to ideas and information outside of the ning environment where people are exploring ideas and concepts in a much different manner and the audience is a bit more diverse. Hope your projects are going well!

I replied,

Kelly, this is such excellent advice. Thanks much for taking the time. I think the iGoogle approach (or Pageflakes, which I fear might be overwhelming – and I’ve never tried Netvibes) is right on. I’d originally planned to do Bloglines, since I haven’t found a better service for finding feeds; and I like its simplicity. But maybe you’re on to something otherwise.

And added this question (nudge), which I hope Kelly sees and acts on, so we can all learn more about/from this voice (though I just re-found Kelly through a Technorati search):

You know your Blogger profile is blocked, right? Doesn’t lead to any way to connect back to you via your comment link. Intentional?

Patrick Higgins answered my shout-out link to him (Technorati is such a great shout-out tool;):

I love being called out like this! Kelly speaks of giving them something like iGoogle or Pageflakes to begin with, but it sounds like you have inroad already with Anthony [a teacher at my school who has taken off with speedy and impressive results over the last year] and with another teacher whose name escapes me at the moment, which can be to your advantage when presenting a new idea to a staff that is slightly hesitant.Base it may be, but envy has always been something that I have used to my advantage when presenting to staff. I make it a point to present the work of teachers that are leading the charge, creating digital content with their students. What I have found is that other teachers want to do what this teacher or that teacher did. Like I said, it may not reside on the ethical high-road, but when it comes to initiating change, I’ll take anything I can get.

Concerning the walled garden idea, my belief lies along the same lines as using emotion to trigger buy in; you need to assess the comfort level your staff has with these social applications. Asking someone who has not written for a non-student audience in 10 years to do so will paralyze them. As much as you may want to blow them away with what is possible, you run the risk of losing them if you go too far above where they are comfortable.

Then Wesley Fryer added this wonderful piece of “disruptive” advice:

I’m very interested in your thoughts along these lines as well as the thoughts of others. I think Kelly’s use of the word “stage” is really important. ACOT showed us that teachers go through different stages when they are in a supportive environment for creative technology use, and doubtless you’ll have teachers all over the board at your workshop Wednesday. I like Ning because I think it provides a more accessible way for teachers to readily join in conversations, but I agree that the “open range” of blogging and tagging is far richer, and those are fields we want to both show and invite our teachers to explore. I have found that del.icio.us social bookmarking is an ideal way to help teachers understand the power of social networking, tagging, and working on the web. About a month ago when I was in Goodland, Kansas, I spent all the workshop time with about 50 teachers, who each had their own laptops, in the morning and afternoon on social bookmarking. I think helping teachers save, access, and locate “good stuff” online is an enduring need, so social bookmarking SHOULD fit into everyone’s “what’s in it for me” perspectives. I agree forcing everyone to blog won’t light the fire of inspired creativity within all teachers, but I certainly DO think it is reasonable to expect/require all teachers to be reflecting on their practices. I would advocate giving teachers choices about how they reflect, perhaps on the entire day, in posts to a Ning, in their own blog they setup on blogger or elsewhere, in a VoiceThread or series of VoiceThreads, etc. The key is that everyone is EXPECTED to reflect, and that reflective pieces will be made PUBLIC. That is radically different and potentially disruptive, but the interactive aspect of this perhaps has the most “energy potential” to engage and “hook” some teachers on the value of these tools. I haven’t been to or participated in many PD events which had this as an expectation, and I think it’s a great idea.I agree with Papert that “uniformity” really is a major evil in formalized education, so the degree to which we can provide differentiated pathways of learning and assessment for teachers in PD sessions as well as students in their classes, the better off we are in avoiding the dangers “uniformity” presents to authentic learning.

Good luck with your workshop! I’ll look forward to hearing what you all end up doing and how things go!

Sue Waters added her voice with this defense of Ning:

Clay – interesting thoughts on Ning and I have to say until I saw this community modeled effectively I was never that fussed. Last week I had to run an 1 hour online session on Video in Elearning for the Australian Flexible Learning Framework. I had to target it at beginners but was asked to make it interactive. Tough requests considering it was all online using Elluminate.

So I decided to set up a Ning community so that participants could discuss the topics before and after the session plus use it for practicing embedding videos. You can check out more about the session and how it went here.

What I found was that participants are slowly starting to use Ning. I have a much greater understanding of who they are and what assistance I can provide them compared to what I and they would have gained from a 1 hour online presentation. If all this interaction was based only on my blog I would not have achieved the same outcome.

Most of these participants are not using Feed Readers and do not know what RSS is. So to see that several individuals are achieving what they see as first is for me the greatest reward and the Ning community gives me the ability to gradually increase their skills (those that want to) to get them to the point where they can be moved out into other parts of Web 2.0.

I suggest you check out my page at etools and tips for educators to see what the participants are saying.

(I did follow her links, and wasn’t surprised – but was impressed – by the enthusiasm bubbling off the pages of her Ning.)

Then I found Graham’s post through Technorati’s link to his “reaction” to my prior post – it’s long, it’s his, it’s an excellent investment of your three minutes to follow and read – and I answered his post there, and following Sue (who copied her reply here there, round and round), copied that answer here:

Your post – and Sue’s comment on both of our posts – extended my thinking and enlarged my network (I’ll be checking out your links to Darren and Keving shortly!). And it all happened through Technorati.And that sort of underlines what I think we’re both trying to get at, without at all disagreeing with Sue’s point that Ning is clearly powerful. It underlines that the whole blogosphere produces pathways in a different way than Ning does. Again, both have their uses and relative strengths (Ning’s media players are incredible, for example, and I embed them in my blog posts on Blogger, though I wonder how easy that is on WordPress – have you tried?).

One distinction seems safe – Ning’s population seems comprised more of newcomers, and it would be interesting to track how often they peer over the walls, and how often and soon they establish their own blogs, their own connections through non-Ning RSS feeds, etc.

Again, I don’t think we’re disagreeing with Sue. I’d even hazard the guess that’s Sue’s ultimate goal is for her Ning members to go “open range” once they’re in deep enough.

Tribes v. Nomads comes to mind, I’m not sure how fairly or validly.

And your point about the pleasures of creating your own unique fingerprint in this world is the one that really seems possible only in the open range.

I’m glad we’ve connected, by the way. It’s been instructive and, as importantly, good for some chuckles

And finally, I replied to Wes with an update of how the workshop idea has progressed to this point – and I still have 36 hours to tweak it, and invite all of you to tweak its wiki here (put a link to your blog at the credits on the bottom of the page, please, to model the collaborative wow of wikis!):

Wes, thanks for the thoughtful input. I’d arrived at something similar with the help of my Twitter network as I processed more after this post. As things stand now, we’re going to invite the fearless to create their own blog, and encourage the less comfortable to feel fine about using their staff Ning blog to reflect.We’re going to start the morning by signing all staff up with a “baker’s dozen” of must-have 2.0 accounts and bookmarks – Google, Diigo/del.icio.us, Flickr, Bloglines (they can OPML to something more complex like Pageflakes or iGoogle later), and other things (all on this wiki).

Then we’re going into breakaway sessions led by the early adopters at our school – 11 separate workshops from which teachers choose three, and are required to take my “Digital Arts Menu for Multiple Intelligences,” in which the goal is to let them choose a mode of digital expression suited to their learning style and creative bent.

By the end of the week, they’ll be “encouraged” (okay, required) to reflect on their blog or Ning, in whatever medium they choose.

And I’m trying to figure out how to set up an auto tag-aggregator to suck all those posts onto one page. Never done that before! Tips?

Thanks, all – you’re making this exhausting process an exhilarating one at the same time

That ending really says it all! In Shanghai last month, Wes used the noun “magic” to describe this world. It’s a word I often use too (though science is the proper word, and scientists the true magicians). The magic still amazes.

And that’s why I want the focus of Wednesday’s workshop to be on the participants’ creativity, again. The magic of this world can’t be taught; I’m seeking ways to open them to learning it through experiencing the creation of that magic, to becoming digital magicians themselves.

Or at least Sorcerer’s Apprentices.

I’d love to hear thoughts from any and all, on any and all of this.

Images:
“Mickey in the Hood” by undergroundbastard