Beyond School

Standing on a corner
in Hong Kong -
It ain’t so good to be alone
in Hong Kong.
–Screaming Jay Hawkins, “Hong Kong” (psst…do yourself a favor and click the little icon for a classic Screaming Jay number on Youtube, and a Wikipedia link, thanks to the very cool Apture tool)

Just a quickie to show the local flavor of Kowloon, Hong Kong, to Stacy Zheng of Students 2.0, who tweeted, “I’m insanely jealous of you right now. Hong Kong tops the list of my “places I want to visit”. Have fun! ” – and to show my wife the typical “I don’t speak your language so I’ll take whatever haircut you give me” ‘do I just got in a local barber shop across the street from my hotel.

It’s nice to be back among the Chinese people, among whom I lived in Shanghai for five years, and came to admire more than any people in the 25 countries I’ve traveled. It’s so crazy: they don’t have near the money to spend on English lessons the way Koreans do, yet they speak English so comfortably, with broken grammar but still so communicatively, they far outstrip the Koreans in this respect, who seem so fearful of making a mistake – the internalized grader at work in that so-grade-fixated culture – that they literally do not speak English at all, despite spending more per capita on lessons than any country in the world.

So here’s a bit of fluff from a Kowloon noodle shop [Update: I just discovered Youtube now allows us to annotate our own video uploads, and did that for the below. It's in beta and doesn't work in embeds yet, so you have to click through to the Youtube page to see it. Kinda cool. Think of the educational potential....]:

First, a mini-photo essay on my own point of view about privileging writing over speaking when grading in the collaborative, networking, multimedia century:

Three weeks after the Diigo stampede, I’ve been concerned that the new trend of putting Diigo annotations on posts instead of leaving comments in the thread was a negative thing. Only Diigo users would see the conversation, and the post’s comment thread would be left poorer for that.

But after a wild four-hour storm of 74-and-counting comments on my Muhammed Ali post about privileging writing over other communication strands when we grade, it occurs to me that Diigo might come in handy here. There are so many incredibly insightful comments there, and the issue is so relevant to the futures of our students, that I fear the sheer bulk of comments might dissuade new readers from discovering the gold shining here and there.

Diigo highlights and annotations of the thread might help. If you want to take part in this experiment, go at it. It could be a great way to demonstrate the value of Diigo highlights and annotations as a complement to, instead of a substitute for, blog comments. Because the debate – particularly the one between Benjamin Baxter, who maintains that writing should constitute the bulk of a student’s grade in English/Language Arts and history classes, and opposing viewpoints that grades should more equally credit speaking, graphic language, and more, as articulated by Arthus Erea, Adrienne Michetti, Kirstin “Keamac,” Dean Shareski, Claire Thompson, Sylvia Martinez, Carolyn Foote, and many others – that debate never seemed to reach any resolution.

It sounds like I’m piling on Benjamin here, but I don’t mean to. Fifty million people saying something is true doesn’t make it so. Moreover, Benjamin works in an inner city school, and his arguments are rooted in his perception of what best helps his students’ futures. It differs with mine, but I’m in a different context. And we’re all running on varying assumptions about things like the future of work, the purpose of schooling, and more.

But that thread drifts into so many tangents – the high school freshman Arthus v. high school teacher Benjamin debates are priceless, but sometimes distracting (or am I wrong?) – that I see Diigo, again, as possibly helpful here. Highlight and annotate the strong assertions, the weak rebuttals, the evasions of direct questions and the red herrings, and let others add comments to those annotations.

(This connects, by the way, to a conversation with “Uninspired Teacher” Tom and Charlie A. Roy on the “Schooly Speeches versus Real Talks” post, about using juries instead of judges in mock trials – or better, real ones – to improve that old practice.)

Peter Rock said it took him an hour to read that post and thread (but he also said he read it slowly). That scares me. So many comments in that thread don’t deserve burial in the noise.

So head on over to that thread, if you’re a Diigo convert – especially if there’s a Diigo group on assessment - and have at it.

At the same time, far be it from me to dictate rules. If you want to just comment instead, of course that’s okay.

—

Photos:Toksik by The Sizemore McCabe Project, Continental Paper Grading Company by quinn.anya, Spring Branding Near Crane Oregon 1982 by mharrsch

This isn’t theoretical – necessarily. It could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Given a 1:1 MacBook school, a geeky teacher, no bandwidth or filtering or blocking restrictions, how would you design an elective class to showcase 21st century learning possibilities?

I’ve got an elective “writing seminar” beginning next week, with about ten students from age 15-17. Most have MacBooks.

I’m free to structure this class however I want. And it should be obvious I take “writing” in its communicative (and digital) sense – including multimedia, connectivity, project-based learning, the whole nine yards.

I see this as an opportunity to experiment. And to co-teach with anybody out there with an idea needing a classroom – maybe one of the many administrator, librarian, or academic readers out there who wish they still had a classroom to implement some ideas.

How can we seize this opportunity to do things differently and demonstrate the possibilities?

The conditions: class meets every two days for 75 minutes. There are no issues of filters or bandwidth to worry about: you name the site, from Skype to YouTube, from Twitter to eternity, we have access.

Assessment and grading can be as non-traditional as you please.

So there it is. Sketch your vision(s) below*. And let me know, also, if you want a hand in actually playing “teacher” for this class. You don’t have to be a “schoolyteacher.” Heck, you can be a freelance musician or gonzo entrepreneur for all I care. Socrates didn’t go to teacher certification school.

If I like the idea – and if the students do – we’ll run with it.

Deadline: Tuesday, 8 January 2008.

–

*Remember: this is an Open Thread. That means there is no such thing as a comment too long. The thread is the thing. Also: notice your comment is followed by a link, via my CommentLuv plugin, to your last post, by title. [Update: Check out the 30-odd comments on the first Open Thread, "Your Fantasy Alternative School," to see how open threads collect great ideas and invite you to visit the blogs of the contributors.] And finally, if you like your comment that much, of course you can post it on your own blog as well. It’s not an either/or. Both here is better, since the thread adds to conversation, and the posting on your own blog keeps your own developmental archive intact. Thanks!

Photo: peter-noster on Flickr

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

Finally: read comments and leave your own without leaving your Bloglines BETA!

Finally. See the whole blog from your RSS reader (how could you go a week without new papa and writer extraordinaire Scott Schwister beaming at you from his blog? How can you miss my latest “Iraq War Costs” sidebar widget and all the other furniture I arrange for your edification and comfort?).

Better still – and this is the revolutionary moment in RSS history I’ve been waiting for, seriously – read both posts and comments in your aggregator window – and leave your own comments there too. What a time-saver and idea-expander, all in one tweak. Check out the beauty (and click both images for larger view):

Note that you have to use “3-Pane” view, “Preview” tab.

Regular readers know I don’t often blog about tools anymore (and long-time readers know I cursed Bloglines for a solid week over their ImageWall last summer, until Bloglines graciously listened and compromised). But this one deserves trumpeting from the rooftops – because finally, RSS Readers are not conversation-stoppers. THANK YOU, BLOGLINES BETA.

(And I know, I know – shared feeds on Google Reader, etc. But that doesn’t add anything that del.icio.us doesn’t already offer. And I’ll take a good comment thread over another post-only view any day. Blogging is about conversations. Don’t believe me? Check out the 20 comments in the “Science, Religion, and Goodness” post, or the 20 more in the “Leaving Teaching to Become a Teacher” post – that’s where the meat is.)

In my last post, I made a couple sins of omission when giving thanks and measuring the success of Students 2.0.

Sin 1: Thanks to Stephen Downes for supporting the launch by featuring it in his (very influential, and rightfully so) OLDaily.

Sin 2: I didn’t mention what is, to me, the most valuable aspect of the Students 2.0 blog: the comments. Without them, we’d have a handful of students writing to the void. With them, we have the type of peer-to-peer, “student” to “adult” conversation on equal footing, that I dreamed would happen if this thing was done right. One more comparative stat:

• Number of posts:comments ratio: Students 2.0: 13 posts: 310 comments = 1:23 ratio. Beyond School: 424 posts: 995 comments = 1:2.3 ratio.

(–it’s enough to make me simultaneously weep with joy and gnash my envious teeth. It says so much for the educators who are leaving their own soapboxes to converse in the s2oh comment salons. Gives me hope, really.)

A delicious postscript / tempting call to action

I’m learning so much simply browsing my RSS feed for s2oh comments.

I’m also gaining occasional inspiration. To wit: Bill Fitzgerald’s idea about taking on the College Board for its hijacking of education and perverting it into a competition for points on SATs, AP Exams, and so forth. Here’s Bill’s comment, in response to Lindsea’s “One Sweet Dream” post:

The test prep companies drive a lot of the hype behind college pressure, as their profits depend on your parents getting worried enough to shell out mucho greenbacks so you can sit through classes designed to get you extra points on the SATs/APs.

(As an aside, I would love to see an entire high school class, nationwide, boycott the SATs/APs. The Educational Testing Service would suffer an enormous loss of revenue, as they would not take in the testing fees from a few million students (aka, the captive audience, aka, you). If enough students boycotted the exam to affect the statistical significance of the test, colleges would need to find a different way to evaluate students — and colleges would find a way to evaluate and admit students, because, while they also don’t want you to know this, colleges need you — and your tuition dollars — to continue to exist.)

Whether the specific tactic Bill envisions is the most effective is secondary to the idea of simply putting pressure on the College Board and the educational system to change. We’ve seen what an educators’ Twitter – del.icio.us marketing blitz could do with s2oh. Why stop there? Why not “man the tweets” again?

Anybody want to play with this idea? It could be powerful, seems to me.

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.

Here’s a fun Traveler’s IQ test for you. Timing counts! Report back here with a comment. Let’s get Diane Cordell and Steven Downes in the ring again – time to “flip another goat-sucker”!

My score, first time:

And see “related links” below for a few other challenges you can take!

Photo Credit: Stuart R Brown

Tis the season to be jolly. We only live once, so let’s end this most amazing year with some well-crafted, twitterary prose.

Don’t know what a Twittory is? Yet another amazing OZucator, Mike Seyfang, turned me on to this with his most excellent post today (from his most explosively creative edublog), in which he writes:

The story was underway and it appeared that I might need to write something on Wednesday. I could hardly get to sleep – my mind raced on long complex sentences comprising no more than 140 characters. About 2am I hit on the idea of using the minimum number of words to cause maximum disruption to the plot line. (I have always hated writing, was self branded as slow learner at school because of my hate of serialised text). I thought I could kill off the main character and maybe shift time in a very short sentence.

–and for which you must see his post for the rest of this gripping story.

As things stand at this moment, the roster for Twittory #2 is at about 34 people – a good 106 short of the required 140 for a properly-written twittory.

My new twitterfriends from Australia (@heyjudeonline) and the U.K. (@digitalmaverick), as well as the most excellent Minnesota scrivener Scott “Rip van Edison” Schwister (@sschwister) have all decided to join this Twittory #2.

Please jump in with us! What a fun, creative way to end the year. All you have to do is add your 140-character-maximum tweet to the story when your number comes up, and watch the story grow as others add their own tweets.

One tweet per person for 140 tweets will add up to a very interesting literary experience – maybe something we can find a use for in the classroom (or staff development room) after trying it ourselves.

Seriously: I’m so full of the love for my twitterverse and other networks, it would be a thing to remember. I’d love to see old friends and new jump into that Twittory roster, to usher out one wonderful year.

Photo: “‘Tis the Season” by (nz)dave

After my first outing doing a rather “schooly” self-assignment for AP Literature, I got what I asked for: friendly and constructive criticism – “assessment”? – from Dean Shareski, Bud Hunt, AnneO, Diane Cordell, and my flat world team-teacher/blood brother Chris Watson – all whom I thank for taking the time.

So you’ll notice these changes:

1. No scrolling text. Instead, I used iMovie’s “Music Video” editing option. One bothering limitation in that option is a ten-second maximum duration for each block of text. Another is the slider for text size – a numeric text-size option would be nicer for uniformity’s sake. (Dean suggested no text at all, or subtitles. Since I want my students to have the option of reading along as they listen, I chose to stick with the text. But I didn’t like the scroll either. Subtitles would have taken forever to add, line by line. Thus the “music video” devil’s bargain.)

2. Less jumpy transitions. On my first try, I learned the time-consuming lesson that all text edits over images are erased if you put transitions before or after a clip. I also learned something about measuring the duration of some lines of recital first, and then adding images with those durations set. I also reduced the use of the Ken Burns effect, because that effect consumes a lot of time, and is often damaged when fades or dissolves are added to them.

3. (This one was tough:) I added some editorial and “teacher-y” stuff in there for my students. It goes against the opposing desire to make this an entertainment piece for all. (And it just occured to me I could have easily exported a straight recitation, then added the teacher stuff to a second schooly version. Damn.)

So here’s the next installment, this time on YouTube instead of Google Video (for you comparison shoppers out there):

Paradise Lost, Book 4 (episode 2): Satan Enters Paradise

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYgp7r_p0cI[/youtube]

This one is about four minutes long. It took me about four hours. Feedback still welcome! (And feel free to read my AP Literature students’ feedback on our open class Ning.)

To Reflect a Bit More:

I’m still wondering about the overall value of digital storytelling. I know that for me, at least, I record the readings over and over, never quite satisfied, discovering an inflection better placed here than there, and so forth. But I have to say, it does get tiresome. Maybe that’s the fault of the parameters I’ve set: reciting someone else’s work, limiting it to still images, voice-over, and text. Not what I’d call a very in-demand real-world skill. (Or am I wrong?)

(I’m also curious how many of you out there who have assigned a digital storytelling project have tried one – or more – yourselves. And what your impressions were after the attempt. Comments?)

I really want to start playing with actual filmmaking: scripts, shots, storyboards, the whole bit. That would be far less schooly, and surely far more engaging. Yet I look at so much “crap” when students (and others) are given a camera and told to make a real film, I don’t think I would assign that to students without some very tight scaffolding and staging. But somebody – was it Dean? – mentions the “Don’t give them a camera until they’ve given you a storyboard” rule in this year’s K-12 Online Conference, don’t they?