Beyond School

I’m still working out the ideas I got from watching Dean Shareski’s “Design Matters” K12 Online Conference presentation. I just applied the idea of quality design principles to an evaluative rubric called, “Why Do We Subscribe to Bloggers’ Blogs? Quality, Quality, Quality – 21st Century Style: A Guide for Secondary and University Bloggers.”

(Brevity was never my strong point.)

Click the screenshot above for a larger image. Better still, go to the Young Writers ‘07 wiki page for the document, and leave suggestions on the discussion page for improvement.

The K12 Online Conference makes me feel a bit like we’ve entered a stage of “Yeah, we’ve got it. We know about enough of the infinite tools and, more importantly, how to discover more of them, learn to use them, and adapt them to our purposes to create all sorts of multimedia and so forth. It’s time to turn the page, and focus on quality.”

Which takes me full circle back to Dean’s presentation.

So I’m presenting this guide to my soon-to-graduate-into-adulthood AP Literature students this week. Their individual blog-writing, based on self-selected, passion-based subscriptions in their RSS readers, will constitute a major part of their writing grade. It won’t be graded until the end of the quarter in ten weeks, and again at the end of the 3rd and 4th quarters. I want them to forget about grades and simply write their way into the connective world.

But they’re going to blog authentically. They’re going to earn their readers, subscribers, comments, and Technorati authority the same way we all do: by writing well, designing well, and connecting well on their blogs. I’ve really got reservations (on the high school level, anyway*) about giving students readers through “teacher-swaps” – “Have your class read my students, and I’ll have my class read yours” – because that’s, again, schooly. In the real world, writers and bloggers get audiences through committed reading, writing, and hyperlinking. The law of averages dictates that, if a student consistently links in his or her writing to writers far and wide with whom they share a passion, some percentage of those writers will respond.

That’s real. That takes the good, honest work of quality reading, thinking, and writing. Underline that: quality.

And as I’ve written before, this is a reason I’m against linking to whole class blogs on Support Blogging and other sites: entire classes do not produce quality. In my view, we should promote only our young writers or multimedia bloggers of quality. Otherwise we’re depriving them of the spotlight their talent deserves by lumping them with the lowest common denominator. We need more meritocracy, and less flabby democracy. Quality should matter.

Anyway.

I’d like to see teachers of the middle and early years take the rubric on the wiki, and adapt it to the skills-level and language of their students.

We’d then have a vertically articulated K-12 series of rubrics (or guides) to spiral students into truly networked, connective writing by the time they graduate high school. In the best cases, they’ll have global networks of kindred spirits in whatever niche of the blogosphere floats their individual boats before even entering college.

And we’ll say “Wow. We really did our job well. These kids have a bigger network before college than I did after college.”

(If you want a link to the current draft, here it is on Google Documents. But I hope some of you will pitch in for some netroots curriculum creation by making those spiraling rubrics on the wiki.

–

*And yes, I can see assigning students within a class to read and respond to each others blog-writing with constructive feedback for peer learning and all of that. But that doesn’t mean we should promote them to world readership to equal degrees. Our coaches don’t do that on our sports teams. Why should we writing coaches be different? We want our best stars to make it to the pros.

For more on that classroom blogging grail-quest – it really is my greatest fixation as a teacher – check out these links:

Technorati Tags: k12online07cl09 k12online k12online07

You know that cotton-headed feeling after you’ve updated your way-behind grade-book? That’s where I am right now.

Luckily, it was a good experience. I love the discussion on our AP Lit Ning about Laurence Olivier in King Lear. The forum was 12 pages long since being assigned on Thursday, and I hadn’t looked at it. Nice to see the seniors get into it. Nice to see they discovered Sir Laurence, too. (That Ning is open to the public, remember. If you like Lear, you’re welcome to pop in. “Where is God?” and “Was Shakespeare an atheist?” are two questions that are beautifully flogged.)

I also skimmed the 28 new student blogs. A handful were already compelling enough for me to add to the Young Writers 07 wiki I started with Chrissy in New Zealand last week.

Anyway, that semi-lobotomic post-gradebook daze prompted me to share with you Mac-owners this little gift:

My Six Favorite Mac Shortcuts

1. Forward delete: FN + DEL
2. Zoom desktop: CTRL + 2-finger scroll up and down on trackpad
3. Zoom browser text, but browser and website container sizes don’t change: CTRL + APPLE + 2-finger scroll on trackpad (this one’s fantastic – you have to try it to really appreciate it)
4. Spacebar: next section down on webpage
5. Spacebar + Shift: next section up on webpage
6. Apple + Shift + r : refresh cache (useful for plugin dinking)

Have any you’d like to share? Add ‘em.

For more language arts lessons, see:

S’rite. I be stylin’ my thang.

I’ve been adding plugins to my new self-hosted WordPress site like a drunk three-year old. Some work, some don’t, some gum up the whole works and inspire flights of colorful cursing. But it’s all fun, and very powerful, what the WordPress open development community enables with their many plugins (and if you’re using 2.3, this list of compatible plugins for it is a life-saver). I’m loving it.

So here’s an update of new features: an “archives by tags” page (see top navigation bar) that lists every post I’ve written (including all of the old Blogger posts, which I imported with a single button-push on WordPress 2.3) and, get this: organizes them by tags, in ascending order. That’s powerful. (You can get the plugin yourself via the link at the bottom of that page.)

I’ve also added a page called “hosting wordpress” that has four screencast tutorials that drag any masochists out there down the brambly path of my own trial-and-error (but ultimately successful) install of WordPress 2.3 on Powweb. You can do it too, for a few dollars a month. Then you’re free to add your own plugins, new themes (and see this list of 2.3-compatible WP themes to save yourself heartache), and all that to your heart’s content. It feels incredibly creative. Beware addiction.

The last page, so far, is a “Teaching Gallery” page. It has short descriptions, movies, and links to my own attempts to create 21st century projects in my school. So far, an overview of Project Global Cooling, the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki and blog, the Broken World wiki history textbook (student-created) and blog, and our current modern translation of King Lear, mafia style, on a wiki at King Lear Street Talk.

I’ll be adding more. Hope some of you feed-readers will drop in and poke around, leave comments and suggestions, questions, whatever.

Thanks to all who have stuck with me as I’ve switched horses.

For more posts on creativity, see

Photo Credit: “Pink is his color” by stgermh

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.

(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.

More from the previous posts. I’m having a lot of fun creating that staff development wiki. The “Digital Arts for Multiple Intelligences” pages are coming along nicely, but unevenly, so your input would be great (thanks, Patrick and Diane!).

I’ve also got a page called “Links to Real World Examples of 21st Century Educators.” I’ve added links myself, but…

…as my high-speed middle school colleague Anthony Armstrong suggests in his recent post, the best way to compile examples of 21st c. classrooms and educators is to invite you all to collaborate and share.

I updated the wiki to include the password (“welcome,” w/o quotation marks), so come on over and add your own classes (or favorite examples from others), and your favorite digital tools for the various multiple intelligences. (And while you’re there, why not take the Multiple Intelligences questionnaire and learn your alleged strengths? 40 quick questions and a cool little graphic is yours. I’d love to hear your profiles in comments

It’s good for all – drives traffic and readership to the classrooms that want them, and gives us all food for thought on how we might approach The Next Thing.

And while you’re at it: there are so many great staff development wikis already out there. Feel free to start a page and add your own, and/or others, for a master list. Why not?

Photo credit: Flickr Tag Network by toby maloy

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 don’t run shrieking when students use certain taboo vowel-consonant combinations. The way I see it, 21st century moral “commandments” should focus on far more “evil” “sins” than cursing, coveting a neighbor’s ass (as in donkey), and other Bronze Age no-no’s. Instead of washing my own child’s mouth out with soap to make him or her “moral,” I’ll be preaching a new set of commandments about 21st century sins – things like as “Thou shalt not drive a gas-guzzler,” “Thou shalt not buy blood-diamonds,” and “Thou shalt not be a selfish and socially uninformed consumer-drone.” No combination of “f” and “k,” “sh” and “t,” or “g” and “d” phonemes is in the same moral ballpark as earth-destroying habits.

So that’s the relevance argument.

Then there’s the hypocrisy argument, which goes like this: the vast majority of adults curse. So does the vast majority of high school young adults, imitating their elders in this as in the “21st century sins” mentioned above. And I’m known to engage in the occasional use of what, in the U.S. Army, we called “colorful language” myself. (Let’s not even get started on our entertainment industry’s attitude toward all of this.)

I mention this because yesterday I read the first drafts of my AP Literature classes’ modern prose adaptations of Shakespeare’s King Lear. For those of you who’ve sinned against your own aesthetic lives by not experiencing the power of this greatest of Billy S.’s tragedies, you should know that cursing occurs repeatedly throughout it – and does so as high art. Here’s an example: Lear cursing the womb (!) of his treacherous oldest daughter, Goneril –

KING LEAR:
Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful!
Into her womb convey sterility!
Dry up in her the organs of increase;
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honour her! If she must teem,
Create her child of spleen; that it may live,
And be a thwart disnatured torment to her!
Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth;
With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks;
Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits
To laughter and contempt; that she may feel
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child!

Some of you cursing purists will say that the above is not in the same class as today’s more vulgar, four-letter word variety, and you have a point. Lear curses with style and grace, as befits a king. But Kent, his chief knight – Lear’s “Army Chief of Staff,” as it were – curses, as befits a career soldier, with much more salt and directness. Check out his classic “cussing out” of the slimy Oswald, servant of Goneril –

OSWALD:
What dost thou know me for?

KENT:
A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of they addition. (Act II, Sc. 2, ll. 14-24)

If your Elizabethan English is rusty, and you don’t hear the vulgarity and sexual insult sloshing in practically every line, download the free “Answers” Firefox addon, and click the unknown words while holding down “alt” on your Mac for an instant popup definition and more (PC users, you’re on your own – maybe “ctrl”?). Kent calls Oswald a pimp, son of a bitch, bastard, son of a whore, “wussy,” a suck-up, and more, and then says, in today’s language, “Deny one word, and I’ll kick your disgusting little donkey” (substitute the King James Bible word for donkey here).

It’s depressing, isn’t it, how the art of cursing has degenerated in our own modern age? Our four-letter words are so unimaginative and artless by comparison.

So if you were me, how would you guide students to translate these curses? Having Kent abuse Oswald by hissing,

You bad person, I’m going to kick your bottom.
You son of a bad woman, you sissy, you person born out of wedlock,
You big meanie, etc

just doesn’t strike me as a faithful literary adaptation. (It does strike me as schooliness, though. Some teachers, like Wilde’s classic Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, would give such a bowdlerizing an “A,” I’ve no doubt.)

So I told the class, if they have a passage in which modern-day cursing seems the best choice for literary faithfulness to the original, then go ahead and let their character curse. I also warned them that they’d be assessed and graded based on how judicious and mature they were with their choices.

It’s only the first draft for these teams, and we’ve only adapted the first Act or so, but already there’s some interesting stuff happening. I share it partly for laughs, and partly because, pedagogically and socially, there are openings here for explorations into social contexts of using curse words – when to use them, and when not to.

I’ll shut up now, and paste a few passages of the Shakespeare first, followed by the translations. I’m curious to hear your reactions to these literary performances. Oh, one more caveat: my “Street Talk” and “Shakespeare in the Hood” unit name caused one student pair to do a sort of hip-hop, gangster translation. Which one will jump out at you as you read

CORDELIA (original)
I yet beseech your majesty,–
If for I want that glib and oily art,
To speak and purpose not; since what I well intend,
I’ll do’t before I speak,–that you make known
It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness,
No unchaste action, or dishonour’d step,
That hath deprived me of your grace and favour;
But even for want of that for which I am richer,
A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue
As I am glad I have not, though not to have it
Hath lost me in your liking.

CORDELIA (adapted)
But, let me say a word, Dad.
If you want me to suck up and say all the bullshit
You wanna hear, then
You just don’t understand me at all.
Its not all that fucking chaos
That made me break our bond,
And even without your dough, I’m still good.
I’m fine without the sucking up and
Attempting to steal your dough.
I do what I want, even if you care.

***

KING LEAR (original)
Thou hast her, France: let her be thine; for we
Have no such daughter, nor shall ever see
That face of hers again. Therefore be gone
Without our grace, our love, our benison.
Come, noble Burgundy.

KING LEAR (adapted)
Well she’s yours now, cause
I don’t have such as bitch as my daughter
And I don’t wanna see her again.
So just get the fuck out of my house.
Come here, Burgundy.

The above opened up an interesting discussion on that wiki page in which I asked (typing with one finger because I was eating a sandwich, thus unable to capitalize),

is cordelia’s f-bomb realistic? think about it – would a loving, good daughter use strong curse words to her father, or would she express her emotions with different, more respectful language? how does your dialogue change the characterization of cordelia in the audience’s eyes?

and one of the two authors replied with this, which I find revealing (he’s Korean, remember – and I’m adding the emphasis below):

well if it’s normal life English (like a typical American family English) we’re talking about, yes in my opinion I thought that it would be okay. I mean, after homestaying at an American house for 8 months, I had a feeling that from what I’ve seen from my past that it was similar and that the f-bomb was an okay idea.

Cordelia’s appearance, I guess to keep the same audience appeal as it did centuries ago, when Shakespeare first showed this play to his first audience, I think the dialogue did change the character in a more aggressive manner but still kept the same appeal that she had hundreds of years ago.

Not a bad beginning for these discussions as the unit continues.

This is getting longer than I’d intended, so I’ll close with a student paraphrase of the stunning soliloquy of the villain Edmund, bastard son to good Gloucester (and notice today we would agree with Edmund that society and conventional morality is criminal here, and he is an innocent victim of it – which I’m convinced Shakespeare realized as well, great social critic that he was):

EDMUND (original)
Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got ‘tween asleep and wake? Well, then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate: fine word,–legitimate!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

EDMUND (adapted)
I will do whatever it takes to reach the top, just like all else in nature. Why should I let traditions screw me over? Just because I’m a year younger than my brother why do they call me bastard? Even when I am good as my brother, why does society treat me like shit? With shittiness? Shit? shit? At least I was born out of passion, unlike the losers like my brother. Well, then, brother, I’m going to take your land. Dad loves you more than me. Legitimate is such a good word. Well, so-called legitimate, if this letter works as planned and everything goes out fine, Edmund the Shit, will be more powerful than you. I’m going to get rich. God bless me.

Call me a knave if you will, but in my book, this is a pretty faithful and effective first draft!

Awake and refreshed now. Neurons still firing from a heady mental cocktail blending the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference, my RSS subscription to Crooks and Liars (my favorite political blog), the creative potential of iLife for student-people and teacher-people alike and, five minutes ago, a dash of eureka inspired by reader comments to a week-old and month-old post on this blog.

Crooks and Liars linked to an ACLU online graphic novel about racial profiling that caught this English teachergeek’s eye. I followed the link and read the comic. Here are a couple frames:

Then I thought of my AP Literature King Lear project (we’re adapting the Lear story to the present, re-writing the verse as contemporary English prose, still in dramatic format, on our King Lear Street Talk wiki, after which we’ll record “radio theater” performances of it for publication on Librivox).

I thought of two reader comments of late that gave me ideas I wouldn’t otherwise have had (the power of blogging-as-conversation, again, for Those Who Still Don’t Get It): One of those readers – also a writer, in what I want to call the “reader/writer web,” since this new web turns all of us who use it into a new breed of reader/writer/audience/co-thinker – was Diane Cordell (her Journeys here). Reading one of Diane’s posts a month ago, in which she posted a comic creation she’d made on ToonDo, led to me making one of my own here. This led to Diane’s comment,

You DO realize that the next step might be to create graphic novels – or graphic poetry anthologies.

I loved the Illustrated Classics comic books (not the abridged novels we use now for reluctant readers) that were published when I was a child – I’d be interested in seeing how your class portrayed good old J. Alfred – or tackled Blake’s Tyger. Or re-interpreted Beowulf (maybe you could collaborate with Christian Long’s Brit Lit class). Frankenstein might also be fun to tinker with.

Then I thought of another comment from Patrick Higgins of the always-excellent Chalkdust, replying to my post about the Lear project. Patrick wrote,

I am going to scout out our curriculum tomorrow for our AP Lit teachers and see if they, too are reading King Lear and have them [meaning "the students," I think - and being an ESL specialist, I see the value here] use your page as “cheat sheet” when they have difficulty.

And it hit me: Diane was right about Classics Illustrated comics in the Old Days – I loved them. I remember getting an A on a high school English class essay on the Iliad based on the comic version * And Patrick underscored the usefulness of such a product.**

And we have Apple’s Comic Life bundled on our students’ MacBooks, plus ToonDo online, for two options for making a modern King Lear graphic novel.

The only problem I can see is time. Making the graphic novel still requires the re-writing on the wiki, so creating the comic art would add more hours to the project. But I still think the graphic novel idea is pedagogically valuable, because that genre differs from the prose wiki format in a way uniquely tailored to benefit student writing in the much-needed area of verbal economy. Look at this panel from the ACLU comic and you’ll see what I mean:

The graphic novel, by restricting text to limited fields – narration boxes, speech and thought bubbles – forces economy in a way that text-only writing does not. And economy – saying the most with the fewest words possible – is a stylistic skill sorely in need of training for my seventeen-year-olds (and let me beat you to the punch by confessing I need it, on these pages, as well).

So if anybody else out there is reading Lear this year, and is interested in collaborating…. If we could divide the labor, my 35 students creating the book alongside yours, just picture the final product: a talking graphic novel – wiki-based? – with mp3 performances of each page embedded on the page. How cool would that be?

—

*That Comics Illustrated Iliad was probably better than many of the lame, archaic prose translations high schools assign out of either cluelessness or cost-consciousness. I can’t believe how many English classes I’ve seen using horrible, 100-year-old translations of the classics that I would hate to read, but that students, due to the Victorian or otherwise stilted English of those bargain-basement translations, would have a hard time even understanding – when there are fantastic new translations in our own generation’s English that might bring those classics to life in the classroom. Examples: Stephen Mitchell’s new Gilgamesh translation, Theo Cuffe’s new Penguin translation of Candide, Jack Zipes’ recent Signet adaptation of Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights. Yet teachers still buy the Dover editions. *shudder*

**I shared Patrick’s comment with my classes, and they saw the sense of what he noted, and seemed to see that this was more real-world than a stupid homework or school project because it would be used Out There in the World. Thanks, Patrick. Getting students to understand the Beyond School goal is incredibly difficult.