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.

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*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.