Beyond School

In a post last month I mentioned seeing the need for short video presentations about web 2.0 in education, and posted a snippet from a parent presentation I gave at our 1:1 Apple Laptop School launch. That snippet focused only on the motivational power of a simple ClustrMap on a blog.

Here’s another one: Less than three minutes, it’s about how blogging can transform a person who does not write into a person who writes daily - because of the connective nature of authentic, self-directed, passion-based (or, for the lukewarm, interest-based) blogging. I use myself as a case in point.

This clip makes me chuckle because I loved standing with my school administrators on stage, talking to parents of a neurotically grade-obsessed culture, and announcing quite non-chalantly: “I don’t like school. I like learning, but I don’t like school. I want to take students beyond school and into real learning.” I wonder how such a thing sounded to Confucian ears.

I conclude with a brief pontification on the fact that homework scribbling is not writing.

I’ll also post this on the “Teaching Gallery” page of this blog. (And stay tuned for more “Cut the Crap” movie-making tutorials here, and on the “Cut the Crap” page.)

Here it is. Criticism is welcome, since this is part of my own project-based learning about multimedia production.

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JoonPyo, whether he realizes it or not, gives Sam Harris some competition with his “God Did It” post, in which he constructs a decent hypothesis on the historical and psychological origins of religion, and its survival in the world today. Nice style, nice argument, though no connectivism with other writers, which damns this fine post to the status of a tree falling in the forest, or the sound of one hand clapping (but one thing at a time - he’s finally putting some effort into his writing, and probably producing better stuff than he ever did for teacher assigned “writing” - a.k.a. “homework”). Here’s a snippet, though you’d enjoy the whole thing:

As we learned more about the world, and more scientific ideas replaced superstition, the need for multiple gods disappeared. We realized that weather couldn’t be influenced by praying, so we got rid of the rain god, and the sun god, and whatever other god there may have been.

Today, most religions are monotheistic. There’s just God himself. But why do we still need this god? Because we cannot answer the questions I posed at the beginning of this post. We don’t know where we came from, or why we’re here so we just explain it away as an act of God. God put us here. God did it.

While I have no issues with Joon’s religious skepticism, his skepticism toward the merit of Apple compared to Microsoft and PCs is something I do indeed take issue with. He attacks Apple for being incompatible with most Korean websites, when really, I’d argue the issue is that Korea is shamefully out of touch with international standards of web-compliance as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Why blame Apple and Firefox for the bad code used across the board by Korean web-designers? Like Korean conformity and xenophobia generally - and these are uncontested givens about today’s Korea - Korean digital practice is out of touch with the world. Since Joon is interested in a future in the tech industry, maybe he can drag Korea out of its isolationist cage and align it with the world’s best practices. Korea has a need for a digital rebel and visionary - maybe Joon will fill that need after high school?

Joon also shows a lamentably passive conception of the uses of the internet:

….unless you’re using IE, you’re stuck with a non-functional website. As a Korean, using a Mac severely limits my web surfing. I can’t buy things from an online mall. I can’t use online banking services. I can’t play online games. I can’t even check my e-mail if I’m using a Korean service provider. The list goes on.

All passive (okay, gaming is active, but you’re still not creating any content yourself): all Web 1.0. More ammo against the “digital native” superiority argument. The young form habits and comfort zones too. Joon argues for Active X as the solution to Apple and Firefox, but doesn’t address the fact that that solution comes at the expense of all the viruses, malware, spyware, and so forth that we Apple and Firefox users are blissfully unconcerned with.

If any of you evangelists for the old religion (churches, mosques, etc) or the new (Apple) want to visit Joon for some proselytizing, you’ve got the links

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Since this is a perennial issue, I’m sharing this letter to parents about our student blogging launch in my AP Literature class. It’s important to realize that this approach is tailored to the age group of my 17-year-old seniors. They’ll be considered adults in a few short months, so I designed this parent approach with that fact foremost in mind. (This is not to say the letter wouldn’t work for earlier grades. I think it should be considered from maybe age 12 and up, since it discusses maturity and good judgment in managing your online identity, and that’s a discussion we all know has to happen as early as is reasonably possible.)

What I like about this approach is that parents can choose the level of privacy - name, image in photos and/or videos, comment moderation - for their “child” (we have to come up with a better word for the young adult offspring of parental units).

Another thing I like is that it doesn’t use the unfortunate term, “blogging.” It uses the label “connective reading and writing” instead. To me this is far from hair-splitting: it’s a way to separate my pedagogical purpose from the abomination of “blogs as on-line diaries” - god in heaven, the world can do without these - or, worse yet, “blogs as the new way to turn in homework” (god in heaven, students can do without these). To bang that drum again, blogging to answer teacher or textbook questions is not real writing, not authentic learning, and (usually) not relevant to students - but is a great way to make them hate blogging as yet another “schooly” imposition and drive them, as I wrote about so tirelessly several months ago in my “How Teachers Can Kill Student Blogging” series, back to their Facebooks and Myspaces for real writing.

By calling it “connective reading and writing” (and I tried to very briefly define and explain how revolutionary this is in the parent letter below), the emphasis is instead placed on self-directed reading and writing - and creating networks of interest with real-world writers by discussing their writing, linking to it, commenting on their blogs, and hoping to attract them to form a relationship by commenting back on the students’ blogs. This type of blogging is more properly considered “project-based learning,” the way I’m doing it this year, because I’m framing the 7-month blogging journey as a goal-oriented project: “I want to read real-world bloggers who write about x, write about my responses to what they write, and develop a network (or ‘community of interest,’ or whatever buzzword you like) with such people over the next 7 months.” That’s not just writing on a computer. That’s reading, writing, thinking, and connecting with a real-world purpose - beyond school. So that’s a project. They can learn so much more from others in the blogosphere than they can from us teachers about so many real things banished by the factory curriculum.

(But they still have to get it. And that’s a battle, since they’ve never had to get anything but how to study for the next test, or plan the prom, or be a cheerleader. Here, again, is the “envisioning your blog’s future results” activity on Google Docs as my best effort to help them “get it.”)

One last point before I paste the letter (and here’s its link on Google Docs, which you can freely use and adapt): anybody who’s following the idea so far might be wondering, “But how are you going to manage remembering the privacy levels chosen by the parents for each student? That seems like a nightmare.”

Here’s how: use Diigo. That’s what I’m going to do, anyway. Diigo now allows us to leave annotations (”stickynotes”) on web pages that are not attached to any highlighted texts, but just float on the page as a little yellow speech bubble. So I’m going to put a private, floating stickynote on each student blog’s homepage telling me the privacy levels chosen for him or her. It looks like this:

–hover over the speech bubble, and it shows you your annotation, eg.: “full name, pictures, videos okay, self-moderated comments,” or whatever.

So here’s the letter. If anybody wants to suggest changes, or collaborate on them, I’m all ears.

______________________
Student Name

Parent Consent for Student Weblogs

Dear Parent(s),

As part of the 21st Century Literacy initiative in the high school, your child is required to practice a new form of writing called connective reading and writing.

What is Connective Reading?

Connective reading involves finding writers on-line who specialize in a subject (or subjects) chosen by each student, and subscribing to those writers via RSS (Real Simple Syndication), and regularly reading those self-chosen writers’ new articles in the students’ RSS reader.¹

What is Connective Writing?

Connective writing involves students writing, on their weblogs (”blogs”), about the writers and ideas ideas they read in their RSS readers. When writing about these writers’ articles, students will make hyperlinks (basic web links) to the articles they are writing about. And here’s where the power of 21st century writing comes in: the writers your child links to will quickly discover that they have been written about (through a site called Technorati), and in most cases, will visit your son’s or daughter’s weblog to read what they wrote. Why is this powerful? Because: if your child’s writing succeeds, the writers they’re writing about will comment on your child’s ideas and writings; and in the best cases, some of these real-world writers will take an interest in your child - after all, your child shares an interest with them - and will become mentors, guides, and supporters of your child’s learning through regular visits and “conversations” on your child’s weblog.

How Do Students Benefit by Connective Reading and Writing? Self-directed Learning, and Networking.

In short, it’s a way for your child to read more about subjects they have a genuine interest in; to learn more about that subject through reading about it; to write more - and better - in order to attract readers in the world who share their interest; and to develop a real-world network of adults with expertise in the subject your child wants to learn about.

Choose Your Child’s Level of Privacy

By school policy, your child will not be allowed to reveal personal information such as address, birthday, phone number, or email address. However, opinions differ about the use of a student’s full name, and about images of students in photos and videos - so we are offering you choice in these areas.

Please read the brief “for and against” summaries about names and images below, and check the option you prefer:

a. Name: If the student’s full name is used, his or her weblog will show up in Google and other search engines. Pro: For talented writers with maturity and good judgment, this can be a benefit, as a sort of “online portfolio” of the student’s work. Con: For students with less maturity, skill, and/or judgment, showing up on search engines may not be desirable. A “first name only” might be a better choice.

CHOOSE ONE OPTION ONLY:

___ MY CHILD MAY USE HIS/HER FULL NAME

___ MY CHILD MAY USE ONLY HIS/HER GIVEN NAME, NOT THE FAMILY NAME.

b. Image (photo or video): Pro: Like sharing your name, sharing photos and videos of yourself - an “author” photo, a “greeting to readers” video, for example - can be helpful in establishing connections with readers. We like being able to connect a face to a writer, to see and hear the writer on occasional video or audio clips. Con: Similar to use of full name, students with less maturity or poor judgment should perhaps not publish images or videos of themselves.

CHOOSE ONE OPTION ONLY:

___ MY CHILD MAY USE HIS/HER IMAGE AND VOICE IN PHOTOS AND VIDEOS

___ MY CHILD MAY NOT USE HIS/HER IMAGE IN PHOTOS AND VIDEOS, BUT MAY SHARE HIS/HER VOICE IN AUDIO CLIPS

___ MY CHILD MAY NOT USE HIS/HER IMAGE OR VOICE

c. Screening (”moderating”) reader comments: In connective writing, reader comments are the way learning networks are formed. While rude or inappropriate comments from the world are extremely rare, they are still possible. One option is for teachers to moderate (”screen”) all comments on a student’s weblog articles before he/she sees them. A second option is to allow students to moderate their own comments. A third option is to simply not moderate comments at all, and let them be published as soon as readers leave them.

Student Moderation: Pro: encourages responsibility, ownership, and maturity; Con: sensitive students might be unable to deal with inappropriate comments (remember, these are extremely rare).

No Moderation: Pro: Readers like to see their comments immediately after they submit them, which encourages more commenting; Con: rude or inappropriate comments (e.g., “spam” or uncivil remarks) might appear without the student’s immediate knowledge.

Teacher Moderation: Pro: shelters students from the possibility of a rude or inappropriate comment; Con: treats students like children instead of mature young adults.

CHOOSE ONE OPTION ONLY:

___ MY CHILD MAY MODERATE HIS/HER OWN COMMENTS

___ I WANT TEACHERS TO MODERATE MY CHILD’S COMMENTS FOR THEM

___ MODERATION OF COMMENTS IS NOT NECESSARY

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at [ EMAIL ADDRESS OR PHONE NUMBER HERE].

Please print your name, signature, and date in the spaces below. And thank you for your cooperation.

[SIGNATURE BLOCKS HERE]

¹ Want to know more about RSS readers? Ask your child to show you his/her Bloglines account. You might decide it’s a powerful tool for staying abreast of the latest information about your own interests - many professionals around the world now use RSS readers in their daily professional life to remain competitive and up-to-date.

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The Long Preface:

“A teacher is only as good as his students.”

That’s how I prefaced my little “beginning to blog to the world” pep talk to my Advanced Placement Literature seniors. I already posted about the “Walden 2.0” idea - a grandiose name, granted, for a simple escape into the woods to film our “about me and my dreams for this seven-month blogging journey” clips.

“If you can’t be visionary, this isn’t going to work very well.”

I meant that. I believe that. But I knew when I said it, and still know now, that the battle was uphill. Either I was paranoid, or else their skepticism was palpable. And who can blame them? They get their fill of teachers trying to sell them irrelevant guff on a daily basis. Why should my snake oil be any different?

“Envision seven months of fishing for readers, comments, conversations, connections with experts out there in whatever it is you’re interested in. What does it look like?”

I tried to use my own blog as a datum - a real tightrope without a net, since first of all, I show it too them so often already, and second, it can be misconstrued as egotism regardless of how many times I state that it’s the phenomenon itself that’s the point, not me.

“Who do you want in your network? What teachers and helpers and mentors, what friendly supporters?”

I told them blogging has connected me with people who share my passion - education - and has enriched my understanding and practice of that passion beyond my own wildest dreams. And that it has encouraged me to dream even wilder. I told them about my own ten-month journey from a little in-school wiki collaboration in February, to a massive 12-country wiki collaboration attempt three months later, to Project Global Cooling now - how all of them succeeded, how all of them found caring audiences and partners, how all of these dreams, once articulated through simple, dogged self-publishing, became realities.

“So what reality can you dream for your own blogging journey?”

I told them I suspected dreaming their own pathway for their own journey would be very difficult for them, because twelve years of school had smothered any capacity for self-direction they might otherwise have developed. I told them about the student in the Danny Mydlack’s Sudbury School “unschooling” documentary, Voices from the New American Schoolhouse, who spent his first year of unschooling “detoxing,” in his words, by doing nothing but playing video games - for an entire school year - while the unschool staff simply let him.

And how that same student, the following year, plunged into self-directed studies with a passion. He learned to script his own video games. He developed a passion for algebra. He found himself.

Oh what the heck - I’ve posted that student before, but he is so powerful, here he is again. Drag the scroller to exactly 4:00, and give him a five-minute listen. He’ll blow you away:

(The entire documentary is viewable on YouTube as well.)

I mentioned the girl in the school who signed out regularly to go to the stables and groom and ride her horse, because showing, breeding, and training horses was the future she already knew she wanted.

Their eyes got a far-away look in them during that part. Imagine being trusted to want to learn stuff, instead of being forced to - and being encouraged to decide which stuff for yourself.

The Story:

Shana loves chemistry. She seems to have the vision. She seems to be blogging in hopes of finding fellow chemistry types out there for conversations. And she does it beautifully in this post about the speed of modern life and . . . the strangely spiritual chemistry of autumn. And this from her second week of blogging.

Ask yourself - if you were a chemist, wouldn’t you appreciate the young mind that produced this work? I’m not a chemist, and I do.

The Epilogue:

A “teacher” is only as good as his “students.” Shana makes me feel good right now.

I’m not so much of a dreamer that I think all of my students will get it. We all know the law of averages dictates otherwise. But if those rarities with vision learn to strengthen that skill - and vision, the more I think about it, seems to rightly deserve the label “skill” — and to apply it? Well, then: over the next seven months, we might be in for something worth seeing.

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It’s been a heck of a week, and it’s only Wednesday morning. So here are some updates about 1) attempting to inspire a visionary foundation in my students’ approach to blogging (via the “Campsite Seminars” in the woods around our school, as posted about earlier after watching Christian Long’s segment of Dean Shareski’s “Design Matters” K12 Online presentation); 2) shifting Project Global Cooling - our globally collaborative, never-ending “citizenship 2.0″ project - into second gear with a self-hosted website, a Ustream tv channel, and more; and 3) gearing up for the second annual 1001 Flat World Tales creative writing workshop with new classrooms from new countries joining this year.

In Dreams Begin Realities: Seeking a Vision for Blogging via the Walden 2.0 / Campsite Seminars

“Digital Natives” my bright white…board. My seniors have no idea about weblogs, connective writing, Technorati, embedding html, tagging, RSS, and so forth. It’s been a struggle teaching them these nuts and bolts, but those mechanical tasks are done. For the record, that was Stage One of my re-tooled attempt to integrate writing instruction via blogging in my high school (as the English department head, I was able to push through a four-year plan in which students would write from grade 9 to 12 on the same blog, and write a sort of biographical reflection their senior year based on the evidence in those blogs).

So to recap:

Stage One: “The Machine”

1. Create a blog on our hosted WordPress MU
2. Claim it on Technorati
3. Claim it on Clustrmaps
4. Claim it on Sitemeter
5. Install all these in your sidebar
6. Install the Oddiophile Technorati Tag Generator in your Firefox bookmarks toolbar, and tag all entries aplit and aplit07
7. Choose a theme (I’ve installed over 100 in our server)
8. Choose a name, tagline, etc
9. Write an “About” page introducing yourself to your readers and telling them what they can expect on your space
10. Create a Bloglines account
11. Create Bloglines folders for each category of reading you think a “well-rounded, cultured person” should do
12. Find at least three blogs in each category that you like, and subscribe to them
13. Embed your Bloglines blogroll in your sidebar

They’ve done all that, with a few digitally-challenged exceptions.

Next, I wrote a “Guide to Quality Weblogs” for students to use as a rubric to critique each others’ blogs. It addresed every trait I could think of that goes into a quality blog, from theme design to post design, from content on the levels of the whole blog to content of individual posts, from connectivism via links to conversationalism via invitational conclusions in posts, prompt responses to comments, and more. I assigned each student to critique three other students’ blogs using this rubric, and leave their critiques not in the comments - who wants a comment for all to see that says “Your theme is boring and so are your ideas”? - but as Diigo annotations that only members of our class Diigo group can see.

Again, “Digital Natives” my patootie: many students left good comments that rightly belonged in the “comments” section as Diigo stickynotes, again showing they have no idea of the very basics of this world. But they did it. We’ll keep returning to these criteria over the coming seven months.

I told the students that I will be grading their blogs only in the beginning, and only based on this criterion: “Are you writing regularly?” If they’re not, they’ve got trouble on their hands. Otherwise, any content is okay. After all, it took me a month or more to find my own feet in my own blog. Let them stumble about for a while, and trust in time. I’ll only grade them again at the end of the quarter, as a major writing project grade (this is AP Literature and Composition, after all.)

So: the machine is assembled. Now for the soul - “the Ghost”:

Stage Two: Putting the Ghost in the Machine by Dreaming Your Blog’s Future

I had four camcorders charged, tapes re-wound and ready for a shoot, when students entered the class today. The timing was perfect: both classes were after lunch, on a golden autumn afternoon. The woods around us were ablaze with color, as were the mountain ridges surrounding our horizon. Sunny, beautiful. Perfect temperature. A perfect day for “Walden 2.0″.

I assigned the poetry readings for the next class’ seminars and got that out of the way.

Then I gave them a handout and talked them through the rationale behind it: trying, for once in their schooly lives, to become visionary - to imagine where they want connective blog-writing to have taken them at the end of the next seven months. And to articulate that vision for a brief video interview that they will embed in their about page (if they want to extract the audio and only use that, or combine it with a slideshow or whatever, to protect their identity, etc, that’s okay too).

The handout is nothing special, but it’s linked here on Google docs, public, if you want to use it. This is what it says:

The Campsite Seminars

No. 1: Dreaming Your Future into Being

“In dreams begin realities.”

–anonymous

“Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.”

–Anais Nin (20th c. French writer, mistress of Henry Miller)

Directions: Real simple. Gather your thoughts about the following questions. Bullet points are best. You want to only glance at these as you talk spontaneously during your filming. (And don’t worry, we can always re-shoot. Just be you, and you’ll be fine.)

1. What I want you (my readers and visitors) to know about me is….
2. My thoughts and feelings — positive and negative — about connective writing via weblogs are….
3. If I were free to study or apprentice in anything in the world — to sit at the feet of the best talents in the field, and learn from them — they would be people in the field(s) of….
4. What you can expect to see me exploring on my blog — sharing what I’ve read, what I think, who I like who also explores this subject(s) — is the subject of …..
5. What I hope visitors to my web-log will do is …..
6. Beyond my wildest dreams, after seven more months of writing for, to, and in the world, my efforts will lead to these results (personally, socially, professionally)…..

I gave them ten minutes or so of quiet time to create that vision (oh, you factory school bell schedule), then gave them a quick lesson on how to frame shots in the camera with quality.

Then we went to the woods.

The groups of four filmed each other discussing their vision in this beautiful setting, while I laid down and watched the sky and trees for twenty minutes. Ochre, russet, azure, gold: an eyes-open power-nap. (And don’t we notice autumn differently as we age?) I heard snippets of their talks, and liked what I heard.

Then we returned to the brick walls, and called it a day.

I’m going to be late for school if I keep writing this, so I’ll stop here, after adding the Murphy’s Law postscript: I’m trying to capture the footage from our Canon ZR800’s into iMovie, and iMovie doesn’t recognize the camcorder. It did last week. I’ve spent hours troubleshooting with no luck. Pray for me.

I’ll have to save those 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling updates for a later post, probably today.

(I’m still having trouble padding images. Sorry. Working on it.)

For more on classroom blogging, see these posts:

Photo credits (via search.creativecommons.org):
Liquid Silver Melts the Surface by .supernova.
il mio punto di vista by fabrizio
Zero Gravity by [auro]ra

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