I get a good number of emails from people asking me to plug their book, blog, project, etc, and normally I just delete them (okay, I save the doozies like, “I’d like to give you the opportunity to let me guest-post on your blog” for laughs on blue days).

But this one was hard to delete:

Hi. My name’s Joe Solomon & I’m a blogger and social media consultant for nonprofits (EngageJoe.com). I’m currently helping to spearhead Social Actions Labs (a grant funded, not-for-profit initiative) – where we’re building web applications that help people connect to actionable opportunities across the web.

More specifically, we’re about to launch a revolutionary DonorsChoose.org Wordpress Plugin. You know the WP feature - “Possibly Related Blog Posts”? Imagine “Possibly Related Classroom Projects.” Our plugin will match relevant classroom projects from the DonorsChoose database of 10,000+ projects – and enable you to share them with your readers below your posts.

As a leading education blogger who uses the Wordpress platform, would you be interested in test-driving this Plug-in? We would really appreciate your feedback and are eager to share your blog as one of the first to raise awareness for DonorsChoose projects using this new technology.

We set up a campaign on ThePoint – It would be awesome if you could pledge to test out the plug-in upon launch.

We think this could be *huge* and I hope you’ll make the pledge and help raise awareness of classroom projects that need help across the US.

I checked it out, expressed tentative interest, and then Joe sent me a screenshot of how the plugin would generate causes based on a McCain post I did recently.  Check out the “oops” factor:

Hi Joe,

It’s an interesting idea. I looked at the screenshot, and blast the luck, saw that I would be promoting Abstinence Education donation requests with that post you sampled.

That’s a red flag. Is there a way I can delete any causes for which I’m unsupportive? If so, I’m willing to play.

(Regular readers might remember my Friday Funny post about Abstinence-Only Sex “Education,” and its hilarious tendency to make sodomites of our virginity-obsessed teens - and let’s not even start to talk about the creepiness factor in the incest-tinged “Purity Balls” - no pun intended - these smarmy dads take their daughters to, complete with Hymen Pledges and other whacked insanities. So, um, support Abstinence-Only? Over my dead body.)

But Joe replied:

Hah.  Yes, our algorithm still needs some tweaking.  Many posts we’ve tested have had impressively spot-on results –  from political posts that then recommend projects that help students develop critical thinking skill for the election — to a post about Steve Jobs bout with cancer that then recommends classroom projects that cover the tough issues surrounding cancer.

Currently, though, our developer has added a feature that lets you add “%NORELATED%” and this will remove the classroom projects from your post. [emphasis added]

I hope this answers your question…

It did.

So, without further ado, I’m happy to help classroom projects find funding by matching donors and causes with this plugin. Check this bottom of this post to see how it works.

Oh. My. God. With all the scandalous words on this post, we might get some whacked results. But it’ll be an interesting experiment, and I should be able to delete the links if I don’t like them. We’ll see.

(And for the record, Joe allayed my reservations about any profit motive on his part with this info:

I totally understand about the making money.  Social Actions is a not-for-profit initiative and DonorsChoose.org (which supports this project) is a non-profit as well.  Check out my website to learn more about my work — engagejoe.com.

Finally, the method of using The Point website to encourage the “Collective Action” that Shirky mentions (and many of us have discovered) is so difficult is worth noting itself.  The idea is, you announce a cause campaign there, invite people to commit, and promise not to launch this campaign until X number of people do commit, giving you a “tipping point.”  (I notice Alan Levine of CogDogBlog is the only other e’blogger I know who’s also supporting this particular campaign.)

For more info about the plugin, this is from the WP Plugin page:

“Possibly Related Classroom Projects” enables you to share relevant classroom projects from DonorsChoose.org based on the content of your posts.

DonorsChoose.org is where teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn and succeed. Anyone can then choose projects to help bring to life. DonorsChoose.org usually has over 14,000 active proposals.

“Possibly Related Classroom Projects” makes it super easy to connect your readers to relevant classroom projects in need of help.

You’ll be amazed at the relevancy of many of these classroom projects to your posts (as well as the awesome and imaginative projects that are happening in classrooms around the US).

“Possibly Related Classroom Projects” is a project of Social Actions Labs.

For more info about the WordPress plugin, please see our project page.

For more info. about DonorsChoose.org, please see their Help section.

Okay. I promised, I waited, I tipped. I hope some of you will consider joining the cause.

(Now let’s see if any kinky links turn up about hymens, sodomites, or other whacked “classroom projects.” :P)

5 Comments

• At August 2, 2008, Joe Solomon wrote:

  Clay,

  Wow! Thank you so much for this post - it was a lot of fun experiencing our exchange through your eyes! ;)

  It was also fun to to explore your archives and discover matching classroom projects -- I just clicked on your "My Suicidal High School Years - A Happy Ending Bullying Story" -- and saw projects such as "No Bullies Allowed! Putting A Stop To School Bullying!" and "No More Bullies!"

  See -- http://beyond-school.org/2007/12/17/my-suicidal-high-school-years-a-happ...

  And I really like the unique way you made the plugin match your theme! Very cool!

  I feel very fortunate to have worked on this project -- thank you for helping to make it happen!

  Best,

  -- Joe Solomon

  http://www.socialactions.com/labs

• At August 3, 2008, Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: WeAreMedia Module 5: Network Weaving Skills (One-on-One Interactions) - Still time to win a free book wrote:

  [...] http://maxschoolbus.com/2008/07/31/introducing-the-donorschooseorg-plug-... [...]

• At August 7, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Joe, sorry for the tardy, but just want to weigh in and say I've been constantly impressed by the matches I've seen for each post from your plug-in. I haven't had to delete a single one.

  Well-done!

  Clay Burells last blog post..**Warning .. http:/ is a known spammer . delete this message

• At August 11, 2008, 5 Blogs Add the DonorsChoose WordPress Plugin! - Social Actions wrote:

  [...] This is taken from a post on Beyond-Learning entitled - "My Suicidal High School Years: A Happy-Ending Bullying Story" Note how the first two classroom projects focus on bullying and the third "Book Club Books for Fifth Graders II" is about starting a book club that helps students focus on tough issues - ranging from bullying to self-esteem. Check out Clay Burell's post about the plugin here! [...]

• At August 15, 2008, Joe Solomon wrote:

  Clay - That's awesome to hear, your comment has been an extreme boost to our team!

  I also have some great news - your post inspired LeadingFromtheHeart to add the plugin - http://leadingfromtheheart.org/2008/08/14/takingaction/

  :)

Snapped at Staples in Manchester, NH

After watching the following video on Dean Shareski’s blog (thanks to Kate Tabor for the alert):

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

–and then watching this immensely disturbing clip from the Uncounted documentary about election theft in the 2004 USA elections:

–and in the 2006 elections:

–it should be no wonder that I fantasize that, on election day 2008, students and teachers take cellphones and video cameras to the voting centers, and show what a smart mob can do to defend democracy.

You can see ten more clips from Uncounted here, and order the DVD here.

I never had a civics class in school. Are they still taught in the US? And are educators either practicing or modeling politically engaged behavior in their own lives? What’s our ratio of communicating to our elected officials in proportion to tweeting our networks, for example? Do we need to reflect on that?

The elections are just around the corner. What a learning opportunity for our students and ourselves - especially if we act to ensure our votes are counted.

2 Comments

• At July 25, 2008, Tracy Rosen wrote:

  Good one Clay.

  I have always (well, since their use really began to accelerate) thought that the existence of cellphones requires us to be more accountable.

  Schools ban cell phones because (for one reason) some students are posting videos to youtube of angry teachers. So we ban cell phones instead of dealing with the fact that we have an angry, abusive teacher in the classroom? (I wrote about this last year, if you are interested: http://leadingfromtheheart.org/2007/05/14/and-nowyoutube/)

  We are just being held accountable. Perhaps in a sneaky way, but whatever. As a teacher I am ALWAYS in the spotlight and my behaviour should reflect that. Actually, my behaviour should reflect my core values and my assumption is that most teachers do not value anger and hatred and belittling of those in their care.

  We are in an age of uber accountability - look at recently reported implications of facebook use --> http://tracyrosen.tumblr.com/post/42742982/implications-of-facebook-use

  I agree - we need (well, Americans need, I'm a Canadian bearing witness) to make this upcoming election play out in that spirit.

• At July 25, 2008, Alex Steed [of Make wrote:

  I'd like to think that this is going to be one of the more interesting venues where on and offline activism meet. Perhaps spectators and citizen monitors will organize and spend time at known trouble areas via Meetup? I worked for the Democrats in 2006 and we had lawyers that we could call just in case anything tricky happened. It would be more helpful, though, if that action were crowd sourced.

danah boyd just posted a “request for brain-fodder” from her readers, and I played along by posting the below (or trying to - maybe it’s being moderated, maybe it was spammed, maybe some cyber-Cerberus ate it on the banks of the thread).  It’s a question I’ve been turning over for a while now, and enough of us have jumped into collaborative classroom projects now to share our reflections on the question I asked danah.

Let me preface this by saying that I think Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis deserve monumental statues on Cyber-Main Street for their pioneering work in the Flat Classroom Projects.  They sparked my own plunge into the 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling.  So I’m not dissing anything here, but rather critically reflecting on our own assumptions about our students’ psycho-social developmental readiness to catch the buzz we’ve all caught from this so-spiked digital koolaid.

As I say below, in horribly confused prose, danah’s presentation of her research on teen networking practices made me question whether teens are as impressed by the potential of global collaboration as we (rightly) are.  I’ve gone through two of them now, and am fairly certain that once the unit was over, so were any connections that those teens made with other teens flung wide around the globe during that unit.

Faceless Flat, Huggable Round?

And that leaves me wondering if local collaboration - within a school (and my, does that hurt Mr. Unschooly to say), or a comfortably snug geographic zone like a town or city - might be more engaging for the students.  Face to face is possible across town, and less so around the globe - and face to face seems, if I get danah right, to matter more to teens. The world may indeed be flattening, but round may have its own excitement for them.

Another anti-koolaid factor for teens might be that generally, they’re too busy with schoolwork to have developed any passionate, intrinsically compelling causes to collaborate about. Beyond schoolwork and school society, neither their identities nor their concerns extend. So . . . . you know, “Collaborate about what?  Why?  Don’t you realize the football game is Friday and the prom is Saturday?”

I’ll only add that part of all of these reflections involve the levels of engagement I saw in two different types of collaboration I’ve done in the past two years: one was global (wiki workshop here, anthology of best stories here), but the other was within the school-building. That second one involved all the students in world history - five classes shared between another teacher and me, meeting at different times, but all working on historical fiction set in the French Revolution on a wiki, all linking to the characters’ diaries created by their friends, all creating encounters of their own characters and their friends’ characters in a wildly promiscuous way.  My takeaway, when I compare, is that the collaboration that had the most zing to me was obviously the global collaboration: come on, my students in Seoul were writing with students in Colorado and Hawaii.  But my students?  They were way more zapped (in teacherspeak, I mean “engaged”) by the work confined to the fourth floor of our high school.

It makes me want to pull out my “Child Development” textbook from my education classes for more input.

But in the meantime, I’ll ask you for input too: Here’s the question for this Open Thread:

If you have led students through a global collaboration project, are you aware of any permanent change in your students’ networked lives?  Have they sustained any of the relationships formed then?  Have they used the experience to start their own independent collaborations?  Or have they climbed back out of the rabbit hole and resumed teen life as usual?

I really hope some of you - and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, especially you students out there - will throw some observations in comments letting me know your thoughts. My Korean student population may be anomaly, for all I know.

If they’re not an anomaly, though, it bears asking: with all the incredible labor that goes into teacher design, planning across time-zones, and managing of these projects (not to mention the same demands the students have to face when participating in them) - if local is more developmentally appropriate, just think of all the crows’ feet and raccoon eyes we escape by scaling things down to local size.

*    *    *

I embedded danah’s presentation in a footnote to my post last week about getting students to learn the story of history, but here it is again. She starts around the 8 minute mark, wearing the wool cap.

Here’s the comment I left her, but I won’t hate you if you stop reading here. I said it all above.

Okay, this k-12 educator who drank the “global collaboration” edu-koolaid a couple years ago will bite:

I saw your preso on YouTube (where, Berkman? Berkeley? I forget), and your summary of your research on teen practice online supported a creeping suspicion from my own experience that teens just aren’t yet psychologically developed enough to “get” the power of global networking. Their maturity levels - and thus their online practices - are still local and somewhat narcissistic. So while their teachers expect all sorts of vistas to expand in their students’ understandings, the students are pretty uninterested in the fact that they’re doing project work with other students a pole away, and far more interested in working online with their schoolmates in a classroom down the hall.

So: a) Do you think “flat classroom” projects (global collaborations) in high school assume a psycho-social developmental level that teens largely lack, and thus might be a largely wasted effort on the part of their teachers (who do grasp the significance of the shifts)?

b) At what age do you think such experiences will enhance education?

Sheesh, this feels as woolly as my grey matter right now. Hope it makes sense.

25 Comments

• At July 25, 2008, Reggie Ryan wrote:

  I to have gone through a few 'localized' and 'international' projects. In analyzing the conversation from both I think that the local conversation by teens centers around familiar topics that only local kids would have. I certainly think there is value to finding connections across nationalities, but the time and effort are tremendous.

  The local connections seemed to of more value as kids connected over common school work, social issues and local information. Local projects spilled over after completion as the conversation kept up based on shared experiences that only local kids could have.

  Working in a large areas like Chicago, there is a tremendous value to connecting locally across districts. I just haven't seen that connection when working with kids across the world.

• At July 25, 2008, diane wrote:

  Oh, it made real, sad sense to me. I was unable to even get my students interested in looking at, let alone participating in, connected projects. Couple that with our districts repressive attitude towards interactive tools and a general staff defensiveness regarding technology and you get a grim gray picture.

  I don't intends to be around long enough to see the inevitable shift. My philosophy now is to show my students what's available, plants some seeds of awareness, and try to modernize the traditional tools (PP - sigh!) with which they feel comfortable.

  It's not much, but it's a start.

  dianes last blog post..Both are Transformed

• At July 25, 2008, Morgante Pell wrote:

  Students don't find global collaboration that interesting simply because we expect it. For adults (even savvy ones), the idea of connecting with someone across the globe in near realtime simply adds such a large "wow" factor that it offsets any costs (in sleep). As students, we take that ability for granted: it has pretty much always been there, and always will be.

  If the coolness factor is taken out of the equation, there really isn't too much going for global collaborations. In general, they take a lot of effort from all involved while the payoff feels impersonal. It doesn't seem to be connected to *my* life (relevancy), which means it really isn't all that interesting. If I succeed, I won't receive passive praise. Global collaborations are generally hidden from those not directly or tangentially involved with them.

  To illustrate my point, here are some bad examples:

  1) I get more satisfaction out of writing a letter to the editor than a blog post (even a high traffic blog post). Online, people must *actively* seek out the content and thus are not really bystandards. However, people will passively read the letter (regardless of subject or writer) and thus get exposed to the ideas. (Plus, I just like the ego boost of random people telling me they liked my letter on the street.)

  2) I get more satisfaction where I can *see* the difference I made. $1 given to a local charity gets about 1 meal for someone. Meanwhile, $1 given to a charity abroad can feed a family for much longer (depending upon location). However, I still prefer donating locally because it is *my* community. We like to improve things we belong to, not things everyone belongs to.

  I do think global collaborative projects have a place. They are great for rural schools where there simply aren't enough peers to have decent diversity. I also think the tools can be leveraged locally in very effective ways. Google Docs works great for collaborating on a project across the globe, but it also works great sitting right next to each other.

• At July 25, 2008, Kate Tabor wrote:

  We have been trying to connect students to issues within our own community with the mixed results that I expect given their developmental readiness to both engage outside the friend/peer connections and to generalize or extrapolate evidence of social injustice at a small scale to the world. I know, we are asking a lot. In their narrative writing it was clear to me that some were ready to "get" connections to issues in our community, and some just came across as spoiled kids who had a hard time understanding why they had to go outside on a cold day. I edited the junior anthology of writing - each student had to submit this narrative assignment for inclusion in the anthology. We worked with google docs, so if you would like I could "share" some of these got it/didn't get it examples with you.

  I've been trying to get teachers to brain dump to a wiki so that we can see some patterns. That too is asking a lot ( http://pensieve.wikispaces.com).

  I'm excited by some Shirkeyesque thinking that Dean Shareski wrote about recently in his blog post about a group in San Francisco called Carrotmob. http://ideasandthoughts.org/2008/07/19/this-might-workproactive-group-ac...

  This is concrete enough so that students might see results and feel successful at creating connections and change.

• At July 25, 2008, C. Tschofen wrote:

  I wrestle on one hand with wanting to "give kids the world" and, on the other, with the concept of education as something emergent in response to kids’ personal interests and intrinsic motivation. In that light, I've wondered…to what degree is structuring/requiring/generating mass collaborative projects another kind of (gulp) schooliness?

• At July 25, 2008, Vicki Davis wrote:

  Global collaboration works keeping one vital factor in mind. Teacher engagement PRECEDES student engagement.

  Some projects just want to throw kids together and don't have meaning for the students. Connecting globally isn't easy. It is very challenging and I think it best happens when you start with say two teachers and two classrooms with a meaningful project and then on from there.

  There will NEVER I repeat, NEVER be a "magic pill" for education where teaching just becomes easy and kids just do it themselves. It doesn't happen in our flat classroom projects nor does it happen in any course I've ever taught.

  That being said, when global collaboration is done well and when teacher engagement is high -- the learning that results is permanent and transformational -- at least that is what I've seen.

  I don't like the term "social networking" for education and prefer "educational networking" -- by mixing the two up in research we're getting some sort of bastardized results that don't really reflect what we're talking about.

  Also, remember, that we must work to do age appropriate, class appropriate, learning style appropriate projects and teaching. And that all of this is very very hard work.

  No magic pill here -- however, I can 100% say that my students would not have the same result collaborating with just schools in Georgia as with schools around the world.

  Finally, there are ways to flatten the classroom by working with people in the community -- just check out what Ernie Easter in Maine is doing with his project to create online virtual museums with several community organizations.

  Flat comes in multiple flavors, but it must be meaningful and requires teacher engagement.

• At July 25, 2008, Cool Cat Teacher Blog: My response to "Does Flat Fall Flat?" wrote:

  [...] read a quick post by Clay Burell entitled Does Flat Fall Flat for Teens where Clay reflects on some ponderings by Danah Boyd: "As I say below, in horribly confused prose, [...]

• At July 25, 2008, Terry Smith wrote:

  I'm off the intended age group since I teach elementary and do projects involving mainly grades 3-7, but I did want to comment on one question, about scaling back. Maintaining interest level over time does require a lot of extra work by the teacher, keeping the kids interested, reminding them that we have our good friends in Taiwan who need to hear from us, and so forth. The realities of life right here in Hannibal often supersedes the attractive-connective-foreign-magic of our projects. So... keeping the projects shorter, and keeping them to a given short term target (having a giant salad party after collaborating with Pakistan on plant science) helps the effort to stay alive. 1001 Tales to the Alien King, for example, is a great project, but if not managed carefully and spirited along to the agreed upon edit/review dates, it fades in the kids' minds. So if too many teams are grouped, too many teachers are pulling out their hair to get the cross-group stories written and commented on; other teachers may have completely sort of forgotten about the project, again a fading point for members waiting for feedback. So before this gets too long - the magic that works for my kids' projects is short, specific, and done -- then later, we recall and reconnect using the memories of what we have accomplished, and the friends we have met. Usually, only a few kids will continue on connecting with the kids they have met in projects. So hopefully along the "short" path, kids have socialized, shared, done some thinking, and contributed to an overall learning community, even though it may have existed for only a short time.

• At July 25, 2008, Penelope wrote:

  Morgante's comment on the lack of "wow" factor is spot on. As a teacher young enough to have grown up with the internet, talking to and networking with people around the world is just a part of my life. I only think about how neat it is when I realize that other people don't have friends on several continents.

  As a teenager, I spent time on a variety of online communities, and the web was young enough at that point that there was a certain cool factor to think that soandso was from Australia and we were interacting, but at the same time, it was just another way of doing what you could do with a phone, if you only knew the person already. Instant communication, in other words, has never not been a part of my, or my students' life experiences.

  If anything, local, and face-to-face collaboration is the unusual thing in our students' lives. How many really have a sense of their own community outside their social circle? How many have local issues that they care about, and would love to get to work with others to solve?

  I do see the value in global experiences for students. There are all kinds of lessons to be learned through working with people from all over the world. I see the best projects as those which build from childrens' curiousity about the world (most have at least some ridiculous thing they want to know how people do in other countries) towards collaboration.

  I don't know how much of it is developmental, but I would say that teenagers are by nature already so focused on finding identity within their "tribes" that expecting even 13, 14 and 15 year olds to really get much out of it could be too much. Danah's examination of how they use social network sites matches with my experience and my understanding of what teenagers are doing. It's all about moving from your identity as a child, in relationship to family, to an identity based on your relationship to peers. Identities based on a larger circle probably do have to wait for a later stage.

  Penelopes last blog post..The end of summer break...

• At July 25, 2008, Tuttle SVC: This Always Seemed Obvious to Me wrote:

  [...] Clay Burell:And that leaves me wondering if local collaboration - within a school (and my, does that hurt Mr. Unschooly to say), or a comfortably snug geographic zone like a town or city - might be more engaging for the students. Face to face is possible across town, and less so around the globe - and face to face seems, if I get danah right, to matter more to teens.It is also a question of scale. Is one global collaborative project a year from grades 6 - 12 sufficient? If so (and I'd say "yes," give or take), it is a nice feature, but not any kind of structural shift. [...]

• At July 25, 2008, Ann Oro wrote:

  I have my own two children (11 and 13) in my classes. It really doesn't seem to matter to them if they work across classes in the building or across continents. As my oldest has said, work is work. In some ways, if I do the work in the building I know everything will be ready and up-to-date in time for the next scheduled bi-weekly class.

  At the same age growing up, I had a pen pal in Africa and one in Sweden. Those letters captured my imagination. Probably because I determined the content and direction of the letters. We prescribe the projects and requirements in most cases at school.

  That said, it is still worth the effort. I am teaching my students how to communicate across continents. I am teaching them how to be culturally sensitive. They are practicing good digital citizenship. Many students will need those skills as they go to work. Perhaps they won't have those opportunities in high school. I'm glad to provide them in the K-8 setting.

  After school, they are putting up YouTube videos, participating in social networks, and who knows what else. Like others have said in the comments before mine, it's just their world.

  Ann Oros last blog post..Google Custom Search Eye-Opener

• At July 25, 2008, Carl Anderson wrote:

  Two thoughts come to mind as I read your post Clay, and the comments that follow:

  1. Why are we collaborating? Too often I think we seek out places in the curriculum for collaboration for the sake of collaboration (I am as guilty of this as the next teacher) instead of first starting with our learning objectives and finding the most appropriate activity to achieve them. If we know collaboration is available. we know how to set it up, and it seems to be the best fit than great, otherwise our students will not see the scale of what we are doing.

  2. This conversation about collaboration seems to need some redefining or sub categorization. If we have our students edit Wikipedia they are still participating in a global collaboration but not on the same scale as if they are involved in group blogging, Skype conversations, etc. with a group of students half a world away. Both are global collaborations but each has a different level of connection with other individuals. Students might not form lasting relationships with other students overseas from a collaborative project from the latter example but there is a good probability that students in the first will continue to contribute to a site like Wikipedia at least to some degree. In the end which is more valuable?

• At July 25, 2008, Alana wrote:

  Hi everyone,

  Aren't we talking about teenagers? I remember this as the most self absorbed time of my life. Service learning cracks that only so far as they work on local issues - and in my experience the only time the international edge gets a buzz was if we were twinned with other folks of similar ages working on a similar issue somewhere else. Webcams/sharing videos/that had buzz - but only once some work was done to set up the twinning project.

  Great for the adults in the picture as well - always nice to have international colleagues. Maybe there should be a social network for teachers to meet and twin projects with others - or is there one I just don't know about yet?

  I don't blame them - time enough to take on the issues of a global world once we develop real competencies in our personal lives.

• At July 25, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Reggie: Good input. The "spillover" you mention is a factor worth remembering - local issues continue to play out in our locales (duh), meaning followup and extension beyond the unit are easier and more relevant.

  @Everybody: As Reggie notes, "There is value to finding connections across nationalities," and I'm not denying that. I'm just seeking food for thought on more sustainable and relevant ways to do that (for teachers and students alike).

  @Diane: I look forward to watching you work after your retirement. Should be interesting, seriously!

  @Morgante: So you're a student? Thanks for weighing in. I'm laughing as I read your comment's parenthetical "(and sleep)" - very relevant to this guy in Korea. But I'm thinking as I read your student's perspective on teacher "wowiness." And your points comparing the local to the global are very appreciated - seems less "narcissistic" than simply "personal."

  @Kate: Do you have a blog? If not, how much do I have to pay you to start one? ;-) I'd love it if you'd link to any Google Docs you find relevant to this discussion, but love it more if you'd post about them (said kindly). And a HUGE thanks for the Shareski reference. It generated a project idea in the post after this one.

  @C. Tschofen: See @Morgante above. I discussed this dilemma - prescribing collaboration v. inflicted schooliness - with Chris Craft in this podcast, and in a follow-up podcast with Dean Shareski. I hear you. @Terry Smith succinctly identifies a lot of reasons for scaling down duration and geographical reach. I really like what Chris Harbeck did with "releasing the hounds" (see the K12 Online Conference presentation from 2007), and my own experiments with similar "unprojects" this year in my Networked Learning class felt like ways to thread the horns of that dilemma. There's something fascinating about not prescribing the "what" (content) or "how" (form) at all, only the "how much" ;-). (Don't take that last phrase too literally!)

  @Vicki: Again, I don't mean to suggest global projects don't "work," but to question to what degree they do, relative to local ones, and whether the benefits justify the costs.

  The projects I've both participated in and overseen for others have without fail had massive amounts of teacher engagement (thus the "crows' feet and 'coons' eyes" reference), and have been pedagogically well-thought out, from meaning/relevance to scope and sequence; they were not of the "Some projects just want to throw kids together and don’t have meaning for the students" variety you depict. And to repeat the point of the post, the students much preferred the activities in which the classroom walls went down - uniting an entire grade level in a history unit - than when the school and national walls went down. And that takes us back to the psycho-social readiness question that prompted this post.

  I'll point to Chris Harbeck's "Release the Hounds" and my own variation on this last semester as possible evidence that less can be more, that "teaching" can become "easier" and "kids [do] just do it for themselves" (as self-directed learners, with all the messiness that entails, and the freedom and time to fail, recover, and try again).

  Out of curiosity: How many students in the Flat Classroom Projects are still in contact with the people, or active on the issues, they worked with/on during the project? That, again, is the kind of information I'm curious about longitudinally, as it bears on that psycho-social readiness question I'm curious about.

  It seems you come close to @Terry Smith's position that there are "multiple flavors," including less intensive and prescribed ones, at the end of your comment.

  All that being said, Vicki, I'll repeat: I'm not dissing the FCP, nor your contributions to mapping the new territory. I'm just curious to hear people reflect on their experiences with all of this. Thanks for troubling to comment.

  @Penelope: How interesting, you young thing. I graduated HS in 1980, and went through college with a Brother word processor with floppy disks. So your input from across the teachers' digital generation gap adds an interesting element to all of this. And I especially appreciate your comment on the lack of local connectedness. That's why schooly student councils tick me off to no end for being Haunted House and Prom-obsessed. Thanks, too, for your input on your experience in reference to danah's research.

  @Ann: Again the issue of "prescribed" versus "self-determination" comes up in your great example. As for the experiences you're providing your students, where do they fall along that "prescribed - self-determined" continuum, and along the "long-term - short-term" one as well? Just curious.

  Thanks again, all.

• At July 25, 2008, Will Richardson wrote:

  The thing that I keep coming back to is actually what you've been espousing for quite a while now, Clay. Isn't all of what we do in school contrived at some level? Doesn't it have to be? And who is going to ever be totally engaged in that? And, to push the rhetorical questions further, as evidenced by many of the comments above, our kids do a lot of this global connecting stuff after school in the context of what they are passionate about. Yes, it's about teacher engagement to some degree, but at the end of the day, it's more about whether or not the student is learning about what he or she really WANTS to learn, not what someone else thinks they should learn.

  And one other thing...even though you may not have felt "success" in your efforts, I think there is a residual learning about simply the process and the complexity of creating and working in those connections that will benefit the kids you worked with a great deal.

  And one other other thing...I do think that face to face collaboration and collective action (Shirky) are more stimulating and engaging, but I also think the value of helping kids do the unf2f stuff is absolutely as important.

• At July 25, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Will: Thanks for stopping in. Contrived "at some level," yes - and that points us back to the question of degree of prescription that keeps popping up in the thread above.

  For the record, I didn't say I felt "no" success in these efforts, but that I observed more engagement with the local than with the global - which all goes back to the by-now-cliche "psychosocial readiness" issue at the heart of this post, thanks to danah.

  I'm glad you brought up the "residual learning" point, because I've had the same thought myself and made it to my students, predicting that many of them won't see relevance or potential in the experience until long after they've left my classroom.

  Again to clarify, I'm not arguing "for" f2f "against" online, but instead for online collaboration that more easily (being local) can lead to f2f. So to add a variation to your last sentence, I "think the value of helping kids do the unf2f stuff [in a way that may result in face to face collaboration and collective action] is absolutely as important[est]." :P

• At July 26, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Carl: Sorry, a brain misfire kept me from responding to your comment w/all the others. Re: "collaboration for collaboration's sake," agreed. And your prescription for judging when collaboration is desirable is in line with mine, somewhat. I still think embedding it as a "Quick-in/Quick-out" ("natural") feature of learning, rather than designing a unit around it, has more sustainability and authenticity. Treat it like a phone call you'd make when you needed that call, rather than killing yourself scripting the whole thing. Maybe include carrots for authentic, high-leverage use of these tools in any learning activity from interested students, but otherwise just model the stuff by using it, and let it sink in that way.

  Nice sub-dividing of different types of collaboration. Good closing question. As Vicki notes, maybe the "social" is less important than the "educational" sometimes, in which case the continued editing of Wikipedia is more relevant than the continued connection with peers worldwide. (Why does this put me in mind of the Twitterverse?)

  @Alana: Indeed, indeed. The more I think about it, the more the local is the logical bridge between the narcissistic and the global. It's the swimming pool before the sea.

  (And there are more partnering networks for classrooms than there are Protestant denominations now, from Ning to Wikis to barbershops worldwide. Okay, not barbershops.)

• At July 26, 2008, Jenny Luca wrote:

  As a teacher who embraced what you began with Project Global Cooling I'd like to add my 2 cents worth to the conversation. My students were really keen to make this project work and to all intent and purpose they did. They pulled together a concert from nowhere in six weeks. They did it because they believed in the idea and they knew they were part of something that was global in scope. My one criticism of the project was the lack of student to student collaboration across the participating schools. This collaboration needs to be facilitated by the teachers involved in the projects. Lindsea was our only real contact and she was doing this pretty much by herself without a lot of school support. I think it's really important to get the teachers involved talking with one another thus enabling opportunities for students to get to know one another. This is what Vicki and Julie do well and hence their projects are meaningful. My students still want to reach out. They've just set up their own blog as a means of reaching out and fostering more involvement. http://projectglobalcoolingaustralia.wordpress.com/ourmission/

  They started writing their first post yesterday which should go up sometime this weekend. As a school we are new to the idea of global projects but there is interest from our students. They can't do it on their own however. They need passionate teachers guiding them.

  Jenny Lucas last blog post..School’s out Friday

• At July 27, 2008, Julie Lindsay wrote:

  Clay, thanks for starting this conversation. I have blogged a more detailed response at http://123elearning.blogspot.com/2008/07/beyond-wow-embed-flat-learning....

  My conclusion reads like this.....

  "So, I say let's get beyond wondering what the average teenager is thinking or doing as most likely it will be something self-centred, but let's continue to reach out and provide experiential learning opportunities that are confronting and challenging knowing that by starting with a spark a fire is sure to follow and that the process and practice of global interaction is pedagogically sound. So Clay, I think the benefits, albeit intrinsic in nature, far outweigh the costs on teacher time. We need to wake up our fellow educators and students to the advantages of cultural diversity, collaborative learning and online tools to support this pedagogically and embrace flat learning experiences as the norm. We need not be 'disappointed' if our students are not changing their work patterns immediately or at all, the residual knowledge gained from flat classroom experiences will ultimately shape the way they approach the world, as it has for educators."

  Julie Lindsays last blog post..Beyond the 'Wow': Embed the Flat Learning Experience for Sustainabiliy

• At July 28, 2008, Drupal wrote:

  [...] moderated, maybe it was spammed, maybe some cyber-Cerberus ate it on the banks of the thread) ... READ MORE[rsslist:http://beyond-school.org/2008/07/25/flat-too-flat-for-teens/] Social Enterprise Feed: [...]

• At July 28, 2008, E-Learning Journeys: Beyond the 'Wow': Embed the Flat Learning Experience for Sustainabiliy wrote:

  [...] for his kind words about our Flat Classroom Projects and for starting the conversation about 'Does Flat Fall Flat for Teens?' The comment responses to his blog post many and interesting to read, as is Vicki Davis' response [...]

• At July 28, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Julie,

  I read your full post on your own blog, and nodded in agreement with most of what you had to say.

  I especially liked the "beyond the wow" thrust of it all, which dovetails nicely with several other comments about not doing it for its own sake, but only when there's a good purpose for it.

  I'm still unable to let go of the idea that, at this developmental stage, local collaborations geared toward local action and connection might serve as good "training wheels" before pushing kids off to ride global bicycles alone (and that's one mangled metaphor, but I hope you get my drift).

  In other words, "Think globally, act locally" might still be good advice for leading kids out from their classrooms and into the world - but first their close world, and later, the far one. Local citizenship, as Morgante noted above, has more immediate and personal results; and more importantly, aims to improve the local community. That's something best done by the local players, students included.

  Which is not to say there's not room for both.

  Thanks for weighing in.

  Would you like that statue in bronze, or marble?

• At July 28, 2008, Gregory Louie wrote:

  Hi All,

  I love the lyrics in this song sung by Kathy Mattea and written by Pat Alger and Ralph Murphy. It reminds me of the wisdom of taking the longer perspective when working with students.

  "Sometimes I stop on my way home

  And watch the children play

  And I wonder if they wonder

  What they'll be someday

  Some will dream a big dream

  And make it all come true

  While others go on dreaming

  Of things they'll never do

  We're all just seeds

  In God's hands

  We start the same

  But where we land

  Is sometimes fertile soil

  And sometimes sand

  We're all just seeds

  In God's hands

  I saw a friend the other day

  I hardly recognized

  He'd done a lot of living

  Since I'd last looked in his eyes

  He told his tale of how he'd failed

  The lessons he'd been taught

  But he offered no excuses

  And he left me with this thought

  We're all just seeds

  In God's hands

  We start the same

  But where we land

  Is sometimes fertile soil

  And sometimes sand

  We're all just seeds

  In God's hands

  As I'm standing at a crossroads once again

  I'm reminded we're all the same when we begin

  And in the end...

  We're all just seeds

  In God's hands

  We start the same

  But where we land

  Is sometimes fertile soil

  And sometimes sand

  We're all just seeds

  In God's hands

  We're all just seeds

  In God's hands"

  I love the sentiments expressed here. Looking back to those confused teenage periods in my own life, I see how my best teachers planted some powerful seeds. The most powerful where ones that eventually formed the foundations of my own philosophy of being in the world by exposing me to the wisdom of ancient cultures. These were the seeds that formed the basis for the understanding of my own soul.

  I wonder what I would have said about those lessons back when I was a teenager. I expect I would have mocked them like so many others of my peer group, but that mocking would not have truly reflected the impact those lessons had in forming my way of being in the world.

  As a teacher, I try to develop the mindset of one of my many mentors, the one who plants trees. He told me that he plants them not from himself, but for his children's children. His is a perspective that has wisdom and honors the totality of the human life span.

  So I teach, innovate where I can and continue to hope and trust that seeds planted today will grow in unknowable but profound and beautiful ways.

  All the best in everything that you do,

  Greg

• At July 31, 2008, Estie Cuellar wrote:

  I'd like to weigh in on this topic from a different perspective. I left "Corporate America" several years back to teach Career and Technology Education classes to high school youth. I made this leap because I was tired of improving a corporate bottom line--I wanted to do 'something' to improve the lives of young people in what is an increasingly competitive job market (not to mention getting into college!).

  With that said...my perspective is shaped, honed, skewed (possibly) from a business perspective. While I admit that I am a newbie with regard to wikis and global collaboration in my classroom, I am a seasoned veteran with regard to building and sustaining a competitive advantage in the workplace.

  In my estimation, our students need all types of collaboration--building, local, national, and global. And, as others have already stated we can't collaborate just for collaboration's sake. Young adults (all of us, actually) are always asking, "So what?" As educators it's our responsibility to answer all of the 'so what' questions before they are asked...we have to let the students know up front 'what's in it for them.' If the content isn't relevant, if they can't make the connection(s) on how they can apply (in the 'real world') what they are to learn, then what's the point?

  I consider it my 'duty' if you will to prepare my students for the inordinate amount of (and sometimes downright nasty) competition they will face as they enter the marketplace. In addition, I am driven to teach my students how to build and sustain a competitive advantage in both college and career. By participating in meaningful collaboration projects (be they global or otherwise), students are exposed to another valuable learning tool that will help them build that advantage.

  Estie Cuellars last blog post..Thing #20 YouTube and TeacherTube (part 2)

• At August 1, 2008, George wrote:

  Sorry for being late! I am slowly going through this but, here is the response I posted on danah's blog post. [you have my email if you're still interested]

  I don't think that teens lack the psychocosial foundations of connecting with the world. For the past 4 years, we have held global projects connecting 3 million students from across the world with each other and with experts investigating environmental change and life in the Arctic regions of the world. Their experiences caused change rarely seen in the regular old classroom. In other words, they initiated action within their own community, holding fundraisers, carving dogsleds (the projects have to do with dogsleding across the arctic), and striving to teach others (adults and teens alike) that local actions have global implications... My perspective is that teens are ready. We just need to figure out the best way to get them excited about such projects. If you just tell them "hey look, here's a kid in Greece, talk to her" I don't think you'll be seeing much "change."

I’m thinking of so many public attacks on so many contributors to this community - adult and young adult - recently, in which the victims of the attacks did nothing to provoke those who attacked them.  I’m not going to link to any of them, because I don’t want to give them publicity.  I just want to try to articulate some things keeping me from sleeping tonight.  And since I do want to try to sleep again, I think I’ll condense them into a list:

1. Stats and rankings seem increasingly insidious to me. The more we value them, the more prone we are to follow the path of Fox News in a race to the bottom, for the sake of pushing our stats to the top. Dylan said it well in “Idiot Wind”:

Now everything’s a little upside down
As a matter of fact, the wheels have stopped.
What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good,
You’ll find out when you reach the top
You’re on the bottom.

(–On a personal note, I’ll share that the unexpected and completely surprising rise of this blog’s readership over the past few months has tempted me more than once to publish posts that now embarrass me. I wanted more “fame,” which is a ridiculously overblown term for such a small niche in the web. I’m going to keep my Technorati widget, because the connectivity it provides is good; but I’m going to remove the reactions rating.)

2. To insist that we know better than others because we’re “trained professionals” is dangerous. Lobotomists used that argument in the ’50s and ’60s, and blood-letters before them. Readers of Pink’s A Whole New Mind, regardless of their views of the book, may remember reading that today’s physicians are being trained, as “professionals,” to learn how to listen to their patients. The web has made it possible for us to listen to our own customers - students - in a manner unparalleled in history. To insist we’re professionals, with drop-out rates soaring and basic educational knowledge and skills plummeting, is a flimsy argument against listening to students who care enough to add their voices.

3. Speaking of physicians, these lines from the Hippocratic Oath seem applicable to educators - sheesh, to people generally - as well as to doctors:

I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.
I will preserve the purity of my life and my arts. . . .
In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction. . . .
All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal.
If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and practice my art, respected by all men and in all times; but if I swerve from it or violate it, may the reverse be my lot.

4. We can talk about controversial ideas without mentioning individuals.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Here’s to diplomacy and openness.

11 Comments

• At July 14, 2008, diane wrote:

  Some of the comments I read online veer dangerously close to cyber bullying. The anger and derogatory tone linger long after the precipitating issue is forgotten.

  NECC was a shining opportunity for me to meet, in person, members of my PLN. Those I had grown close to via online interaction were, without exception, a pleasure to spend time with.

  When I encountered people who were virtual "acquaintances" I could gauge their interest in conversing by observing, body language, visual and auditory cues. That, of course, is missing in a totally digital relationship. The wrong word at at stressful moment can't be recalled or totally erased when it enters cyberspace.

  Computers have simultaneously enlarged and narrowed our vision. It's a point we need to keep in mind while flinging our thoughts out for all who care to read them.

  dianes last blog post..Where in the World? Part 2

• At July 14, 2008, Cathy Nelson wrote:

  WELL SAID Diane!! I love your ways with words.

  Cathy Nelsons last blog post..Survey says…results shared

• At July 14, 2008, Cathy Nelson wrote:

  "Praise locally, criticize globally."

  Said by Doug Johnson

  Blue Skunk Blog

  Cathy Nelsons last blog post..Survey says…results shared

• At July 14, 2008, Ken Allan wrote:

  Kia ora Diane

  I so agree with your line "computers have simultaneously enlarged and narrowed our vision." It is applicable to many other aspects of their use. But the dimension-narrowing in communication in particular is one that society has had ample opportunity to explore, long before computers came on the scene.

  It is simply a matter of scale.

  Writing letters is a singularly narrow means of communication, but it is interactive and it gives opportunity for many to explore the same vagaries of lack of vocal expression, facial expression, tempo and body language, as in digital communication.

  Publishing books and newspapers brings opportunity for these perpetrations to a wider audience and to some extent match the communication breadth of Web 1.0 Internet, at least in order of magnitude.

  There is nothing new with this in Web 2.0 except for the opportunity for open discussion to take place 24/7 in a public arena of prodigious size.

  Ka kite

  Ken Allans last blog post..A Message from Middle-earth on ItCanSay

• At July 14, 2008, Pat Hensley wrote:

  I'll be honest - I don't understand the personal attacks. I think that it is okay to disagree with others on issues and debate about them (that's the fun of the conversation!) but to attack someone because you disagree with their views is just immature behavior. I don't think it is diplomacy as much as it is just sensible mature grown up behavior. We have a policy in our house that our kids grew up with and we try to model this constantly: If you have nothing nice to say, then don't say anything at all. This policy is also followed in my classroom. Why can't grownups act like grownups? Thanks for a great post!

• At July 14, 2008, Andrew wrote:

  Thank you for encouraging others to discuss issues in a civil manner. We need the free exchange of ideas in order to improve our community. Local, national, global, and virtual...

  Most of us have at least two (hundred) reflective moments of, "Oh crap, did I really say that?" Good parents and teachers correct those faults and lead us to reflection without belittling the individual.

  Well done.

  Andrews last blog post..Obama-Care Versus McCain-Care

• At July 21, 2008, The Jose Vilson — Short Notes: Vale La Pena (It’s Worth The Sorrow) wrote:

  [...] got to thinking about that because of this last post by Clay Burell that resonated with me a bit. Yes, it’s about the edublogosphere and how people care too much [...]

• At July 22, 2008, Tracy Rosen wrote:

  It begs the question - why do we blog?

  I blog because it helps me to think.

  And it offers the added bonus of getting input on my thought processes from others - in writing so I can look back and reflect.

  If I ever start to forget about why I blog I hope that I can at least remember some of what you have written here.

  Tracy

  ps - I use the same template for my class blogs - how did you get the translation bits at the top to stop sliding down the side?

  Tracy Rosens last blog post..I unlocked the key to Mysql and Php :)

• At July 22, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Tracy, your comments about why you blog really hit home. That's how I used to feel about it, and wish I still did - and how I'm trying to feel again by doing some mental hygiene to get back to basics.

  Thanks for the comments, all.

  I fantasize that people who race to the bottom for stats get waves of comments calling them on it. It's amazing how little we see that happen.

• At July 22, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Tracy, I never had the sliding translator feature. Sure you're not talking about a theme other than Widejournal - maybe hyperreal?

• At July 23, 2008, Tracy Rosen wrote:

  You're right --> © 2007 Miss Rosen’s Classroom. Powered by Wordpress wearing MyJournal Hypereal

  They both look quite similar! Maybe I'll do a switch then, the sliding is annoying.

  (ps - that's another reason I blog, to play with blog design. Satisfies my need to play with visuals AND write...amazing )

  Tracy Rosens last blog post..I unlocked the key to Mysql and Php :)

Goal:  Work to build multiple and overlapping communities of learners in our district who have knowledge, expertise and/or interest in the hardware and software and services that our district is supporting.  Help those communities to begin to learn from each other and to support each other in their teaching and learning.  As best as I can, document and share the learning and stories of the community.

I’m aware of so much potential in our classrooms and schools, and so many new tools that are coming online in the district that can be used to help students and teachers create deep and meaningful opportunities for learning and reflection in our classrooms.  These are tools like laptops (three new elementary schools, opening in the fall, will have laptops for every teacher; many more schools are investing in laptops for some teachers to be used with) interactive whiteboards, and/or clickers and document cameras, software like ActivStudio, which we’re trying to standardize on across the district, and services like Moodle, which powers our St. Vrain Virtual Campus.

There are a multitude of projects and programs that already meet and discuss some of these issues - but there’s nowhere to go to see all of those conversations, or for folks who aren’t already connected to those groups to have the opportunity to find ways into the conversations.  I also know that, with so many resources out there, we need to do a good job of aggregating all of that stuff somewhere (or somewheres) and then helping people to find that space.

Also, if we can work to build and/or sustain these communities, we can work to develop leadership on instructional issues in our district.  Better yet, we can help teachers to teach teachers.  That’s a good thing. I believe very strongly that the answers to most of the important questions facing schools and teachers and learning and students aren’t going to come out of school districts - they’re going to come out of classrooms.  It’s my job to help get the stories out there and the people connected.

That Networked Learning elective “English Seminar” class I taught last semester ended two weeks ago. (Sift through the archives for related posts.)

For new readers or simply people not tuned in here during the last six months, here’s a recap: Ten students of mixed grades (9-12, ages 15-18), each with a MacBook laptop (the school is 1:1), were given the most open, autonomous, swim-or-drown class experience they’d probably ever had, and are likely to ever have again.

The idea was simple:

This is a language arts course: writing, speaking, communicating.  If you spend this semester communicating about topics that “teacher” assigns, you will not be real writers. You will just be doing homework.  Writers write of their own interests and ideas.  That means you will have to find your own topics, in order to experience being a writer, speaker, film-maker, etc.

So you will develop a web-based project based on your interests; use whatever modes of communication you desire - writing, podcasting, screencasting, movie-making, etc; launch and grow your project over six months, and apply the principals of quality - in whatever “language art” mode you’ve chosen - from the mini-lessons and sitting together conferences we had; do your project singly or in teams; extra credit for using Twitter, Skype, Facebook, YouTube, and the rest to network, go global, and “imagine big.”

If you “try big” and fail, you can still receive an A, if you articulate and apply the lessons your failures taught you.

A six month project in absolute freedom will bring you to brick walls, slumps, quagmires, that may last for weeks.  As long as you push through them, and come out the other side, you don’t need to fear for your grade. I want you to experience the difficulty of not being able to quit in the face of adversity, the difficulty of freedom and responsibility, of keeping an idea alive.

If you’re lazy, unproductive, unimaginative, unconcerned about quality - you won’t do well.

You will be given almost the entirety of each 77-minute class to independently work on your project. I will occasionally give whole-class mini-lessons on authentically good writing, audio- and video-production, and will also check in with each of you by simply pulling up a chair next to you and talking about your progress, challenges, and thoughts. But the rest of the time will be yours to work. So you have no excuse for not getting that work done.

You will grade yourselves, by the way, based on your monthly production and reflection on lessons learned. You’ll have to justify your grades with evidence of your work.

Since it was the most “radical” (per Dean) “releasing of the hounds” (if I have Chris Harbeck’s gist right) and “edupunk” (if Lindsea is right, since I didn’t jump on that meme) thing I’ve done in my teaching career, and since I wrote about it regularly throughout the semester, I want to honor my contract with a final report to whatever readers out there wonder, “How did that ever turn out, anyway?”

The problem is, I’m overloaded right now. I just got back from Hong Kong yesterday, still have immigration issues to deal with, a career transition to navigate, and a new apartment to move into in ten days.

So I’m going to share with you excerpts from the final reflections some of the students wrote during the final exam, in a series. I’ll preface each student with my own summary of his/her project, and anecdotal impressions of his/her journey. A caveat, first: I wasn’t on top of my game in setting up these reflections. In the past, I’ve always created an anonymous user account on Moodle, and had students evaluate the course using that account in order to ensure maximum honesty via that anonymity. I didn’t do that this time. You’ll have to decide how much weight to give the following lines.

1. Younsuk and Jaeho: Basketball without Borders:

Younsuk, a sophomore, has been featured a lot on these pages over the last six months. He teamed with senior Jaeho to launch the Basketball without Borders project, which evolved into a beautifully networked series of podcasted Skype interviews with Asian college and professional basketball stars in the US and elsewhere. This project was the dark horse of the whole class, and it exploded in about month three to win the race by several lengths.  These guys astonished me with their ability to use their own personal and family networks to arrange interviews with players in Japan, Korea, and the US.  Nothing comes close, in my teaching experience, to seeing them enter the classroom so many times to say, “Mr. Burell, we have a Skype interview scheduled with [this or that player] for this class. Can we go to a quiet room?”  And then to see, at the end of the class, these successful audio producers come back in with grins wrapped so infectiously around their heads. (I videotaped them for Youtube in one such moment on this post.)

I had Younsuk as a freshman in English 9 the prior year - the first class I ever did classroom blogging with. I can tell you that his writing has gained impressively in ideas, in voice, in rhetoric, in style.

The irony? At the beginning of the class, Younsuk insisted, in no uncertain terms, that he had no interest in podcasting. Click here for all the posts on this blog with Younsuk and/or Jaeho.

Here are some excerpts from his reflection:

• This revolutionary course that I took this semester, revolutionized me as a person. I certainly became a better writer that cares. Through my project, I had real audience. In order to succeed, I had to have a good writing that catches people. I’ve learned to make the title catching, and I’ve learned to make sure the audience wanted to read. To do that, I had to think about the sentence styles, order of what I write about, and maybe throwing some nice metaphors. I’m starting to care about what I write a lot. And one can observe my improvement in writing if one reads my own blog. [note: this is not his PLN basketball blog, but his personal blog for his English class, now in its second year]
• As a thinker, I’ve learned to think. After doing a project about something I’m interested in, I’ve learned to think in my own way, that things  I like can turn into something like this [note: this is his basketball project blog]. After realizing this, I’ve learned to write about things that I like. And to me, writing is just like thinking. When I write about something I like, then I feel good. I’ve learned that ultimately, I would want to please the audience, but it all starts from pleasing myself with my own thoughts.
• I’ve learned that I’m a producer now.  I produce things. I’ve produced my website, I’ve produced the interviews, and I’ve produced the productivity. I never turned in anything. Everything I did in this class, was what I produced. I’ve learned that by producing, I can learn more.
• As a networker, I’m not a big user of twitter. But using our connection, we’ve reached three big-time interviewees. One of the tools that helped us was facebook. There are many “non-educational’ ways to use facebook, but it still keeps people in touch. It’s easy to contact people, and it’s easy to expand my network by becoming friends with my friends’ friends. This method led us to interview three big basketball figures in Asia. Connection is important, because with one, you can have a million.
• Again, I thank Mr. Burell for this revolutionary class. It was the only real experience I had at school.

Re: that last bullet: Man, if only students realized how much teachers need to hear that from their students. My morale would have been so much higher this semester if I’d only known he was getting what I was trying to deliver. Hear this, students: your teachers need positive feedback more than you realize. Give it to them, if you want them to stay in the classroom.

*    *    *

Jaeho was a senior, and Younsuk’s partner. As I said in a comment to Jaeho’s final reflection before graduating, “Thanks for making this vision worthwhile. It’s been amazing to know you as a student in this class, and as a different student in AP Lit. I much prefer this class.”

Because my wife just got home, and writing is a completely different endeavor as a married man (and this is light-years from a complaint, as I’m very, very happy), I’m going to simply paste Jaeho’s entire final post here (being on the school server, the entire pln blog will probably be deleted soon, so call this an archive):

Signing Off

Photo by: Jarrellish

“It is a small world after all”. The past five months truly taught me what this quote meant.

As with most other cases, the start was not so great. I did not want to make this into a academic, insignificant project. Deliberating desperately to figure out a way to make this work, I came up with a risky idea of focusing on the stereotypes about basketball. Due to the relatively long time that took us to decide on what we are going to do, the group went on a slow start.

Connecting to the world.. It was not so far away from us after all. After I chose the focus, things started to work out for us rather quickly. Luckily for us, the Columbia University basketball star Keijuro Matsui accepted our interview request. “Maybe this could actually work“, I thought to myself. Then Ko Yada, then Kelvin Kim. In approximately 4 weeks, we had interviewed 3 basketball sensations. The empty parking lot started to fill when visitors started coming to see the show and naturally the show began to flourish..

Writing… This was an inevitable part of the class. The primary problem was not knowing my weaknesses. It wasn’t too long before Mr. Burell pointed out that my sentence structures are always the same. (Subject verb object). Clearly, I had to change this style to make people want to read me. As time went, luckily for me, my writing improved to a level where Mr. Burell said “That was good!” I have not completely grasped the art of organic writing yet, but started to notice where to pause, where to put in the funny stuff. Looking back, my lack of confidence about writing was preventing me from trying out different things in my writing.

At this point, I can honestly say that the English Seminar Class has taught me two valuable experiences that I did not experience anywhere else. It has taught me the power of technology, and the techniques of creative writing.

For the ending, I want to thank Mr. Burell for having faith in us when we were lost in the Sahara Desert and helping us find something that can be extended into the world.  Thanks.

Stay tuned for a few more student reports.

4 Comments

• At June 21, 2008, Frank's Blog wrote:

  "The problem is, I’m overloaded right now. I just got back from Hong Kong yesterday, still have immigration issues to deal with, a career transition to navigate, and a new apartment to move into in ten days."

  ...I think Carrie from Sex in the City could relate well to you these days. He he he ,,,, sorry couldn't resist!

  Frank's Blogs last blog post..21CT: Firefox 3 Final Version Now Available

• At June 21, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Frank, the worst part of the move is all the shoes I'm having to box. Those and all my accessories. :P

  It's good to hear from you. Related to your own "overload" post recently.

  Did you _really_ have to drop your header, which was in my Edublog Creativity Hall of Fame?

• At June 22, 2008, Frank's Blog wrote:

  Hey Clay, hahaha! I wish I did have more shoes!

  The header image is smaller but has returned. I am working on a fix .. edublogs is working on adding feature to allow a sticky top post ..when they do that .. I can put it there again ..

  Your EFL students must be really advanced. If I had the conversation that you quoted above with my EFL students they would not "get it" at all. This is sad, since we are a neighbor to the USA. You would think that the geographical advantage would help; but it doesn't seem to.

  Thanks for your posts. And, yes ,,, I was busy but have now returened to blogging, twitter, and such. Thanks God. Hope the newlyweds are still having fun!

  Frank

  Frank's Blogs last blog post..21CT: How do you use Web 2.0 in classrooms?

• At June 23, 2008, diane wrote:

  I don't know the total count of students in your classes, but having even a few who experienced such personal growth would mark the whole year as a success in my book.

  You challenge them, Clay, you ask them to stretch and experiment. For those who accept the challenge, the change is truly life altering.

  dianes last blog post..Lolita in the Library, Vampires on the Shelves, and Gay Penguins in the Zoo