Remote Access

Thinwalls and The Outsiders

We are in the final throes of finishing up our study of the novel The Outsiders in our thinwalled classroom. Beginning with a Skype chat back in October (while I sat in a questionable professional development seminar actually), our study of this piece has taken us through different stages and steps.

We read the book in both class in Snow Lake and Los Angeles. Instead of assigning chapter questions to suck the life out of the book, instead we had the students write a reflective blog post every two chapters. At first, we left this wide open to students. We expected them to write a summary of the chapters and we also talked about things that could be written about (traditional elements of literature: characters, setting, predictions, author's craft and style, etc.). Later in this study, we gave the students several words (heroism, fear, survival, and friendship) and had them choose one of these words for each set of chapters and defend their choice based on the book.

This part of our connection went well. We also built time in to our classrooms to get students reading and commenting on the posts of other students. They were involved, interested, and debates raged across the classroom and the blogospere about various things that came up in the book. We ended up with a fair number of pieces we were pleased that the students had produced.

For a final project, we wanted to take a different tact. We wanted the students to become more independent and think their way through this piece of literature. We set up a wiki where we asked kids to choose a theme from the book and organize themselves into the spaces they are interested in. After some shuffling, we had 17 total groups. We hosted an initial chat on Moodle for the students to set up their own times to chat. In this initial chat the students met to fill out a planning template we had posted on their wiki page. A basic outline asking them about their form of representation, a timeline outlining each partner's responsibility and their focus. From this point we provided class time and the students were on their way. While all of the students decided on a presentation of some kind (PPT or Google presentations or Voicethread), this actually might not have been a bad idea considering that we were only giving them two weeks to finish this project.

In the end, this was a successful connection but we learned a lot of things (as usual) about trying to hook kids together long term as we are doing:

- We've learned about the important of commenting on blogs compared to posting. They carry equal weight. They both need to be taught as skills and they both require extended periods of involvement to achieve some sort of mastery. For middle school students to push other learners in their class is something completely new to most of them and getting them to see the value of this difficult task is not easy.

- We spent the majority of our time during this part of our collaboration working with communication skills and channels. Over the course of this project, we had the kids using Moodle, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Meebo, Skype, email, and the discussion tab on their wiki page. This number of tools shows the number of troubles that we had. We moved into using IM in the classroom after pushing the edges of what we could get Moodle to do for us. We thought this would hep to solve our troubles and increase the capacity of our network. Instead, it brought new problems. In the end, we still had students who had trouble connecting and the number of channels available to them may have led to some troubles and misunderstandings as they were often unsure of what tool they were to be using. But as Barbara has mentioned on her blog, the chat transcripts and the discussion tabs on the students' wiki pages have given us a unique view of their challenges and thought processes. One take away from this process that we have is that we have now made it a classroom requirement that all students have Skype installed on their home computers. We require kids to have specific school supplies, why not specific software?

- A constant stream of email, Skype chats and calls were required by the adults involved in this process to problem solve, open doors for students, and also to bring students together and hold them to account. We had to dedicate ourselves to this openness and these channels between our classrooms and schools. The time involved was not small, but this was essential to the success of this part of our collaboration. This was a "warts and all" process of transparency and openness.

Next up: a short collaboration, a compare and contrast activity of early leaders from Egypt and America allowing us to uncover ideas of what makes a good leader and what a society needs to advance.

Photo Credit: Collaboration http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=235290355&size=m

Tags: thinwalls, The Outsiders, collaboration, Skype, dare-to-dream, Barbara Barreda

I Want to Play

"(Writing) is like making spore marks from mushrooms on white paper and swiping them away, looking for patterns."

- William Gibson being interviewed by the CBC.

William Gibson is one of my favourite authors and I spent last weekend getting a good start on his new book, Spook Country. I also realized something else this weekend: I expect to be able to play with the texts I am spending time with.

Fro example, in the novel, Hubertus Bigend is one of the main characters. Wondering who he is, one of his new employees Googles him and finds a Wikipedia entry. The funny thing is, on a whim I tried to find Hubertus Bigend on Wikipedia too; and I found him. Since the book came out, someone has created this entry and has used Gibson's words from the book. The same is true for Node. This is a magazine that turns up in Spook Country. Scary thing is, someone took this magazine and turned it into a real website. Wondering what else I could find I searched around and found William Gibson discussion boards, his own official website, and an hour long interview with him done recently by the CBC. This is what I listened to on my walk in to work this morning.

These texts are all interactive, they are extensions, playing off of the original, an organic growth. This is what it means to be literate. This is what I am demanding from the texts that I spend time with. I want to be able to dig further, to go beyond what I can see and read at first glance. I want to be able to read news articles and blog posts. I want to listen to the podcasts and search out the Flickr photos of the places that are mentioned in the book. I want fan fiction and more.

This is something the kids in our classrooms are getting as well. They want a full multimedia experience growing out from a single piece of text. They listen to the music, read the blog posts, and want to post their own comments, their thoughts, their YouTube pieces. They want to be a part of the discussion, the growth that happens from any text. Rigged up with a webcam, a built in microphone and a keyboard, they move between video, audio and text.

They expect to be part of the discussion, part of the living thing that text itself is becoming.  This is how we get kids excited about language, about writing, about thinking: by giving them the power to be part of the conversation. When we lock our machines down, filter their internet service and not allow them to be contributors we take away the involvement, the intensity, the power. Remember doing grammar worksheets in school? I don't. But I do remember art class, the time I got to take part in making a radio play and another teacher that let us act in class. They involved me, they challenged me, they forced me to think, to play with language, to defend my opinions.

Language fairly pulses and thrives across cyberspace. Let kids in to the conversation.

Rant over.

technorati tags:spook, country, william, gibson, language, classrooms, change

Blogs = Complex Spaces

Over the few years that I've been blogging, I've seen the sites themselves and the software take giant steps forward. Blogs are no longer just about text. As people have demanded more functionality, they have become complex spaces bringing together information from many different places and services.

This was brought home to me last week when I arrived in Shanghai along with a few others (virtually of course) to help out with one of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach's presentations. Chris Betcher from Australia put up a slide (which I captured using Jing, one of my new favourite little applications) on Elluminate that deconstructed one of blog posts. As the pictures shows, his blog aggregates information from many different places into a single Chris Betcher portal.

 

A blog is a complex space. A piece of text in its own right that is as complicated as a textbook of any kind. In fact, I believe it is much more complex as one blog may differ from another much more than one textbook from another. Combine this with the addition of hyperlinks taking readers on to other spaces and the level of reading comprehension needed to navigate a text like this rises dramatically.

As I become more convinced of the legitimacy of blogs as information sources and the staying, revolutionary power of participatory media, I also become more convinced of the need to teach students comprehension and navigation techniques just as we would with any other piece of text.

Colonization Project

As part of our grade eight social studies curriculum, we have to study European expansion and colonization across the world.

To get the students in my class involved in the topics and thinking in role more deeply about what the effect of these expansions were, they have started a new set of blogs. The students first brainstormed about where these colonies were, coming up with list that included Canada, the 13 colonies, Australia, Mexico, India, etc. From here, they organized themselves into pairs and have begun their research. One person in each pair is writing as the European, and the other as a native person who would have lived in this place during this time. As they are completing their research and putting it on one of our wikis, they also need to write a series of blog posts, in character explaining what is happening. Some of these posts need to be pre contact and others post contact. I am hoping to see their thoughts develop and change over these posts. As well, they each must comment on all of the posts written by the other person.

While this project is only beginning, I am seeing some interesting things. Much deeper research and information synthesis has been the first result. As well, the students are becoming much more involved and are seeing this issue in a different light then a pure research project would allow them to. The connections and interaction possible through blogging is making the students much more aware that there are two sides to the story. They are seeing the realities of the time and the characters involved as humans with different motivations.

Our school year continues until June 30th so this will probably take us up until the end. I am interested to see where we go.

Several of the blogs are available at:

Jamestown

Canada

India

Caribbean

technorati tags:colonization, project, weblogs, school

International Polar Year

Looking for a "cool" new blog to watch?

The University of Alabama at Birmingham is participating in the research that is happening for the International Polar Year. As part of this research they have started a blog, a YouTube channel and a flickr set.

Excellent places to watch over the coming year and great resources for kids.

technorati tags:poar, year, antarctica, uab

The Case of the Disappearing Comments

Interesting.

Was over at Bud's blog looking up a few things when I was touring through his cocomment sidebar and saw he had recently left a comment on a post I wrote yesterday. The only touble is that it never showed up! I also know that Darren left a comment on this same post, it even shows it on the backchannels of my Typepad account, but it is gone as well.

Anyone else left me comments only to see them disappear? Anyone else finding this with Typepad?

Maintaining What You've Got

As we return to the bright lights of the classroom this week, we are beginning with looking at the resources we've got and looking for new voices. I've asked each of the kids in my classroom to email me a list of their Bloglines account so that I can go through it with them, ask them a few questions about it, and ensure they are meeting the requirements I have for their accounts (subscriptions to several required reading blogs, 10 - 12 self - selected student bloggers of which a maximum of 50% can be local kids, all subscriptions "school - appropriate" and respectful of our internet usage policy.)

We've also looked at our classroom suprglu account, their blogs, spam filters and blockers, their settings, our Flickr account, etc. Several of the kids grumbled about having to complete these tasks, wondering if textbooks would just be easier. I agreed with them, textbooks would be easier; but also far less interesting, immediate, and up - to - date. They agreed with that.

Maintaining what you've got is part of working with online resources. Calendars need checking and updating, filters and feeds need to be checked, banners need to be changed. We often take an 80 minute class approximately once a month to do this kind of work. It's like house cleaning. It's a new and different skill compared to anything else working offline brings. But it is one of the realities of working in these ways. Books sit on shelves and often don't need to be looked at for years on end until the dust builds up and the bindings crack. Feeds and filters are active and need looking after.

technorati tags:blogs, suprglu, maintain

Watch Lists

As a piece of a lesson on flexing the power of your personal learning networks, today I showed the kids in my class about Technorati and how to create an RSS watch list.

They seemed to get it almost instantly, which is different from kids last year. Not to insult the class I had last year at all, I think it has much more to do with how much we've learned this year about harnessing the power of RSS feeds for learning. With the environmental issues science unit we just completed, and the upcoming, self - chosen language arts units we are beginning immediately after Christmas, watch lists can be very valuable as the kids search for new perspectives and ideas on their topics.

Last year when I talked to my class about watch lists, they ended up to really be a tool that few people made any use of. We hadn't spent enough time as a class with Technorati and with RSS feeds in a deeper way for the kids to understand the usefulness of working in this way. Today was met with much more success and it is always a good day (especially this close to Christmas holidays!) when the kids can learn to harness a new tool for the benefit of their learning.

technorati tags:technorati, watch, list, tool

Blogging Peaks in 2007?

CBC's website is quoting a study from Gartner Inc. that the number of blogs world wide will peak and level off in 2007.

After a constant barrage of Technorati statistics for the past several years showing an ever increasing number of blogs, Gartner simply says that the number of people who want to try blogs are soon going to have done so, and others will move on to something else.

This week I also read somewhere (sorry for the lack of linkage) that the number of downloads from the iTunes music store are dramatically falling as well.

Signs of changing patterns of online behaviour?

What's coming up next?

technorati tags:cbc, blogging, gartner, technorati, itunes, change

Co - Opting Their Literacies

I think I'm getting it.

Or possibly not getting it.....?

I've found a number of interesting, challenging sessions here at NCTE in Nashville. I've had the privilege of seeing Scott McCloud yesterday morning speak about graphic novels, their relationships to comics, and a connection to things such as calligraphy and Egyptian pictographs. I also listened to M.T. Anderson, the author of Feed, among other things, talking about how an author constructs a world that is immersive, crafted, and well - researched.

But a few sessions I've been in have been disappointing. Sessions like "Using Hip - Hop to Teach "X." In other sessions I've heard teachers enthused and gushing about weblogs in their classrooms. My ears perk up and my level of hope rises, only to hear them go on to discuss how their weblogs are locked down and closed off from the general public. When they show screen shots of their work, we see a list of teacher generated prompts with kids simply responding to them.

Sessions like these make me think two main things. First of all, we still don't get it. We are still trying to appropriate the literacy practices of youth culture, and co-opt them for our own means. We use hip - hop to teach grammar. We use blogs to nitpick the ultra fine points of novels and to teach grammar. We don't honour the literacy practices of the people in our classrooms for what they are. To many teachers, they are not legitimate on their own. It is OK to sue blogs, as long as we are tearing apart their writing while we use them. We will teach them how to shoot video, but only for a "feel - good" unit, a reward if they work hard on the other stuff we want them to do. New literacy practices become the sugar which makes the medicine go down easier.

Second, we still crave control. We are willing to give kids the experience of blogging, if they are responding to a list of prompts. We are willing to use video if the videos are a series of X number of shots, each lasting no longer then X number of seconds. We definitely do need to teach structure and use frameworks with kids; they need a frame and a form to hang their thinking on, but to me, it smacks of assignments not changing. Are we still doing old things in new ways? 5 paragraph essays in video form?

Today is my final day in Nashville. Tomorrow will be a very, very long day as I leave the hotel around 6 A.M., fly to Minneapolis, Winnipeg, and then drive North for seven hours to return to Snow Lake. It has been an interesting trip, and a worth while trip. I have met a lot of interesting people, renewed some relationships from last year's NCTE conference in Pittsburgh, and made new contacts.

I'm glad to see more sessions on topics like graphic novels, video editing, and blogging, but now we need to move along our pedagogy to match the tools we have access to.

technorati tags:learning, literacy, NCTE, Nashville, change