Although it sounds sad, it really isn’t.

For those of you who have been reading this blog for a while and those of you who are reading it for the first time, I have some very exciting news. I have decided to join together my blog, podcast, and various project sites into one resource: Learning is Change.

I have found that working with so many different platforms has left me a little frazzled and strapped for time. I have also gotten tired of other people (podomatic and edublogs) having more control over my content than I do. So, starting today, I will be posting regularly on the Learning is Change blog and Podcast.

All of the content from both this blog and Discourse About Discourse: Educasts has been painstakingly recreated (okay, so I just copied it over) on the new server. Those of you who subscribe to my feed through feedburner will be unaffected, but if you subscribe to the edublogs feed, you will need to switch over to http://learningischange.com/feed/.

I am very excited about this new venture that I am undertaking. Please check it out and let me know what you think. I have set up video and audio comments, so that I can hear my audience first hand. I hope to see or hear from you soon.

You are invited to attend the Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation Conference.

What is Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation?

Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, is a one day conference/meetup for teachers, administrators, students, school board members, parents and anyone who is interested in education. It will be held on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008, from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, USA.

Education is conversation. Conversation creates change.

The future of education does not exist in the isolated world of theory and abstract conference sessions. Instead, it exists in conversations. It exists in creating a robust learning network that is ever-expanding and just-in-time. Learning 2.0 is not the beginning of this conversation. It is merely a stopping point, a time to talk about the visible difference that we all seek. We read. We reflect. We write. We share. We learn. Come join us for a day of conversation about learning and technology.

You can learn much more about the conference on the wiki, including information about registering. Here are some highlights:

Tentative Schedule
We’re still working on the details so this will be updated before the conference. Also, this may expand if we have more folks register than we are anticipating. (To quote Bud Hunt, “This conference stuff is hard!”)

Registration
You must register so that we know how many folks to expect and so that we can have enough lunches available. (Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?)

Cost

Free, baby. And lunch is included, thanks to the generous support of Littleton Public Schools, St. Vrain Valley Public Schools, and Arapahoe High School.

Wireless

BYOL (that would be Bring Your Own Laptop) – we’ll have wireless access to the Internet (filtered) – we may test our capacity to handle density of machines, but hopefully things will go swimmingly. If not, we have wired machines in various places you can access.

Questions for Students
We’re having a student panel discussion during lunch. Here’s your chance to submit some questions for them to consider.

Invite Others

We strongly encourage you to invite other folks from your school, district, neighborhood, or learning network to attend as well. It would be great if everyone could bring at least one person with them that is perhaps new to this conversation. Put up THIS POSTER everywhere you can (within reason).

Questions?

Feel free to email Karl Fisch, Bud Hunt, Ben Wilkoff or Mike Porter .

I’m not sure how many people truly mean it when they say it, but I am truly honored by my inclusion in the Most Influential Blog Post category of the 2007 Edublog Awards for The Ripe Environment.

To be along side Karl Fisch and his amazing work to create a mirror for our schools…

To be next to Konrad Glogowski and his visual portrayal of pedagogy…

To be nestled in with Scott Mcleod and his viral networking power and ability to see the greatness in a single idea…

To be among Kris Bradburn and the challenges put out by Wandering Ink…

That is what I am most honored by.

Thanks to all who nominated me. If you care to, please vote for this blog. I don’t imagine I have written as influential of blog posts as the above bloggers, but I would like it not to be an absolute slaughter in the polls.

What do should we do in the classroom?

One of the biggest takeaways that I have been formulating at the Virtual Schools Symposium is that the hybrid model is not fiction. When students have access outside of class hours (and this is not a given by any means), shouldn’t we be expecting that they be connecting and collaborating during this time?

The more that I work with my new 7th graders (the students who I have only known under the Academy of Discovery Model), the more I realize that productivity is something that comes from having the ability to work at your own pace and schedule. I keep seeing the majority of essays being written at home even though I feel the obligation to give them time in class. I keep seeing my students make more meaning out of the emails and instant messages outside the classroom.

My real question, I guess, is what activity is so well suited to face-to-face contact that it can’t be replicated online? Whatever the answer to that question is, is what I need to be doing in my classroom, every day.

Here are my thoughts on what can’t be replicated online, yet:

• Debate – In its truest form, debate is a refined series of verbal arguments that require many people talking in rapid succession. Although you can do debate in an elluminate session, the passing of the mic is awkward at best and the visual separation of the competing sides is not possible.
• Networking – It is why we still come to conferences. Finding great people that you want to work with and that will challenge you is something that is lacking in the online world. A social network does create a sense of community amongst many people, but it the bonds forged are not immediate. They take time and tending. In face-to-face communication, it is easy to see the worthwhile. It is easy to recognize excellence. That is what classroom time can be: the search and recognition for excellence (in writing, in math, in science, etc.)

What are the things that you think are so essential in the classroom that they can’t be outsourced to a virtual space? (Do they still exist? Will they always exist?) I really want to know.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I hope to see you soon.

VSS Blogroll so far:

• Virtual High School Meanderings
• MrMoses

Technorati Tags: VSS2007

“The people that complain are our best customers, not our worst.” -Jackie Huba

In the keynote for NACOL VSS 2007: Jackie Huba, an advertising consultant and blogger, is talking about creating learning evangelists. Her idea is that word of mouth is all powerful. The students and parents that complain about learning are the ones that may be the biggest evangelists. They are the ones that care enough to put forth ideas. They are the ones who want a better product. For every complaint from them, many more complaints exist (she says 26).

What does this mean for us as teachers on the cutting (sometimes bleeding) edge of education?

Well, I think that we need to be able to pay attention to our critics and frame our ideas in order to make them into evangelists (I would call them advocates). We need to be solving issues of content and access so that our students and parents see that we are listening.

If we are listening to our stakeholders, we need to do something about it. Pushing further and further out into the blogosphere and online learning without listening to what is working and what isn’t will never create the kinds of advocates that we need. So, my next question is: How do we listen well? How do we use what we hear to change, or possibly, keep doing something that is working.

Point #2

“Google Never Forgets.”

If you post something, write something, create something, google will remember. Bad press matters, as does bad research, bad marketing, and bad framing. I want to make sure that I don’t make any missteps with my identity. Is that possible?

Technorati Tags: VSS2007

I was not the only one with this idea, however.

I just so happened to sit next to Kathryn Knox, Ph.D. (Senior Director of Curriculum and Instruction at the Colorado Virtual Academy) and we struck up quite the conversation about online learning.

My favorite part of the discussion was when we stumbled upon community as a tenet for a successful online school. She put it this way: “Without community you don’t have a school. You have a program but not a school.” This idea really caught me and it hasn’t let go yet.

Are we trying to create programs that are viable and sustainable, or are we trying to create communities that constantly need tweaking and guidance. The first is easy: Set up the systems, install the software, write the content. The second is terrifyingly hard: engage all stakeholders, listen, change.

I really need to keep looking at the Academy of Discovery to make sure that I am not just creating a program, I am creating a community.

Technorati Tags: VSS2007

But…

More and more I am coming to realize that most people are not looking for this. They do not want a searchable database of thousands of Web 2.0 offerings. Instead, they want a well organized document that makes the connections from technology to pedagogy for them. Most teachers are not trying to find a new way of mashing up two web pages so that it gives off a split screen effect (if anyone knows of something, let me know). Most teachers would say that is pretty geeky. And each and every one of them would be right.

I have made peace with my idiosyncratic geek status in the education world. I don’t want to be defined by it, but I am still proud of it. I think it is about time that I stop trying to make others like me, though.

Our model of success should not be to see how many people we can get to be WebHeads. Our model should start somewhere more along the lines of Step by Step: Building a 2.0 Classroom. Or prehaps, as simple as a series of documents. Something that could exist as paper, that could still have value in the analog world.

So, about a month ago I started working on such a document. The document is supposed to be an introduction to the essential tools and resources needed for creating an authentic learning environment online. It is not perfect, and it is not finished. When I started sharing the early version on Starting from Scratch, quite a few people contacted me wanting to know if they could use it. Please use it, upload it, change it, but keep me a part of the conversation.

• What should be there that isn’t?
• What can be eliminated as inessential?
• Can this document be used for other purposes?
• How can it be refined?
• What is the next step for teachers when they have the document?
• Is it enough to get people started?

If you missed the link to the document above: 101-resources-ver-2.pdf

Please let me know what you think.

A blog is informative, but stylistically so. The ability to craft a unique image within the information is a virtue that we should all be striving for. So, in an attempt to put these words into practice, here is what I am talking about.

Topic: Cell phones and iPods in the classroom

With his two fingers pushed together, carefully spreading them outward across the screen, one of my students was doing something that I had never thought of a couple of years ago. He was blogging from his iPod. Immediately, we gathered around the gadget, pondering its significance. It was distracting and powerful: the ability to blog about anything at any time. Just think if twitter wasn’t blocked at school.

I still can’t quite wrap my head around cell phones being used for things other than voice. I have been saying for quite a while that we need more laptops in the classroom, as many as there are laps. But can’t we get done most of what we need with our plans from verizon and AT&T? Watching the mini-safari browser spin into action leads me to believe that we aren’t far off from this reality.

I want my students to be thinking about how they can utilize their cell phones in my classroom not how they can sneak a look at what time it is on the display when I am not looking. Their cell phones are bejeweled with authenticity. In many cases, their cell phones are so representative of their lives that given the choice of losing a cell phone or a limb would cause them to pause to think.

Where is the research that says cell phones are great for the classroom. Well, mostly it doesn’t exist yet, at least not that I know of. If anyone has seen any great studies or has done some great work with non-laptop ITC, please share. All I have right now is anecdotal evidence from my classroom and the presentation from K12 Online 2007. Surely there is more to it than that.

I have italicized (for my students) the moments where I intentionally added imagery or description in order to make a potentially boring subject interesting (at least to me). My hope is that blogging moves closer to this style and further away from the dense writing of academic papers. Let me know what you think about either idea.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Well, the time has come for a new K12 Online conference, and I am happy to report that my daughter reached her first birthday without any major catastrophe (although she is still keeping me up at sometimes). This time, though, I am not merely listening in on the conversation. This time, I am a presenter in the Obstacles to Opportunities strand. It is my greatest hope that the work I have done for this conference will be seen in the same light by other new fathers who are trying to find a way to both cradle their baby’s head correctly and balance an iPod on their pajama leg.

So, if you are interested in the presentation check it out here. 

You may find the supporting documents even more intriguing, though:

1. Starting From Scratch Companion
   
2. Authentic Learning: Metaphor and Vision
3. 101 Resources and Tools for Authentic Learning

Some students blog because they have to. Some students blog because they enjoy using the technology. Some students blog because they like their choice of topics, but very few of my students blog because it is the life-blood of their communication. They don’t see it as their primary or even secondary way of putting ideas out into the greater world and getting validation for those ideas. This saddens me as much as it sobers me. I have been putting off thinking about it for a while because I believed that this kind of community would exist out of my classroom eventually if left alone. Unfortunately, I don’t think that a laissez-faire approach is going to do it.

That is why I now believe that every student blogger need to find a niche, a type and style of writing that best fits them and draws in a larger audience. This niche should not just be an understanding within the blogger him or herself; it should be a well articulated part of their writing.

So I say to my student bloggers:

You cannot create an audience from thin air, you must go in search of an one. You must write about things that make sense for you, that you are passionate about. You must go and find your niche. Subscribe to other’s blogs about sports. Find those interesting voices that you would like to become a part of. Link to them in your blogroll and in your posts. Start commenting on things that are outside of our small writing community. Break out of the repetitive storytelling that can lead to feedback loops within small groups of friends. Use Google Blog Search or Technorati. Use Netvibes or Google Reader. Work to find what you are looking for in your own writing. It may take longer to write your next post, but once you find your niche, you will be able to work within that framework that you have set up and never again be at a loss for words.

I can’t take any credit for this idea, though. I was inspired to try to make my blogging community a part of the greater conversation by two presentations at the K12 Online Conference.  If you haven’t checked out Sustained Blogging in the Classroom  or Initiating and Sustaining Conversations: Assessment and Evaluation in the Age of Networked Learning, you really should. The latter may be the best presentation on blogging in the classroom that I have ever witnessed.

Although I believe that my classroom blogging community is working, it has a lot more potential energy than kinetic at this point. I think only now am I really able to admit that to myself. I have found one of my own niche again: reflecting upon what goes on in my classroom.

For the Ripe Environment to exist, we have to have better (and more simple) reasons for doing what we do with technology. So, I was struck with the simplest of all reasons for using blogs in your classroom: It’s the content, stupid. (I believe this is the one and only time that my mind has blatantly stolen from Bill Clinton and his 1992 presidential campaign.)

The following is what I shared with my students after I shared my rather abrasive reasoning for blogging in the classroom.

That is why we use blogs to communicate, not because they are easy, not because they are more collaborative, it is simply because they let the content speak for itself. Without content you are nothing. Without great ideas there is no hope for the future. It is the content that matters, not the format. That is why we do blogs, to pull content up through the rss straw, roll it around in our mouth-like readers, tasting each smooth milkshake post and swallow it down, totally satisfying our desire to fill our bellies with content.

Now, content can be anything from stories to videos to embedded PowerPoint. The only crucial element of content is that you are proud enough of it to consider it yours. That means that content does not exist in an answer that was just done to get it over with. Content does not exist in the unrealized half-wonderings of a before school speed post. Content exists in thought-provoking ideas. It exists in well-worded prose or original poetry. Content is the torrent of inspiration that is created when authenticity is the goal, and you actually have the time to do something.

I actually wrote the preceding piece on my Palm Treo while I was eating cereal. I didn’t start writing it as a way of addressing The Ripe Environment, but this piece really gets at prerequisite number 6: Students and Educators should know that their products and ideas as valuable. If we are concerned with content, students will know that we genuinely care about what they express and teachers will know that their ideas will have some impact. If we focus too much on adding more features or tools to our toolkit, we will never get to the act of content creation. And that would be a very sad thing.

My Cross pen is always, always by my side. Slipping it over the edge of my pocket feels grand. It is that extra insurance for everything I do. I will never be without an idea because the idea instrument exists. It is connected to me.

I will use it on mundane homework, the calculus equations that fit so perfectly on the page. But, its real work, the strokes it was meant to make are the ones in my titled notebooks.

I sit in the cubicles that look like a swastika, only because they are the quietest place I can find. I pen the prose that only my best friends will see. This pen is for me, just like the time. I own it, forgetting all other writing implements, all other worries.

I am a cross pen moving the page to meet my needs. I am the world of ideas, stroking ego and creating the colossal theories that outline my outlook, my personality.

I believe that everything we do should be in the purpose of creation. We need to create the environment, create the products, create the expectations and create  the hope of a generation.

But, what is that hope? What can you possibly expect out of yourself to ensure that you are are a part of it?

I know that these are just words. I know that we actually have to do it. There is no way to get around the work that comes from creating.

So, when is it appropriate to look back? when is appropriate to take stock?

Every creation is worthy of reflection.

Just a few thoughts to get you thinking, I guess.

The social network that many of us have come to love, Classroom 2.0, is a space for teachers to come together and share ideas for and stories about teaching in the 21st century. Yet, so far, it has not been an avenue for turning on “would-be advocates” to social media. It has basically been a way of aggregating all of the great minds that are already engaged in the authentic use of technology. Although we may be able to see Classroom 2.0 as a living example of collaboration, most other people won’t. They will see it as a teacher-based myspace, a place where work and play blend into this muddy mixture that can not possibly pay attention to the details of an individual classroom.

So, if Classroom 2.0 isn’t it, then what are the Living Examples of collaboration that The Ripe Environment requires?

Well, I don’t have to look to much further than the hour and half I spent with these eight teachers. In fact, I don’t have to much further than the first few minutes I spent with them. In those beginning moments of our time together, I asked the following question: “How would your writing (and writing instruction) change if the form and content of your writing were separable?” Now, there is nothing very special about this question except in that it demands an answer. Most teachers cannot resist a question about how they will or will not change their teaching in light of a new idea. Better yet, this question does not ask for a generic answer that could have come from anyone, but a real answer that only the individual teacher can provide.

I realized, perhaps too late to make my presentation as good as it could be, that the only thing Living Examples require is action on the part of the newly initiated. If the example of collaboration can go on existing without the new teacher, it isn’t Living in the way that it should. If the type of collaboration is revolutionary but requires no revolutionary step on the part of the person seeing it for the first time, then it is just another piece of noise that can be filtered out.

There are too many collaborations going on in our edublogosphere that require only minimal thought and effort on the part of the observer. Classroom 2.0, for all of its merits, will continue to be an edubloggers’ paradise until new users are made to feel challenged by the very notion of collaboration. Where are the engaging questions that will bring new bloggers into our spaces? Where are the wonderful memes that grab a hold of our attentions? Why aren’t we reaching out with inquiry rather than answers?

We seem to simply accept that everyone should want to use blogs, podcasts, wikis, social networks and all of our other wonderful tools, but we really don’t ask other people if they agree. We need to let others poke holes in our logic/pedagogy. We need to ask others to contribute, not just to the periphery of the conversation, but to the hearty core. We need to let them change our spaces, to create the Living Examples for a new group of teachers, teachers that can get along fine without technology in their classrooms (or at least think they can).

So, those are the things I learned today. Throughout my presentation, the most engaging moments were when I was asking my fellow teachers to think about how they saw blogging working in their classrooms or how they envisioned a shift in their instruction.

The Living Examples, therefore, are time sensitive. They only exist for the moments in which a teacher feels challenged enough to act and collaborate with either the challenger or others who feel the same way. If they do not take advantage of the opportunity they have been confronted with, the same question or line of thinking will never engage them in the same way. They will need another Living Example of collaboration in order to get them into the Ripe Environment, and we need to create it for them.

So, I guess my challenge to anyone who reads this is as follows: What are the questions, ideas for inquiry, or memes that will get teachers and students to create Living Examples for one another?

“Honestly… because my friends will hear it.”  – Sam Altman

I’m pretty sure that this can become an analogy for why creating blogging and collaborative writing communities are so much more engaging than writing in a journal, writing an essay for a teacher, or taking notes in class that are only for a test. Students aren’t willing to put forth the equivalent of 99 cents of effort if only they (or only their teacher) is going to see it. However, if their content will be seen by many other students, they will put forth $5.00 worth of effort.

I want my kids to always put forth $5.00 worth of effort. I want them to continue to come back and purchase more and more content from the ideas that my classes provide. Are there any other ideas other than giving students the ability to broadcast/syndicate their content that will make sure that we receive that level of engagement and effort? What is the specific value of expression that engages students? How can we capitalize on it in our classrooms?

This woman really gets the kinds of environments that kids crave. She told the story of a character dying on Degrassi and students needing a place to grieve. She created that environment, gave kids the tools, and then let the kids talk. I find this anecdote to be extremely compelling. For the most part, I don’t do this in my classroom.

For the most part, we don’t show students compelling content and then let them recreate it. We don’t give them the tools and set up the environment and let them go. Why? Are we interested in what they would come up with, or are they more interested in seeing the kind of knowledge that they can amass?

I hope that we start to focus more on creating the environment and finding the best tools (ideas, resources, collaborative values, etc.) that will allow them to create or recreate learning. What are the standards for that?

His response was quite interesting. He first started talking about reassuring the teachers that they are working with turnitin.com and other anti-plagiarism sites, but then he started going on the offensive. He put a challenge out there for teachers: “We need to teach kids how to cite sources before fourth grade.” He said that most students are not trying to cheat; they just don’t know what qualifies as plagiarism. He also calls into the question the line between plagiarism and collaboration. We need to explain, expand, and explore this line.

Where is this line for you?

Should we respond to his challenge?

Clearly, this man is going to be a star. We need to watch his projects because he is going to move the debate, whether we are with him or not.

His research into fan fiction has helped him to think about online communities that create mentorships and opportunities for continual advancement. He talks about how kids start writing harry potter fan fiction one day and then two years later they are helping other writers to edit their work and get it ready for publication. This is an amazing process for creating mentors. Why aren’t our educational communities like this?

We need to create online mentorships between adults and students. This needs to not be a weird element that borders on child predator activity. How can we set up these connections so that the mentorships go both ways. The digital native/immigrant debate is counterproductive. It doesn’t allow these groups to blend and change. It doesn’t allow students to indoctrinate teachers. It doesn’t create the kind of hope that is possible when communities cross-pollinate.

How can we do this? I really want to know.

“It isn’t about pushing ideas down their throats, but rather letting them pull what they find useful.” -Music and Social Media

How can we let students pull content rather than pushing content upon them? How can we create an environment where there is so much content that students have to heavily explore and interact with the concepts in order to create meaning.

They must be able to access information at all times.

But, we shouldn’t be too eager to let them pull the answers out of the white noise of content. We should be helping them to craft the questions. There is no way that students will pull the right music, text, movies, concepts, skills, etc. unless they have crafted the right questions. We need to help them pull what will produce the most change, the most creation, the most higher order thinking skills.

We need students to pull, but we need them to pull well.

The first of the 10 prerequisites for The Ripe Environment is “Educators and learners must have a genuine need to be heard by others and, in one way or another, receive feedback for contributions.” This need for input and feedback equates to a continual longing for connection. Our ideas must be connected to other’s for them to have value. They must be experienced by someone out there somewhere who is intrigued, disgusted, embarrassed, or in some other way affected.

Connection is different in The Ripe Environment, though. It is no longer sufficient to meet someone and shake his or her hand. This is not a connection; it is merely a coincidence that both of you happen to be in the same room. A connection is something that is felt when ideas/personalities/beliefs meet one another and are challenged, bettered, or assimilated. Two people can be talking about the similar ideas or completely opposite opinions, but until a link is made between the two, neither are aware of the similarities and differences. That means, that there is no value held within either. And truly, connection is all about creating value for the the two people doing the connecting.

The three types of connections that create the most value are as follows:

• The 1:1
  • Definition: Two people with the same aims. A friend. An adversary. A person who encourages you to do your best work.
  • Examples: A twitter friend. Someone you e-mail/IM regularly that asks you exchange questions and answers with. A collaborative document (i.e., Google Docs)

• The autograph (aka 1:many)
  • Definition: A fan or follower of someone else’s ideas. An inspiration. A person that creates (or attempts to create) a movement.
  • Examples: A twitter follower. A blog that you read or write. A podcast. A comment on a blog post.

• The frame (aka many:many)
  • Definition: A builder upon other’s ideas. A new context for established content. A collaborative network.
  • Examples: A tweet. A Meme. A trackback. A Wiki. A webcast. A social network.

All three of these connections are essential for the culture of collaboration to occur. If we stop at merely 1:1 interaction, collective intelligence is wasted. If, on the other hand, if all we are doing is framing other’s ideas out in the open, there is never any time to develop personal relationships with those that can directly benefit from our ideas and help them to grow.

So, we can blend the three types of connections. A link within a blog is both a 1:1 and a 1:many, as is a comment. Blending personal and public connections is a way of introducing our own contacts to our greater network; it is a way of getting rid of the apprehension that people have about putting themselves “out there.”

For example, a colleague of mine writes great e-mails. They are concise and beautifully written. They are based in both theory and practice. They ask amazing questions and beg me to go deeper with everything I am working on. So, I tell him to start blogging the e-mails, and I ask him if I can podcast about them. What I am doing is introducing his ideas to some of the other people I am connecting to. These are the connections that make sense in The Ripe Environment because they don’t allow any good idea to stay archived in an e-mail folder, never to be heard from again.

My hope is that we start honoring these types of connections for the inspiration and passion that give to our daily lives. We cannot settle for an atmosphere of acquaintanceship in our learning communities. We must strive for an culture of connection.

This post is in draft form. My hope is that it will expand to include better definitions of each type of connection as well as examples. Please feel free to comment to that affect, or if you would prefer a more 1:1 connection, please e-mail me at benwilkoff@gmail.com. I would also like to thank those of you who are already interested in expanding upon this idea (Patrick Higgins, Chris Lehmann, Alec Couros, TechKnow, and Christian Long) . Please write as much about as you can. It is the only way that The Ripe Environment will actually occur.

I am tired of talking about the tools. Many of us have been talking about the tools for a long time now. We have said that using technology for technology’s sake is counterproductive. We want to use technology as a tool, right? But the tools for collaborating and creating are the largest sticking points for others. Teachers get caught up on jargon, on the basic skills of one program or process. They are still so focused on “podcasting” or “dreamweaver” that there is no room for creating the environment in which people will actually want to go beyond the tools, into true learning (you know, what we want our kids to be doing). What, then, is beyond the tools? What should we really be reaching for? The Ripe Environment. The simultaneous personal and public experience of using all of the tools at the teacher’s disposal to tear down walls, collaborate with each another, and question the traditional role of technology in the classroom.

So, how do we get to The Ripe Environment? Well, I have started to reflect on how I became a constant-learner and contributor to this thing I am more and more reluctant to call School 2.0. I want to replicate this process for others, and showing people my flickr account, my del.icio.us account, my blog, my podcast, my pedagogy, my wiki projects, and my twitter account just doesn’t seem to work very well. What does actually work is making sure that they have the right environment so that they can explore these resources on their own, through their own creation.

I am now proposing the 10 prerequisites for collaboration as a way of creating The Ripe Environment in the classroom, in a school, and in a district. There will be quite a few follow-up posts about this topic, but I wanted to get some feedback on what I have already written before I go too far off the deep end. Please leave a comment or e-mail me at benwilkoff@gmail.com.

Here they are:

In order for the environment to be ripe for collaboration, educators and learners must:

1. Have a genuine need to be heard by others and, in one way or another, receive feedback for contributions.
2. See living examples of collaboration (not case studies or projects from a few years ago) that they can become a part of.
3. Have the time to connect more than two dots together. (Rather than connecting: “My students need to know this” with “here is the information” they need to have time to connect “My student needs to know this” with “my students need to evaluate this for validity” with “my students need to know how to use this resource to find the information” with “my students need to create new information for others to use.”)
4. See collaboration as an extension of their natural instincts as a teacher (opening possibilities for learning).
5. Find the backchannels relevant to them (these backchannels must be encouraged and honored as vital sources of learning).
6. Know that their products and ideas are valuable.
7. Understand the marks of successful collaboration. (They have to know what it looks like.)
8. Accept that questions are both for interdependent and independent learning. (All questions are serious points of inquiry in The Ripe Environment.)
9. Believe that personal and professional change can never be institutionalized. (Individuals create change, not schools or districts.)
10. Know that meetings, conferences, and workshops are not the places where the most powerful learning and change takes place.

I will be writing more about each one of these 10 prerequisites, but please let me know what you think about them as stand-alone ideas.

This is both a big moment and a small blip, a tongue-tied mixed-feeling overture. It reassures me that I have done something important, but I that can never rest on my laurels. I will never stop being passionate about learning, nor will I cease to use collaborative tools in the classroom. This is who I am now, and apparently, that makes me a Totally Wired Teacher according to Edutopia, Yahoo Teachers, and Ypulse.

Steve Hargadon nominated me for this award about a month ago and I really didn’t think much of it. It seemed like the Edublog Awards, something way out of my reach. But, about a week and a half ago Anastasia Goodstein e-mailed me saying that I was one of two finalists, and that the interview for the final decision would take place later in the week. I was flabbergasted . I have never presented at a major conference. I have never met the likes of David Warlick or Stephen Downes. Surely, I could not be The Totally Wired Teacher of 2007.

After many nervous moments before the interview, I had the chance to talk to Karon Weber (this isn’t her site, but it does say that she used to work at pixar and that she created the gobbler feature for yahoo teachers), Jim Daly, Derek Baird, Anastasia Goodstein, and Nicol Addison (I couldn’t find a relevant site for her). I really enjoyed the interview, a half hour of talking about how my classroom has changed and how I have dealt with the unchanging traditions of schools.

Then, last Saturday I received this e-mail:

Hi Ben. I’m thrilled to let you know that you have been selected to be receive the first Totally Wired Teacher Award at the Ypulse Mashup in San Francisco! We were all incredibly impressed with the trailblazing work you’ve done with your students.

I have always wanted to do something that I love, and teaching and learning is as good as it gets for me. That is why this award comes as such a wonderful surprise. I have found fulfillment in creating authentic learning environments for others. But, if this award is a symbol of that fulfillment, it is only the most concrete symbol.

If I have learned anything from the past few weeks, it is that we need to recognize those around us that are doing great work, and not just with words. We need to value them with the actions of collaboration and respect. So, instead of using this blog post to gloat about doing such great things in my classroom, I would like to take a moment to recognize those who have inspired me, who have led to this achievement:

1.  Bud Hunt - He is one blogger who I have followed for a long time, but only recently met. His words of struggle and success keep me going. His ability to also have a young family and do what he loves is evidence that it is possible.
2. Karl Fisch – When I stumbled upon his professional development blog a little over a year ago, I read everything. I think his blog is the only one that I can honestly say that I have read every word of. I would just sit there nodding my head at his ideas, and each one of them has challenged me to be a better teacher.
3. Vicki Davis (the other finalist for Totally Wired Teacher, incidentally) – Her observations on how blogging and wiki creation can change the classroom are wonderful. Her work with constantly expanding the boundaries of school mean that it is easier for me to try it.
4. Paul Allison – His forward thinking and questioning never get old. His voice of struggle is sometimes the only one that resonates with my experience. He is doing great things, even if he isn’t always convinced of it.
5. Clarence Fischer – I always want to hear what he has to say on an issue. He has a way of distilling his ideas into easily thought-through chunks. I also like building off of all of the observations he has of the edublogosphere and his classroom. I also appreciate that he is never too tired to reflect upon his practice.

To all of you, Thanks. I hope that this informal award means something to you.

This phenomenon, although real and slightly annoying, is not what I want to concentrate on. I don’t want to plumb the depths of why it is that people around the world will comment on your blog and give you feedback on your work, but it is maddening to just get a coworker to check out a great resource. I’m not interested in figuring out why the parents of your students are less inspired than the parents of other teachers’ students. In fact, I really don’t care that the recognition for doing online presentations and creating learning objects that are widely held as groundbreaking is seen in local circles as an affront to the organization from which you hail.

All hyperbole aside, what I would like to focus on is creating collaborative opportunities in your “own town.” How can we go about making sure that the great types of conversation and feedback described above are going on in the hallways in between classes?

Well, I think I have come up with three things that will help:

1. Wear your passion on your sleeve.
2. Reach out on a consistent basis.
3. Find a way to incorporate what others are doing already into your vision.

I have been e-mailing quite a bit about my podcast on this topic. There are a few teachers out there that are wrestling with the use of technology in their teaching. One such teacher, Jason Hando, said that he worked with a “flat world” project initially without applying all of the technology. After he had worn his passion on his sleeve for a while, he applied some web 2.0 technology in the form of a blog and received positive feedback from his school administration, including his principal.

This is not the only kind of passion that I think we can wear on our sleeve. We can be constantly talking about the great resources that we have found in our feed readers. We can be showing off the authentic products that our students are creating daily. Eventually other teachers will start to ask us how we are doing this. We can let our students and their parents become the advocates for the kind of learning experiences that are abundant in our classrooms. They will start wearing our passion on their sleeves too.

We should also be sending feelers out every once in a while for anyone who is ready to incorporate School 2.0, even to the smallest degree. Hold a class on blogging in the classroom even if you know only 5 people will show up. Send an e-mail tell others what you are doing that you know will only be read and trashed by the majority of your staff. Pull other people into a project that you are working on if they are on the outside looking in at your technology realization. Be the one teacher that “gets it,” but isn’t angry that others don’t.

The last thing that I have found for working collaboration with the people around you into your hectic global collaboration schedule is to honor what the teachers in your school are already doing. I am a big fan of looking at a project that is already in place and just making it 2.0. A great example of this was when my team decided that we were going to go on a field trip to Denver. Most of the other teams in the school were having the kids to a scavenger hunt of key places in the downtown area and answering questions on a sheet of paper, which was to be turned in and never to be heard from again. My way of making this trip into a “2.0″ experience was to use Mapwing so that my students could make interactive tours of downtown which could be looked at by anyone from around the world to find out more about our fine city.

Each teacher on our team was able to contribute their expertise to the project, but we were showing the kids how to collaborate and create in an authentic way. My hope is that more of these types of cross-curriculum projects start to happen organically because we have opened up the door by using what was already in existence.

What do you think? Are there other ways to create collaboration in our own towns and become, if not prophets, at least teachers with advice and experience worth sharing?

When I first learned how to harness the power of the read/write web, it was by aggregating all of the blogs that meant something to me. Whether it was answering the daily challenges of Weblogg-ed, finding meaning in Edublog Insights, or trying to parse through the Borderland, I was enraptured by all of the great work already happening in the edublogosphere.

Now, I find myself with less and less time to read what others are because I am so consumed with trying to make my own vision of School 2.0 work. In some ways I think that this is an improvement. I am now participating in the conversation rather than just observing it. But, in many other ways, this is not an improvement. Will Richardson is always talking about how reading blogs prepares you for writing them, but finding the time to consume information that is not directly related to the projects that you are working on is harder than I would have ever imagined. The pile of blog posts just keeps adding up. And according to this, I will never catch up unless I do something drastic.

Well, I think I may have found a solution, both for myself and for all of the people who seem to be having the same trouble (I know that there are at least a few of you out there). I have been playing around with my new Palm T|X, which was purchased with funds from my school district’s Digital Educator Program. At first, I was rather disappointed with the limited web functionality of the built in browser. That is until I realized just how effective of a feed reader a palm pilot can be. Google Reader Mobile allows me to read one post at a time and then progress to the next. I don’t have to worry about seeing the 2000 blog posts that are unread. I can focus on just one. I can also pull it out whenever I have a free moment. I don’t have to pull out my laptop and fire up bloglines and search for something good to read. It becomes a book of blogs for me. It becomes the way for me to catch up again and listen in on the conversations going on in the edublogosphere.

The real reason, though, that I am so excited about finding this new feed reader is that I can imagine having a set of these in the classroom (5-10) and setting them up next to the bookshelf. Anytime a student wants to read something written by a fellow classmate, they take a palm pilot off of the shelf and read a few blog posts. This would not be the ideal venue for responding to blogs, but it would further the community of writing. These devices are also pretty inexpensive, so getting a few into the classroom would not require a huge investment.

What do you think? Are there other uses of a web-enabled palm device that I am missing for the classroom (other than for reference)? Is this another way of creating School 2.0 in small increments.

1. This is way too technical for me. It is fine if you want to try it out (and fall flat on your face when parent/administration/other teachers find out what you are up to), but I am just fine to live in oblivion. Wikis (did I say that right?) are too complicated for my kids. There is no way that they would be able to handle that kind of organization on their own. Your kids are different. You have more access to the technology. You were born into this stuff. I am too far into my career to start learning something new.

2. We tried something like this back in the 70′s/80′s/90′s/a few years ago. It didn’t really work then, but feel free to give it a try now. I was pretty excited about it before, but I think my interest petered out around when I realized that I was doing more of the work than the kids were. I think there are a few teachers in the school down the road who are doing this kind of stuff, so I’m not really sure that it is new or different. I will just sit back and watch you put effort into collaborative tools, but I will not put my own support behind it.

Now, #1 I have made my peace with. If a teacher has decided that they are not ready to try something new yet, I will reframe it as many different ways as I can think of in order to get them on board. At least they accept that working with students around the world, getting instant feedback on authentic writing, and infinite choice in assignments are things that are truly different than the traditional goings on of education.

#2, on the other hand, does not even acknowledge that working with web 2.0 tools is something that is a transformational step. They are so used to educational jargon and methods being repackaged and renamed that they have come to believe that School 2.0 is just a big facade that houses the likes of Project Based Learning or Cooperative Learning Groups. I can’t blame them for thinking this in the light of all that public education has taught them, but for them not to be able to see the drastic difference between writing an essay to one teacher and writing an essay to an entire school (and beyond) to be critiqued and linked to and built upon is something that I just will never understand.

Case in Point: After presenting The Academy of Discovery to a high-level technology coordinator in DCSD, he said that there were pockets of people who were trying this out elsewhere in the district. I was shocked. It was news to me that we just might have the most progressive district in the US and I just don’t know about it. Or, perhaps the problem is that he is having trouble distinguishing between an authentic collaborative student-directed wiki (receiving 50,000 hits in 6 weeks) and doing iSearches with google in order to make posters to put up in the room. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but I really think that this is an important roadblock to advancing our vision of education. Many educators, administrators, and parents believe that all technology integration is created equal. This is just simply not the case.

So, I guess what I am saying is this: We need something that will distinguish us from mundane “technology in the classroom.” We need to be seen as going beyond what has been done before, not something that is untested or fad-like, but rather something that is essential. How do we make sure that people get that we are not doing something old in a new way? We are doing something new, something that you would never be able to do without the tools of online collaboration and rss.

This is a challenge that I am willing to take up because if we can’t even explain what is going on in our classroom to other educators so that they realize the potential of a school 2.0 environment, we will never be able to explain it to the rest of the world.

that we have doubted ourselves.

that we have felt like we haven’t made a difference.

that we hoped for more.

that a lesson didn’t go according to plan.

that we have worked toward something that didn’t come to fruition.

that we have been wrong.

We must know that these things are better than any sense of certainty or definitive answers that we can muster. Doubt is the manifestation of powerful reflection. Knowing that we haven’t reached everyone shows us just how many we have reached. Hope for the future is why we are here in the first place. Failure is only a negative when it is uninspired; inspired failure is the birth of the most authentic teachable moments. The direct path toward change can’t always be plotted, even if we are working for it. But, we are changed by the work we do, and that can be enough in most cases. Finally, being wrong is beautiful when we can acknowledge it and strive to make it right.

I had to write this because of all of the great things that I have done this year, I have so many great regrets. I say that they are great both because they are large and because they are valuable to me. I hold them close to me to show me the way forward. I gather them together and wear them as a badge of honor. These are the things I will tattoo across my curriculum next year, the things that I will use to transform my teaching, again.

I have been hearing from so many educators (Wesley Fryer, Steve Dembo, Paul Allison, David Warlick, and others) that all of the learning comes from the conversations, not the sessions. They are absolutely right. In the hallways we were talking about pedagogy and authentic learning with people who have a vision for education, but in the presentation rooms, we only discussed a well formatted agenda for specific (always proprietary) tools.

After going through all of the motions of this day, I have decided that gadget wonks are of no value to me. Although I see that they are disconnected from the classroom, that isn’t what bothers me. Many people who aren’t in the classroom have great ideas for the future of education. What bothers me is that they have can’t see the entire vision. They can’t see the affect of reflective practice, of piecing together the scattered collaborators into a movement.

The entire vision for School 2.0 is of desperate importance. It is the only way that the learning environment will change. Gadgets do not create change, people create change.

If I really believe that, I need to stop asking myself how I can get more gadgets into the classroom. What I really need to start asking is how I can get more people into the classroom, through collaboration.

I want to cram as many people into my classroom as possible. I want parents, students (both mine and others’), teachers, community members, and anyone else who has something of value to feel as though they are a part of my learning environment. They should not feel like a foreigner in my learning environment. But, how do we do this? How do we start to bring in all of the rich voices from the outside world without the dependence upon gadgets and proprietary methods? How do we stop teaching for tools themselves and start teaching for learning?

It may sound like I am making a semantic distinction, but I feel, especially after spending an entire day at an extended sales pitch, that our students will never transfer learning if they believe that they can only do it on one tool, or in one classroom. We need them to know that learning happens everywhere with every person they know in a key role. The only way that they will learn is if the people they are connected to learn with them.

Last night, though, every student from Wallingford was removed from the spaces that they formerly had called home. The following were the reasons given for this total reversal of technology integration and collaboration:

A parent has complained about wiki and even contacted the State General Attoney to see if it violates anything. Her grievances about the wiki were the following1-there were three personal pictures — all on the map of the home page 2-some kids used their real names on pages or as a username 3-in my post on icon I identified that where I live and that I teach at a “blue collar school” 4-I had pictures of the school and the rooms which could provide a blueprint for a killer 5-some kids put personal descriptors “I am five feet tall with brown hair named Sam” 6-on my “lesson plan blog’ One thing i wrote down last Thursday was something like “Myspace words of Wisdom” which she interpreted as me telling the kids about how they should join. I actually had a heart to heart talk with the kids about what they were including and the problem with the public sites. We just had two students in CT have full scholarships revoked after the University saw their MySpaces. The other part of this is that the school system looks down upon “outside” websites run by teachers. So because the attorney general is now possibly involved, that implies risk to a minor, and that’s frankly not something I am going to play around with.

The question I kept thinking about after reading this e-mail is, “Who failed?” Was it the teacher who didn’t set up enough rules and guidelines for the students that were written down? Was it the parent who failed to work with the teacher and understand the nature of the collaboration? Or, was it the students who couldn’t grasp the public nature of the internet?

Because of one or a combination of these factors, these students are being shut out of an avenue for self expression and learning. What can we do so that this doesn’t happen to us?

Creating an educational movement based upon technology integration, student-directed authentic learning, and anywhere/anytime collaboration. However, this show is not merely for educators, rather it is an easily accessible look at what 21st century classroom are capable of. The show will be grounded in practice rather than theory, so as to convince all of the students, parents, teachers, and bystanders who may still be clinging to the ways in which they have been taught. The show will have an interview-based format, in which I will be probing the experts on what can be done to create change. I will be searching for ways to cultivate School 2.0 in the minds of all who are interested in seeing our children meet their true potential as thinkers, leaders, and doers.

Sounds pretty exciting, right? Well, here is the rub. I have no idea what to call the thing. All of these really terrible names are jumping around in my head asking me to use them for a project that may go on for years. I can’t be tied down like that. I need something clever, something with hope and promise. Not something like the ones I have already written down:

1. The EdTech Vision Podcast.
2. The EdTech Community Podcast.
3. The Open Education Podcast.
4. The TEACH Podcast (Technology in Education through Authentic Collaboration and Heuristic learning)
5. Technology in Authentic Education Podcast
6. The Next Generation of Education Podcast
7. The Education Collaboration through Technology Integration Podcast
8. The Education 2.0 Podcast (This one was Cameron’s)
9. The Educational Technology Collaborative Podcast

None of these will do, mostly because I don’t think that any of them really encompass what we, as a community of teachers and learners, are trying to accomplish in transforming education. So, I put it to you, humble readers. What should a podcast be called that is trying to spearhead an entire movement into a weekly episode. If I am going to envision so much collaboration in the classroom, it had better start with me.

I often think about this digital trail that I am leaving behind. It is amazing to me to know that many of the ideas I am having right now will affect others years from now. I still receive e-mail about a band webpage I put up when I was 16. It is scary how much the internet has a memory. It is cataloging every keystroke I publish. And this is beautiful. The internet knows that my name is associated with my ideas. This makes me truly happy.

So, in an effort to make concrete something that is so disparate, here are the key elements of my web presence (these will have active links in the near future):

Podcasting:

1. Discourse about Discourse: Educasts
2. Discourse about Discourse: Educasts Digg Page
3. Weekly Authentic Gcast
4. Yongesonne Gcast
5. 2005-2006 Discovery Podcasts

Blogs:

1. Discourse about Discourse
2. Daily Lesson Plans
3. Isabelle’s Dandelife

Wikis:

1. Academy of Discovery
2. Discovery -Isms
3. Discovery Utopias
4. DC Edusphere
5. Yongesonne’s Educational Technology Resources
6. LA Cresthill Collaboration
7. Lesson Planning Wiki

Social Bookmarking:

1. WeeklyAuthentic del.icio.us
2. bhwilkoff del.icio.us

Social Networking:

1. Myspace
2. Standpoint
3. Stop CyberBullying
4. Facebook

E-mail:

1. Gmail
2. Firstclass

Public Accounts at services I regularly use:

1. Teacher Bloglines
2. Student Bloglines
3. Discourse about Discourse Feedburner
4. Flickr Account
5. Google Calendar
6. Google Documents
7. Google Reader
8. Conversate
9. Jotform
10. Wufoo
11. Technorati

Number of Google hits for “Ben Wilkoff” – 891.

I hope that none of this comes off sounding narcissistic. This exercise merely meant to show the beginnings of my digital legacy. It is also meant as a challenge for you to estimate your web presence and to start to think about how your digital trail of breadcrumbs will help others down the road.

Without too much further exposition, the fallacy is as follows:

Professionals create more valuable content than amateurs.

By calling this statement a “myth” I am not aiming to devalue the work of people who have a lifetime of experience or that I would like to declare that students officially know more than their teachers. Instead, I would like to analyze the way that we define professionals and amateurs, and the kind of respect these kinds of definitions can and should provide.

In our stereotypical understanding these two words, we seem to glorify the professional and vilify the amateur:

We value all that the professional can do for us. He gets the job done. Although you pay a premium for his services, it are always worth it. He has the credentials that tell us he can do what he advertises, and he packages everything so nicely, presenting us with just the right amount of content as to not over or underwhelm. We feel safe with the professional in charge.

Now, the amateur on the other hand, works on his own schedule, according to his own interests. He gives us more information than we need, and more specific details than we could possible comprehend. His excitement is annoying when you consider that he doesn’t have the experience to back up his work. Sure, he is willing to collaborate with you, but you don’t have time for it anyway.  The amateur makes connections to others’ work by remixing it, sometimes by breaking intellectual property laws. The amateur is dangerous.

I would like to now enumerate the actual traits of each worker/learner. This is not an exhaustive list, but I think it gets the point across.

A professional is:

• Someone who has experience with marketable skills in a given discipline.
• Someone who has achieved accredited education based upon standardized performance measures.
• Someone who requires compensation and/or credit for products and ideas.
• Someone who’s work must remain consistent and thematic.

An amateur is:

• Someone who has specific skills that allow them to create a specific product.
• Someone who has achieved personalized education based upon self-assessed interest and achievement.
• Someone who does not require compensation and/or credit for work.
• Someone who’s work can be sporadic and follow inspiration in any field.

I may be oversimplifying things a bit in making these statements, but I believe that this dichotomy is the way we encounter the entire field of education. Each student we encounter is an amateur, and we see them through the stereotype. We should, instead, give them the respect that that word really commands.

My examples of amateur wisdom do not come from wikipedia or from digg. They come from my classroom. I would like to show you what my amateur students are capable of.

• The Great Remix Debate
• Iwthswtl Avenue for the Rich
• Thinking about Thought Cont.
• The Putsal Super League
  

Professionals would never have created these. No one would have paid money for them or said that they are achievements equivalent to 1400 on the SAT, but they still have great value. Their value is in their their amateur status. Their value is in their passion and authenticity. Their value is in the fact that each one of the students involved in these projects are learning for themselves. To me, that is amazing.

Professionals will always be among us, and I think that they deserve credit for their work. But, real learning happens in the realm of the amateur. Real challenge and job satisfaction happens there to. The real challenge of School 2.0 is incorporating more amateur moments, encouraging all students to become true amateurs.

This year I chose to think about next year that seems to be approaching so rapidly as to be nearing terminal velocity. All last week, I said what I have always said about next years, “I am determined to get it right next year.” But this year the “it” is different. This year I am not referring to classroom management. This year the “it” is not referring to teaching a book or unit the right way. The “it” this year is that I am going to get the next generation of my classroom right. I am going to make sure that I have all of the research and ideas in place so that I know and everyone else knows what the Discovery Team will look like when it comes through this fundamental change.

So what will change next year? Well, it is my hope that teaching will become a more collaborative process and learning will become more student-directed. This may sound far-fetched and somewhat hollow, but I have outlined everything, down to the assessments (much better than CSAP if you ask me) in a wiki. The fact that it is a wiki means that it can change. This vision is malleable by anyone who is interested in taking a stab at making thing better for teachers and students.

The Academy of Discovery is more than just a vision, though. It is a gauntlet that is being thrown down. It is a statement that says education will not be effective without collaboration, context, conversation, change, connection, and continuous support. This ultimatum, however, is more for students than teachers. It means that once we provide you with all of the infinite resources, creativity, potential of a connected classroom, it is your responsibility to be amazing. It is your responsibility to direct your engagement. It is your responsibility to learn.

Digital Writing is:

•    Dynamic.
•    Multi-dimensional.
•    Infinite.
•    Pluralistic.

With these things in mind, all writing should be:
•    Infinitely editable
•    Inherently clickable
•    Continually discussed
•    Focused on revisions and the history of revisions.

Dave Cormier turned me on to the idea that we are still writing for the technology of paper, even if we have moved beyond it in terms of its capabilities. I found intriguing and more than a little frustrating to think that we are still formatting our ideas to be read in a linear and static text form. We have put so much investment as a society in the technology of paper that very few people are ready or able to move past it. Yet, in order to fulfill the potential of a fully connected society, we must start to think in new ways, read in new ways, and especially write in new ways.

First, the idea of ownership must be changed. All writing should have the ability to be edited at any time. Just by clicking on the letters, you should be able to add your own piece of understanding. Anyone should be able to see the original iteration, but they should also be able to see any additions, subtractions, contextualizations, or expansions. This is the only way to have true collaboration. If we stop setting up boundaries for ideas—yours vs. mine—we will all become better writers and visionaries.

All words should blue and underlined; they must be clickable. There is no reason for a story, a poem, an essay, a blog entry, a novel, a biography or even a letter to lack context. Each word should take us to someplace new. Each word should let us explore the web of thought that caused it. Now, if one person were trying to accomplish this, it would never happen for want of a real life. Yet, if each user can add his or her own contextual links, the writing context would grow, the webs of knowledge would spin themselves, and reading and writing would change forever.

If there is anything that blogs have taught us it is that writing should not exist in a vacuum. Ideas that are not read and discussed are of no value. So, logically, we should share all of our writing, discussing each aspect of our discourse and getting instant feedback on our vital work. Comments focus us upon revision, but they shouldn’t be at the bottom of the page. They should be attached to the words, never separated from the context of the ideas. Paper doesn’t allow us to hyperlink our comments, connecting them to the words that made us think of the comments in the first place, but digital writing can allow this if we can move beyond our vision of the internet as Digital Paper.

Digital Paper does not allow us to push writing to what it can become. It limits us to think of writing as a singular and static process. Things like Google Documents are great resources, but they lack the pervasive nature that digital writing needs to have. The entire Internet should be editable, discussable, and clickable. Only then will we be able to shrug off our dependence upon paper as a substance and a metaphor.

Because Google Video has already been banned, I must first take a look at the reasons (or potential reasons) why it was banned and address each issue individually.

• Google Video has “R-Rated content” defined by 8e6 technologies (our filtering software) as “Services pertaining to anything that involves 18 and over material such as lingerie and swimsuits, revealing pictures. Sites that are adult in nature without being explicitly pornographic.”
  • Although I cannot refute the fact that there are a few Google videos that have these elements, I take exception that this filtering is a one size fits all solution for a question of content that many if not most students see every commercial break in prime-time. This solution means that a first grader needs the same protections as a 12th grader.
  • This also leads us to believe that there is no way to filter out certain content, rather than an entire resource. The mere fact that 8e6 can filter out the video portion of the Google domain leads me to believe that this is possible.
  • This solution asks us to accept that teachers are inept at verifying that students are working with valuable video resources, and that students are merely hungry for the smuttiest pictures they can find, which on Google video are pretty sparse.
• Video resources, like Google Video, provide only augmentations for the curriculum and are not an integral part of the learning experience.
  • All of the research currently being done on learning styles comes back with the same conclusion: our students are growing more and more visually engaged. Although Google Video is not the only visual way of presenting materials, it may be the most dynamic. Google Video clusters content by user defined “tags” or categories. These tags provide students and teachers with multiple chances at learning the same thing. Not every student is going to learn in the same way, and many students need the contextual elements (background knowledge) that a collective history on film can provide.
  • Taking away Google Video and other services like it is not like taking away a student’s No. 2 pencil, but rather their colored pencils. Students can still write out their responses, but they cannot illustrate their words, conceptualizing them into proof of actual knowledge. Google Video is not just about consuming video content; it is about creating content. My students respond to videos on a regular basis, critiquing them or expanding their boundaries. They have made video content an integral part of their writing and blogging life. In fact, many of them do not see any boundaries between the act of inserting a picture, a video, or text into their writing. My students are living in a culture of remixed information. When they see something that should be questioned or drawn attention to, they need to be able to do it, at school. By making sure that they can only talk about this content at home, we are insuring irrelevancy in the lives of our students.
• Not enough teachers and students are taking advantage of Google Video on a regular basis for this decision to affect many people.
  • True, Google Video has not reached a tipping point in our schools. Most teachers are not using it as a daily or even weekly classroom resource. This logic, however, is backward. The fact that most teachers are not using this resource does not mean that it should be taken away, it means that Google Video should be promoted and talked about, touted as an ingenious way to create engaged learners. We should be leading the charge to change people’s perceptions about what constitutes learning. We should not wait for the outside pressures of popular culture, and the glacial speed of institutional change. We should educate our students on the potential that video sharing provides for teaching, so that they may better make their own decisions about what content to consume.

Along with all of the reasons above, I think that there are still more that need to be brought up so that our school district can see the value of Google Video and other web services like it.

• Google Video is free, and unlike any paid service, provides up to the minute coverage.
  • I do not believe that you get what you pay for. I believe you get what you share for and what you build for yourself. Because Google Video is built by its users and all of the video files are shared with entire world, the resource can remain free yet be essential. The fact that Google Video gets most of its content through non-traditional means (read non-institutional) it means that much of the time it contains content that can provide for a more varied viewpoint, a more in-depth look, or a more timely expose. For example, if you search for information on the London Bombings, the videos that pop up are not only excerpts from cable news channels but also first-hand accounts from people who were there with camcorders and cameraphones. This kind of citizen journalism is exactly what we are trying to teach our students to do. What better way of showing them its potential than by letting them use it in the classroom.
• Google Video asks students to become content evaluators and validators.
  • Along with my previous example of the London Bombings, the search results also turn up a few “documentaries” on conspiracy theories for the government’s involvement in the bombings. These films are far from the mainstream, but they present a perfect opportunity to teach our students the value of content evaluation. Our modern students are presented with many conflicting reports of events, ideas, and relative values on a daily basis. It is our job as educators to show students how to judge the validity of each claim they hear. They should be responsible for researching the credibility of each story, rather than just accepting it because it is on the internet, or in a textbook.
• Google Video is not about the content; it is about the potential.
  • The real value of Google Video is not the content that is already there. As I have said previously, it has not reached a tipping point for education yet. Google Video is valuable, instead, for its method of content distribution, its potential to change the way that we share information. If our students have the ability to create and upload their own investigations, if they have the ability to critique and evaluate the content of others, and if they have to potential to hover around certain topics of interest and forge organic learning communities, then there is no end to power that Google Video can give them.

To be sure, Google Video is not the only resource out there that our students would benefit from use at school, but I believe that getting it un-banned is a first step in creating the conversation about un-banning 21st century learning. So, I challenge everyone who feels the same way as I do about Google Video and other resources like it, to throw down their own reasons and examples for why Google Video is so valuable to the classroom. I would like to compile them all together and send them to 8e6 technologies and our District technology administrators to see if we can find a solution to this rather misunderstood problem. Link to this post, comment on it, or build upon it. I would hate to think that the power of all of our voices would go unheard when it is put in such inherently understandable terms.

Sure, I had a pretty tough time in middle school, but everything worked out in high school, if in an overly eccentric way. I always identified with the loners and nerds, but I stopped thinking that those were bad things long ago. Why then do I seem to obsess over the minutiae of teendom. Why do I care if a boy picks up a cigarrete out of boredom or explores his city for the first time? Why am I so concerned with the first time around, when I am at least on my second? Well, in an attempt to try and figure this part of my personal curriculum out, I will be analyzing these books that have left such an impact on my reading life.

For a while now, I have been compiling a list of all of these particular influential books, and here is what I have come up with:

1. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
2. The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green
3. Looking for Alaska
4. Catcher in the Rye
5. Old School
6. King Dork

I would like to analyze my affinity for each one of these books individually in the hopes of find out why they force me to keep looking that this part of my life with a critical eye. I think that I am both up for this challenge and up for doing something, anything to work through this obsession.

Resources are scarce. People are scrounging around, negotiating uneasy solutions, forgoing all tact. The truth is: people are desperate. They want what other people have.

The computers. It always comes down to the computers.

“When can I schedule my class in the lab? What times exactly do you need the laptops? Can I just use a few of the computers in the library for a research project?”

These are the questions I hear all of the time from the hungry hoards, myself included. You see, there is significant disconnect between what the people need, and what is available. This situation is creating a power differential, a hierarchy of computing power. How can we possibly survive in such dire straits as these? With teacher pitting themselves against teacher, signing up for more than they need just so they are guaranteed some.

“You want a projector? Well, I’m afraid you are going to have to do a little dance for me to get it? Mhuahahaha…”

 Who sees this tragedy of unrealized potential? Who notices the loss of interactivity? Who understands the lack of new knowledge being created in the minds of young ones? All for want of a few laptop carts.

We can end this horrific state. We can come together and guarantee a laptop for every child, but only if we recognize the problem. Only if we take the time to care.

Please go to the following links and see what you can do for 1:1 learning. It is the only chance we have to end this unfortunate situation.

• Wes Fryer’s 1:1 Presentation. 
• Talking points for 1:1
  
• Anytime Anywhere Learning

Yesterday I began my podcast by asking myself about the current Graduation Requirements. Are all of these things really essential if many of you will never need to know how to explicate a poem or find the derivative of cosine. We are building students that are all alike. How will you ever stand out in high school, college, or life if we are merely creating different sized versions of the same student. So, I started thinking about what the real graduation requirements should be. I came up with these skills as essential, the ones that all other content can be filtered through:

1. Collaboration, and building upon other’s ideas
2. Writing for specific purposes
3. Creating and pacing your own learning
4. Thinking critically and coming to evidence-based conclusions

But what kind of classes do you take in order to get these skills?

Well, I am proposing that the first class that would get at these new Graduation Requirements would be a class in Collaborative Writing. This class would consist of personally selected projects that involved research, writing, revision, and a huge dose of communication. All students would set up two ways of writing/publishing their work: a wiki and a collaborative document editor. The wiki would be used mainly for research and idea generation. The students, working in teams, would start pulling resources together and linking and writing about them on their wikis. They would also be doing the scholarly writing on their collaborative document editor (like Google Documents). In order to generate more ideas, they would hold weekly podcasts/interviews that measured how they were doing on their projects. They would post these so that all students in the class could see just what others were doing in order to accomplish their writing goals. We would also set up a space and time for students to interview experts on their topics using a blog, a skypecast, or a simple e-mail. Throughout the class, the students would constantly be revising their definition of collaboration in the 21st century, aiming for a class definition that gets at all of the skills they think will be useful later on in life.

Obviously, this particular class needs some fleshing out, but I think that it would be one worth taking and worth teaching. I believe that more writing and thinking would get done in a class like this than in any two composition classes. And I think that is really the point.

When we started blogging at the beginning of this year, I knew that each one of you would develop an online identity, a persona that would be the budding writer, making comments and creating new work. Yet, I had no idea that we would also be forging a collective identity, or more appropriately, a collaborative identity. We now have the power to show the world just what we can be as writers. We can show off the best of collective self. With just a few tags, we can change the way that people see us and access our pulled-together thoughts. So, I guess what I am trying to say is that I think our del.icio.us account is beautiful. It is beautiful because it is us.

The future of reading is interactive. It is non-linear. It is user-directed and open-ended. It is visual and collaborative. It is a new skill to be mastered.

Books are linear. You have to start at the beginning and end at the end. The author has already chosen how the story will go. There is a progression that must be followed. Yet, you have no part in creating this progression. All you can do is go along for the ride. Imagining all of the events and people in the story is about as interactive of an experience as you can hope for.

The future I see for literature is one in which all stories are 3-dimensional. What I mean by this is that you can put them together in an infinite number of ways. You can add to them and explore them by navigating a virtual space. It will be like you see the entire story at once, rather than looking at just one moment in time. All stories will somehow be connected to a visual counterpart, taking away some avenues for imagination but creating many more. You will have to be able to analyze both written and visual forms of text, and you will have to fill in the holes of any plot with events of your own.

N ow, I don’t believe that traditional stories and books will ever be extinct. We naturally have beginnings, middles, and endings. But, I believe that there will come a day when this new genre of Creative Reading comes to the forefront of our literacy practice. I believe that someday soon we will have the ability to walk through a story the same way that we walk through a mall. And to show you that this is possible, here is my rather crude example. (You will need Google Sketch-up to read it.)

What I am proposing instead, is that you teach what you want to know to yourselves. It may sound like I making you do my job, but really I am asking you to really do yours. You learn much better when you care about what you are learning. Although I have a set curriculum of what will happen in class everyday, I am proposing that you create a personal curriculum made up of one thing per quarter that can actually be accomplished. We will work on them some in class, but the majority of your learning doesn’t happen in a classroom, so why should these walls confine you, especially with the things you think are truly important. Please know that I will give you whatever resources you need in order to teach yourself, but it it is your learning and you are going to choose it.

Whenever you feel that you have learned what you wanted to throughout the semester and whenever you have gotten just what you wanted out of your search, making yourself into the ultimate expert on the topic, you will present me with a written, visual, or auditory product which shows your learning. I will give you a grade for each of the things that you choose to learn, and since it is your choice, I don’t know why you would get anything other than an A. All of Language Arts is open to you; anything that has at least some reading or some writing involved with it will do. We will be developing our list of three possibilities starting today. Do not choose too quickly; these are the things that you are going to be engaged with for quite some time.
Personal Curriculum Requirements:

1. Must have at least 1 thing per quearter you really want to learn about or how to do.
2. Must be related to Language Arts in some way (if only by the fact that you are reading something or writing something).
3. Must be able to demonstrate mastery of the concept, idea, action, theme, etc.
4. Must be approved by Mr. Wilkoff.

My personal curriculum for the second half of the year:

1. I want to find 3 great books about sensitive boys coming of age. I want to read them and enjoy them and not try to think about how I will use them in class. I want to go on a personal exploration with these books because I feel like I still need to sort a few things out with my coming-of-age faze. I want to start writing a coming-of-age novel/short story of my own.
2. I want to research just how blogging affects students ability to write. I want to find hard data to support the fact that I believe students write better when they blog.
3. I want to get to know my students so well as writers and readers that I would be able to pick them out from a line-up of writing pieces and book choices.

When I started middle school, my friend Charlie started me on a heavy diet of punk rock and ska. Now, this is not to say that this music had more depth to it, but I believe that it started my process of listening for more than just vocal melody. I started listening to the purpose of the music. The music that I was being introduced to had political aims. Many of the punk songs were railing against the way that teenagers were being treated. This was so relevant to my budding teenage angst.

In high school I began exploring music for myself. I was not satisfied to listen to what other people were listening to. I wanted my own bands, my own ideas. It pained me to see so many of my classmates clamoring for one more pop song to climb up the charts. I wanted raw guitars. I wanted disconnected feelings. I wanted reality.

There is nothing so unreal as a pop song. The world should not be able to fit into one simple rhythm, one simple sentimental chorus, one emotion. Life isn’t like that. It is complex and important. Boiling it down into a four minute catchy masterpiece is preposterous.

Journey, although not the only band that capitalizes on the one emotion, simplicity over everything sentiment, that the masses seem to crave, they are the band that seems to embody it and use it to persuade unthinking youngsters to like their music and pop music in general. The following is an analysis of their most enduring song:

Just a small town girl, livin in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin anywhere

The way that this song opens is incredibly vague. Where is the specificity? Are we supposed to believe that small towns are better than big cities? Is she trying to get away from the lonliness of being away from a small town? The thing she is trying to get away from seems to be lonliness, yet she is going anywhere, alone.

Just a city boy, born and raised in south detroit
He took the midnight train goin anywhere

Now it seems as though, both big cities and small towns are no good. If this loneliness is everywhere, what is the emotion can we possibly feel other than it.

A singer in a smokey room
A smell of wine and cheap perfume
For a smile they can share the night
It goes on and on and on and on

The idea here seems to be that the only solution is to have singular moments of drunken happiness while someone sings their troubles away. Hooking up with someone based upon only trying to get away from your problem is the wrong message to send. It is not something to savor in an anthem. It is something to be written about in a trashy novel or talked about with disdain among friends.

Strangers waiting, up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searching in the night
Streetlight people, living just to find emotion
Hiding, somewhere in the night

So now we are looking to prostitution. I don’t have any problem bringing the problems of the world into music, however, to do it is such a superficial way is terrifyingly inept. Find emotion? What emotion? How can you create any connection to the audience other than with melody when you have such trite lyrics.

Working hard to get my fill,
Everybody wants a thrill
Payin anything to roll the dice,
Just one more time
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on

Is there anything more cheesy than saying that everyone wants something and we are all looking for it. Some winning and some losing is not something that needs to be stated. It is an obvious part of life. It is a line that was picked to rhyme. Nothing in music is more despicable than that.

Don’t stop believin
Hold on to the feelin
Streetlight people

Finally, my questions at the end of this torturous song can only be: what should I not stop believing, and why should I hold on to the feeling if the feeling is one with a prostitute or hook-up?

Now, it may not be fair to disect a song and put my own slant on it, but I believe that all the music that I listen to should matter to me. I believe that even if something is catchy, it must relate to me. Nothing about this song, other than the incredible melody and vocal quality, relates to my life, or provides me with edifying thought. I will not attempt to criticize the music of this song because, after all, I am tainted by all of my experiences with discordant music, just like some are tainted by much of the pop music that they have been exposed to.

The end to this debate can only come with another song analysis. Whatever some other students might believe, I do not think that all of the music I listen to is for everyone. I do, however, believe that everyone should be able to appreciate the lyrics of my emblematic band: Death Cab for Cutie.

There’s a saltwater film on the jar of your ashes; I threw them to the sea,
but a gust blew them backwards and the sting in my eyes
that you then inflicted was par for the course just as when you were living.
It’s no stretch to say you were not quite a father
but the donor of seeds to a poor, single mother that would raise us alone.
We never saw the money that went down your throat
through the hole in your belly.

Thirteen years old in the suburbs of Denver,
standing in line for Thanksgiving dinner at the Catholic church.
The servers wore crosses to shield from the sufferance plaguing the others.
Styrofoam plates, cafeteria tables,
charity reeks of cheap wine and pity and I’m thinking of you,
I do every year when we count all our blessings
and wonder what we’re doing here.

You’re a disgrace to the concept of family.
The priest won’t divulge that fact in his homily
and I’ll stand up and scream if the mourning remain quiet,
you can deck out a lie in a suit.
But I won’t buy it.
I won’t join the procession that’s speaking their piece,
using five dollar words while praising his integrity.
Just ’cause he’s gone, it doesn’t change that fact:
he was bastard in life, thus a bastard in death.

These are simple lyrics, yet they convey an image. They aren’t talking about the specifics of life, not skimming the surface in an attempt to reach the masses. Even though my father was not like this, I can relate to the power of this message. It is about something. It is powerful, potent, relevant, and beautiful. Journey may be catchy, but they can’t hold a candle to modern indie-rock music.

Identity is art. It is craft. It is make-believe. There is truly no such thing as a personal identity, only one that we have constructed to look like someone we would want to be. In reality, we are all swirling around within our own skin, looking for something to hold on to long enough to call our own. Comfort is a luxury we do not have when it comes to identity. We must exist in a constant flux as to who we are and what we want. Race, sexual orientation, personality: these are the things that complicate this process. Discomfort in our own skin is the constant state of our lives because of pressures from each other, ourselves, and our societal environment.

Relationships affect action. The connection made with another person requires a deliberate change in identity. You must shift into your mode of friendship with this person, remembering all of the things that you have done with this person, all of the things that this person doesn’t like, all of the things that will be of value only to this relationship. This creates discomfort within the skin you were born into, chafing against the way you must act with other people. In the book, Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry, Jeremy Simms never feels comfortable within in his own skin because he is constantly having to change his identity for his white family and his black friends. This change is most obvious in a passage when he must try to live within both identities at the same time. In talking to a black friend he must stutter out, “She d-did, Pa. R-right now, ‘fore y’ll come, she did–” His white father cuts him short with “an angry gaze upon his son” causing Jeremy to “falter” and “[hang] his head.” This stutter is emblematic of the discomfort that Jeremy feels when talking to his father in the presence of his black friend. He is so uncomfortable that he cannot speak clearly. When forced to get back to his “white” relationship, he can no longer say the words that he most desires to. His relationship with others is directly responsible for paining his identity.

Teacher 2.0:

Impassioned secondary teacher wanted to create high-level small-class learning environment in a diverse school dedicated to reflective pedagogy, thoughtful technology integration, and teacher leadership.

General Job Responsibilities for all teachers at our school:

• Collaborate with team, department, and greater teaching community via both synchronous (essential question directed in-person discussion, Google Documents-style collaborative lesson planning, real-time chatting) and asynchronous methods (wikis, non-mass e-mails, Personal Learning Network reading and linking).
• Maintain a reflective teaching blog, podcast, and/or wiki which is focused upon finding solutions for classroom problems, creating more student engagement or acheivement as shown through authentic assessements and teacher anecdotal evidence rather than state-wide assessement scores, or generating new ways to connect to students, teachers, or other members of the education community.
• Read and interact with a Personal Learning Network made up of a few administratively selected educators and a vast majority of personally selected teachers, authors, and students who challenge you to become a better teacher.
• Create your own professional development objectives for the year based upon your passions and your readership of your PLN. The majority of the professional development time throughout the year will be based upon your own objectives.
• Create curriculum that can be shared, edited, and reproduced through creative commons licenses.
• Use non-graded e-portfolios as the exclusive means of assessment and personal student reflection.

Specific Job Responsibilities for the English Language Arts position:

• Create and maintain a digital authentic writing community, in which students are responsible for reflecting upon their own work, linking and commenting on others’ work, and understanding and controlling the direction of their own writing progress/process.
• Conduct project-based learning that asks students to address real-life issues through authentic writing and media creation.
• Use inquiry-based lessons to teach the conceps of textual analysis, considering all types of text (visual, auditory, and performance.)
• Model the creation of touchstone-texts and resources that produce well-balanced viewpoints of our world, and help students to do the same.
• Ensure that each student can question the validity of statements made in writing or in speech by verifying sources constantly.
• Cultivate each student’s unique writer’s voice so that the intentions of their writing meet the impressions of the reader. This process must include constant feedback, grammatical and conventions mini-lessons, and constant question asking as to the purpose of the choices that the student author has made.
• Conduct in-depth digital and conventional discussions on the nature of read and writing, user-selected texts, and thematic issues related to other curriculum.
• Model higher-level thinking skills in writing and verbal remarks to the class and expect the same high-level thinking from students.

I know that I will be adding to both of these lists quite a bit as my thoughts keep coming, but I thought that I would start off with these. Please let me know what you think of they way things truly should be in schools. Oh, and if anyone knows of a job like this out there, please let me know. I would love to be a part of a school that is this perfect. (I know that this doesn’t exist yet, but I suppose I can dream.)

The concept of critical mass has always been intriguing to me, but until recently I never saw the application to thought, teaching, or writing. For those of you who may be uninitiated, critical mass is the idea that there is some number of things (atoms, people, ideas, uproar, etc.) that it takes in order to create a desired action (attract more people, create a revolution, etc.). This means that it is very hard for one person to change the outcome of an election, but it is pretty easy for 10,000. This is a critical mass of people.

Well, I began thinking of what the critical mass of ideas was. If I think about the problem of world hunger for a minute, I probably won’t come up with any lasting solutions. But the question is: how many minutes do I have to think about it for me do so? How many different ideas do I need to have in order to create a critical mass, finding a path to a true answer that will actually work. For most of us it probably takes quite a few minutes and quite a few ideas to actually come up with answers. We have to consider all of the different possibilities and then pick the best one (and even then we are often wrong). It is my belief that only a true genius can see an answer from one idea. They are the only people who have a critical mass level of one idea or thought. The rest of us need more, and that is where other people come in.

If other people are not in the picture, if they do not put forth their ideas, drawing out more thinking from us, then very few things would ever get done. This is why teamwork and group participation is so important. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen a discussion be born and die with a mere two comments from students. On the other hand, there are just as many discussions that reach a critical mass of comments, and every hand goes up. What is the critical mass of a discussion? I believe it is at least 3 hands up at a time, with at least one different idea. This is, however, just a working theory.

As for engagement, its critical mass is much harder to determine. I have been in many classes (Spanish in middle school) that I feel truly bored in. When I feel this way, it is very hard to become engaged in what is going on. How many thought-provoking moments does it take to draw me back in? How many times do I have to relate to the subject for it to work its way into my brain and take hold? The critical mass of engaging ideas is probably different for everyone, but for me it is considerably more than one. It also helps me when I have the tools at my fingertips to engage. If I have pen and paper at hand, I can better engage. If I have a laptop and a wireless connection, I can be looking up what we are talking about. I can be writing up notes. I can be making comments about the stupid things that people are saying around me (to myself). All of these things are aids to my critical mass of engagement. I wonder what this would be for each of my students.

I have talked quite extensively about memes and viral ideas and books, but I think that a critical mass of ideas is much bigger than one for writing. I have to hear/read about something a few times or at least be thinking about it a few times before I can comment on it, or incorporate it into my way of thinking. Blogging is the easiest format for creating critical mass that I have ever seen. You can collect ideas, aggregating them in your head, until the time when you have amassed enough of them to start writing about them. If you are running out of things to write about, start reading. Create a critical mass for yourself. Look around you, all of the ideas are staring right at you, waiting to be collected.

It is my position that entertainment is the driving force for the acceptance of unreality as reality. The reality shows of Cribs and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and even sitcoms such as How I Met your Mother and Two and a Half Men show us a distorted view of reality, but asks us to believe that it is real.

For the vast majority of us, there is no amount of hard work that will allow you to buy a 100 million dollar home. But even worse, most of the homes and cars displayed on Cribs are leased for the amount of time when the superstar is a superstar. Not even the most famous of our American celebrities can maintain an overly extravagant lifestyle for life.

Extreme Makeover seems to distort our concept of reality even further, though. It asks us to believe that if something bad happens to you, you will be repaid by the benevolent hand of a TV executive. If you lost a loved one to a long battle with cancer, you will receive a large house in return. This is not the case, no matter how much we may wish it were. Bad things will happen to all of us, and it is our responsibility to deal with them and work through them. No one is going to do the grieving for us.

As for the overly sexualized and stereotypical sitcoms that are on this season, reality seems to be the furthest thing from the minds of the writers for these shows. They are dedicated to bringing an escape from real relationships with actual emotions behind them. Instead, they show a flimsy and fake “dates” with multiple partners in each episode. It may be funny, but it certainly is not reality.

I know that I have not fully explored this topic, and this is for a reason. I hope that one of you will take up this idea and build upon it, either in support of my thesis or against it. I would love to start a great debate on the unreality of American entertainment, and this is my way of throwing down the gauntlet.

I happen to love the middle school perspective. It is so creative and thought provoking. It is the reason why I never plan on teaching at a high school. Yet, the middle school perspective has its limitations. I’m sure that I don’t need to enumerate them, but suffice it to say that even though I thought I knew everything when I was in the 8th grade, I actually didn’t. So, where do we get other perspectives? Well, we read good books, and we read interesting magazines. We watch terrible news channels, and we experience obnoxious movies. These pieces of entertainment, whether good or bad, all provide non-middle school perspectives, but there is only one problem with them: they weren’t written or performed just for us. All of the other perspectives in our lives are highly impersonal. Sure, we can relate to the characters in a book or we can understand that a news story will affect us personally, but they weren’t prepared in the same way that we prepare our Weekly Authentcs for one another each week. They weren’t prepared with just us in mind.

So, in order to correct this, in order to ensure that other perspectives drectly address us in the way that we address each other, I am introducing Guest Blogging into our community.

Each week, I will ask a group of “Adults” one question that you have voted on and at least one of them will respond in a blog post. You won’t know all of the people that I ask, and you won’t know who will answer. You will know, however, that each response from these other perspectives is just as authentic and sincere as the posts that we write each week.

I’m willing to bet that at this point you have at least two questions (although, you may have a heck of a lot more).

1. Who gets to be in this panel of “Adults?”

Well, anyone who wants to be. I will be asking parents, other teachers, administrators, professional bloggers, professional authors, and others to be asked the first batch of questions.

2. What kind of questions can we ask?

Pretty much anything that will get someone to tell a story, relive a memory, or relay some information. Things like, “What was the worst trouble that you ever got into, and what did you learn from it?” or “How did you deal with making friends in Middle School?” or “Is homework really important or are you just saying that so we don’t watch more TV?”

These guest bloggers are here for us to gain insight that we wouldn’t normally find. They are here so that we can listen to all of the voices around us, not just the ones that are standing in the front of the classroom or sitting in the back. We must use these voices, commenting on them and building upon them for these are the voices of our greater community, and to ignore them is to ignore the laughter, thought, and learning that comes along with them.

The first six letters hold an inordinate amount of power, and frankly, it makes me sick. The A’s, B’s and C’s have too long had a stranglehold on our schools. They hold students hostage all in the name of describing proficiency. The teacher in me has had enough inscribing a student’s ability onto the top of a paper and then watching students see it as a judgment of them as a person. Grades are supposed to foster growth, but instead they tear down self-worth. There is no purpose for grading students in a modern school because the process is inherently subjective, it promotes unnecessary competition, and it takes away time from authentic feedback that is necessary for student learning.

Grading lacks purpose in today’s schools because teachers are incapable of making completely objective grading decisions. Every time that a teacher looks at the student’s name on a paper, recognizes a student’s handwriting, or thinks about a student while entering grades, he or she is making a judgment call. It is difficult, even if only on a subconscious level, to dismiss all of the previous experiences with an individual students while grading. The heated argument with a teacher, the broken promise of making up work, the ridiculous disruption of the classroom that distracts all other students, these are all things that weigh upon a teacher. The fact is that teachers are human, and all humans have preferences. Playing favorites, although a universally despised practice, is alive and well in our current classrooms. The only thing that will solve this problem of subjectivity is getting rid of the entire grading process.

The worst kind of competition is also supported by modern grading practices. By wost kind, I mean the kind that promotes cheating, plagiarism, and outright intimidation by students who wish to maintain the edge against one another for the few A’s given at the end of each semester. There is so much pressure for students to do well that all emphasis on learning gets completely left behind. Grading, at its core, is all about incentives: you do this level of work, and you will get this grade. Well, what happens if you can find all of the answers to a test or worksheet on the internet? The incentive to do the work on your own simply disappears. The grade has become an end in itself, the goal for all students. It is no longer the well defined marker of success it was dreamed up to be. It does not show students where they are floundering, instead it is a measure of how well students can work the system and best other students in a competition for “Most Shortcuts Found in Learning Process.”

Authentic feedback is the backbone of any successful learning experience. Learning exactly how good you are at something from someone you respect and trust is essential. It allows you the opportunity to look critically at your work, making it better with each moment you spend collaborating with a well intentioned teacher. What I have just described is the ideal situation for modern education. The only problem is that it cannot exist due to grades. Authentic feedback is circumvented because a teacher must spend all of his/her time deciding how many points something should be worth, which standard an authentic learning activity falls into, and which stiff sounding descriptor vaguely defines where students are at in their work. Questions that cause students to dig deeper into a subject will never be asked so long as teachers must submit to the torture of grading every piece of paper that students put their names to.

Grades are holding back America’s children. These impressionable youngsters must constantly compete, many times dirtily, to maintain their standing amongst their peers. They must forgo any type of authentic information from teachers that would help them to engage further in their learning. They must even be labeled with subjective levels of proficiency, showing a complete lack of understanding for self-worth or purpose. So, if not grades, what else is there? I have shown here the beginnings of a comprehensive form of assessment, one that is authentic, intrinsic, and student directed. Students should always know their A, B, C’s, but their lives should never be defined in such trivial letters.

I really think that looking for the answers behind the words is so intriguing. There are so many things that we can learn about the words just by looking at their definitions or their contexts. Take the link for Imagination. It taught me about the difference between creative and reproductive imagination, and I believe that this definition enriches my understanding of the post. Is Hockey90 talking about imagination for things that have been or haven’t been experienced yet?

The other question that this post raises is that of how many other links besides dictionaries can be used to create greater contexts for our Weekly Authentics. I really feel challenged by this post to explore the concept of total linkage, so here is my response:

It is an open ended ecstasy to know who you are and what you want out of life, to have identity and purpose. But how do you find these things? Where can you look but within for answers to these questions.I used to think that there was a perfect way to be yourself, a version 2.0 that you could achieve if you changed enough, becoming more virtuous, loving and true. I would choose my words and ideas as well as I could, making myself the perfect being that I imagined was possible. After ever time I was my usual clumsy self, I would replay the situation in my head over and over until I knew what I should have done, what I should have said.

Lisa was the girl that I never kissed. We dated for 8 months and we never kissed. I think that is why we were so good together, though. We were always looking for things to talk about, so we wouldn’t have to approach the subject of us not being the slightest bit romantic. The unfortunate problem with this was that we ran out of things to talk about.

And I blamed it all on her. I commanded her to express herself more openly. I begged her to be more emotionally available. I was the better person, the sensitive guy that every girl dreams about. I didn’t think that asking for a few good conversation topics was too much. She did the right thing, though. She broke up with me.

Looking back, I can see that I was not the best version of myself, I was merely the most pompously sure teenage boy I knew. That is the problem with Identity and Purpose. If you have a false identity, you will also have an impure purpose, just like if you have no identity you will lack purpose. It took a Lisa for me to understand that. Have you found your Lisa yet?

We can never know what the future holds. For her, or for anyone. She is this thing, bright and new that I can’t quite see the end of. I want to know what she will be at 13, but I never want to stop seeing her at 0.

There is nothing abstract about her. She is real, here, now. I can speak about love, but there is no such thing as this kind of love. It doesn’t really exist. It is not something that you or anyone else can experience. It is mine. My wife may understand, other fathers and mothers may understand, but they do not feel this. I look at her and she is miraculous. I look at her and I am dumbfounded. I look at her and I find so many other inadequate adjectives. The best I can do is to only use nouns.

• Button (the kind that makes two very separate things close together)
• Eyes (the kind that are do dark and so knowing that you can’t look away when they are open)
• Nose (the kind that is trying to be every kind of hope imaginable)
• Smile (the one and only that I want to see)

I wasn’t in labor, and I didn’t have to push. I didn’t carry her for 10 months, and I didn’t wake up every day feeling sick. I can never be her mother, but I’m glad that someone can. You see, I owe her the whole of my belief that souls grip one another over a precipice, tight enough to either gain solid footing or be broken completely apart.

Soon she will stand on her own two feet. Soon she will think, and laugh, and be broken hearted. Soon, but not now.

For now she is bundled up tight. For now she is dependent. For now she is the best thing that I have ever known, not because of what she can become, her potential for greatness, but because of what she is already: my daughter.

So, I have taken it upon myself to look for better images. And what place is better for this kind of quest than in our writing community? In fact, I know of no other venue so creative and outlandish as to have writing about both ice-block feet and magical coins and keys.

To me, this high level of diverse thought is a direct challenge. It is a test to see how well we can hold together such fantastic ideas while all the while knitting closer together this community of writers. So, I put it to you. Can you find and put the following images together in one of your own authentic posts and link to all of the images that you have found to be useful? If you are the first person to post their scavenger hunt weekly authentic with correct links to each of the written images that you find, you will have the choice to drop any missing assignment you like, take home any book that you like from my bookshelf, or get a gift certificate for a pizza from anywhere you like. There will be five other prizes for the best scavenger hunt entries, so don’t feel like you have to rush through. Also, I would encourage everyone to comment on the posts that they find throughout this process, just to show the writers how much you appreciate their contributions to our community.
Let me first give you an example of what I am talking about:

Images-

1. Salt marks around the eyes (tears).
2. A flooded parking lot.
3. Ring of smoke.

I hoped that she couldn’t smell the salt, the eerie distaste in my mouth and around my eyes. I hoped that she didn’t know where I had been, but she could probably tell from my waterlogged sneakers. She had told me not to go out in the deluge that threatened even my eyesight. She had said that I would lose more than I would gain. She was right. She was always right.

This time, though, I knew I had to go. I had to leave, to get away. So, I took my favorite jacket, the one dad gave to me before he moved across the country. It didn’t really protect me from the elements, but it sure did protect me from my mental environment. I left her in her ring of smoke, holding on to the last cigarette she would ever need.

Now you try this Blogging Image Scavenger Hunt for yourself (you must use at least six images):

Images-

1. A bell ringing.
2. A dirty dog.
3. Insomnia (lack of sleep).
4. Broken bone or heart.
5. The left side of the body.
6. The beauty of snow.
7. Running away.
8. A roof.
9. A pen or pencil.
10. Mean brothers or sisters.

Update: You may now take a post your Scavenger hunt and look at the Scavenger Hunt Entries on our community navigator. Look for the posts that you would like to nominate as the best authentic image piece, which we will do next week. Prizes will be awarded at that time.

I want her to be here in my arms. I want to look at her and get to know her. I want her to be the perfect vision that I have seen for nearly ten months now. Is there anything that could happen now that I would care more about than my daughter coming. No, not a chance.

My mother told me that all my Kara has to do is to sit on the edge of the bed and put her hands on her stomach then say, “Baby out. Baby out.” I don’t see how it could not work. I just need my mind to switch over into “Dad mode.” I have seen glimpses of it when I am putting together Isabelle’s crib. I just can’t seem to make it stay. This overwhelming feeling of pride and hope. I want it to be with me always.

I am uncomfortably ready. Not uncomfortable in the sense that I don’t know what to expect. I don’t have the slightest clue of what to expect, but that is not why I am uncomfortable. I am uncomfortable because there is nothing left to do but wait. Sure, I could be planning lessons. I could be fixing the floor. I could be organizing the back room in the basement. I could, but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything but Isabelle.

She isn’t even here yet, and I am already willing to kill for her. I am willing to do anything to ensure that she is okay. There is no way to test this willingness except to put me into a situation of true peril, and I hope that never happens. I am confident, though, that were I to be faced with choosing to eat molten pieces of glass covered in anthrax and then jump from 1000 feet without a parachute or seeing my baby harmed in any way, I would pull up a glass of milk and choke the delicious glass down.

I just have one question. Not when, but why? As in why isn’t she here? Why isn’t she with me right now? Why is she waiting for one more instant? Doesn’t she know that I am ready. Doesn’t she know that I will give her a blessed love forever? Doesn’t she see the agony I am in just sitting here and typing out things that aren’t yet real when I could be looking at the only thing that matters to me right now? She should know. She should come. Now.

I don’t take this feeling lightly. Thinking is my favorite pastime. It is what I do when I am feeling bored. Think and write. Being too tired to think is torture, like seeing the cookie jar on the counter and being too small to reach it. And yet, the exhaustion of working through my ideas is too much for me right now. Mental drain is real, and every one of my formerly available faculties have been slowly sucked down. I haven’t even the ability to rub two brain  cells together to create the warmth of wit.

So, what can I do when my smarts smart? I start to explain things that are really going on. I give a play-by-play of everything I feel, because I have no filter, no way of getting around the inevitable.

I have a pile of papers to grade.

I haven’t written the lessons for when my baby is born.

My wife can’t sleep.

My dog keeps pooping in the house.

My tile floor keeps breaking.

I haven’t done my homework for Language Theory.

I’m not sure what else I can say. These are the things that make my mind mushy. These things weigh upon me, piling themselves on top of one another. So many others too. Also. In addition. As well.

• Words are always applied to the whole object
• Each word has an exclusive meaning.

• Learning meaning is only done by applying a word to new concepts or objects.

It’s about speaking up without yet being spoken to.

It’s about survival.

It’s about making lists.

It’s about hoping to God that I have a few more hours.

It’s about a relentless search.

It’s about being open to something that hasn’t been dreamed of yet.

It’s about wringing out wet T-shirts.

It’s about not knowing how things will turn out and acting anyway.

It’s about running in place and getting winded.
It’s about feeling worthless.

It’s about The Glass Menagerie, West Side Story, and Waiting For Godot.

It’s about the history of all things beautiful.

It’s about crying when you recognize something.

It’s about mothers, and the absence of mothers.

It’s about wanting to wriggle away from all responsibility.

You see, I may be a fragile, murky, pedantic and obtuse, broken, fanatically supportive, fluid, wandering failure, but at least I’m not ugly.

Listen to this article

1. Choose one of the following to respond to in your writing (to be discussed as a whole class after 5-10 minutes of writing):
   • Why do you think that people act differently online then they do in real life?
   • How can we create a safe environment for everyone on our blogs besides setting up rules or guidelines?
   • What are the inherent risks of posting to a blog at least once a week?
2. In groups of 2-3, explore the Discovery Blogging Rules websites and brainstorm your own rules ideas that fit into the following categories (to be used for creating our official Discovery Blogging Rules for 2006-2007):
   • Creating a blogging environment without fear (of insult, of reprisal, of dishonesty).
   • Creating a scholastic blogging environment.
   • Creating a blogging environment based upon protection (of personal information, of identity, of unique thoughts).
   • Creating a creative, non-restrictive, tolerant, and sensitive blogging environment.
3. In groups of 2-3, write down approximately 5 Blogging rules that you think should be a part of the Discovery Blogging Rules.

We discussed and debated the student generated rules, especially those that further explored the concepts originally outlined in the four resources mentioned above or those that were noticeably absent from those four resources. Here are our results:

Discovery Blogging Rules

2006-2007

1. I will not give out any information more personal than my first name or post pictures of myself.
2. I will not plagiarize, instead I will expand on others’ ideas and give credit where it is due.
3. I will use language appropriate for school.
4. I will not insult my fellow students or their writing.
5. I will only post pieces that I am comfortable with everyone seeing; other pieces I will keep as drafts.
6. I will not be afraid to express my ideas, while not overgeneralizing or making derogatory/inflammatory remarks; any posts on controversial issues must be submitted to Mr. Wilkoff for consideration before they can be posted to my blog.
7. I will use constructive/productive/purposeful criticism, supporting any idea, comment, or critique I have with evidence.
8. I will take blogging seriously, posting only things that are meaningful and taking my time when I write.
9. I will try to spell everything correctly.
10. I will not use my blog posts or comments as a chat room. (No IM language.)
11. I will not bully others in my blog posts or in my comments.
12. I will never access another student’s account.
13. I will be proactive in monitoring the comments that others leave on my blog, utilizing the comment blacklist if necessary.
14. I will personalize my blog and keep my writing authentic, while taking responsibility for anything blogged in my name.
15. I will not provoke other students in my blog posts or comments.
16. I will use my blog as an extension of the classroom, and in doing so, I will leave anything that unsaid in the classroom unsaid on my blog.
17. I will only post photos which are school appropriate and either uncopywrited or correctly cited.
18. I will not spam.
19. I will only post comments on posts that I have fully read, rather than just skimmed.
20. I will not reveal anyone else’s identity in my comments or posts.

Infractions of these rules will lead to the following consequences in order of severity and number of offense:

1. Letter of apology to those offended by the infraction (individual students, one core class, or whole blogging community), warning by teacher, and editing or deletion of offending post/comment.
2. Letter of apology to those offended by the infraction (individual students, one core class, or whole blogging community), temporary loss of blogging privileges (duration of quarter), editing or deletion of offending post/comment.
3. Letter of apology to those offended by the infraction (individual students, one core class, or whole blogging community), permanent loss of blogging privileges (duration of school year), editing or deletion of offending post/comment.

The process by which blog posts violating rules 3, 10, or posts of a controversial nature may be used:

1. Students present the idea/draft for Mr. Wilkoff’s consideration.
2. Mr. Wilkoff will either accept or reject the writing based upon its merit on a case by case basis.
3. The student will post the piece of writing with this warning: “This piece of writing is authentic in its use of controversial language/topics.”
4. Mr. Wilkoff will post a heading: “This blog post was accepted by Mr. Wilkoff for use as a Weekly Authentic despite its controversial nature.”

These rules have already started to work their magic. This past week, one student violated rule #18 (spamming). The letter of apology for this infraction, which has shown me that these rules are workable, is as follows:

I hope that my classes and I have added something to the discussion of blogging in the classroom. Please let me know if you have a better way of doing this, or if you think we have missed anything.

• The process of continuous instinctual categorization of words and contextual evidence is responsible for understanding sentences.

• The meaning derived is greater than the sum of its parts.

SoccerLover did a great job picking something that I could really connect to. She picked a representation of life through books that I find tantalizingly fulfilling. It did leave me with a few questions, though.

• What do I think about it?
• What does it mean to me?
• Do I think this metaphor for a book is accurate or could I come up with a better one?

Ultimately, I decided to take the challenge that I thought that this post represented.

You read A Book.

Its words are an inviting whisper, a nearly unspoken calling of laughter and thought. This playful friend beckons you to get lost, without a worry for finding your way back. It is Pan and his flute. It is the harmless apple in the Garden. It is a million possibilities that never really narrow down because they always reach the furthest recesses of your mind. It is the beautiful dancer that hypnotizes you until you forget that you are watching anything, you are such a part of the moment. It is the playmate that leaves you at the bottom of the gorge, with only your wits as defense. It is the bug that crawls in your ear just before you sleep and won’t let you forget that it is there, for the buzzing. It is a hopeless cause of remembrance on every page, the whole of yourself mirrored back to you, disfigured yet satisfying.

Just as an addition to my ever-growing Wish-List:

• I would like to be able to do live collaborative screencasting so that I can conference individually with my students and we can point to and talk about certain aspects of their writing.

Can someone please work on this application. I would really like to use it in my class this year.

Book Recommendations:

• The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World

• Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language)

• Not everyone can be a mathematician, but everyone is a linguist in a manner of speaking.
• Linguistic Determinism (Language Shapes Thought) and Linguistic Relativity (We see reality through our native language).
• Is it naive to believe that there is a universal mentalese?
• Does language support or influence thought?
• Language is not a prerequisite for thought.
• Language and culture are inseparable/interchangeable.
• Pinker and Whorf (Determinism/Relativity) are at odds.
• Pre-linguistic children have thoughts but do not have language.
• Thought of language vs. Language of thought.
• Is there some other aspect of language than just thinking and speaking? (The Psychosis of language?)
• Grammatical constructions are not a prerequisite for being able to express a concept.
• Neurolinguistics – Language in the brain.
• Differences between Human and Ape’s brains:
• Frontal Lobes
• Compartments
• One More Book Rec.
• Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought

When he sent me the questions, however, I was impressed with the depth that they were calling for. So, I took on them as a challenge and answered them as completely and with as much cogitation as possible. The two questions that struck me the most (and produced a clear sense of focus for the year’s worth of teaching with technology) were about new tools that I want to use this year and new tools that I wish would be created this year. Because I found these two questions to be most illuminating for my own practice, I would like to challenge the greater Edusphere to answer them and share out all of the tools that they want to use and wish were available.

• Are there new tools that you’re looking forward to using with students?

I’m looking forward to setting up wikis with my kids. I am also looking at geocaching as a way of exploring more authentic nature writing. More specifically I am excited about using the following websites to encourage content creation and a love of reading and writing:
1. Writely – For collaboration on writing dramas or stories.
2. Glypho – For collaboration on storytelling.
3. Quickmuse – To make poetry writing more transparent.
4. Trackslife – To track writing progress.
5. Standpoint – To create belief statements about reading, writing, and life.
6. Vaestro – To create an audio forum to talk about blog posts.
There are some others, but these are the ones I am looking forward to most.

• How about tools that don’t exist yet, but should? Do you have any particular designs or wishes there?

1. I really would like rss to be more versatile. I would like to see any webpage that I want within an RSS reader and only see what has been changed since the last time I looked.
2. I would like my students to be able to create content in a fully functional word processor/video-editor/image-editor/webpage-editor and be able to post to any service that they wanted without having to log-in to their individual pages.
3. I would like blogs and wikis to become more like one another. (Blogs should be more editable, wikis should allow for more community.)
4. I want a way of controlling what all of my students see on their computer screens without having to buy remote desktop software. (In other words, I would like to have a live (and hopefully free) screencasting tool.)
5. I want podcasting software that uses voice recognition to create transcripts of each podcast to be read while you read.
6. I want a tool to discuss literature side-by-side with a digital copy of the book.
7. I want to be able to tag, put a sticky note on, or comment on/rate anything (pictures, videos, websites, blog posts) and have anyone with a browser be able to see these things without having to download anything or sign up with any service.

Yoz e-mailed me back about some of the items on my wishlist. He gave me a few resources (VNC, Coner.ning, and Castingwords), but none were really what I was looking for. If anyone who reads this knows about anything that would fill one of my wishes, please leave me a comment. More than that, however, I would love to see what you wish for in the coming year of creating classroom 2.0.

A man is fully understands his biases, abilities and shortcomings. A Man thinks. A man never uses his strength to make others feel weak. A man knows that there are differences between himself and a women, but sees them only as the completion of everything he can’t do. A man can see the truth in everything. A man is confident enough in his masculinity to not have to prove it every chance he gets. A man is tolerant. A man works hard and knows how to play with every thing he “has to do.” A man gets what makes him unique. A man is always trying to make himself better. A man is the manifestation of hope. A man is honest about personal needs and emotions. A man, from time to time, wears a devilish grin. A man is aware, both socially and personally. A man cares about what is important.

This is what he wrote in response for his English class:

As always Mr. Wilkoff gives an answer that makes me feel stupid in comparison, I really liked his. I think I agree with just about everything on his answer. I did note that he did not say a man has to have a penis or testicles, which maybe was just implied. I do think that most things stated could be done by a woman, but maybe that shows that men and women aren’t so different. Men and women obviously aren’t the same but we have our similarities. Really the question is really hard since it is so vague and everyone really has different and correct opinions. By definition all it takes to be a man is to have the biology of a man, but just looking back at our day shows us that men act different then women and it’s probably not a coincidence. Maybe it is just nurture over nature and we act like men because we were taught to, but it would take a hell of a experiment to prove that right. And lawsuits would come through your ears for trying to do a social experiment on a kid and give him make-up and purses.

I really like the fact that this teacher has now turned writing into a conversation. It strikes me as incredibly authentic and fun. I hope to do something like this when I come to my Study of Race and Gender.

• How can we use our language so that our students become more metacognitive and reflective?

• Is peer editing actually useful for students or only for teachers?
• How would our teaching practice change if we were to consider all of our students as gifted?
• Iquiry works for all students, no matter the level of giftedness.

• Food
• Japon Spicy Tuna handrolls at the happy hour price.
• My wife’s savved second breakfast of Lucky Charms.
• Ordering Dairy Queen Blizzards with chocolate ice cream.
• People/Pets
• My wife as she picks at her stretch marks.
• Charlie when he sees his red leash.
• Places
• The fear of never breathing again after the SCUBA gear fell out of my mouth.
• Objects

• Kara goes into the kitchin, stepping on the slightly-off new tile floor. She sets herself up for her first breakfast. Try number one at filling her stomach. Out come the rice chex and the two percent milk. Out comes a big spoon to get it all down quickly. She scarfs in front of a tivo’d family feud, sitting on the couch that she sinks into and hates because of it. She waits. She hopes. She knows. It is is all in vain as she heads for the toilet that she knows too well…
• Intentionally use one craft that we discussed and that is present in the “professional writing” and use it in your writing piece.

• What is the author doing in this piece?
• Are these elements of this particular genre?
• Example:
• Memoir Crafts (Murphy the Dog):
• Short/Long sentences fluency
• frames setting first
• aides-voice
• personal/universal

• Getting ready to write
• Writing
• Making a little bit better
• Celebration/Publication (making writing public).

• Grammar in context.
• Guided writing is more effective than free writing.
• Modeling good writing of your own, published writing, and student writing is important.
• Sentence Combining works.
• Use scales for success in writing.
• What is the target for your writing?
• Inquiry in writing is powerful.
• Asking questions as an author or a reader of authors is a virtue.

• Shakespeare Set Free (Writing prompts for each chapter of Shakespeare’s plays).

• Mark Overmeyer will be e-mailing us his classroom process.

• Sculpt
• Take Away
• Add to
• Write about other’s sculptures.
• How is this like the process of revision?

I am writing about what I am writing about. The right wrists placed near the right keys. The longer I think and write, the longer I rightly think. I have no concept of content, a supposed constant companion in an essay. This essay, though, this one right now lacks all content, so what is left? Style, my friend, style.

The essay, as a way of making meaning about a topic, is so perfect. In this way, I am writing about nothing. I can’t write about anything but what I am writing about. I have no point, but to be pricked by potent words. This is the writing that is continually reborn, every syllable is eating itself, turning itself inside out, and becoming the same again and again.

Just as a sine wave crosses the x-axis infinitely, writing about the words themselves is the freedom to come home as many times as I want. I can go deeper into the crevices of every word, seeing them as open and hopeful, more so than any others because these are words about words. This essay is as closed and open ended as a circle. It can never be about what it isn’t about.

I find purity in writing this essay. in its unending and unbeginning. Truly, all of these words cannot exist. They can only be within my head. But they are at my fingertips too, and because they are there, I love them. Once I start writing, I have changed what I am writing about. How can I then write about it? I love my paradoxical essay, my potent words without a point.

So, these words must blur together and leave no residue in your mind. I have said nothing about something many times over. That nothing, though, is so savory, so stylish. I could write about writing about nothing for a very long time.

I’m not sure that my student implied all of this when he wrote it, but I hope that he did (we’ll see when I show it to the class tomorrow). I like this type of recursion and metacognition. With a little bit broader scope, this kind of writing about writing could be actually useful in the classroom. Let me know what you think about this “instantaneous reflection.” Is it useful? Is it important to reflect upon every action you do as you are doing it? Do we do this naturally or do we need inquisitive 7th graders to point it out to us?

• Quality
• Quantity
• Manner
• And one more that I can’t remember.

• Double Negatives are okay.
• Deletion of verb “to be” and other unnecessary pieces of english.
• Contracting auxiliaries.

The required texts for this course:

Linguistics: An introduction to language by Adrian Akmajian et al.

The Language Instinct: How the mind creates language by Steve Pinker.

Optional Texts for this course:

Analyzing Political Discourse: Theory and Discourse by Paul Chilton

Thoughts and Utterances: The pragmatics of explicit communication by Robyn Carston

Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers by Diane Blakemore et al.

• This is the first class that I have had that requires a book review. It has to be relating to linguistics, but I am not sure how loose the relationship can be. (Can I read Know-It-All?)
• Chomsky (mostly a nativist) was one of the first to argue against B.F. Skinner’s ideas of behaviorism.
• Language Aquisition Theories
• Inside (within the brain) (Chomsky and Pinker)
• Outside (within the environment and interaction)
• A combination of both
• The critical age of langauge aquisition is aprox. 5. If a kid does not have a hold of the language by this age then there is either something wrong with brain activity or the child’s environment.
• Language values:
• Be clear
• Be brief
• Be simple
• (Be relevent)
• Language Attrition: where you forget your native language because you don’t find it useful.

1. One book that changed your life:
Slaughter-House Five. I will always remember the first time I realized the true power of “So it goes.” After every death in the book (including the deaths of inanimate objects) this phrase is echoed. It makes me so happy that world goes on after us, that everything around us is normal, even death. Of course, in the book, time travel and aliens are normal, so maybe I keep missing the point.

2. One book that you’ve read more than once:

Catcher in the Rye. Every time I read this book I am at a new stage of my life. I identify with a different part of Holden. I used to understand his rebellion so much better because I was rebellious. Now I understand his preservation of innocence because I want that for my daughter.

3. One book you’d want on a desert island:
The Old Man and the Sea. I think if I were on a desert island I would finally have enough time to analyze the meaning of all of the simple and beautiful words.

4. One book that made you laugh:
A Heartbreaking Work of Stagering Genius. Dave Eggar’s humor is some of the ripest and most intelligent I have known. I can’t help but laugh at his tragedy.

5. One book that made you cry:
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He lost his mother and father within a few months of one another. The weight of loss in his story is so overwhelming that it is hard to imagine reading it without at least welling up once.

6. One book that you wish had been written:
Simple Answers Suck: A book about the inherent complexity of searching for anything worth knowing.

7. One book that you wish had never been written:
Toxin. I had to teach this trash novel once in a Modern Literature course. It has the worst dialogue imaginable and the characters could not be more flat. I eventually had to teach it as an example of bad writing.

8. One book you’re currently reading:
Know-It-All. I have great respect for anyone who reads the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and doesn’t break up his marraige in the process.

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:
Everything is Illuminated. This is a great movie and I have heard that the book is even better. I can’t wait to get some time to dive into it.

10. Now Tag Five People You Want to Hear From:

I would rather tag all of my students. I can’t wait to see what they say.

When I got the first comment of dissent, I started to think about what I was really putting across with my 50 theses. I realized that much of them could be seen as a grand plan for revolution in modern education. Now, I see that as a good thing, but some people would say that most revolutions either don’t work or are revolutionizing the wrong things.

The other aspect of these comments that really caught me off guard was the way that they were reacting to the title: “Progressive teaching.” Do I mean that I am a liberal democrat when I say this or do I mean that I simply want things to change for the better and not have us become either complacent in our successes or lost in our failures. I was hoping for the latter.

Are we so polarized in this country that even the words we use must either be in support of republican or democratic views? I had always said no. Words are how we enter into debate; they are how we strengthen our communication so that things can actually get done. I was not trying to throw fire onto tradition, and I was certainly not trying to align myself with a hopeless pedagogy.

Now to address the specific concerns that have been raised:

The first firm disagreement from another representative of the Edusphere came from Darren. In picking apart my first four theses, he said,

1. Teachers should be the change they want to see in their schools. What the heck does that mean?
2. Teachers should constantly reinvent the wheel to make it ride smoother and faster over any type of terrain imaginable. Why? There’s another sensible saying: if it works, don’t fix it. This doesn’t mean that teachers shouldn’t practice a critical pedagogy to determine if their instruction is meeting the needs of the students, but change for its own sake seems a tremendous waste of time to me.
3. Teachers should never teach the same things the same way twice. See #2.
4. Teachers should see tradition for what it is: the hope that things will stay the same forever. This is the most insidious. Tradition isn’t the hope that things will stay the same, it’s a link between the past and future. It gives us a foundation, a rock, something upon which to build. Graduation exercises are a tradition we have–should we get rid of them out of some belief that they’re stale or out of date? That’s not progressive, that’s destructive.

I would like to address each grievance individually.

1. I stole “being the change we wish to see” directly from Gandhi’s mouth. It was shameless, but I had a good reason. I believe that teachers should never preach a particular way of doing things and then not put them into practice themselves (not walking their talk). If modeling is so important to students, it should also be that way for colleagues. You should be able to walk down the hallways of a school and notice the teachers who are really trying to reflect and collaborate. You should be able to see the change in them.
2. I do not advocate change for change’s sake. I advocate change because things can always be better. It is hard for me to understand not wanting things to run more smoothly in a classroom, or your teaching to be more effective eveen when 85-90 percent of your students made at least one year’s growth last year. I can never be perfect at what I do, but I want to get at as close to that ideal, as close to reaching every kid as possible. That is why change is so important. If you keep going as you always have, those 10 percent of kids will never get what they need out of education.
3. At the very least, you have to admit that you will never have the same students twice (they change their minds from day to day sometimes). How can you teach two different groups of kids the same way? I get anxious when I know that I am not engaging the group in front of me. When I know that a lesson isn’t working or could work better, it is my duty to make sure that I make the correct adjustments. Getting better at what I do is so important to me that it literally keeps me up at night.
4. You are right. This one is probably the most insidious thesis of all 50. But maybe it is just in the way that it is phrased. What I mean is that tradition for the sake of tradition doesn’t make sense. I actually like traditions. I like going out with my wife on our anniversary. I like going out to my grandmother’s house and watching the parade every 4th of July. But these are traditions that make sense. These are ones that are authentic and have purpose for the individuals involved. The traditions that I am trying to change are the ones that lack all of these qualities. Traditions like “Social Advancement” (passing a failing student in elementary and middle school so that he/she will be with age-similar peers) must be changed because they are not helping students to succeed. The traditions that may have been a good idea at one time, the ones that made sense when we didn’t live in a global community and economy, the ones that aren’t focused on helping students to learn, these are the ones that must be changed. As for graduations: I spoke at my high school graduation, and I loved every minute of it. From writing the speech to practicing it endlessly to getting up and showing everyone what I had done. I do not want to eliminate tradition, just the stance that all traditions are necessary.

The second comment that really got me thinking was by another man named Jeff:

Let it suffice to say for now that any random five of these items gives ample reason why my wife, my son and I commute over two hours each day to his modest private school. His school is a cornucopia of diversity; each class in his three years there has been filled with students from across the globe. At the end of first grade he was reading at a fourth grade level and he was by no means the best reader in his class. They are busy mastering subject matter while their public (and many private) school counterparts are being subjected to “an environment that encourages life-long learning”.Our nearest public school is 600 yards away from our house.Public education has been in the stranglehold of the “progressives” for what…about 100 years now?And this is what you have to show for yourselves?

Martin Luther had this idea first, but I’m sure he won’t mind if I borrow it. I kept thinking that progressive education needed a good rally cry, a belief system that we could all debate, discuss, and eventually agree upon. So I decided to start this project. Here are the first 50 theses of progressive education. I have categorized each of my beliefs in order to organize my thoughts and prevent any redundancy. Please write your ideas and additions into the comments for this post.
Change:

1. Teachers should be the change they want to see in their schools.
2. Teachers should constantly reinvent the wheel to make it ride smoother and faster over any type of terrain imaginable.
3. Teachers should never teach the same things the same way twice.
4. Teachers should see tradition for what it is: the hope that things will stay the same forever.

Collaboration and Community:

5. Teachers should be a part of a supporting network of dedicated fellow teachers who challenge each other to be better.
6. Teachers should accept advice, encouragement, and feedback freely from anyone who has their best interest in mind.
7. Just like teachers should never write off a student, they should also never write off a fellow teacher as incapable of change or merely incapable.
8. Teachers should never assume that their ideas will be adopted or believed even if they have research on their side but they should always try to convince people anyway.
9. Teachers should evangelize what they believe, but never prescribe it as a program for other teachers to follow verbatim. All teachers are different.
10. Teachers should not fear certain subjects of conversation with colleagues; all teachers deserve to be challenged in a way that they can understand and accept.
11. Teachers should never participate in anything in their classrooms, departments, or districts that can’t or won’t be shared with others and perhaps improved upon.
12. Teachers should be honest and open about what they excel at and what they need help with.
13. Teachers should be addictive personalities.
14. Teachers should never have to worry that someone has their back.
15. Teachers should see gossip for what it is: the nearly irremovable wedge driven between teachers to cut off all collaborative possibility.

Curriculum:

16. Teachers should be an integral part of all curriculum decision.
17. Teachers should never merely teach their content; they should teach the usage of their content in new and different situations.
18. Teachers should disarm racial, gender, and class biases in themselves and their classrooms by always speaking honestly about the corrosive effects that these biases can have on every question asked and curricular decision made.
19. Teachers shouldn’t see a difference between teaching to the students and teaching to the test. They should trust their methods to get students to where success lies.
20. Teachers should never give an assignment that they wouldn’t be willing to do themselves.

Teaching/Learning Theory:

21. Teachers should always have a good answer for the question “Why is this important?”
22. Teachers should find their inspiration for lessons in anything they want. There are infinite entrances to learning.
23. Teachers should learn.
24. Teachers should never think for their students.
25. Teachers should know that they have effects farther reaching than this year’s classroom, and should teach accordingly.
26. Teachers should be an expert in what they teach, but not the expert.
27. Teachers should allow a specific entrance to every student for their curriculum, thus creating universal access to learning.
28. Teachers should promote the complex and sometimes ambiguous nature of problem solving and real world application by bringing it into the classroom and showing students how complexity isn’t a vice, but a virtue.
29. Teachers should use theory only as an avenue to creating real lessons and activities that are student-centered instead of using it to create more theory (application instead of abstraction).
30. Teachers should learn from their students all that they can about student learning, teacher practice, and the next generation of life.
31. Teachers should know who their students are, and because of this, know what they need to learn.
32. Teacher should know what is unique about their school/district, and they should use these things to add idiosyncratic interest rather than jumping on a curriculum bandwagon.
33. Teachers should never frame their days by asking, “What can I fill this time with?”
34. Teachers should be ready to influence minds at a moments notice by asking students questions and learning something from the answer.
35. Teachers should anticipate anything but assume nothing.
36. Teachers should find solutions the same way that they find problems, by looking for them.
37. Teachers should preserve their individuality because it is the only way that they can preserve the individuality of their students.
38. Teachers should be prepared for, have an affinity toward, and see the value and beauty in the inherent difficulties in teaching one child, let alone 120.
39. Teachers should use the language of their craft in their classroom, encouraging their students to know the content more intimately, but they should never shirk their responsibility to be an adaptive translator of their content language.
40. Teacher should blend who they are with what they do. Teaching should be an authentic act for the teacher, not just the student.

Professional Development and Administration Support:

41. Teacher should be confident enough in their knowledge and teaching craft to justify any decision to a parent or administrator.
42. Teacher should know that new ideas exist, and should actively search for them in colleagues, both near to and far from them.
43. Teachers should never hide behind educators’ jargon and acronyms to make it appear as though they have a monopoly on knowledge.
44. Teachers shouldn’t be forced to choose “or” instead of “and” when it comes to resource needs in the classroom.
45. Teachers should read widely from both new and old media specific to their own interests in education, rather than read teacher books from someone unconnected to the classroom.
46. Teachers should never form an adversarial relationship with their administration; no sustained curricular or pedagogical decisions can be made only at the classroom level.

Reflection:

47. Teachers should know what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t work in their classrooms.
48. Teachers should collect anecdotes as data just as often as they collect test scores because more people are convinced when stories are connected to numbers.
49. Teachers should see honest reflection as the main avenue of change in teaching.

Technology:

50. Teachers should see technology as being as integral to learning as pen and paper, an aid to but never substitute for good teaching.

I know that this list needs a lot of work. Please help my far reaching attempt to give modern educational belief a clear and powerful voice.

I think that this could be done by holding meetings at local schools in order to address the myspace/internet safety issues. There should be a place where parents can ask as many questions as they want and learn about the educational benefits of moving beyond pencil and paper based classrooms. I would like to set something like this up at my school. These are the resources that I have so far. Let me know if I need to include anything else.

Safe Blogging and Social Networking Resources 

Karl Fisch’s Internet Safety Links 

A resource for CyberBullying 

A wiki introducing Internet Safety to Parents 

A sad little article about the lack of understanding among teachers about internet safety. 

I am still working out what this meeting(s) should look like. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

Our group definition for Equity: Access to opportunity with unlimited guidance and support.

We need to eliminate the gatekeepers at our school. They treat learning as an elitist act. You need to socialize students to intelligence. Gatekeepers are teachers who prevent access to learning because they have a problem with a disposition or a type of intelligence.

You don’t have to be the smartest teacher in the world. You simply have to be resourceful.

In order to make sure that kids are prepared, there must be a discussion among teachers about what the expectations will be throughout the years.

Part of learning is failure.

Exposure alone to rigorous curriculum is going to prepare you later in life, as long as the support is there so that students don’t feel like a failure.

Be a talent scout for kids, especially the ones that don’t look like the typical AP-Student.

Strategies are a lifeline for students to be successful in the rigorous classroom.

We should echo students’ language in order to value their background, we should show how our language translates to theirs.

Learning is not a sprint; it is a marathon.

Rubric for Access and Equity
	Teachers/Administration	Students	Parents
4	Actively promote rigorous classes for all students.	Are enfranchised to make decisions about appropriately rigorous classes	Advocates for an inclusive program and encourages student responsibility
3	Recognize need and working toward greater levels of access for all students	Simply Enjoy the diversity	Recognize value for all
2	Superficially recognize need, but no action taken (lip-service)	Social Expectations	Only concerned with own students
1	Gate-Keepers	Grade-Grubbing or Apathetic	Apathetic or uninformed

Alternate Rubric for Access and Equity
4	3	2	1
Students WANT to enroll in AP courses; there is a waiting list to get in.	Teachers actively recruit students to enroll in AP classes	An open enrollment policy exists but not many students are interested.	Students must all qualify for enrollment in AP classes.
Population of AP classes is diverse	Population is diverse	Population of ap courses is only partially diverse.	Population is elitest
80% of AP students take the AP exam	70% of students take the AP test	60% of students take the AP tests	50% or fewer take test
Resources and support and well established in the building and often used by students	Resources are support are available and developing	Minimal resources and support available to AP students	Little to no support is available for AP students.
AP teachers are given time to collaborate and attend AP training	Professional resources are available in building	Professional Development resources are available but not well-known or used	Teachers research and locate AP info on their own.

In elementary school some parents are helicopter parents, but in high school they turn into black hawk down parents.

What does it mean to be in a rigorous classroom? Does it mean that everyone can get an A or a B? How do we communicate this to students/parents?

In order for a rigorous curriculum to take hold and be sustainable, we must have coordinated support from administration, teachers, parents, and community.

Intelligence is not static. It can be honed and solidified with strategies.

Learning is learning no matter where you are or what you are doing, we only attach elitism when it comes to academics.

You cannot laugh at true learning.

There is no such thing as Pre-AP classes. All classes should provide strategies for students to succeed in a rigorous high school and college classroom.

We need students to have a repertoire of automatic strategies. Students should be able to decide for themselves which one is the most appropriate.

If we don’t use our professional development time wisely (taking it back to the classroom) then we are wasting taxpayer dollars and the time of everyone involved.

Do we need to embarrass our reluctant teachers into signing on to engage in collaboration and academically rigorous classes?

Can we get money to work on weekends toward vertical teams?

I know that as a proficient reader, I have developed my own shorthand and language for coding a text. Is it more helpful to have a set list of codes for reading, or is it better to let students make up their own and create a language similar to the way I did?

If you say: Annotate the text, how many kids would actually do it? What would they think that annotating the text means that they should do?

Never put someone down without showing them the way back up.

I can’t think of a better way to ask for a community than to create one and hope that other people join up. I have already run this idea by a few, more experienced, Edubloggers, Bud Hunt and Karl Fisch. They have both responded pretty well to the idea and are willing to help me get it off of the ground.

After my initial e-mails to my administration and these two great teachers/resources, I thought that there would be no way of stopping such a mammoth idea. My principal loved it, and the feeder area coordinator thought it would work well with some of our other goals. But last night, I received an e-mail from the Web Services manager of my district. In it he said that I should consider using two semi-crippled technologies (Firstclass and SchoolCenter) that teachers in my district are already fairly comfortable with (and the district has already paid for). I say that these are crippled technologies because they have real holes in their capabilities. They just can’t do everything that I want to do with this community.

Even with this minor setback, I have decided that I will not compromise (at least initially) my vision of the “Perfect Online Professional Development Community.” I would like to see just how collaborative, easy to use, scalable, social, and reflective I can make this experience for other teachers. So, without any further explanation, I would like to unveil what I think are the essential pieces of a new generation professional learning community.

A central portal will give you access to the following (I am thinking about using protopage):

1. A master blog that would guide discussion.
2. Blogroll
3. Recent Blog Articles (a la SuprGlu)
4. Archived Blog Articles (in a newsletter type format)
5. A Google Earth Mash-Up of all of the school represented in the community
6. Bios of the teacher bloggers (if they wish to include them) done in a social way so that collaboration is easier (an Elgg.org-type personal page)
7. A calendar for event planning (Skypecasts, Classroom Demonstration Webcasts, Classroom Picture Flickr Stream)

The other aspects of the community that will not be directly shown on the portal’s front page except for simply linking to them:

1. A Q+A section for both teaching questions and technical help questions (Ning.com has a great set-up for something like this).
2. A Digg-Style Article/Website recommender.
3. A Wiki for success stories of technology integration or improved practice (a little like David Warlick‘s Telling the New Story Wiki)
4. Walk-Throughs (screencasts) for how to create blogs, collaborate, etc.
5. A way of dealing with comments both attached to and unattached to their original posts. (co.mments.com has a pretty great strategy)
6. A professional development bookshelf (akin to either this one or this one)
7. A way of signing up for an e-mail RSS system for new posts (most teachers check their e-mail religiously)
8. A belief statements wiki about technology or teaching in general for certain collaborating members or individuals (this could be a running list of belief statements and/or a running list of questions that these belief statements beg to be answered. I also like the idea of using standpoint.com somehow).
9. A system for sharing lesson plans and ideas (both formatted and unformatted) including a collaborative document center.
10. A cross-school project starter (partnering up similar teaching styles)

Questions I still have about how to get this done:

1. How do we get as many different positions represented in this community (principals, core teachers, librarians, elective teachers, etc.)
2. Should we try to protect anonymity on the blogs?
3. Just how much do most people know about these technologies? Will it be like starting from scratch for most people? And if so, should I send out a formal (or informal) survey about these ideas (What have you done in your classrooms with technology? Do you like to create you own lessons? How much do you enjoy reflection? Do you want feedback on your classroom ideas from other teachers? How worried are you that this is going to take too much of your free time? How many of you already blog?)?

Well, that is pretty much it. I would like to make this project as appealing and voluntary as possible, so that everyone who is in the community has a lot of buy-in. Let me know what you think of this grand scheme. What is possible and what is not possible?

• Authentic Writing (aka Real Writing)

Authentic Writing at its most basic is writing that has a real audience and a real purpose.

Now to define the two new terms I have just created. A “real audience” is one that is not only the teacher. The teacher and the self can be part of a real audience, but rarely do they make up it entirely. A real audience is made up of people who are genuinly interested in the writing for what it has to say not because they are forced to be interested. A real audience is one that is likely to listen to, comment on, or attach value to a piece of student writing. Equally likely for a real audience is the posibility of using the writing to create something new. Finally, a real audience is one that does not require perfection to find importance.

A “real purpose” is one that has some intrinsic value to the writer. Getting better at writing can be a real purpose, but it is not (and should not be) the only one. A real purpose is determined by the context of a student’s life. It is made up of what the student wants to do or would benefit from doing (making a grocery list, writing a passionate eulogy, getting out some teenage angst) rather than what he/she has to do. Writing with a real purpose is a social act; it is connected to the self and to others without any educational manuvers or imagination on the part of the writer (i.e. Write a letter to your congressperson about spending a million dollars).

To further illistrate the point of Authentic Writing, here is a chart of what constitutes Inauthentic Writing versus its Authentic counterparts:

Authentic Writing	Inauthentic Writing
A grocery list	A CSAP prompt
A blog post	A research paper on a teacher-selected topic
An intelectual passion paper	A form poem that is only seen by the teacher
Student-selected creative non-fiction	An essay that does not relate to the student or the current curriculum

Here is my idea:

I will develop a quiz on new technologies that will help my students throughout the year (blogs, wikis, rss, podcasts, thinkfree, glypho, etc.). They can either follow the links and find each of the answers individually. Or they can search and follow their own path to a file (or website) with all of the answers to the quiz in one place. I need to work out the logistics, but I can imagine finding a way of hiding the file (or website) so that my students will still have to use all of the skills that they are being quizzed on.

Do you think that this is possible or a good idea?

These are the assumptions about the two competing orientations of Language Arts department:
Anti-Change Orientation:

1. We are a leading department in the district and we are doing the best that we can.
2. The main objective of the department is to follow the directives of the district and the school administration.
3. Reflection is touchy-feely and therefore unnecessary.
4. There is no time in the regular meetings for talking about the specific lessons and resources we are using in class.
5. You must go through drudgery and organizational hoops in order to accomplish anything worthwhile within the department.
6. Striving for change is either a hopeless endeavor or completely unnecessary.
7. All issues involving students and teachers can be looked at through a black and white lens and are therefore easily solvable without debate, nuance, or further research/intervention.
8. When you find something that has worked in the past, there is no reason that it shouldn’t continue to work in the future.
9. Technology is simultaneously unnecessary in the classroom and too hard to learn to make the effort worthwhile.
10. Young teachers cannot add significantly to a department until they have had sufficient experience and have adopted the teaching styles of veteran teachers.

Pro-Change Orientation:

1. Unnecessary social and pedagogical differences hold us back from really fulfilling our roles as master teachers and supportive colleagues.
2. The main objective of the department is to create a unifying voice of all of its members so that we make sure that all students can learn in all classrooms.
3. Teachers (members of the department) know what is best for the classroom (in terms of assessments, lessons, programs, etc.).
4. Reflection leads to a greater depth of learning, higher retention rate, and greater buy-in from all participants and is therefore an essential part of the department.
5. The only way to make sure that our department stays student-centered is to bring the classroom into the department via easily digestible, highly engaging lessons that have worked well with our population of students.
6. Striving for change is courageous, filled with promise, the inevitable result of looking at where we are and where we need to be.
7. Passionate ideas, candid discussion, and a safe environment that allows teachers to freely mentor and seek help can circumvent most of the unpleasant tasks and red tape associated with the process of creating worthwhile/useful materials.
8. There is nothing that works so well that it should never be revisited, reflected upon, or bettered somehow.
9. The student issues surrounding reading and writing and teacher issues of development and interpersonal clashes are inherently complex and should be met with understanding and appropriate action to bring about lasting resolutions.
10. Technology is an integral part of any classroom that aims to engage our savvy student population and prepare them for a 21st century world.
11. Young teachers should learn as much as they can from veterans who are continuously improving their craft. These young teachers should not have a qualified voice in the department because they are the ones who will either continue teaching if they are fulfilled by it or leave teaching if they find that serving students has taken a back seat to logistics, assessments, or tradition.

I’m not sure how I am going to bring these two viewpoints together, but I think enumerating these viewpoints may lead to some good discussion amongst our department’s members. I have visited the Classroom Change Wiki, and I think that a lot of these ideas are congruent with the ones that are already there. It may be of use to the Edusphere to start another section of the Wiki devoted to change at the department level. Please let me know what you think about any of these ideas. I am particularly interested in refining these points so that we can discuss them as a department and not have people throwing chairs at one another.

Wendy, a co-chair of our department, and I have been talking about different ways of reflecting after/during meetings. Karl of Fischbowl fame had his fellow teachers answer to these five categories with his own examples:

• Setting- too dark and difficult to hear everyone’s thought. The computer room didn’t allow for an open discussion. Many people were typing a theri computer rather than listening and aprticiapting in the class discussion.
• Pressure to do all of the technology pieces-we were all over the place in terms of feedback on this topic. Some were glad to try something new, others didn’t believe that their participation in this class required the implementation of all of the new pieces of technology.
• Participation- we were accepted into this program to try and change our way of teaching, and so we should be expected to participate in the discussion and the class. We can’t move forward if we don’t all focus and contribute when we are together every two to three weeks for only three hours. We need to leave the “other things” outside of the class and concentrate on the task at hand.
• Speed- we are moving through things too quickly. We need to devote the time to each new piece before moving on. Don’t introduce new things with only a few minutes. Instead, give us the class time to work.
• Collaboration- we need more small group work. Either discussion of concepts, what others are doing in class or bainstorming new ideas, this needs to be built in to each class session. Also, this doesn’t need to be done by department. This can be just as valuable having interdisciplinary time.

I wonder how these categories of reflection would pan out in our department.

1. Wikis and wikibooks
2. One to one learning
3. Digital Storytelling
4. Web 2.0 and social networking
5. Podcasting

Looking at this list, it seems that these topics are a little hokey. They are basically the buzzwords for the last few years. I feel, however, that I have gotten beyond the buzz. I hope to prove this with the following posts. If you get anxious, please go to my furl site. Search for these categories.

Expectations before I turn 25 (not hopes, not dreams; things that I know will happen):
1. I will have a child.
2. I will have a master’s degree.
3. I will have a book published.
4. I will have a salary that makes my family’s life comfortable.
5. I will have a cd pressed.