Colleagues Approach

Today, four colleagues approached me for advice on blogs and wikis.  It seems that my experiment with wikis this year is making waves in the establishment.  One of the teachers was the newest member of our staff; the other was among the most senior members. The third person is on our tech staff.  And the fourth was the head of our school.

The younger, newer teacher was bubbling over with excitement. She’s taking a course on technology in the classroom, and one of her final projects is to start a blog or a wiki (or both).  I’m hoping to convince her that she can in fact do both (but one step at a time!). We have a second appointment tomorrow to discuss what she wants to do, and what kind of platform she wants to use.

The older, more senior teacher was more hesitant but pretty excited. She’d watched over the shoulder of one of my students editing a page, and thought it would be a good tool for her multimedia class.  Each student could have a page of their own, with all their multimedia files attached in one place.  I demonstrated how to start pages, and how she could track what each student had worked on, and how to read the history of a page.  I think what’s really exciting is that this tool is going to grow on her in some awesome new ways, and while she was reluctant to start her wiki project on my wiki (the school currently has each class that wants a wiki placed in a different environment behind one of several log-in screen, rather than in a single environment), I think she got, intuitively, that this is a tool that benefits from mass collaboration.

The tech-gal saw me making Jing videos, and wanted to know why I wasn’t using some other program.  When she saw what I was doing, she said, “That makes the program I’m using seem antiquated. Thanks for the tip.”  I think we’ll see a massive update of our help-videos pretty soon. What do you think?

Finally, the head of school stopped by to see what I was doing, and what our techie thought was so cool.  So I showed him Jing, and he watched a couple of videos, and then helped me make one.  (That will be a shock to the kid! The head of school commenting on his homework!?!?) Only, I erred and hit escape instead of save… darn!)  When we were done, he turned to me and said, “This could be huge.  Huge.” And walked off with a thoughtful tilt to his head.

In some ways, a teacher’s lounge right in the middle of the school, where people are always passing through, is the best place to sit while you’re using new technology.  Everyone sees what you’re doing; they see that it’s easy, and powerful, and good-looking, and brings potentially incredible results.  And then they step up, and want to learn.

Jing and the New Critique

For years, I’ve been laboriously slaving over student papers, trying to read the often-terrible handwriting; to interpret the sense of my student’s mind; and then try to get 1-3 recognizable sentences out of a paragraph of mess.

The wiki this year improved matters substantially.  For the first two thirds of the year, I just had to read egregious sentences without also having to slog my way through the scribbles. And I could edit them with a click of an “edit” button.  But that didn’t give me the ability to explain WHY I was making the change. Students definitely felt put-upon to have changes made, without knowing what the reasons for the change were.

Then Shelly turned me on to a different way to use Jing from TechSmith.  The last few days, I’ve been going into the wiki, starting up Jing, and making short 3-5 minute videos explaining to students how to edit and expand their work.  The videos aren’t terrifically large, around 20-30 MB, but because of how our wiki usernames work it would violate student privacy to post them here — you’d know the names of my students, and see their work. That would probably get me in trouble.

Even so, I did about 17 such videos today, and the evidence is that the ideas I recorded are having some initial effect.  It’s strong feedback, and it’s more or less instant — one kid edited his page at 8:18pm tonight, and by 9:00pm he had commentary back.  It looks like he’s already made a few changes to his page.

Five minutes turns out to be not enough time to correct every problem with their writing.  It’s enough to point out a recurring mistake — a comma splice, for example, appeared eight times in one student’s paragraph.  To help him out, I rearranged a few sentences and converted two of his comma splices to periods. Then I suggested that he change the next few on his own.  Another student got several reminders about including dates or year-references or place-names in her writing — at least one per paragraph.

I like that the feedback is semipermanent.  The students can delete the videos from the pages, but I keep the master files on my computer, and I could create links to them.  I think I’ll also make up some videos that explain common grammatical errors, like comma splices.  Then I can post those to the wiki, too, and include links from student pages to the explanatory videos.  I could also include trackbacks, so that if you’re trying to figure out comma splices, I can explain how to fix those in a video, and a nearby links-list will take you to some pages with uncorrected comma splices that you can correct for practice.

All that is going to take time, and templates, and tools I don’t have in Apple’s WikiServer software.  Maybe in the next edition.  In the meantime, the videos are a hit.

Returning

Well, I’m back from DC, and I’ve had the first week of classes in the spring term start, and we’re almost done with accreditation preparations (the visiting committee comes week-after-next).  So I feel like it’s safe to take up the blogger’s mantle again, and start writing.

Expect new entries shortly.

Shear Madness

It’s apparently one of the longest-running plays in the world. Frankly, I don’t see why.

The premise is simple:  Tony and Barbara run a hair salon in fashionable northwest Washington, in a building owned by the retired piano player Isabel Churney, who left the concert music business after a nervous breakdown on stage.  Tony is a fabulously gay man with a penchant for the theatrical, and Barbara is a gum-chewing late-80s hottie.

In the course of the opening scenes, Tony nearly ruins one man’s haircut, and completely fails to give another guy, an apparent construction worker,  the shave he asked for, while two other characters — a businessman and an heiress — come in for various reasons and engage in various chicaneries.

It emerges that two of the men are police officers assigned to stake out the building, because someone is threatening Mrs. Churney (who never appears) with blackmail, and now she’s been murdered.  The detective brings the lights up in the house, and involves the audience in solving the crime, to the horror and bemusement of the actors on stage, who pretend that they didn’t really know there was an audience until the lights come up.

Done well, this can be an effective play.  Done repeatedly for school groups, as the Washington DC production seems designed for, to keep hoi polloi out of (say) the Opera House… well.  It seems to have lost much of its magic.

And I admit, this is the seventh or eighth time I’ve seen this production. The stage business is much the same all the way through, and I admit that I’ve started getting deeply confused about what they did last year and what’s new this year.  Given that yesterday morning saw the signing of the health care reform act, and that the relations between the political parties were so strained, I’m surprised there weren’t more good jokes, and new jokes.  But the lines about Miley Cyrus and Paris Hilton were tired, and tiring.

Meanwhile, the Washington National Opera’s new production of Porgy and Bess was playing downstairs — a marvel, they say, of the Gershwins’ thoroughly American opera.  I’m thinking, next year we won’t be seeing Shear Madness. We’ll try to do some other cultural event at the Kennedy Center, and stay out of the murderous hair salon.

Crowdsourced Field Trip Budget

Tonight, the group I’m chaperoning in DC had dinner in a Thai restaurant. It wasn’t the most popular option, but it was good. Review tomorrow, when I’m feeling up to it; likewise my impressions of SHEAR MADNESS after the eleventh time.

No, what I really wanted to talk about was crowdsourcing the budget of my annual Washington DC trip. I happened to have all the paperwork with me when a student asked about what I had to pay to go on this trip, and I told him “nothing.” That upset him a little, so I got out the papers and my budget, and I showed him how the numbers run. In due course, I had five kids genuinely interested in the mechanics of taking money from ten families and generating travel for twelve people.

They asked good questions — why this hotel (it’s close to a metro station?) Why eat dinner as a group the first night (the group helps build a reserve fund when they don’t order big-ticket items from the menu). Why did you buy 15 tickets for SHEAR MADNESS? (Because 12 tickets at full price are more expensive than 15 tickets at group-rate price). Is there tax on the cost of the rooms? (Yes.) Do we have to pay it, ’cause we’re a school group? (Yes, because it’s a DC tax not a CT tax and we’re a CT non-profit not a DC non-profit). Is that ten cent fare hike that took effect between when you budgeted and now really hammering us? (yes, actually, it is.) WIll we get anything back at the end of the trip (No, probably not… see note on taxes and unexpected fare hike). What’s this line item, “cushion” for? (That’s the money I hold in reserve if case I have a genuine emergency, like a hospital visit or a cab ride).

The five kids didn’t have questions about every line item, but it felt good to make their trip more transparent to them. They could see that our odd numbers of boys and girls had cost them a trip to the movies — because we needed an extra hotel room. They could see that buying our train tickets in October as opposed to November had saved us the cost of that hotel room. The list went on.

One kid caught a number that was doubled: $115 for an entry fee that was listed twice. He found me almost $40 I didn’t think I had. (Thanks, Stephen Downes, for reminding me to trust people with better math skills — even if they are 15. No, ESPECIALLY if they’re 15.)

I have about a dozen notes from questions they asked about things to do differently next time. It felt good to involve them in the money side of the process for the first time, and it flattened the relationship between us. In the Metro tonight, kids chipped in nickels and dimes to cover the $0.10 fare hike for the first time in all the years we’ve been coming to DC. Because for the first time, they were invested in where the money came from, and what it was spent on. And that transparency made the experience more valuable for them.

Next year… transparent budgeting, all the way.

St. Patrick’s Day Primary sources

• http://stpatricksday.com/history/stpatrick/confessio.shtml
• and a Link to the Wikibooks version: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Confession_of_Saint_Patrick

The Confessio is one of St. Patrick’s two known and confirmable pieces of writing.  I read it, along with the letter below, while in seminary during our introduction to church history.

The Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus is the other of Patrick’s known and confirmed writings.

• From AncientTexts.org: http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/celtic/ctexts/p02.html
• and on Wikibooks, with links to the Latin original text: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_to_the_soldiers_of_Coroticus

Enjoy!

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Maher on Newsweek story

“America has found its new boogey-man.”  Yes, colleagues and friends… we’re America’s new whipping boy. At least Bill Maher understands that it’s not really our fault.

The “drawsay”

An essay is a written attempt to prove something.  Can you have a “drawsay”? Images and drawings are powerful. They have a meaning and a hold on their audiences, sometimes far beyond what should be given.  Of late I’ve been experimenting with drawing my ideas rather than writing them.  I’ve gained some traction with it, thanks to my friend Dave Gray‘s ideas about the Semigram.

Dave created this video on Forms, Fields and Flows (which I call the Semigram).  Try it, and see if you can create a drawsay today.

The Reality Check

Will Richardson writes, in a recent blog entry titled “Reality Check“:

[A school administrator] said that a group of parents had requested a meeting to discuss the methods of a particular teacher and his use of technology. It seemed this teacher had decided to forgo the textbook and have students write their own on a wiki [...] and that he shared all of his lectures and classwork online for anyone, not just the students in his class, could access them and use them under a Creative Commons license.

When the administrator got the phone call from the parent who wanted to set up the meeting, she asked for some sense of what the problem was. The reply?

“Our students don’t need to be a part of a classroom experiment with all this technology stuff. They need to have a real teacher with real textbooks and real tests.”

Will, I have this sort of doubt all the time.  I’m one of those teachers who’s experimenting with wikis and creative commons licensing, and with posting all my lecture materials and classwork online.  And so far, the parents are not the ones complaining. The students and the administrators are.

The students aren’t all sure that they want their work to be on a wiki.  The ones who get it, GET IT. They’re enthusiastic contributors, all the time, and I love having them as students.  The ones who don’t get it, really don’t get it.   They find reasons to not have access to the wiki, or to excuse their lack of contribution with  “the school’s internet service is broken”  or “my password doesn’t work” or just plain, “why do we have to do this?” And I kind of see their point.  A lot of my students in this second category have reading difficulties, or writing difficulties. Moving online sometimes helps, but it also produces anxiety for some of them: they have to show off their poor writing skills to the world, in a format that doesn’t go away at all. Ever.  Others don’t speak English very well, and their writing is worse (why is it that Chinese and Korean students have such trouble mastering definite and indefinite articles in English?).

Administrators don’t really like it, either.  It’s hard to grade this work precisely.  It’s public, but in a way that many of them find inaccessible.  Some of the administrators at my school feel that middle schoolers learn certain kinds of material better by hand-writing that material rather than typing.  They may be right.  I certainly learned more by making this timeline than my students will get out of simply reviewing it. So there are trade-offs.

The question is, do students learn more about a given subject by using tools that bypass their weaknesses, and give them access to semi-instant global feedback?  Will they be held back from future advancement by the global feedback they ask for today? I think the answer to the first question is yes, and the second question is no.  Asking students to use online, globally available tools — and asking friends and colleagues and communities around the globe to evaluate their work — will ultimately make students more confident, more successful, and more capable.  They will be linked up with learners everywhere, as I have been, by keeping this blog (and making these slide shows, and speaking at these conferences, and … and…)

It’s deeply counter-intuitive in some ways. Maybe my students aren’t ready for primetime, no.  But my students are ready to reach out to people learning the same material, and say, “Hey! You! On the other side of the planet!? What do you think about this?”