Lazyteacher

Image Credit: Flickr Playstation by Stebbi

I’ve had student blogs for a few years now and in our schedule we have a short Monday class (40 minutes) that I’ve used for SSR and quick updates on the week’s plan for learning. Next year, I want to expand blogging to go beyond class assignments and have them choose topics and ideas they are personally interested in and blog on those. That sounds easy but looking around the ‘Net it’s clear that it isn’t. Here are some of the sets of knowledge, skills, and habits of mind students will need to have for the whole project to work.

Of course, some of this becomes ingrained as bloggers blog. They learn these things by doing, but a little front loading should decrease the learning curve steepness.

Terminology

• Links (in a typical class less than 30% of my students already know how to create a link)
• Heading
• Posts
• Attribution
• Comments
• Spam
• Backchannel
• Blogroll
• Flaming, lurking, trolling

Skills

How to write for a blog. Slate magazine published a useful explanation about how style affects readership. Also, it’s important to explain the write then link rule otherwise students get stuck in searching for links rather than putting their ideas in a reasonable order.

How to find content to play with. It’s not always easy to find someone who is writing about their deep obsession with dragon orchids. RSS feeds are exotic for students. Start with Alltop or iGoogle to get the ball rolling and then move them to Google Reader or something similar. When it comes to searching through blogs, I may be idiosyncratic in finding Google’s Blog search to be more useful than Technorati. Of course, a del.icio.us search could work as could using popurls for a general spur for creativity and interest.

How to comment well. This is less technical. Students need to be convinced that commenting on other people’s blogs is a good deed. It demonstrates gratefulness for the work they’ve put out and it creates a potential for a conversation. Also, remember to comment back to those who comment to you. They also should learn how to agree constructively and disagree without contempt or condescension. A quick scan of comments even after NYT articles will show that even adults fall down on this.

How to follow copywrite laws. Students need to know what Creative Commons is and how to give credit for images they use. They need to be at least aware of the 4 factor rule and what is respectful of the intellectual property of others. See this FAQ from the EFF about student blogging rights.

Habits of Mind

Some of the previous bits included some habits of mind, but these are meant to be inculcated as well.

Blogging is about creating a community of constructive conversation: It’s easy to get caught up in ego battles and bush wars of various kinds (especially if someone on the Internet is wrong!), but attention should be paid to establishing a generosity of spirit that welcomes debate, encourages others, and participates in the discussion of ideas with creativity and civility.

Blogging is about becoming a lifelong learner: At it’s best blogging gives people a voice but also a collection of ears. Starting a blog or participating in a blogging community is a way of transcending distance, ennui, and inertia to create something important. We learn what we couldn’t have learned before; we teach to people who would never have met us otherwise.

Blogging is fun. It’s difficult to get students to forget that they are being graded. A superior teacher would be so zen that she could make students forget that the whole blog thing was her idea in the first place. In a reasonable world, students would find themselves drawn to blog to such a degree that it would continue even after the class is over.

This is where I’m at with this now. As time goes on, I may add a bit and refine it. Any other must-include parts of the blogging curriculum?

Resources:

Defining tools for a new learning space: Writing and Reading class blogs by Sarah Hurlburt

One thing I love about the summer is that even with 2 beautiful, attention-demanding kids, a homestead that needs upkeep, friends that want to burn meat with various devices, and the need to luxuriate in the deep of existence, I still have time to read scads and scads of pages. Yesterday, I was able to start and finish Jennifer Egan’s The Keep. The last time I did that was, like, last summer, I think. It was glorious.

The Keep has two narratives going that merge towards the end for the big reveal. One narrative is about Danny, a going-nowhere aging hipster who travels to a castle in an unnamed Eastern European country to help his cousin Howard convert it into a postmodern (pre-modern?) hotel. When they were kids, Danny played a trick on his cousin that went horribly wrong and now he isn’t sure if his cousin is looking for payback or truly has his best interests in mind. There are moat-fulls of gothic elements: dead twins, mysterious baronnesses, ghosts, secrets, and underground passageways filled with torture devices. But the story itself feels modern. The tension between the two keeps the novel fresh while infusing it with some of the power of the gothic genre.

But what I loved most about it was that Egan can write a description like few can. She constantly chooses offbeat metaphors and details that surprise but still explain. The magic she exhibits in doing this reminds me about how hard it is to teach students to do the same.

When he first came to New York, he and his friends tried to find a name for the relationship they craved between themselves and the universe. But the English language can up short: perspective, vision, knowledge, wisdom–those words were all too heavy or too light. So Danny and his friends made up a name: alto. True alto worked two ways: you saw but you could also be seen, you knew and were known. Two-way recognition. Standing on the castle wall, Danny felt alto–the world was still with him after all these years, even though the friends were long gone. Grown up, probably,

I love how the paragraph conveys not only how Danny feels, but some of the self-absorbedness of his view. He stays sympathetic even if not always admirable. Apparently, there are some talks about movie version, which would be difficult and very likely to rely on the reveal instead of the atmosphere.

If you get a chance, take a look at the official website for the book. It has a feel of a ARG with testimonials by the author, news, and photos of The Keep. Still, none of them really go anywhere. Or at least I couldn’t make it anywhere. A real, honest-to-goodness gothic ARG would have been a cool addition to the publicity for this book.

The Keep would be a good novel to have in the bookshelf and before I send it back to the library, I want to cherry-pick some strong paragraphs to use as models with my kids. Her Look at Me was on the shortlist for the National Book Award, so that might be a good one to pick up after I’m done with All about Lulu and All the Sad Literary Men.

I am a technologically ept guy. My dad used to work on those big Wang mainframes that required punch cards to be force fed through in order to enter data. I programmed games in BASIC. Bill Gates had nothing to fear from me, but I come to technology young and it’s second nature much of the time. Now of course, we live in a Golden Age of Nerdocity.

Still, Twitter is a mystery to me (nstearns).

If you don’t know what Twitter is…the basic idea is that Twitter is a micro-blogging program that looks a lot like a party line Instant Messaging board. You have 140 characters to write what you want and then anyone who decided to ‘follow’ you can see what you’ve written. For some people Twitter is like fried, sugary manna from Top Pots Doughnuts. They love it; they rave, they gnash their teeth when it’s down (which is approximately 42.3% of the time).

Why would you want to do that? For me, the Internets are like a big stack of newspapers. I surf and link to find out stuff. I check out Slate magazine or my Google Reader or the New York Times. When my kids tell me, “I spent 6 hours on Facebook last night,” I’m not horrified, I’m mystified. What do you do for 6 hours on Facebook. Do you just write “Whasssup” on 1000 friend walls? That sounds like my version of Hell.

Apparently, even on the Web, I’m not a people person.

But in the classroom, I could see Twitter working. A number of edubloggers have talked about backchannels and how they relieve the tedium associated with paying attention in a lecture. When I watched some of the uStream or CoveritLive NECC conference, I noticed the accompanying chat was pretty off topic, irrelevant, messy, and human. People were responding sincerely to what they were hearing. Even if what people were saying wasn’t always enlightening, it was an improvement to being glued to a chair and having no contact with the people around you beyond passing notes.

If kids were able to chat with each other using one of those tools, would it enhance the classroom experience? Let’s say I were to do a class discussion on Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Normally, people would take turns responding to my provocations or leading discussions in certain areas. In a Twitter-ed class, they could be discussing what’s going on on an entirely different level. I could even shoot the chat conversation behind me as we discussed. I’m worried that this violates an important Brain Rule (#4 Attention), but it might be worth it if I’m not able to maintain Attention anyway in a 30 minute discussion.

Anyone ever tried this in the classroom?

Image Credit: Screenshot from TwitterBlocks

Re: The Onion

Did you know you have 412 emotions? Simon Baron Cohen (Not this guy) and his crack team of researchers narrowed down the entire range of human feeling to 412 discrete emotions. In Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open, the pop sci author does a whirlinwind tour of brain science from the point of view of, well, a dude such as himself trying to understand himself. He explores emotion, memory, personality, and brain scans to shed light on what’s going on in our heads that we might not be able to quite access with our conscious mind.

The research on 412 emotions–meant to assist autistics who need to study human emotion like I need to study Spanish–reminded me of Scott McCloud’s Making Comics where he shows how to draw differing emotion-feeling faces by combining simple emotions.

Other researchers such as Robert Plutchik cobbled together cute little charts that dissect emotions. For instance, he explains that optimism = love + joy (apparently not madness + full belly) or that love = joy + acceptance (isn’t that contradictory? didn’t you need joy to have love? Is optimism just love with a lot more joy?).

Anyway, why would this matter for writing teachers? Sometimes I imagine that I’m half-Asperger’s (though my score on the Autism Quotient is actually ok) and emotions aren’t always easy for me to decode. It might be interesting to have students use one of these half-mathematical emotional theories to pre-write for creative writing. For instance, you could plan on writing a story about remorse and you would plan to dramatize how and why your main character would feel both sadness and disgust; writers would need to create separate ways of showing how those two emotions are manifested. The sadness might be shown by doodling cartoons of a favorite puppy over and over again and the disgust might come through in a telephone conversation with a friend where the main character constantly puts herself down.

Hopefully, the kids will come up with better examples than that.

I came to graphic novels–like most people I know–through Maus. Spiegelman’s tale of his father’s experiences in the Holocaust was the first where the very strangeness of the medium added to the author’s idiosyncratic decisions (such as to depict all the Jews as mice and the Germans as pigs) resulted in a reading experience that you just couldn’t have in any other way. Comic books told stories, but they felt constrained within the genre. No one wonders if Spiderman will defeat Doc Oct eventually. Maus suggested that a graphic novel could tell a story in a powerful, effective way that used novelistic technniques but also took advantage of the comic panel to make rhetorical and artistic points.

Maus led to a number of graphic novels–some revelatory others disappointing. I’d head of Will Eisner’s The Contract with God Trilogy from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Published in 1978 it was a watershed moment for the medium. The first set of the trilogy (The Contract with God) is a set of 4 stories that revolve around life in mythical Dropsie Avenue, an Jewish immigrant neighborhood in NYC. The stories combine forceful, almost melodramatic illustrations with wry, cynical stories that dwell on human weakness and our inability to resist our impulses.

The title story involves a Russian Jew who escapes the pogroms of Tsarist Russia because of his piety and good works. He makes a “contract with God” in which he promises to be do good works in order for unspecified advantage. When he takes in a foundling girl and she later dies of leukemia, he rejects God in a heart-rending panel. Afterwards, he becomes a unscrupulous slumlord and tries to make as much money as possible. Strangely, this may be one of the more positive stories of the series. The other three trade in a much darker, much grimmer view of human nature. No one seems to have benign intentions and no one seems to be able to resist their gnawing Ids, clamoring for release.

I want to be able to say I could teach this in my classes. I don’t think I have the guts. Many of the stories in the first book of the series involve graphic sex and violence. Of course, I realize that I’ve taught books like 100 Years of Solitude which have more sexual content. But the shock of seeing even blue outlined forms having sex in haylofts might be too much. Still, the graphic novel has the potential to amaze. Students might accept Eisner’s graphic stories in a way they might dismiss or ignore if they were more traditional short stories. The writing and art has an undeniable vitality to it that attracts even while the stories themselves express deep reservations about human nature. At the end, I get the feeling that Eisner retains some affection for the grimy lives of humans, something close to pity, disgust, amusement, and wonder all mixed together.

The second book (”A Life Force”) is much tamer and a good US History class could use excerpts to illustrate ideas about life in Depression-era US. The stories even intersperse short articles about the Depression along with the narrative. The last (”Dropsie Avenue”) describes the machinations involved in the evolution of Dropsie Avenue froma tenement into a set of inexpensive homes. This feels less vital to me, but it does make interesting points about white flight and political power which would be harder (and less engaging) to describe traditionally.

In the end, I think having a set 5 books might be a good solution. Smaller groups (especially in a US history class) could read the book, present aspects of it, and even create their own panels or comic book pages that tell stories which illustrate issues in US History. A class in literature or creative writing could use the book to show (ala Understanding Comics) how a graphic novelist can use the conventions of the comic page to tell a story, set a mood, and suggest themes and symbols.

Eisner’s work is masterful and engaging; it would take an excellent teacher to exploit it, but the result could be well worth it.

Wired has a new series out dedicated to the implications of massive sets of data, toiling microprocessors, and advanced mathematics.  The upshot is that–with the amount of petabytes out there and with the ability to make increasingly accurate predictions based on that information–we will no longer need to rely on the messy, rule-of-thumb kinds of theories that mere carbon-based lifeforms might cobble together. So says Chris Anderson:

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

This is tremendously exciting. Gimme a problem any problem.  Unsure about which public policies would be the most effective in combating poverty while still maintaining a roaring economy?  Just enter the entire historical database into you battery of Crays, push th red button, listen for the gently rocking motion and out spits the answer.

Or not.

Wired has a number of short articles that is meant to extend their thesis–a strategy which is a Wired hallmark and one of the aspects of the magazine that makes it better than just a mix between Engadget and People for Geeks.  Still, the individual articles start to show how limited the approach is so far. One article mentions how EU uses a database to monitor news events and sends out “geotagged ‘clusters’ for given events.” Hmmm.  That’s not so sexy.  Though one experimenter says,

“We have lots of data, and lots of things we can try to model predictively,” says Horvitz. “People think in terms of trends, but I want to build a data set where I can mark something as a surprise — a surprising conflict or surprising turn in the economy.”

So maybe if we took the data we might be able to predict something or mark it a “surprise?”
Hey where’s my superpredicting, all-powerful, Star Trek computer? It’s not a whole lot of fun if the best the ComputerOverlords can do is to send you Google Alerts. Still, it’s not over yet.

In an article entitled, “Chill out, your computer knows what’s best for you.” at Physorg.com, the anonymous authors (aka the writers of the press release they published) suggest that computers are just this close to taking over. Even Bob Costas better watch out:

Many potential applications for CHIL technologies have also been identified and suggested in the catalogue. One of these is to use SmarTrack, a real-time system that provides accurate information about the spatial location of people in sports analysis.

During TV coverage of a sporting event, real-time tracking of each player would allow for online analysis of the important phases of the game to support the commentators.

Why stop there? Why not have the computers tell the quarterback where to throw and the linebackers which gap to shoot. All of your free will are belong to us!

Wall-E, we’re coming for you.

Image Credit: Flickr Logical Chaos tigerplish

I just finished Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union yesterday even though it’s been out for about 1000 years. Chabon and I go way back and it’s always been a strained relationship. I read Mysteries of Pittsburgh and was amazed by the prose style and fascinated by the way he was able to make a description sing and surprise. But I never loved it; it was always about admiration and amazement for me and never about a true head over heel lets-run-away-together enchantment.

This novel is a detective story/alternative history where the Jews were kicked out of Israel in 1948 and somehow land in southeastern Alaska for a few decades before the US decides to kick them out again.  The main character, Meyer Landsman, is a detective (a shammes in Yiddish) trying to find the killer of a junkie heroin addict killed in the flophouse he live in before the Reversion sends all the Jews scrambling. There are all kinds of hoary detective cliche’s (down and out detective, losing his badge, tough guy banter, gangsters, at least-spoiler!–his partner doesnt’ die).  Still, no detective story is so crammed full of scrumptious language.

In the acknowledgements Chabon notes his use of Yiddishdictionary.com and it shows.  Did you know shoyfer means phone in Yiddish? Well, actually it is a ritual ram’s horn blown on the Sabbath and so therefore it’s the slang term for a phone.  Yikes.  Still, even though there is a long, obsessed, devoted description of the magic properties of the Phillipino/Yiddish doughnut called shtekeleh which apparently Chabon made up.

But when it comes to description, dude can write.

A ganef wind has blown down from the mainland to plunder the Sitka treasury of fog and rain, leaving behind only cobwebs and one bright penny in a vault of polished blue.  At 12:03 the sun has already punched its ticket. Sinking, it stains the cobbles and stuccos of the platz in a violin-colored throb of light that you would have to be a stone not to find poignant. Landsman, a curse on his head, but he is no stone.

Such a great mix of hard-boiled fiction metaphor-twisting prose and that “violin-colored throb…”  Wow.

What I love about Chabon is that he’s so clearly a lit fiction writer with those sensibilities and brings them into the realm of popular lit. He’s not always easy to read but his challenges tread a good line between litera-cha and popular lit.  There’s talk of a movie version with Cohen brothers directing which could be beyond amazing. I’m not sure who get to be Landsmen–Harrison Ford? Phillip Seymore Hoffman?

As a teacher, I want to clip out some passages as good description models–especially to show how he is able to create surprising metaphors that are nevertheless clear. I’m also interested in how he uses the Yiddish vocab. Could their be an assignment where you get a set of dialect terms or jargon terms and you have to use them to tell a story? I love the idea of the play of language as it’s own character. It would be an advanced skill for students but amazing if it works.

Other resources:

• Spiked-online Review
• NYT review
• NYTRB Review

…or at least minor depression.

Last year, one of out tech support teachers had a set of clickers for free won at a door prize. I’ve always imagined the hilarity that must ensue at a tech lottery: milling crowds of blinking tech people salivating over laser pointers and webcams.  90/10 M/f ratios. Acronyms flying out into the ether.  Backchannel twitters filling the air…A glorious technohaven/glimpse into the future.

Teaching with clickers is an enterprise fraught with doubt, even though I had what might be reasonably termed success with them.  My AP Rhetoric class could go through multiple choice test questions and I could get a good, quick evaluation on which types of questions were difficult for them (i.e. anything about tone or those maniacal questions involving roman numerals). My regular 10s took quizzes and the clicker software automatically recorded their answers and printed out their score. Almost as good as ScanTron.  But I thought the most useful way of using Clickers was in guided discussions about values and attitudes.

You can put up a statement like:

I think most of what I learn in school will have little impact on my life.

and ask students to rate the statement according to how much they agree or disagree with the statement.  1-being agree totally and completely 3-being neutral, meh while 5-being disagree totally and completely. Clickers have a magic effect on participation; no one lackadaisically clicks a clicker. It’s always done with spastic abandon.  In a discussion like this, a quick 10 minute (or on the fly–shh!–don’t tell anyone) prep will get you a good 30-40 minute discussion on the questions.  First, you have the asking of the question, then the vote, then the Reveal! look at that pretty graph.  Finally, individual students talk about why they completely agreed with the idea that school will have little impact. It’s a great way to start a unit or even conduct a midway point snapshot of where students’ feelings are.  It would be interesting to do a pre and post value check and see if the experience of reading, say, The Things the Carried or All Quiet on the Western Front has changed students’ opinions about war.

Unfortunately, I’ll be bereft of clickers next year.  The tech people giveth and they taketh away.  But my pathetic Twitter feed (more on that later) has just given me a couple of options for next year even if I don’t have the cool quasi Wii handhelds to play with.

• Poll Everywhere is a service that lets you ask poll questions and then receive answers through the web or cellphones.  The superpower here is that you can use either computers or cell phones to answer. When you stick with a set of 30 respondents per poll, the service stays free. You can also get the results downloaded into a PowerPoint slide. Still, it doesn’t record the respondents unless you spring for the next upgrade up so it wouldn’t work for quizzes.  There is some talk about certain schools qualifying for discounts, but that wouldn’t apply to us.
• There are a host of other free-ish poll services including PollDaddy, Freepolls, PollMonkey, SurveyMonkey, and Zoomerang. These offer various levels of support and ability depending on the service.
• I’m also interested in backchannel chat services like Chatterous or CampFire but my District bans such site like they are scurrilous plagues, so it would be hard to fall in love only to be ripped untimely from their bosoms.

Any other ideas for Clicker replacements?

See also this .pdf about 7 rules for clickers, this Wired article about the same, Clickers: A Classroom Innovation by Derek?, and then this breakdown from Vanderbilt U.

Image Credit: Flickr 21/365 New Clicker!  hcobb826’s photostream