homoLudens

From the BBC re: the latest military action in Iraq:

Here’s BAWP’s online ‘zine of writing by teacher consultants. First suggested in July of 2002, it finally launched three days ago. Embryonic for about four years.

Sigh.

The
BAWP community of teacher consultants is a smart group, exceptional
teachers, with a level of classroom practice that makes the
union-busting National Board Certified types look clueless in
comparison. And it STILL took four years to get this thing off the
ground. Why?

Karen McComas said a while back
that Writing Project folks who share a vision of ”digital paper” for
teaching and learning should redirect some of our attention to policy
efforts. Agreed. The complete lack of support for teacher exploration
and use of web-based tools [outside of wealthy suburban school
districts] is just one small aspect of the assault on the commons of
public education.

“Row, row, row your web boat.” Frank Smith said it all in 1995.

Seems only right that someone sends me this song link just as the Gay
Straight Alliance finally gets off the ground at Galileo. I chuckled
through most of it, but the sadness of that squeeze box and the lyric
“You can’t fuck with the lady that sleeps in each cowboy’s head???”makes it way more than a ‘Brokeback’ parody. It was written in 1981.
Well worth the listen.

A week ago, I wrote a quick response to a NWP
listserv (yes, listserv -ugh) thread about blogging vs. websites. I
meant it as inflammatory. Unfortunately, its content did not inflame
the discussion I was aiming at. A casual reference to being a happily
fault-accepting ex-Catholic did, however, inflame. Ah - to be
disruptive in an age of religiosity tumescent and secularism gone soft!
Anyway, it was a cautionary experience in blogging vs. listserv-ing
that will - ahem - serve me well in the future. Here’s the piece, revised and lengthened as a reflection on the National Writing Project’s Annual Meeting,
its intended audience now the blog project coordinators at the Omni
Hotel, who’ll get to read this as I fly disconnected across the
country.)

Website or blog? The question has no importance.

Digital
paper is important. You can use it to blog. To photoblog. To podcast.
To vidcast. To participate in bulletin boards like Tapped In and
Blackboard.com and Nicenet and (if you have the luck) Scoop. To MOO, to
Moodle or Mambo. To IM or email your mother and Skype / Gizmo her later
in the day. To have students drop PowerPoint or Keynote or iMovie or
Premier or Final Cut multi-media content to your school server’s “in”folder and access those files from home. To organize and tag and
javascript-include Flickr photos from your student teacher’s travels in
Indonesia. To download video clips from United Steaming for use in your
classroom. To set up a webquests and make Filamentality look primitive.
To tag lesson plans on your department weblogs, or to experiment with
loading them to something like Alan’s MLX,
for easy reference over time. To store and distribute excellent
professional development materials. To integrate web services into
something like the school’s OPAC. Etc., etc.

Digital paper, or
rather its lack, is important at this point. Maybe we should call it
digital space or Web. 2.0. I’d suggest that in this political moment,
most teachers’ lack of access to and familiarity with the use of it
should engage NWP as an advocacy organization. Web 2.0 (the
web-as-platform web, the read/write, listen/speak, view/produce web) is
emerging as most of us in k12 public education wonder why we are stuck
with Web .02 capacity in terms of infrastructure, support and time.

Models
of education blogs written, maintained and promoted by educators who
live in unreal worlds of infrastructure, support and time are almost
useless to me. Hanging out with Writing Project friends in Pittsburgh,
I realized that ever since I posted about access as a key issue
years ago, I should have focused my blogging almost exclusively on
writing project teacher consultants (TCs). As TCs, we’re uniquely
positioned to effectively advocate on local, regional, state and
national levels for a changes to infrastructure and support and time.
More importantly, all of our discussions about advocacy are rooted in
the values that Jim Gray
and colleagues began sharing 30 years ago, the odd notions that
teaching something means doing that something yourself, regularly and
for a real purpose; and the still odder notion that classroom teachers
are the best teachers of other classroom teachers.

Narrowing
the audience helps with blog block. Blogging feels like letter writing
again, something familiar, intimate, collaborative.

The six blog coordinators met today to, among other things, uncover what we’d learned from out 2+ years of working with Kern County Superintendent of Schools in providing Manila hosting and domain management for our TCs. I referenced two levels of learning:

• At BAWP, we learned how a single  early adopter TC learns about technology and spreads his knowledge locally. With Bryan’s and Erin’s
  and Robert’s support, I was able to “informally and on demand” learn
  how to use tech, initially depending on instant messenger and Manila.
  Those guys were incredibly patient and generous and flexible, willing
  to coach and argue and even to learn a great deal about what it means
  to use tech in a real classroom setting. A little bit of curiosity
  satisfied with those tools spilled over into learning about operating
  systems, security settings, multi-media production, file management,
  web-based help and project management systems, voip and video
  conferencing. And the knowledge I acquired from those three was then
  shared with BAWP TCs and my schools’ teachers through the same tools.
  And those TCs and teachers added to my learning. Some kind of threshold
  knowledge got invisibly mastered and then independent discovery got
  easier.
• At a national level, we learned how single local
  Writing Project sites spread their learning through the larger network,
  demonstrating an instance of a disruptive technology working within a
  decentralized organizational structure. Our use of Manila as a blog
  tool and content management system grew organically and it grew without
  the restrictions that come with local school district IT hosting and
  tech use policies.  It’ll be interesting to try to capture that
  history at some point. Which site had the first Manila blog? (I’m
  leaning toward BAWP, at least on the Kern server, but I think Albert in Chicago and Tom in Alaska were in there with their own installations of Frontier.) How did the next site get one - West Virginia, North Dakota, Chicago? How did that lead to more local WP domains - New York, Sacramento - and how did those domains lead to NWP’s blogWrite? Within those local domains, how did schools and programs get domains and blogs?

All of this connects to a presentation that Inverness Research’s
Laura Stokes gave at the Annual Meeting general session. I’ll try to
link to her slides here later, but the map captures some of it. She
emphasized that NWP is not just a professional development program or
model. It’s a national infrastructure for high quality, efficient and
reliable professional development in the teaching of writing. I think
that the two ìtechnological instancesî of that infrastructure in use
locally and nationally described above might just meet the criteria
that federal agencies look at when considering continued funding.
Certainly, those two instances grow naturally out of Jim Gray’s legacy - a decentralized, base-driven, collaborative, and powerful community of teachers who write.

[Revised after the plane ride and return to reliable connectivity. Original here.]

November 1 - the Day of All Saints, Jim Gray, founder of the Bay Area Writing Project and (eventually) the National Writing Project, died.

Saint or bodhisattva, he certainly stumbled into wisdom (Is there any
other way into wisdom?)  and was blessed enough to see where he’d
landed.

I remember from one lunch or another, “It’s a simple idea, but it would be easy to fuck it up.”

Memory is always unreliable. I probably imagined the conversation, and the corn beef sandwich and beer that went with it.

What I did not imagine, but what I learned in my heart in 1983 during the open
BAWP program at UC Berkeley, was that teaching could be a passionate
and coherent commitment to equity, innovation, and happiness.

Friend Robert Deng is helping to organize this November 5-6 event.

Now how could I arrange to attend?

more…

I’m in Hong Kong doing a Writing Project institute behind a campus firewall. No AIM or MS Messenger available. But it appears that blogChat works. So if the diamond below is green, click the link to its left and say hello:

Chat #1 

PDFs available on request for digitally motivated educators in the PRC:

From the NYT today:

School’s
out and it’s hot. Too hot, hot, hot. Hotter than a rainless July in
Jersey. So forget trying to make the image background transparent.
Kudos to King Chen, btw, recent Gal graduate and budding illustrator
for edBlogger’s and the beastie’s artistic confrontation.

BAWP in China did hand off the “blog pearl.” 
Granted, an unusual classroom situation, with only 12 students for four
weeks, but it had definite advantages for beta-testing and we did
successfully bridge the Pacific with writing and responding and posting
and linking. We’ve got screenplays, memoirs, biographical sketches,
magnetic and classical Chinese poetry, and more. Stop by from a visit
and drop a comment or two on some of the writing. But before you do,
remember BAWP founder Jim Gray’s two principles of organizing, which apply to
response as well:

1. Nobody likes criticism.
2. Everybody likes compliments.

Life is short and editors are numberless. I make young writers vow to listen only to the ones they know and trust.

Daily and long classroom practice forces tech enthusiasts to get real
and it ought to be required of anyone pushing anything in schools. That
said, some of what I tried with Manila’s CMS might work. I twinned two
sites, one private and one public, and used news departments heavily.
The private site allowed student content creation and organziation. The
teacher could easily correct the organization, watch the flow of
drafts, and finally use Net News Wire to publish final stuff to the
public site.  The same public site provided postings of daily
agendas, homework, daily howlers (student reports on the previous day’s
activities) and special assignments. Proof will be in the
transfer to a Galileo class in the autumn.

Meanwhile, I think I hear fog horns somewhere beyond the haze.