homoLudens

It’s a middle aged attitude, this notion that if it’s not fun, it’s
definitely not worth it. Money helps too, so we wrote two grants,
schmoozed from various other accounts, and creatively “re-positioned”funds within the larger school budget. Result: a PAID group of 16
teachers ready for a board game with these moving pieces: Manila,
Blackboard, IM, Photoshop, iPhoto, iMovie, Net News Wire, and
CURRICULUM.  On the Blog-opoly site we’ll collaboratively plan the four day agenda, review it, revise it, and implement it.

Kudos to our senior SLAC-er designer, Loi L., whose talent is only surpassed by his patience. If we get sued by Milton Bradley, we promise to visit him in Jail.

he regularly gets me thinking about what I don’t know I’m thinking about. In this case, his pointer to Christopher Allen begins to frame a conversation on Galileo community building energized by Manila blogs and Blackboard sites. David
describes the post as a “fascinating analysis of optimal group sizes
with particular application to online group formation and activity.”Here’s a quote from the article, slightly more than DCT used:

Life With Alacrity: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes:
This all leads me to hypothesize that the optimal size for active group
members for creative and technical groups — as opposed to exclusively
survival-oriented groups, such as villages — hovers somewhere between
25-80, but is best around 45-50. Anything more than this and the group
has to spend too much time ‘grooming’ to keep group cohesion, rather
then focusing on why the people want to spend the effort on that group
in the first place — say to deliver a software product, learn a
technology, promote a meme, or have fun playing a game. Anything less
than this and you risk losing critical mass because you don’t have
requisite variety.

Imagine an educational example added to
the list above. What if the group were a vibrant cadre of friendly
educators within a faculty of about 130, hooked into writing and
reading about their teaching practice and their students learning while
having a hell of a good time? What’s the optimal number in that setting?

What appears to be happening at ‘G-house on the bay‘
is a locally rooted digital community. The notion of a web-linked work
community is no big thing for business people, especially for tech
business people, but for an urban public school, it’s unusual. Gal’s
gradual adoption of blogging and Blackboard-ing and IM-ing and RSS-ing
and e-mailing within a large building has begun to save time, discover
resources, improve collaboration and inspire creativity. How do we
nurture those beginnings?

When I worked for the AFSC,
field staff explicitly discussed theories and approaches to community
building. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such conversations take root
within a public school faculty. Sure, there are the usual department
and whole faculty and special project and “school within a school”initiatives. They inevitably deadend. (Does ANYONE now remember those
halcyon ‘restructuring‘
days? [BTW, that link to Frisco's Ben Franklin Middle was the first hit
on a Google search. I used to coach at Ben for ACCESS. It's a 'dead and
met its maker' FORMER restructured school, about to be closed or taken
over by a 'dream school' initiative.
Well, I suppose that's restructuring of a sort.]) Money, faculty
turn-over, administrative brouhahas, all contribute to the failures.
But essentially, such community building efforts are always top down.
Disruptive technologies make control from the top difficult. Hmmm.

An early adopter at Gal is Dave Barrios. He’s subscribed to homoLudens. I IM-ed him earlier to read the Allen piece. Let’s see what happens.

32.0 kilometer radius? That could cover a good portion of the Emerald City.

China, Bakersfield and Amsterdam beckon. With a dead library database, what’s the point of dawdling?

Teachers. They continue to surprise and delight. Witness the latest Li-blog-ary award, “Mahatama of Metacognition.”

Why,
as a  certified disdainer of BSIRS
(Bonds-salary-inflation-ruined-sport), do I include the screenshot to
the left? Because that is Galileo science teacher and season
ticket-holding David Barrios
caught in the initial moment of his new extra-curricular career,
Giant Blogger. So here’s to you DB - a first and slight attempt at
getting you readers. Note please the posting below the swing-by-swing
commentary, the Misfit Mentor.
So we have a science teacher who likes to write? And who uses IM
nonchalantly? And who grokked Net News Wire’s superior WYIWYG
interface and the concept of XML feeds and aggregation in about three
seconds? This bodes well for the summer training session.

David provided one of several bright spots on a Friday framed by a
major disaster. The Follett library database got wiped. Some server guy
downtown was fiddling around with a reconfiguration. Did he notify
anyone of same fiddling? Nooooooo. I’m going through all the Kubler
Ross stages. Anger doesn’t do the first justice. Then there’s denial,
which still lingers. (Comon’ geeks, don’t tell me the Faircom Server
has to be shut down to dump back ups to the tape drive. I mean, who
even knows what that means, huh? I’m just a bookish, tech-dumb
librarian person.) Guilt is in there somewhere I’m told and I have to
take on some of that. Seems I was supposed to be doing manual back ups
to CD regularly. Who knew? Well, I kind of knew, but never actually did them at
MLK unless the server gods warned me of impending meddling. I found out later that the previous Gal librarian didn’t do any last
year either. Date of last full back up: 2002.

Oy.

I sat in uncharacteristic silence and stared at the office wall
for an hour. Then I
moved heavy furniture around a main room suddenly crowded with the renovation’s new
bookshelves. Later, I vented wrath with my department’s chair,
George, who happily suggested that this just might be an opportunity to
dump Follett and get a decent, interoperable online library management
system started at Gal. Hehe. Leave it to George to look on the bright
side of disaster. What the hell. Some of this smacks of that scene in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where the bicycle salesman
shoulders the sheriff away to announce  “The horse is dead!” It’s
a foreshadowing, a first inchoate suggestion that books are dead.

In the middle of all that, a delegation from the SF Chinese consulate
education department arrived, accompanied by the principal of one of our
feeder middle schools and the district ass’t. sup for high schools.
Mindy Chiang toured them through the online collaboration she’s
managing with our Shanghai sister schools. Most impressed they were. We
may have some staff in Shanghai this summer for face to face follow up
on our recent experiments.

Then Amy Leach, my teaching partner of a decade ago, stopped by for a
library tour and a TGIF at Shanghai Kelly’s. We tried
to steal some wifi bandwidth to check out David’s baseball blogging,
but Kelly’s is in a dead zone. (Comon’ Joel, get the Bluetooth phone
thing happening.) It appears that this Friday scene is established. Not
only did Sean the bartender introduce himself to me, but he bought me a
beer. And then - the final icing on the community building cake -
Margaret Chiu, Gal’s principal, joined us.

I think we need a school T shirt: “Galileo Academy: If you’re not laughing, you’re probably not learning.”

“[Libraries] that rise quickly, just as all the other things of nature that are born and
grow rapidly, cannot have roots and ramifications; the first bad weather kills them.”

Good weather for weeks now. Knock on wooden shelves! We’re putting down roots at Gal - slowly, patiently, methodically.

The main room is still
a disaster from its most recent stage of renovation, and Advanced Placement testing has kept us from spending
more than a few hours reshelving books. The closed door, though, allowed
time for hurried money spending. An unexpected $150K showed up
in the school coffers and lo! - as the The Bookish Prince himself tells
us, “He who knoweth
Excel and its formulas shall raise his position unto the top of the
listing of wishes!” Can’t be sure when it will all be available for
actual work, but recently discovered, arrived or on order for
library-centered use are:

1. a laboriously salvaged summer grant allocation, enough to pay 10
   teachers for 31 hours and 2 teachers for 44 hours of intensive CMS
   training;
2. a second T1 line into the building;
3. online subscriptions to the Gale science reference collection,
   EBSCO’s Teacher Professional collection, and the Oxford Premium
   Reference Suite (the OED - full text! - included);
4. 5 Airport Extreme wireless hubs for various corners of the building;
5. 5 Mac G4 iBooks and 6 Mac G4 laptops for use by 10 teachers during the “Managing Content, Guiding Learning” summer institute;
6. Adobe’s Creative Suite (Adobe PhotoshopÆ, Adobe IllustratorÆ, Adobe InDesignÆ, Adobe GoLiveÆ, and Adobe AcrobatÆ Professional
   ), Inspiration 7.5, MS Office 2004, iLife and (if all goes
   well) the best RSS aggregator in the world on all of those machines;
7. a library-housed Mac G5 multi-media production center;
8. a 17″ flat screen display as a treat for the surly librarian.

Yes,
it’s the result of Machiavellian manipulation, but what isn’t in a
school district (or any other) bureaucracy?

“Say it sharp! Say it loud!
I’m
Machia-brari
and I’m f-ing proud!”

With much appreciation to the immitable Bryan Bell,
designer
extraordinaire, and in memory of the ‘Libra-Adore’ retriever, Harry
Argus, who worked and slept in any number of school libraries, we
proudly present: The Napping Librarian Award. And it’s not completely
in jest, either. The point of doing all this
CMS training with Gal staff is to eventually STOP doing CMS training,
to empower our teachers as independent researchers and teachers of
research. This from the web page:

“Let’s
be honest. The purpose of librarianship in the digital age is to make
librarianship obsolete, eh? It won’t happen over night, but nothing
wrong with a long term plan. Our motto: ‘Every librarian a teacher!
Every teacher a librarian!’” - Anonymous MLIS

• Joel Arquillos, April 26, 2004

San Franciscans publicly complain about the climate: foggy, windy, cold,
grey. In my original East Coast mind, it beats the sweltering and freezing extremes of the
rest of the world. We keep secret April and late
September weeks
when the fog stands off and the wind calms and the sky turns a blue unlike
any other place.

Bernal homage to Amsterdam, Spring, ‘04

I showed Alan Levine, in town for Pachyderm testing, some of the the city’s special places on Thursday night. Sigh - why can’t SFUSD or NWP
enable someone talented and versatile like Alan? (My kingdom and all my
web domains for a php programmer who can talk to classroom teachers!)
It’s difficult working only under the table on all of this content
management and web domain development with KCSOS. I salivate digitally at Alan’s MLX and imagine its use among the BAWP teacher consultant community and at Galileo.

Ahh, it might all come together. The library renovation
nears completion, with nowhere near enough shelf space for the boxed
books, but hey, books are doomed anyway, right? We’ve got a trial
version of the new site proxie server software working and Manila
updates are not a problem. The KCSOS server challenge is under control
and there’s a chance for some hardware upgrading. More and more Gal
teachers are using the web for teaching and writing. Another $5 K grant for summer time teacher CMS training came through. I may actually write up all of this blog bumbling at a Sante Fe writing retreat in June. I’ll be back in Shanghai
for four weeks in December (This is called postive thinking.) and a
teacher from over there will be here next summer. We’ve got some
interesting nibbles for house swaps in the NL.

Now if only all beloved dogs were immortal and all Republican incumbents doomed.

Deng Jian Guo
solo-ed into the wonderful world of Manila’s Esoteric Settings and
explored Chinese text rendering before I could tell him that we were
working on it. Mindy Chiang
(Taibei type - equally intense) was back at him in a flash. Witness,
friends, the birth of the first ever bilingual Chinese / English weblog
international educational collaboration!

In the process of all this set up work, Mindy has tested four input
systems. They all work. And we discovered that Blackboard renders
Chinese as well. So the actual student-to-student communication will be
happening on a UC Berkeley BB site. When we’ve got stuff to publish,
we’ll have the kids throw it up on the blog.

Hehe. I never thought I’d be typing in Chinese. Hah! I never thought
I’d be excited again about improving my Mandarin fluency. Best moment
of the day: I was ranting and raving in Mandarin about the fun of our
Shanghai trip and one of the advanced Chinese students came up to me
and said in English: “I’m proud of you. You made incredible progress
with your Chinese in just one week.”

I found an old posting about a cheap fix for using Chinese character typing in a Manila site. With Erin Clerico’s help - ayah!!! - it works.
In Plug-ins, we just set the Esoteric Settings’ ISOFiltering to “off.”Then we inserted the recommended code into the template of the
site.  Mindy Chiang
is testing its usability with several different ways of writing
Chinese. We’re guessing this is only a temporary work around, but Scott
Young and Jake Savin have expressed some interest in checking it out.

Note: You may need to change your browser View settings to see the properly rendered Chinese.