homoLudens

And he’s from Jersey too. What the hell, I can go along with the
hysterical visions of the weatherless. So ok, ok, it snowed in SF
tonight.

(Props to Meiko for the photo.)

What more is there to say?

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.

January 13 - 14 - 15, 2006

Same location as last time. Purpose and sponsors different. If you live in California, keep tuned. If you live outside CA, you still might be interested.

Faster than a Follett collection management system! (What isn’t?)
More powerful than a loco motivational Web 2.0 speaker! Able to leap
district firewalls in a single wireless connection!

OK, he’s a little early out of his study carrel. First public appearance is scheduled for Internet at Schools West, 10:15 AM, Monday, October 24:

Using a simple Web-based content management system, Galileo Academy of Science and Technologyís library
has ??? yak yak yak??? Using examples to anchor the discussion in real
urban classroom practice, the speakers discuss the obstacles and
rewards that come with ìdigitizingî professional development
opportunities for library media specialists.

The design is by King Chen, Gal ‘05 (who still doesn’t have a DAMN website!), former SLAC-er, former protege of Bryan Bell.
The potbelly and the audience-irritating caption are by me. T-shirts are
available, btw, with all proceeds going to starving student artist King. The
presentation will use print-friendly Li-Blog-ary Man
blog pages as slides. (Hehe - note the image on the laptop screen in
his right hand. King’s got an eye for detail.) No content there yet,
but watch for an announcement on the day of the presentation.

Best part of the event  is sharing the LCD projector with Debbie Abilock.
(Debbie appears to have  a more refined sense of audience than me.
Shown the L-B-M pic a month ago, she e-mailed back: “Whoa???thatís some
image!”) My guess is we’ll accomplish very little in 45 minutes, but
the hallway discussions will be fun. Steven and Jenny are going to be in town. Is there a libr-blogger dinner planned? Back in my Mandarin study DLI days, there used to be this incredible family-owned Italian restaurant just above Fisherman’s Wharf.

That’s what Ken Dow said to me way back in the Fall of 1999 when he generously offered help as we tried Manila
for school tech integration. Given the obstacles that come with the
TI territory, my optimism is limited. But hey - once in awhile it does do
some practical good. Example:

Celia Chan, Galileo’s model blogging counselor, posted a job opportunity on her weblog
at 8:00 AM on Thursday, Oct. 6. I refreshed NetNewsWire at about 4:00
PM and noticed Celia’s post. I remembered that one of my library
assistants, Marcella, was looking for a part time job. We had a staff development day
on Friday, Oct. 7. No students were coming to school. Teen outreach
worker Loan Ly was in IM at the time. Marcella is one of her proteges.
I IM-ed Celia’s job notice permalink over to Loan. She called
Marcella’s cell phone. Marcella called the employer to set up an
interview (the first!) before 4:00 PM on the day the job was posted.
Voila! Marcella got the job.

Asked what she was going to do with her $10 an hour income, Marcella said: “Pay my cell phone monthly charges.”