I am happy to report that  the story has continued in a dramatic way. After reading the story or becoming familiar with it through @wmchamberlain, Dr. John Strange, @drjohnhadley, a Professor of Professional Studies at The University of South Alabama, decided to make my daughter’s blog and experience an assignment for his students.

Shortly after, I began to see a deluge of comments come pouring into Kaia’ blog, which led me to google the term: Kaia Edm 310. I was pleasantly shocked to see over 50 blog posts written about our work.  I also set up a Google Alert to try and filter all of the blog posts that were still being written.

Unfortunately I haven’t the time to comment on each individual blog, so I have chosen to write one comment to be shared collectively with the students in EDM: 310

Dear Students,

It was such a pleasure for me to see your reaction to Kaia’s and my experience. I never would have thought that our simple afternoon activity would elicit so much attention. It just goes to show that people are looking for ways to connect. We so often here people comparing “real” life and “virtual” life as if there is really a difference. When in fact we are all simply living our lives and hoping to share them in whatever meaningful ways we can.

That was the real aim of posting Kai’s pictures online- I was hoping that someone somewhere would find our experience relevant, engaging, human. And by the range of responses it is clear that our story was all of those things.

As we share the daily minutia of our lives, we are able to see how small the world really is, and how similar our experience can be, when we stop and look at what we are all doing. People often criticize social media as a vain and narcissistic way to flood the world with the meaningless details of our lives, but I refuse to follow that route. It is in these very details where we are most human and open for connections.

I think Kaia’s blog is a great example; what started off as a simple way to share pictures with family, has blossom into a portal where students in Missouri are connecting with students in Alabama.

I think this episode demonstrates that using technology should not be some kind of administrative mandate. We can all use technology in various ways. Another misconception of technology is that its user are only interested in various ways we can be digitized. Where as I only see these tools as methods of sharing and documenting my non-digital life. I use these tools to help my daughter understand how a camera works. We speak to our pictures to begin learning about story telling and metaphor. I am simply using these tools to slowly teach her to be aware of her world. We would have gone outside and taken photos with or without social media, but social media has allowed us to connect with you.

We should not want our students to learn to blog, use wikis or go on Facebook for sole purpose of using tools. We must teach them to look critically at reality and find ways to share what they see with others so as to have a better understanding of the human experience. I see the Internet as the new novel, except that we are all authors and we are all constantly writing the chapters one blog post, one tweet, one Facebook update at a time.

So what did you write today? How will you teach your students to be open and brave and connected? How will you help them see that their lives are worth sharing?

Regards,

Jabiz Raisdana

In closing, I would like to add that one of the students from Alabama sent me this great clip of her daughter reading Kaia a book.

Here is our response.

While creating an absolute brand new curriculum and finding resources to make it successful from scratch has its appeal, it is a monstrous task for one person. That is why I am recruiting you to help me. I am hoping that the group brain, the network, or communal learning environment I am a part of will help where they can by: suggesting texts, readers, schemes, resources, and any other ideas that may prove to be useful.

I have created this wiki in hopes of making this a very simple process for the people who can help and  spare some time. If the wiki proves difficult you can just leave me a comment on this post, email me, or send me a Tweet. I am sure everyone is beyond busy this time of year, despite this time crunch, however, I was hoping that you could take ten minutes to look over my document and fill in what you can.

Here are some sample questions:

• Which novels do you teach in 6th grade?
• What is the best writing program you have seen?
• Do you use an anthology or a grammar book? Why or why not? Which one?

You get the point. Any help will be greatly appreciated. If you are reading this post and you are not an English teacher, I would appreciate it if you could share the link with anyone in the English department of your school.

Thanks in advance Learning Network; let’s see what you got! If Web 2.0 is truly what we hype it up to be, let’s see how she runs when put to the test!

After reading many of the comments on this post, I have realized that I was only looking for content and not really thinking about curriculum, so I have begun thinking about essential questions and narrowing things down a bit on this page. Feel free to contribute in either space.

I learned that these birds are most likely from West Africa in Guinea, Senegal and Southern Mauritania East to Western Uganda and Southern Sudan. Knowing this information makes me happy.

Just thought I would share. My brain is now reeling about how to use this in the classroom; I will share when I have a clearer picture. Please post any ideas!

Readers of this blog may have noted that I am at times overly critical of the very technologies I promote, but I want to reassure you that I am a strong proponent of inquiry based learning, and I believe that network learning is the right direction for anyone who is obsessed with investigation, and at the end of the day isn’t the search for truth the very fabric of education. Let me share a few intersecting stories about a little girl, her dad, and a moth caterpillar that may shed some light in this topic.

The story begins in Shanghai at a technology conference of all places. I was sitting in a session led by Alan Levine on photography and the power of Flickr. Alan was talking about the different things he does with Flickr in regards to tags, when he mentioned that you can post a photo of almost anything: a plant, animal, or insect and tag it is as unidentified or unknown and people will identify it for you. At the time the idea seemed quaint, and it immediately fell into the “pretty cool” category, but I didn’t give it much more thought.

Fast forward to a few days ago. I live in Doha, Qatar, and I recently planted a few trees on my roof top garden. My daughter and I were on the roof tending to our young tress when she noticed several caterpillars. She was fascinated with our hairy little friends.

I remember being enthralled with the whole process of metamorphosis as a child and wanted to introduce this transformation to my daughter.  Sure she is only two-and-a-half, but such a magical event can be appreciated at any age. Right? We took one of the caterpillars, some leaves, a branch and put it all in a jar, hoping that we could watch the entire metamorphosis over a span of a few weeks.

The little guy is doing okay. He is eating the leaves, growing, and dropping a massive amount of poops, which are coming in handy for our other project- potty training. “See the caterpillar goes poo-poo too.”

What does any of this have to do with inquiry based learning and Alan Levine? Never a fan of jargon, I am a bit embarrassed to use the term life-long learner, but I did entere education because I have an insatiable curiosity. I wanted to know what kind of caterpillar I was dealing with, so maybe I could take care of it better and make sure it made it to butterflyhood. Let the search begin!

Let me walk you through how networked learning is helping me on my quest. My first step, and I am sure the first step of most K-12 students is that I Googled Qatari caterpillars, only to find a series of websites about the famous tractor company. I can just see the blank expressions on the faces of most 5th graders at this stage of their research, “but that is not what I want.”

What happens next? I had no clue as to where to start. How does one begin an investigation without a starting point? I wished I could just post a picture of it on the Internet and have someone tell me what it was.  I remembered Alan’s session from Learning 2.008, which in and of itself is the first step of network learning. I didn’t remember exactly what to do, so I sent Alan a Tweet and within minutes he had sent me a response giving me instructions:

I ran upstairs took a photo of the caterpillar and added it to Flickr. I did some other research on my own, as any good academic should, and found there are also groups on Flickr that help you identify insects. I sent out a few Tweets hoping that with the combined power of my network and Flickr I would have some answers.

This is really a remarkable thing. We are now able to just post a picture of almost anythinf on the Internet and have someone tell us what it is! Think of the power that gives your students. Think of the way they must learn to interact with others in order to use this power most effectively. I think it is truly amazing.

Within twelve hours I had my first comment on Flickr. At this point in the story I would love to say that someone had correctly identified my caterpillar end of story, but that is not the case. I think often times our students are just looking for the “right” answers as well. Whether they find it on Google, Wikipedia, or someone tells them the “right” answer, the end, and an easy one at that is their objective. While I admit I was a little disappointed when I cut and pasted the answer the guy from Flickr gave me into google and the caterpillar that came up for: Prominents (Notodontidae) looked nothing like the bug in my jar, I realized that learning and research are like many things in life- processes not products.

Posting to Flickr and waiting for a response from a network of people was not the end result, but one step in the process of my learning. When I started I had no idea where to look to even find a starting point for identifying this caterpillar. I was looking at tractors for goodness sake! But with the tips from one person, I had a lead. I was on the hunt.

I cut and pasted words like Prominents, Notodontidae, and Clostera. I got closer and closer. At this point, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Alan was still supporting me with this Tweet:

Now his vast network of experts was on the hunt too. I posted my findings on the Flickr Page in hopes that they will help narrow down the search:

Realistically there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of species of caterpillars. I may never find the exact match I am looking for, but that is not the point.  The point is that I am not satisfied merely punching random terms into google expecting answers and giving up when I don’t find them.

I am interacting with people and hoping they will help me on my journey toward the answer. This process is powerful. This collective, communal learning is what learning looks like. My daughter is only two-and-a-half, and most of what I have said is way over her head, but already she is asking me to watch caterpillars on daddy’s computer. She knows that Youtube is a powerful tool to help visualize and make real so many concepts that are new to her. We watched a Monarch butterfly hatch from its cocoon, hopefully soon we will be able to post our caterpillar hatching on youtube as well in hopes of helping others on their journey. I hope to be able to add the name of the species.

If you have any information regarding this caterpillar please leave it here.

About two hours after writing this post, I received a Flickr Mail from Bob Barker, the guy who had made the first comment,leading me to this page. We will wait and see what the moth looks like, but it looks like we have a Gastropacha (Stenophylloides) populifolia in our jar.

]]> http://intrepidteacher.edublogs.org/2008/12/12/caterpillar/feed/ 3 http://intrepidteacher.edublogs.org/2008/12/11/live-poetry/ http://intrepidteacher.edublogs.org/2008/12/11/live-poetry/#comments Thu, 11 Dec 2008 05:50:39 +0000 Intrepidteacher http://intrepidteacher.edublogs.org/?p=86 Earlier this evening, I was trying to get more out of my social networks by engaging in more artistic collaborative projects. I hatched the idea for the “live” poem. The idea is simple:

• Send out a request on Twitter for participants.
• Create a Google Document.
• Find an image from Flickr (Make sure to pick one from the Creative Commons)
• Wait.
• Wait some more.
• Start to write.
• Leave your poem as a comment on the original page.

Ideas for next time:

• Set a time limit
• Take a screencast of the process so as to watch the “growth” of the poem
• Look at something like Etherpad.

Here is the image and the poem:

Cerulean Tide

a wall of day
and a door to night
creaking hinges
keeping time
footsteps
shuffle
in and out

this is where we met,
the smell of brine and barnacles
moving the sea, slaves to the moon
and desire

warm smoke escaping from a door
in flux soon to close
forever, or so we thought

our eyes consumed, engaged, divorced
time peeling another layer
pushing us together
awash in the sound of
laughter and a distant snare drum

touch gave meaning
memories embrace
did we?
if we choose to believe, we did

this is not ours to keep
never was
but what is left?
closed door, new season
but still, the blue
and blue and stillness blur

choice led us here then
and again
choice parts us after we give
“I want to fall in love with a living poem,”
you said.

another couple in
another out

I laughed and kissed your serious brow
learned the tangles of your hair, left alone too long
waiting for someone to know you
your only desire
for someone to know you

this place will be different tomorrow
in the light
we will see the decay
if we choose

what is the scale for measuring moments?
I say pain
you look away and take a drag on your cigarette
can’t help but disappoint you

your eyes have moved on
I wonder if you will ever be happy
Or if you will discover there’s no such thing

will you come back?
the wall was green, yellow, eggplant
your letter will say.

will your memories lie?
it was blue
it was dark.
we’ll never really know.

The poem is average at best, but it is the process of creation we are concerned with here over product. More thoughts on collaborative art soon.

Later I received a Tweet from @jhawtin telling me about the sonnet she wrote. Here it is:

A wall of daylight met a door of night.
Creaking hinges kept time with our journey,
the drift of lazy footsteps, left and right,
wrapped in smoke and shadow, a comedy.

Awash in laughter, haze and amber pints,
eyes engaged then slipped across the hecklers.
We watched the distant snare drum catch the light.
Crowds moved on. In comfy chairs we rested.

We stayed here under summer’s scudding skies.
Photos captured tangle haired embraces,
the buoys and bikes and lobster pots you liked,
colours rich with time and salty laces.

A season ends, the colours change, and leave.
A smile still sees you here, our dark retreat.

Leave her comments on her blog, Cranky Mango.

Since our first online, meeting Lindsea and I have kept tabs on each other’s comings and goings through Twitter, our blogs, and Skype. We have had Skype chats about music; we exchanged Tweets about film quotes and song lyrics and coming events. In short Lindsea and I have become good friends. I feel I have more in common with her than most of the teachers I deal with on and off the Internet. I am not sure what that says about my maturity level or Lindsea’s for that matter, but I am certain that the future of education relies on crossing our generational boundaries and speaking about our future with young people as often as we can. We need to speak to them, not about them!

One day in May, I think it was, we both realized that we would both be in San Francisco in July. I am not sure about Lindsea, but for me, there was no question that we should meet. I have never officially taught Lindsea in a classroom, but after all the contact we have had online I feel as if I know her as well if not better than any “real-body” students in my charge.

After a few Tweets and phone calls, we arranged to meet at a coffee shop on Chestnut Street on July 11th. A nagging paranoia and fear of what could happen when a grown man meets a teenage girl he has “met” on the internet face-to-face. I could see the headlines now, “Straight A student and star of the Web 2.0 world accuses radical teacher of…”you fill in the blanks. Teenage girls have done stranger things.

How did I know this girl wouldn’t just mess with me and ruin my already precarious career with some bogus allegations? The Internet fear-mongerers work full-time to keep us weary.

I was driving over the golden Gate Gate Bridge on a perfect Northern California day blasting Sun Kil Moon when it hit me- I believe in human beings! I trust them, and because I trust them, I believe in the relationships I build with them, whether in person or online. If I truly have faith in 21st century learning and the new web, then I must trust that these tools, when used responsibly, will help maintain valuable and trustworthy networks. Any mistrust of this philosophy will only diminish the integrity of everything we are doing here. A network becomes a community when you have faith in its members and trust that they have communal goals in mind. You cannot achieve this level of confidence without a creation level of faith.

I will not get into the play-by-play of what we did and how it all felt. I will leave that for a future post or maybe Lindsea can pick-up on that. Instead I will paint a very abstract sketch of how it all went down: the two of us met, drove around the city, watched a drum circle near Hippy Hill in Golden Gate park, went shoe shopping, went to an herb store in The Mission, took in the view at Twin Peaks. We blasted music by local Hawaiian bands and Modest Mouse in the car driving through The Castro. We talked about- Adolescence, sustainability, education, music, Hunter S. Thompson, responsibility, hypocrisy, politics, capitalism, apathy and revolutions. I thought about how- I wish my daughter would grow up to be as wise as the young woman by my side, who hours before was reading Kurt Vonnegut. I wondered whether or not I could ever meet her mother and thank her for raising such an amazing young woman. I relished the thought that I have a group of young people who I am cultivating worldwide to aid in the revolution and how that is all I have ever wanted from teaching. I wondered why I didn’t have teachers like me when I was Lindsea’s age. I probably would have avoided a lot of confusion, but then again maybe it is in that confusion that I learned the most important lessons.

It was a good day.

After our meeting, we promised to write blog posts detailing every facet of our meeting, but as it so often happens, we both let life steer us towards other priorities, other projects. That is until last week, when we re-connected and had a chat on Skype. We recorded the hour-long talk and below you will find my first Podcast. Lindsea is also on a Monday deadline to post her Podcast. I am very curious to see what she found important to highlight and how she will view our talk.

This is my first Podcast, but I am sure it will not be my last. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire process. I hope that after listening to it, when people ask you to explain what you mean when you say 21st century learning, or web 2.0, you can guide them to this post. Tell them that Web 2.0 is about trust and community and collaboration and understanding the spaces between people and finding ways to close those spaces. The jargon may change, Web 2.0 just the latest buzzword, it is nothing more than a tool that help us learn to become more human and organic.

Please comment and leave feedback!

Subscribe Free
Add to my Page

Wow! This discussion is at the same time intense and depressing. Once again, I feel like the kid who doesn’t know the right things to say to be considered cool. I am fairly new to the “echo-chamber,” and as a new member I found it at first very exciting, but I am starting to learn what the author means about the tragedy of commons and not just in regards to Twitter.

Even as a newbie, one can feel that there are certain names that always turn up. There are the experts that everyone follows. There are the names that carry clout, and then there are the little guys like me, simply trying to make sense of this all.

Perhaps it is still the novelty of Twitter that makes it worthwhile for me, or perhaps it is my naivety of the Edublog “in” crowd that keeps me out of discussions like this, and for that I am grateful.

I am a Middle School English teacher obsessed with learning and making connections. So it is a natural link for me to use Web 2.0, both for my own learning, but also to try and figure out what can make my own teaching more productive for my students and their rapidly changing world. Which is ironic because as of now, I don’t even have students, but I haven’t let this stop me from trying to use this network of people help me make the connections I find valuable.

I have met some great people on Twitter and made some great connections. My followers are slowly growing and I periodically check to see who they are, not to see if the “popular” kids are watching me, but to see if there is someone out there operating on my wavelength that could prove to be an alley in the war against ignorance. I blogged and shared my ideas when no one was reading, and I will continue to do so when a few kindred souls might chime in.

Let me finished with a quick story: When I was young I wanted to be the next Jack Kerouac, like every wide-eyed idealist, I was going to write prose that would change the world. I quickly realized that I am not that good of a writer, but that has never stopped me from writing. I don’t want to be famous anymore, I simply must write. The same thing is true for blogging. When I started I thought I could get huge numbers of people to read my work and leave 100’s of comments a week, but now I see that I simply need to write and perhaps, I will meet a few people who like what I have to say.

In closing, Twitter may be old hat for the early crowd, but some of us are still getting good mileage out of it. So come follow that…@intrepidteacher

As you, and maybe some of your readers know, what you discussed in this post has been a very real experience for me. I have written on the subject a bit, but since I am exposed and looking for a new job, I am a bit reserved on how I approach the subject.

But let me try and sort some thoughts out here now:

We want, I think, as educators to teach our students to be resourceful, expressive, open, honest, members of a global community that is rapidly homogenizing and melding in terms of social norms, cultural taboos etc…This is true at least in the developed world, where access to Web 2.0 is at all time high. But then as educators, we ourselves are terrified of who and what we are.

In my case it was a picture that represented my thoughts on censorship that upset a parent, but it could have been my thoughts on social justice, politics, religion, or many other things that, apparently, I am expected to teach but not think or write about.

My point is that there will always be things that will upset a group of people when we are exposed on the web. So the questions is are we trying to use Web 2.0 and all these tools to connect people and tear down walls, or are we still trying to hide behind as many walls as we can?

I honestly feel that if an employer searches me out and sees my work on the web, from my youtube videos, to my flickr pages, to my personal and professional blogs, they should see a complete picture of the type of person I am. I am extremely proud of that person, I have been working on him for 33 years now. He is more than just a marketable teacher; he is a complete human being. Isn’t that ultimately what we are teaching our students? To be able to create themselves and be fully expressive using the Internet tools to not only better understand themselves, but also the people who cohabitate the planet on which they live.

Perhaps I am too naïve and idealistic, I have been told this before, but I am a firm believer that the point of all this technology is connection and exposure. I guess my idea of private and public is fading fast…is the world ready for that? Are our schools?

I have learned the hard way, that they are not, but with things changing as fast as they are, we have to be ready for it when it does. If we as educators are overly cautious to use the web, we cannot expect our students to use it to its full potential.

So if you have never read my work please google Jabiz Raisdana and if you are an administrator and need a teacher please get in touch.

A group of eighth graders (and one especially brilliant seventh grader), a few high school students, and their teacher preparing for a Global Issues Conference in Düsseldorf; they  are discussing the meaning of sustainability and what that means in a 21st century global economy based on over consumption and the profit motive. On the screen they are watching and listening to Lindsea, a sixteen-year-old student/writer/blogger/ who is talking about her ideas on sustainability and her experiencing using web 2.0 to make connections with people like Clay Burrell and his  Project Global Cooling and Bill Farren, who happens to be the creator of Did You Ever Wonder, the video they had just watched as a group, before their talk with Lindsea.  Did I mention that Lindsea lives in Hawaii and that it was 2:30 am her time?

How do scenes like this come about? And what do experiences like this one mean to the future of education, student/teacher relationships, and the future of the planet? Sit back and let me spin the tale of how we weaved our section of the web 2.0 today…

A few days ago Clay Burrell a teacher in South Korea, and a man I am getting to know better and better through our interactions on the web, wrote a post about a video created by his guest writer Bill Farren. After watching the short video, I felt the need to share it with my students for the following reasons-

• In our Global Issues Club, we have been discussing sustainability as the main theme for our upcoming conference.
• In my Language Arts classes, we have been studying the effects of an economic system based on greed, profit, and wealth on the local labor force, and so I felt Bill’s video was a great companion to our Labor Art project.

Jump to today. I was sifting through my Google reader when I came across a post by Lindsea written on Student2.0, a blog to which I subscribe after several suggestions by my contacts on Twitter. Lindsea’s post was about, you guessed it, the aforementioned video and her interactions with Clay and his Global Cooling Project. I was blown away by her maturity, sophistication, passion for sustainability, and education. I left her a brief comment encouraging her while inviting her to check out our Global Issues Club blog. I figured that since we were discussing the same video and ideas she had written about, it would be beneficial for all parties to connect our conversations. I believe this connection of ideas is what networking is all about, but more on that later.

Minutes after I posted my comment, I noticed that Lindsea had commented on our blog, stating that she would love to get involved. I quickly sent her an email asking her if she could join us via Skype for our meeting that afternoon. After checking time zones, a quick IM on Skype about exceptions, and what I think was a quick nap on her part (It was 10:00 pm her time when we first made contact and our meeting would not be till 2:00 am, so she decided to go to sleep and set her alarm to get up and make the call.) we were good to go.

In between the time of our meeting and our initial contact, I noticed that she had written a post on her personal blog about our newly made network connection. She had followed my cyber-trail and read a few of our new student blogs at IntrepidClassroom, pointing out a few students that she would like to read. Jump back to the beginning of this story. Lindsea is talking to my students and promises to be in touch for future collaborations.

This is the power of web 2.0 and building personal learning networks. When people ask me what integrating technology looks like, how can I even begin to explain what happened to day? This is not integrating computer lab time; this is looking at technology and education in a whole new way. This was not a structured rubricized project, convoluted by pedagogy, but rather a simple connection of minds exchanging ideas on a topic we find worthwhile. The line between teacher and student, novice and expert was blurred. We were all learning from each other.

At one point Lindsea was talking about the idea of a sustainable educational model, meaning that students need to learn how to sustain their own education. They actually need to learn how to learn despite of what may be going on in their classrooms. I had goosebumps!

I hope this experience was a wake up call to my students, because I know that it was for me. Education is not about learning facts and regurgitating what your teachers tell you in class, but rather, education is the ability to sustain your own learning. Students are not in school to get grades, go to college, get a job, and join the very system that is destroying their future. They need to find ways to teach their teachers and each other to build a new vision for the world. If our values need to shift to focus on a more cooperative, compassionate, sustainable world, our education cannot be too far behind.

Today was great! I want to thank everyone involved. I hope this experience will inspire the kids who were there to explore the reasons behind why we are building our blogs and the power this kind of networking can have. I also hope that anyone reading this post will keep their nose to the grindstone and keep doing what you are doing. We can’t afford not to.