In case you can't read the above text on this Flickr image, here it is as text:

In a move that has stunned technology fear-mongers and edtech vendors statewide, the internet service provider "Two Flowers" has decided to unblock the website Ning.com on school networks for which it provides content filtering services.

James Scaryman, CEO of Two Flowers, issued a written statement which has been picked up by the AP and other wire services: "We decided to just scrap the fear mongering game with schools. Sure there is objectionable content online, and we're still providing a basic level of content filtering. We were scaring people to death telling them they would all die if they opened Ning on their network, and the truth is we were lying. Lots of kids are already bypassing the content filter at school with proxies, so effectively the main people we were keeping off sites like Ning were teachers."

James went on to endorse the work of digital storytelling groups like Story Chasers Inc., based in Oklahoma, who use Ning networks to demonstrate the power of safe, collaborative publishing online which educators moderate and gatekeep. "Storychasers really is the bomb," James said. We're so excited they are extending the "Celebrate Oklahoma Voices" project now into Kansas. "Celebrate Kansas Voices" is going to rock the house.

Technorati Tags:
kansas, unblock, ning, humor

I referenced this in my presentation last Monday, "Communicating in the Digital Age." Along with the newly announced "Computer Engineer" Barbie, perhaps media campaigns like Intel's as well as toys will help change student perceptions about how COOL it is to be a geek.

GirlGeeks has been seeking to do this for girls and women since 1998. Programs like GenYES can help promote these changes within your school, for boys and girls.

The theme of the PodStock 2010 education conference in Wichita, Kansas is, "I Wanna Be a Technology Rock Star!"

Boy Scout camp in Colorado at Camp Alexander will keep me from attending PodStock this year, but I wish I could be there! How many of the learners in your school want to be technology rock stars?! Perhaps you could share and discuss this video about Ajay Bhatt and help students understand there are "stars" in our society BESIDES sports stars. With all the recent, negative press Tiger Woods has created, this might be a valuable way to re-direct student "star" attention, at least for awhile.

I learned about the "Sponsors of Tomorrow" video by reading the November 2009 FastCompany article, "Intel Risks It All (Again.)" I've added this video to my "Videos for PD" blog page under the "humor" category.

Technorati Tags:
conference, edtech, education, podstock, podstock2010, star, technology, video, youtube, intel, rock, genyes, girlgeeks, perception, geek, girl, women

Via Whelmed and Tomaz Lasic.

Technorati Tags:
education, real, school, world, realworld

From your Facebook homepage, scroll all the way down and in the lower left corner click on your LANGUAGE. From the available choices, choose ENGLISH (Pirate) - beta.

Now you can enjoy using Facebook and reading updates from your friends using Pirate English!

Warning: Be careful when USING Pirate English with others, particularly in professional settings. Not everyone may share your enthusiasm for this language dialect, especially fans of political correctness.

Technorati Tags:
english, facebook, fun, pirate, language

Based on this advice, I am definitely going to avoid selecting choice pieces of rubbish from the local trash bins here, and snack VERY wisely on only rare occasions.

Technorati Tags:
fun, maine, sign, snack, travel, actem, actem09, trash, road

Show Notes:

1. GarageBand 2009
2. School S'Mores
3. Learning Signs (our family learning blog)

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The history of hobos in the United States is actually quite fascinating. Check out the English WikiPedia article for "Hobo" for a sampling. My older daughter was introduced to the history of hobos via the American Girl movie, "Kit Kittredge," last year. I found the following symbols on this sign today both amusing and interesting despite my limited background knowledge about U.S. hobos.

These people are rich

Kind woman lives here. Tell a pitiful story

Police here frown on hobos

I never remember studying hobos in history class, either in high school college. Yet apparently, a fair number of people in the 1940s and 1050s idealized the life of a hobo as a carefree existence which might be preferable to the responsibilities and predictable routines of a more civilized life. The history of hobos certainly could provide material for some interesting and colorful digital stories!

The existence and history of hobos is quite real and serious, but our discussions today of hobos also made me think of John Hodgman (known to many as "PC" in Apple's "Get a Mac" advertising campaign) and his hilarious spoofs of hobo history. I first heard a sampling of John sharing this "history remix" in an interview he shared on NPR several years ago. ("The (Wacky) World According to John Hodgman" from September 2006.) This evening Googling around for a YouTube version, I did find this clever and amusing 7 min, 45 sec version of "Hobo Matters" by John Hodgman, created in a parody style of the PBS series "American Experience."

This would be an interesting video to watch with students studying the Great Depression, and dissect the actual history from the created / parodied history. According to the hobo sign and symbol reference guide we saw today, John Hodgman is correct when he relates in his monolog that a picture of a cat means "a kind lady lives here."

We should be more critical of John's claim that "intersecting circles meant the local sheriff carried throwing stars" or his memory of "President Hoover's pronouncement from his hover yacht in the Caspian sea" during the onset of the Great Depression.

Technorati Tags:
history, hobo, hobos, hodgman, parody, train, sign, symbol

As a big Star Wars fan, I found this remix quite amusing and fun. Nice use of Final Cut Pro.

The NETA 2009 conference was held April 23-24, 2009, in Omaha, Nebraska. The podcast channel from the conference is GREAT. I was not able to attend the conference, but thanks to this audio podcast channel I can attend virtually, after the fact, and you can as well! Way to go Nebraska educators! I think it's definitely a best practice to, at a minimum, audio record key sessions at conferences as the leaders at NETA did and make them available afterwards as free downloads. This substantially amplifies and extends the voices of those presenting at the conference as well as the sponsoring conferencing organization itself.

Go NETA! A twitter account was created for the 2009 NETA conference, which can be a good way for face-to-face conference attendees to find each other on Twitter. I'd recommend, however, setting up a non-year specific Twitter account for conference events so the account can "live on in relevance" after the year of that particular conference is over.

Hat tip to Elizabeth Helfant of St Louis MICDS for letting me know about this NETA09 podcast channel. (Twitter: ehelfant) As a related aside, if you're anywhere NEAR St Louis consider attending their "MICDS Summer Teacher Institute" in 2009. Their lineup of presenters and presentation topics is FANTASTIC. This is sure to be a fantastic series of learning opportunities for midwestern educators!

Technorati Tags:
starwars, finalcutpro, fcp, youtube

[Original Image Link]

Hat tip to Stephen King (@Kicode) for sharing the link to Atom Smasher's "Highway Sign Generator."

Technorati Tags:
school, reform, education, change, funny, humor, leadership

We’re texting a secret story prompt to cell phones all over the world on March 14, 2009. Over the next 20 hours, people will be creating stories, making mobile phone videos and posting them to YouTube. Will you be part of this global experience?

The contest's Ning site includes the seven videos which were submitted for the first edition of Film on Fly, which took place on Feburary 7, 2009. The prompt was sent by SMS text message to participants who signed up, and they had less than 24 hours to plan, shoot, edit and share their video. Cell phones had to be used to RECORD the video, but editing software on a computer could be used for the "chopping" (editing) process. The prompt was:

Everything changed - when the box mysteriously arrived at my doorstep.

Matt Monjan and Steve Dembo created the two minute short "Film on the Fly - Matrix Style," which I think is absolutely hilarious. (This is, of course, guerrilla marketing for the Discovery Educator Network. A very effective method I think.)

Are you ready to take the blue pill?!

Karen Montgomery created this very clever 2 minute video with some help from her family.

This was Hall Davidson's 31 second submission, filmed at an airport security checkpoint:

This one (which I think was created by Dennis Grice, but I'm not sure) uses a very clever technique of panning across hand-drawn images, which are shown sequentially in a flip book.

Great creativity, everyone! I'm signing up for round two! Won't you join us? Get out your cell phone and let's start making some movies!

Technorati Tags:
filmonthefly, video, cellphone, mobile, cell, contest, creative, creativity, digitalstorytelling

Somehow, having a laptop in front of you makes the reality of cognitive multi-tasking more tangibly visible to some leaders. When we've been in class or in meetings, we've always had trouble as human beings maintaining a singular focus on the speaker's voice and topic. In a meeting with my laptop, I'm likely talking notes with EverNote, checking my calendar and adding items to it, and/or looking up something which is being discussed. I'm never playing Solitaire. Yet I find that in some cases, some people assume laptops are just toys and useless distractions when it comes to class lectures or formal meetings. Certainly digital technologies can be used to "distance and distract" (words from John Naisbitt in "High Tech/High Touch" I think) but in my case a laptop is a used in a meeting to digitize thoughts for indexed access afterwards, and to obtain additional information needed to process new directives.

Scott Adams has captured elements of this reality well in his cartoon today.

Thanks to James Deaton for bringing this to my attention via a tweet.

Technorati Tags:
laptop, laptops, cartoon, dilbert, meeting, attention

Even though this video script for the the actor formerly known as Laurence Tureaud may not reflect a basic understanding of connectivist learning theory, I do like the video since I know several school IT departments that could use a Mr. T - style shakeup! Rather than advocating for Hitachi hardware, I'd re-write Mr. T's lines to include the following exhortation:

Wake up fools! Mr. T is in the house! Why are you blockin' all these web 2.0 tools for these teachers and students? Don't you know we've got to collaborate as a nation and a planet if we're going to survive? Are you all a bunch of supporters or blockers? Let's get on the same page with this education mission!

I think this video provides some great ideas for further creativity and remixing of ideas. Certainly it can provide an interesting opening for a discussion on the relative merits of dumb networks compared to smart network technologies.

Technorati Tags:
technology, school, web2, mrt, Hitachi, youtube, video, ad, advertisement

First, there were several boxes of bags sitting outside one of the offices. Apparently, at least a few people felt the availability of the bags in the hallway was an invitation to help themselves to a free bag. As a result, the following "Do Not Take Bags" sign was necessary on the side of one of the boxes:

I suppose I can partly see why people walking by thought these bags were being made available for the general public. If the owners didn't want anyone to take any bags, perhaps it would be good to close the box?

In the same area, apparently some people in the past had seen the deposted boxes and figured it was a dumping area for other boxes of trash and unwanted items. As as result, the following sign (which can be paraphrased as "no dumping") was posted:

Often we bemoan or hear other adults bemoan the behaviors of children as "so immature" or "unprofessional," yet I think we can often find adults in professional contexts who (for a variety of reasons no doubt) make poor choices. These signs reflect that reality, and also gave me a good laugh this week.

Technorati Tags:
signs, trash, funny

The following popular topics might be appropriate and needed at the next technology-related workshop or conference event you attend, or to just cope with the daily stresses of classroom teaching!

1. I get so angry
2. I'm too old to change
3. I can't wake up

I'm thinking the third suggestion above might be perfect for a few superintendents and school board members I know.

Unfortunately these short audio downloads are not free, they cost £3.00 each. According to Google's estimate with today's exchange rate that is about $5.25 US. Seems a bit steep. But perhaps these audio messages ARE truly transformative? They could provide the missing ingredient needed to help get you and teachers you know on the right track with effective technology integration and digital learning strategies.

photo credit: J?sé

I doubt it, however.

Thanks to Clark Boyd on The World Tech Podcast #211 for sharing this site. I'm thinking this would be good to share in my introductory keynote remarks next week at TechCon in Chicago.

Technorati Tags:
mobile, phone, cell, counseling, therapy, gury, mymobileguru, technology, stress, education, teachers

Last weekend our family attended the wonderful wedding of my cousin Devin Henley and his beautiful bride, Andrea. This evening as my wife and I watched "The Red Violin" (a great flick, btw) I caught up on my photo and video uploads to Flickr. I'm in the habit of limiting access to photos of our kids to family and friends (those designated in Flickr) and I did with the wedding photo set, but the video set is too adorable (and not really that identifiable like a photo can be) to not share.

Of the six videos in the set, this one of Rachel dancing to YMCA is our favorite:

This second video of her YMCA dancing, including some breakdancing moves she certainly did NOT learn from her dad, comes in a close second:

Did we ever have a BLAST together at Devin and Andrea's wedding or what? Boy this was a lot of fun! Clearly our family (led by our youngest members) needs to get out and go dancing more often!

Again I say "thanks" to the flash-based camera and camcorder I picked up several weeks ago for enabling me to capture these memorable moments.

Technorati Tags:
dance, dancing, wedding, family

Show Notes:

1. Blooney.com - Website of Steven Smith
2. Oklahoma Arts Council website for storyteller Stephen Robert Smith: AKA Ben Franklin
3. Christian Sanity Theater website for Stephen Robert Smith
4. WikiPedia article for Benjamin Franklin
5. Oklahoma A+ Schools

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[tags]history,benfranklin,benjaminfranklin,franklin,story,storytelling,actor,reenactor,constitution[/tags]

Have you ever accidentally overwritten a computer file you did NOT have properly backed up? I have. A few of those instances are burned indelibly into my neocortex and wherever else long term memories are stored in my brain. Even though tonight's experience did not turn out tragically, I think I'll be remembering it for a long time to come none-the-less.

My earliest computer-related near-heart stoppage took place in the early 1980s, when I was working on a relatively simple but for me, pretty complex program in BASIC. My experiences with computers started with the Commodore 64 in 7th grade math class, writing amazing programs like the following:

Eventually I advanced to slightly more sophisticated programs, and I was working on one I had developed to keep track of my personal finances on that fateful night in 1983 (or thereabouts) when I made the fatal error. My homebrew personal finance program had several hundred lines of code in it, and I THOUGHT I had the program opened in BASIC. As you will recall if you used BASIC in those days, everything was done from a command line, the computing "mouse" had been invented in 1981 but hadn't yet found its way into the Fryer household. Unfortunately, I had NOT opened my multi-line BASIC finance program into RAM, so when I typed the command to save my program to a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk (our computer didn't have a hard drive then) I actually saved a BLANK, EMPTY file over my existing program.

Uh oh. I didn't have a backup.

Hours and hours of work at the computer screen, with one ill-advised click on the keyboard-- down the toilet. Ouch.

Let's fast forward twenty-five years to this evening. I needed to update my personal contact page, bio page, and vitae with new information since my resignation from AT&T was effective at the end of the day Friday and I begin work for the Oklahoma Heritage Association on Monday. I am still using an older version of Dreamweaver to update those pages on my wesfryer.com site, so once I update a page I have to ftp the file (I use CyberDuck) from my local computer's hard drive up to the server in the sky. After I reviewed the updated file I'd changed and set to the server, I realized the mistake I'd made. Darn. I'd been considering moving my vitae as well as other personal pages over to a personal wiki site. If I had, older versions / revisions of the page would have been accessible and I could have "reverted" my page back to a previous version. Unfortunately, I hadn't been using a wiki.

I'd used a pre-December 2007 version of my vitae webpage to update my site. By uploading that version of the page to my server, I OVERWROTE the existing page which had HUNDREDS of new entries in it for all the articles I wrote and presentations / workshops I shared in 2007. Ouch. I put my head down in despair on my laptop's keyboard. My son came over and asked in a concerned voice, "What happened, Dad?" I didn't have a backup on my computer of my most recently updated vitae... and that meant HOURS and HOURS of work had just gone up in smoke. Or been overwritten through the magic ether of the Internet at the speed of light. Or whatever. I was seriously bummed.

Yet in the midst of this near tragic nightmare on HTML-street, a light appeared. A narrow chance my work could yet be salvaged.

Two in fact. And the second one proved golden.

My first glimmer of hope came when I remembered the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The site takes a "snapshot" of many websites at regular intervals. If I was lucky, the site would have a snapshot of my vitae page which included all the new additions I'd added in December 2007 and January 2008.

Unfortunately, the last Wayback snapshot of my vitae was from 16 Feb 2007. The site showed a snapshot was available for 27 Jul 2007, but I couldn't get it to display in my browser, and if it WAS available it wouldn't help. That date was too early. I needed something after January 2008, and before about three minutes before I had started this desperate search.

My second glimmer of hope came when I remembered that Google automatically caches webpage versions. Could it be that Google could come to my rescue? I performed a quick search for my vitae address on Google.

I clicked the CACHED link and held my breath. Would it be Christmas in July? Can furtive prayers at the keyboard of a Macbook be answered so quickly?

Yes indeed! The wonderful Google search engine had indexed and cached my vitae website automatically back on July 4, 2008, and I was able to view the source code of that page and save it to my local hard drive. WHAT A RELIEF! Hours and hours of work had been saved!

Hooray for Google, and hooray for Google's caching functionality!

There are other examples we've heard about where Google's caching function or the Internet Archive's Wayback machine has come back to haunt someone (like when an unwanted, inappropriate photo is posted online and is cached so it can't be deleted forever) but my experiences this evening provide a compelling counter-example to those stories.

I'm delighted Google automatically caches webpages. That's was life-saving functionality for me!

Technorati Tags:
google, cache, backup, save, overwrite, story, pain, wayback, copy

"The Unexpected Champion" (which I posted about Monday night in "Lessons learned about Stopmotion after Arts Academy Day 1") remains a personal favorite movie creation from the past week, but the following are also high on my list this week:

"The Rescue" (34 sec)

"The Lonely Blob and His Special Someone" (1 min, 8 sec)

"The Trophy" (1 min, 54 sec)

I helped create "Not A Tasty Treat" (33 sec) after discussing stopmotion possibilities with projector shadow characters all week with my high school assistant:

As you can see, we got pretty silly with our creations but we also learned a great deal.

Like coaching a sport, I found that the more I personally experienced, created and "played" with stopmotion filmmaking and claymation, the better I was able to teach and facilitate our students as they created stopmotion projects. Many kids tried to put too many objects in their films, and often those did not succeed in telling a cogent story. It was difficult for some (particularly younger students) to be patient enough to take the LARGE number of pictures necessary to make reasonably smooth stopmotion movement. By the last classes of the day today, my high school assistant and I were counseling teams to just use a few characters (keep it very simple) and try to really animate their clay objects instead of just moving them around like action figures or finger puppets.

All in all, I think our workshop and class was a success and a big hit. No one created an epic film (or even something that could be considered a "complete" movie) but everyone got multiple experiences creating stopmotion and was introduced to the storyboarding process. With the exception of my own children and my assistant, NONE of the kids in my classes had ever done any stopmotion filmmaking with objects or with clay. Everyone liked it, and in several cases I had to shoo kids out of the classroom because they wanted to keep on working even after our classtime was over! It's great to work in an environment where the students are having fun and are very motivated to work. (Of course that condition wasn't universal, and this WAS a voluntary summer arts camp, but still it was nice.) We could have had each student work on a single project that was completed at the end of the week, but I think it was better to have them work on and complete multiple small projects. These "small victories" (as Marco Torres sometimes says in similar contexts) are key for learning, I think. The biggest success was that in the workshop, we (as teachers and class leaders) followed the guideline, "More them. Less us." The hands-on, collaborative work in groups was great. Not everything went smoothly, and things were difficult for some at times due to natural group dynamics, but all those things are important parts of the learning process. Teaching this class this week was a real treat!

Technorati Tags:
stopmotion, film, filmmaking, clay, claymation, fun

My favorite blog which addresses presentation design issues is Presentation Zen. The posts "Learning from Bill Gates & Steve Jobs," "Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic," "Bill Gates and visual complexity," and "The "Lessig Method" of presentation" are all good references for additional tips along these lines. If you have seen me present with a multimedia slideshow you've probably seen the influence of these ideas on my own approach toward presentations. Give me a few key words with some powerful images to emphasize your points, and you'll capture my attention as well as imagination much more effectively than you can with a slide deck full of bulleted points, graphs and statistics. Dan McMillian makes that point well with some humor (always a plus if shared in good taste) in this four minute video.

Thanks to Bud Deihl for sharing the link to Dan's video via twitter.

Technorati Tags:
powerpoint, tips, presentation, effective, youtube

I Love Learning. I Hate Schooliness.

--this is my motto. It's one of the reasons I wrote (in a post, "On Leaving Teaching to Become a Teacher," with about 70 comments now),

I'm not sure how much longer I want to work for schools. I'd so much rather teach.

So what is "schooliness"?

I have no idea. But that's not a problem:  I'm a teacher.  I'm quite comfortable speaking with confidence on subjects I know next to nothing about.

Fans of Stephen Colbert will note that "schooliness" riffs on Colbert's "truthiness," which won the Word of the Year awards from the American Dialect Society in 2005, and from Merriam-Webster in 2006.

Colbert, in a serious interview as himself, instead of as his Bill O'Reilly satire persona, had this to say about "truthiness":

Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word…

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the President because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?…

Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.' It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.

I've never tried to define "schooliness," but so many people are quoting it as "Clay's idea," I feel it's time to try - and to ask for your help in the Open Thread invitation at the end of this post.

The Birth of Schooliness

I first used the word "schooliness" in March 2007 - my third month of blogging - in one of a series of posts on "how to save blogging from teachers." (I still worry about that danger, and still think-aloud about that challenge a year later.) I was envisioning a future in which all the edtech evangelists got what they wanted: schools full of teachers in every classroom using blogging with their students. But rather than seeing a utopia to celebrate, I saw a bleak dystopia: Blogging as "just another way to turn in homework." Blogging, like thinking, creativity, and other joys, turned into an aversive horror by the forces of schooliness:

. . . . what reader will ever return to a blog that’s full of homework posts? If Stephen Colbert were here, he’d say such a blog smelled of this: “Schooliness.”

Like Colbert's "truthiness," "schooliness" stuck with me. It was a word without a dictionary definition that still seemed to identify something we all know, all too well.

Schooly Student Leadership

The next time I used the term was this past September. With a few other teachers around the world, I've started a Green Schools movement called Project Global Cooling. The project's purpose is for student members to research waste-reduction measures, and their cost benefits for the school, and then present them for adoption in a formal proposal to the school administration - and to have, ideally, an Earth Day concert in cities around the world, student-promoted, on the same day, which will be filmed and uploaded to the Project Global Cooling website (it's ugly right now, but it's starting, finally, to grow legs - see my blog for future focus on this as it nears its April 19 climax).

One of the PGC students, a student council member, was ordered by the student council teacher-leaders to drop our club. It conflicted with the student council meeting times. That sent me into my second rage against the schooly in my post, "Student Council: Creating Tomorrow's Followers (or, "Smells Like School Spirit")":

Me: “So what are you guys going to be planning in the Student Council that’s so important she’s forcing you to drop all other activities?”

Student: “The Haunted House for Halloween. And the next Student Assembly.”

Me: “The Haunted House….so, like, getting the pumpkins and doing some Halloween thing in the gym?”

Student: “Yeah.”

Me: “And the Student Assembly: what are you planning for that?”

Student: “Introducing the Sports teams. And raising school spirit.”

Me: “And how many people do you have meeting twice a week to plan a Haunted House and a 40-minute assembly to introduce the basketball players and give a few speeches and such?”

Student: “Seventeen.”

Me: “Seventeen?”

Student: “Yeah.”

Me: “Seventeen people meeting twice a week for the next 20 weeks to plan a haunted house in the gym, and an assembly to introduce sports teams? How long can it take to come up with a plan to introduce sports teams?”

Student: “I know.”

Me: “I hate school. Look at how trivial it makes you, even when you want to make a difference in the real world.”

Student: “I don’t have any choice. The Student Council teachers won’t let me out.”

Me: “And look how powerless you suddenly are. You’re 17. You’re a young adult. You know physics, calculus, and history far more than most of your teachers, but have zero power in school despite that. 'They won’t let me.’ I hate school.”

* * *

So, your advice: I want to suggest he quit Student Council, since it’s clearly one very school-blindered, trivial waste of time for all these poor students seeking election in order to show they can handle power effectively - like adults do.

Another idea is to instead advise him to wage a bit of a rebellion inside the Student Council, by asking the very sensible question - “Is this the best we can do? Jack-o-lanterns and basketballs? Can we give the StuCo some teeth? Extend it into the real world? Isn’t it pathetically fay right now? Trivial? Irrelevant? Infantile?”

The sad thing is, it’s institutionalized. The Rat-Race for college admissions puts a high premium on silly bullets like holding a class office. College counselors, administrators, parents, students, teachers - the whole school culture - treat the Student Council like it’s an honorable thing. In reality, it limits the horizons of the 17 most motivated leaders from each grade level to the paltry world of the schoolhouse. It’s outrageously trivial and infantile.

I don’t know if it’s “consensus trance,” blind traditionalism, or winking condescension (”Let the kids play like they have power”), but it smells really bad to me.

Schooly Ethics

Schooliness raised its ugly head again when I considered the moral "offenses" schools choose to punish at school. Drive a gas-guzzler? Promote the bloody diamond trade with your flashy jewelry? Enjoy murder in video games or on your favorite movies? No worries. No punishment.

But use certain taboo vowel-consonant combinations, or look at the human form with certain taboo portions visible? We'll throw the book at you, in our duty to teach you the difference between right and wrong. Schooly morality seems to have been held back since the mid-Victorian era. That was a fun post: "To Curse or Not to Curse: On Teaching the F-Bomb and Other Colorful Words." Read it before you judge it. It's about Shakespeare's mastery of cursing, as an art form. Here's a snippet:

Lear curses with style and grace, as befits a king. But Kent, his chief knight - Lear’s “Army Chief of Staff,” as it were - curses, as befits a career soldier, with much more salt and directness. Check out his classic “cussing out” of the slimy Oswald, servant of Goneril –

OSWALD:
What dost thou know me for?

KENT:
A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of they addition. (Act II, Sc. 2, ll. 14-24)

If your Elizabethan English is rusty, and you don’t hear the vulgarity and sexual insult sloshing in practically every line, download the free “Answers” Firefox addon, and click the unknown words while holding down “alt” on your Mac for an instant popup definition and more (PC users, you’re on your own - maybe “ctrl”?). Kent calls Oswald a pimp, son of a bitch, bastard, son of a whore, “wussy,” a suck-up, and more, and then says, in today’s language, “Deny one word, and I’ll kick your disgusting little donkey” (substitute the King James Bible word for donkey here).

It’s depressing, isn’t it, how the art of cursing has degenerated in our own modern age? Our four-letter words are so unimaginative and artless by comparison.

So if you were me, how would you guide students to translate these curses? Having Kent abuse Oswald by hissing,

You bad person, I’m going to kick your bottom.
You son of a bad woman, you sissy, you person born out of wedlock,
You big meanie, etc

just doesn’t strike me as a faithful literary adaptation. (It does strike me as schooliness, though. Some teachers, like Wilde’s classic Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, would give such a bowdlerizing an “A,” I’ve no doubt.)

Schooly Imagination and Curiosity

I'm battling with schooliness now, most distressingly, in the very people I thought would battle it with me: my high school seniors. It seems they are so unfamiliar with having their own ideas, and writing about them, that they simply cannot do it with any engagement. Their free-choice blogs are, overall, schooly imitations of authenticity. Pretending to have ideas they pretend to care about. Thank Goodness, there are exceptions. But the rule is so distressing, it's led me to believe that, by high school, it's too late to unlock the creativity and engagement Wes so often champions. Twelve years of schooliness seems to have beaten the desire to learn - the pleasure of learning - completely out of most seniors. It seems to me now that, if we're going to feed fires for learning, we have to do it before they're snuffed out. And that means, to be clear, focus on school reform in primary and middle years. (How to reform secondary school, so in the grips of the SAT and AP and College Admissions - not to mention high school teachers living out college professor fantasies - is beyond me.)

Here's a snippet from, "From the Classroom Blogging Doldrums: What Would Teacher 2.0 Do?":

The problem? Little vision, little connective writing.

It’s partly senioritis, I think. College applications, SAT’s, too many commitments to too many extra-curricular activities (got to have those bullets for the college application, even if they come at the cost of destroying both my learning and my GPA), too many week-long sports trips, too many AP classes that were chosen not for interest but again for careerist reasons.

It’s partly Korean culture: parents sending students to night and weekend schools for SAT prep, AP prep, tutors. Students confusing memorization skills with academic excellence, trained to “be instructed” rather than to “construct” meaning themselves. Having no time to be, reflect, explore, wonder (or having no energy, rather).

And it’s partly my own fault: all the macho posturing of Advanced Placement courses as “college-level, rigorous,” etc - and Wes Fryer’s etymolological connection, in Shanghai back in September, of “rigor” with “rigid” and “rigor mortis” echoes here - led me to buy in to what now seems a sadistic and pedagogically pathetic imperative to overload AP students with A Mountain Of Homework.

Schooly Critical Thinking: An Oxymoron

This is from, "Teaching Grammar on the Titanic: On Fear and Irrelevance in Education":

So: the problem with me, as a teacher, is that I design units that don’t address anything important. I’ve been trained to think that my job is to stuff the headpieces of the next generation with such irrelevant things as the definition of litotes and onomatopoeia, to write cute little stories about nothing, to know Stratford-upon-Avon. To be able, paradoxically, to think critically about safe subjects. And above all, not to think about anything that might, god forbid, rankle the status quo. And let’s not even start to think about taking any sort of action.

Again, so: As soon as I stop thinking like a teacher, designing units derived from an institutional culture that defines me as a teacher, and subconsciously makes me far more traditional in my teaching than my progressively-posing ego likes to acknowledge….as soon as I re-define myself as a community leader - as that once-upon-a-time American thing called a citizen - instead, maybe the young adults of my community might have an opportunity to learn how to function in the world they’ll inherit from and manage for us all-too-soon.

Schooly (Anti-)Science

When Bulgaria is, per capita, more scientifically literate than America about biology, geology, and genetics - and when even science teachers are afraid of the "e-word" - little more needs to be said. I say it anyway, in this post that got 1,000 hits in 8 hours (a record for me): Truly Critical: On Science, Religion, and Goodness.

Schooly Writing Lessons

Under the influence of Oscar Wilde's aphorisms and Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, and in order to battle evil with wit and thus smile a bit more in hell, I've decided to slowly compile twitter-like definitions of all things schooly. Here's my first effort, from a post last week:

Schooly writing (noun): Assignments by teachers who don’t want to read them, to students who don’t want to write them; a perpetual and unnecessary misery upon which hinges the student’s future, and the teacher’s present, livelihood; an oxymoron.

Open Thread Invitation to Play: Your Definitions of Schooliness?

Readers of my blog will know about the Open Thread idea. It's simple: A topic or question is proposed in an Open Thread post, and all readers are encouraged to write comments as long as they would like, to copy them to their own blogs if desired, and to converse with each other in the thread. It's fun.

I'd like to do an Open Thread here: Questions:

1. List the topics that come to your mind when you think of "Schooliness."

2. Write your own "Devil's Definition" and give us all a wicked laugh. I'll carry them over to Beyond School and add them to a page there.

We know what schooliness is. We teachers live it daily. Let's have some fun with it.

(Other comments are fine too, of course.)

--

Photo Credits:

• Colbert Motivational Poster by Louisville Joe
• Oscar Wilde Action Figure by -sel

I then joined the "Great Pumpkin" jack o lantern photo pool on Flickr, and contributed four of our best shots (the daily contribution limit for the group) adding to the 1000+ images already there. There are some REALLY skilled pumpkin carvers around the world! How amazing and fun it is to see the pooled results of other jack o lantern photographers!

Over the weekend in anticipation of creating our family learning blog, "Learning Signs," I created a Flickr set of all the images of signs I've taken in the past year since MacWorld in January. I love taking photos of signs for some reason, and I've actually photographed 325 different ones in 2007 so far! Here are a few of my favorites:

Happy Halloween!

Technorati Tags:
signs, pumpkins, pumpkin, sign, flickr, halloween, photography

Made with FD's Flickr Toys.

Beware the dangers of multi-tasking! This is a great video to use for teacher professional development-- for tips on downloading an offline copy of this to share, see my post "Capturing offline copies of YouTube videos."

Again thanks to Miguel's advice, I have used the free UnPlug extension for FireFox (cross-platform) to download several of these videos to my laptop hard drive, so I can play them during professional development sessions regardless of whether or not I have an Internet connection. (Or a fast Internet connection, or an Internet connection that permits a connection to the website hosting the video, etc.)

TechRap: Thoughts on technology's impact on a student's life (Ysleta ISD, El Paso, Texas, USA)

Walkthroughs and Learning Objectives (this should get your administrators laughing, and perhaps thinking too)

Mrs. Burk Perimeter Rap (Some may see this and say, "Good grief, are we making school into a place for edu-tainment?" I'd respond, "Not necessarily. But if you have access to creative, musical videos like this that can help your kids learn concepts, wouldn't you be silly to ignore them or refuse to use them?) If you like this, check out Mrs. Burk's other math-related TeacherTube videos!

Our Hero, Mohamed Sidibay (This movie was made by a group of Grade 4 students in Bradford, Ontario, Canada. It is about a former child soldier, Sidibay, from Sierra Leone.)

Technorati Tags: digitalstorytelling, education

My first guest is a comedian from Canada. He's a former educator and recently appeared on Last Comic Standing. Please welcome Mr. Gerry Dee:

BTW Wes, I added a humor section. He'll never have me back!