If you were walking by room 3208 today at about 3:25, this is what you would have seen:
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.
What a fantastic experience! I look forward to the day when we stop talking about “e-learning” or “distance learning” or “book learning” and just get on with the business of learning.
I must admit to having some reservations about Bill Farren’s video. It conflates the call for educational reform (long overdue) with what appears to be an anti-capitalist diatribe. For all its faults, capitalism has been responsible for improving the standard of living for billions of people, providing jobs, new medical treatments, new methods of growing food, etc.
Yes, the “have it all – have it now” consumer economy has its excesses, and many products are manufactured in awful factories. But many of those employees are far better off than their neighbors who don’t have jobs at all.
Many people seem to have a utopian view of a “sustainable” future. The picture painted always seems to be one of idyllic pastoral scenes and neighbor helping neighbor. It rarely confronts the harsh reality of the slums of Bankok, Mexico City, or Sao Paulo. And those that do tend to use class-warfare populist language, calls to “take from the rich and give to the poor”. Marx and Lenin called for the same things, and we see how their experiment turned out.
There’s also the key “marketing” factor – convincing millions of people to lower their standard of living. Most of the middle class – including the new and burgeoning middle class of China and India – has worked very hard and waited a long time to get to where they are. It might be a hard sell to ask them go back.
@Corrie
I am not sure if this is the place to get into the politics of the global capitalistic system that seems to be infecting our planet like a parasitic virus. But my stubborn nature will not allow me not to comment on some points that you raised:
You refer to a subtle anti-capitalist diatribe. I would argue that this diatribe is also long overdue. I think he is simply saying that we need to change our shift and priorities on the values we teach kids. It is becoming painfully obvious that the American Dream and the promise of capitalism is proving to be false. Capitalism in the guise of 21st century globalization is simply not a sustainable option for future generations.
I think a simple look at the effects of unchecked capitalism and its ancestor colonialism will show a glaring different picture of the billions it has helped. Perhaps you are referring the billion people living on less than a dollar a day with no access to clean water, health care, or education. As for methods of growing food, are you referring to genetically modified foods by companies like Monsato, or the factory farms producing tons of beef that are destroying the planet in the name of profit?
I am a not sure sweatshop workers being better off than the unemployed is the message we want to send our students. Why not teach them that there is a better way to do things? Why not teach them values that will enable more societies to work together for a more just world.
Those slums are a direct result of the very system you are saying is not that bad.
The failure of socialism and communism is an old argument and one that I will not get into here, but let me say that a true socialist state has never existed on earth. No the USSR and Cuba were not what Marx had in mind.
But having said that it is important to remember that the failure of one system does not make its opposite correct. Maybe Marx was wrong, but Marxism is not the only solution to the failing of capitalism. We need to be teaching our kids to come up with their own solutions.
They have been trained into believing that success and development is achieved only by their ability to consume. But I think that Bill’s video argues that we can look for other ways to look at success.
We have no choice. The planet will allow for all of us to live the way we are living.
Well done.
“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.”
couldnt agree more.
if postmodernism has taught us anything, it is that we cant think in the 3rd grade model of Binaries. This debate is not about capitalism versus sustainability. That is too simplified. We have to break out of our old Cold War epistemologies, our old binaries of thinking X versus Y.
This is the reality: capitalism and utopianism are both flawed models if they don’t consider that our economy needs to be first and foremost an environmental economy. Fossil fuels were a gift. But now that day is done. How are we going to live on this planet given that the way that we live is creating greenhouse gases that are getting trapped in our atmosphere and are heating up our world? I’m serious, what are we going to do about this? We can debate about whether global warming is planet-made or man-made, but we can’t argue about whether climate change is real. It is and there’s a slew of empirical evidence from the scientific community that supports this.
The sun is the creator of all life. It sounds silly to say it, but it’s true. The sun creates energy, and that energy fuels our atmosphere, plants, bodies, and cars. The problem is that we are burning way too much “stored-up” energy (coal, oil, natural gas) from the sun, and this releases extra gases in our atmosphere that hold heat…heat that normally bounces back into the space, but is now being held in our atmosphere…baking our planet (which paradoxically may bring about another Ice Age—Why? Because the melting of polar caps are disrupting the Gulf Stream).
We need to find a way to stop releasing so much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Capitalism is at odds with that imperative since it is predicated on consumption and the now-flawed idea that “more is better.” This was true. Once. It no longer is. You don’t have to be a republican or democrat to be concerned with this idea: in the next 50-100 years, the earth will be hotter than it has been in the last 400 million years. On some very basic level, that is the only fact worth knowing about our earth.
Wow – this is fantastic and what I would love to see students in my school being able to do. I have a staff Pd saeesion to run tonight about blogs and I’d love to highlight this post about the ability of the network to connect out students to all corners of the world. Thanks for posting this and sharing this great experience.
Lindsea is an amazing individual. My hope is that are more students like her, needing, DEMANDING a voice in their own education and the future of the world they will inherit.
Wonder posting. Thank you.
Mr. R: Again, well done. Powerful line: “I am a not sure sweatshop workers being better off than the unemployed is the message we want to send our students.”
@Corrie: Below, I’ve pasted some words from the first chapter of Natural Capitalism (there can be more than one form of capitalism; but I don’t really care what you call it). (The book is available free as a download; natcap.org)
I don’t have any idyllic or utopian views of a sustainable future. I just know that what I see now isn’t working and it would be foolish to not look for better ideas.
There’s nothing idyllic about choosing the right diameter pipe and then laying it out at angles, reducing distances, reducing friction, reducing pipe, reducing motor size, reducing $ spent on big pump motors, reducing $ spend on electricity, reducing pollution, reducing the need to mine and extract carbon fuels. All this reducing by simply using better ideas creates wealth for all. Nothing pie in the sky about it. Check out Negawatts if you want to see how wealth can be created by just using better ideas. Just one of the thousands of great ideas out there that aren’t being implemented widely.
CAPITALISM AS IF LIVING SYSTEMS MATTERED
Natural capitalism and the possibility of a new industrial system are based on a very different mind-set and set of values than conventional capitalism. Its fundamental assumptions include the following: The environment is not a minor factor of production but rather is “an envelope containing, provisioning, and sustaining the entire economy.”
. The limiting factor to future economic development is the availability and functionality of natural capital, in particular, life-supporting services that have no substitutes and currently have no market value.
. Misconceived or badly designed business systems, population growth, and wasteful patterns of consumption are the primary causes of the loss of natural capital, and all three must be addressed to achieve a sustainable economy.
. Future economic progress can best take place in democratic, market-based systems of production and distribution in which all forms of capital are fully valued, including human, manufactured, financial, and natural capital.
. One of the keys to the most beneficial employment of people, money, and the environment is radical increases in resource productivity.
. Human welfare is best served by improving the quality and flow of desired services delivered, rather than by merely increasing the total dollar flow.
. Economic and environmental sustainability depends on redressing global inequities of income and material well-being.
. The best long-term environment for commerce is provided by true democratic systems of governance that are based on the needs of people rather than business.
Hi Jabiz,
I used your post in my PD session this afternoon and it was very powerful – I think some people actually could see the power of the network and the great learning taking place. One of my staff who heads up Yr 9 wants to get the Year level involved in the Global Cooling project. This may mean that students from my school can start making the connections that you have found so empowering. Great blog – I’ll keep reading.
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