Category Archives: Networking

Trust and Community

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I first met Lindsea in February of 2008. The details of our meeting can be found here, but I am quit certain Lindsea’s name isn’t new to anybody well versed in the Edublogosphere. She has become one of the Web 2.0 poster children.

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!


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Education Everywhere

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A few days ago, I was chatting with Lindsea on Skype about a variety of topics: music, education, and the need for adults to communicate more often and more in depth with students. We briefly brainstormed a few ideas we each had for the EduPunk challenge, when we arrived at the following slogan for her Street Art campaign: “Education everywhere. Take back your education.” We discussed the idea of Guerrilla Learning, and the idea that we realized was repeatedly emerging was this need for students and teachers/adults to meld their networks.

This is the first paragraph from my latest post for the students at Intrepid Classroom. I am reposting it here along with a link to the post in its entirety in hopes that any teacher or adult who is reading this blog will be motivated to come join us and add your voice to a growing community of teachers and students.

It is time that we join forces and stopping talking about our students and start talking to them, with them. I hope you will at least comment on the post or better yet, come join the Ning and be a teacher at the INtrepid Classroom! We are thirty something strong and growing. See you there.

Left Out Again

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I also left this comment, albeit it was the 83rd one, at The Strength of Weak Ties:

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

Sustainable Educational Model

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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.

Spread The Echo

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This has been and in all truth is still a crazy week. I helped organize a guest speaker at our school to help raise funds and awareness for our Global Issues Club; I have been finishing up two major projects- one on Rome and another connecting growing plants and literacy, I am still trying to find time for the write-ups for both; I am waiting for permissions slips from parents to allow me to share the eight-minute video we made about the former. I am also helping my video journalism class finish up their latest news reports. Not an easy task when dealing with 22 seventh and eighth graders who are do not have enough resources to do their work.

All-in-all life at school has been, is, (I can’t pick a tense, I am so busy) as it should be- very busy and very rewarding. I am extremely happy with and proud of the work my students are doing. And if I do say so myself, I feel I am creating a very student based atmosphere, which allows them to find their own interests and learn. This will be proven in the Rome write-up coming soon.

Then there is the Labor Art project, which is off to a pretty good start. I am in touch with Mr. Mayo and Clarence Fischer about possible collaborations. We want to see if we can get a good look at how kids from different regions understand the role labor plays in their daily lives. In addition to these things, the semester is ending, which means assessments and grades. And I am going on a Week-Without-Walls trip to the Malaysian rainforest with 119 eighth graders.

Wheew! Deep breath….

In Web 2.0 world, I am getting ready to start my kids on blogs, finally, when we get back from the trip. I am reading Twitter and blog posts like crazy, but not finding the time to comment like I want to. Here at IntrepidTeacher, I am at a loss as to who my audience is. I know that the educators with whom I am in contact with and whose work I am reading daily are hearing and reading the same things as me. This is known in the Edublogospehere as the echo chamber. Both terms I am becoming very familiar with, but one of the main reasons for this blog was to spread the echo into my immediate environment and for the staff at my school to also read these amazing ideas. So if you are working with me here at ASD and are a regular reader of this blog, I ask that you read some of the amazing articles listed below, and drop me a line in the comment box that says you have been here. Remember the point of blogging is conversations, communication, and connection.

Evaluating Technology Use in the Classroom

Peering Inside a Cyber Savvy World about Growing Up Online which is generating a lot of talk, and Work With the Willing.

And some great student voices: Tuna’s Aquarium, Student 2.o, and NYC Student Blog.

I wish I had time to comment on all of these amazing educators and learners, but there really aren’t enough hours in the day. Time to get back to work and start writing those summaries and write-ups for my projects.