Chapter 2 Detail
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This is a detail from the first page of Chapter 2
The Marginal Teacher
Games and the Future of Learning
TED presenter Jane McGonigal posits that game play can hold the answers to some of the world’s largest issues.
What I love about this is that her talk combines a few things that I think are vital when looking at education in the 21st Century. Yes, people like games like WOW but I don’t think we have to turn schools into games in order to be successful instructors. The things that WOW and school should have in common (but DON’T) are the the four things that McGonigal shows that massively multiplayer games teach really well: Optimism, Socialization, Fulfilling Engagement, and Epic Meaning. Schools ought to be one of the places that people learn to become “Super-empowered hopeful individuals” rather than meaningless hamster cages (which, sadly, many schools can claim to be).
I am going to try this game, Evoke. I am going to share it with my students and see if they want to play. You can see how I am doing here. I think it could be a really cool opportunity to deepen our discussions of current events in our class. It is also the first really functional use I’ve seen of Transmedia Narrative construction with a deeply positive social purpose.
What is an EVOKE? from Alchemy on Vimeo.
The Yearbook Diary Project
I am spearheading a new initiative this year at Boyle Street. It’s ambitious, but I think we have the right mix of student interest, staff support, and technological know-how. In a word, we are producing BSEC’s first yearbook.
What we are producing, however, will not look like any yearbook you or I have on our shelves. What we are fundamentally creating is a diary of the school for a year. Rather than the regular rows of student images, we are building a collection of student writing, art, images, and memories. Weekly writing workshops have been the primary location for much student writing, but we are noticing that students are starting to take their composition journals with them and producing beautiful words and drawings on their own and without prompting. In fact, an increasing number of students are meeting regularly to talk about what should be in their book and, basically, how best to highlight those things that make learning at Boyle Street unique and preferable to other programs.
What’s exciting about the project is that it is entirely student-driven. Students conceived of the idea, sought staff support, and are organizing much of the buzz surrounding the project. In my experience, a common assumption people make about alternative programs is that the students cannot develop a sense of community since their paths are primarily driven by their own educational needs. What I see is contrary to that assumption; our students are just as interested as anyone else is in defining their own community. The “Yearbook Diary” is a place that I hope our students can showcase those things about their learning community that make them proud.
More to come as the project develops.
S
What I learned from TEDx Edmonton
It was, altogether, a great day full of ideas. This is the best way I have to describe Edmonton’s very first TED-related event. Each of the speakers, either because of convergence or design, riffed effortlessly on the themes of sustainability, sharing, and doing what you enjoy. What’s the most inspiring is that, whether the speaker was talking about printing new hearts or making virtual bubbles collect in your hand, each person was motivated to explore by nothing greater than childlike wonder.
The speakers’ talks are better summarized elsewhere on the web, so I will focus here on the things I left with. First and foremost, the talks reinforced for me that I can best serve my students by facilitating the things that other schools would call “deviant” behaviors. Barring those ideas and behaviors that, in my opinion, could cause harm to oneself or others, I can best prepare my students for their post-secondary careers by encouraging alternative approaches to problem-solving. As Grant said in his talk, he “didn’t know [he] wasn’t supposed to be able to build” some of the things he has created and therefore was not hindered by the idea that he couldn’t. While he very likely was accustomed to setting his own direction very early, I can help my students best by helping them find their directions and not tell them “no.”
The second thing I came away with is the importance of sharing. In my professional context, I am one of the most sharing people I know, but that’s like saying that I’m the least-drowning swimmer in the pool. Education is ironically one of the most proprietary places for ideas. The resistance to sharing is always couched in the language of “building MY course,” as if it were all for the students, but I have seen more than one set of shields raised when talk of “collaborating” begins. Early on in my career, I didn’t know that I SHOULDN’T share and so I was always trying to make connections where none existed previously. I was met by reluctance or polite poo-poohing by other, “more experienced instructors” and I began to follow suit in the development of “MY” courses. One thing I am happy to say never happened for me, though, was the urge to have “power” over my students by holding back any information or truth that I know. Conversely, I have gotten trouble from students and teachers alike for talking about things that are beyond my assigned subject area that I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to talk about. Eventually, it was working with the subject-matter experts at Guru that showed me what a properly functioning learning community could be. When teachers share ideas and work together towards a common goal of student engagement, there is no one who will say “no” to a good idea.
Finally, and I think the thing that is most personally exciting to me, is the idea of Transmedia Storytelling as described by Sean Stewart. In a word, this kind of storytelling weaves completely immersible narratives together from the various media fibers we now have available to us. Modern-day “bards” are tasked with creating various rich universes and then releasing them unto the masses for creative play. I love this idea and can immediately see ways of making my stories more accessible for people to enjoy.
At the end of the day, I left the conference excited about where our world can go if we all learn to play nice and share ideas big and small.
S
Untitled Project Page Detail
A detail from an upcoming project by myself and Cody Porter.
TEDxEdmonton
Last week, I received the sad news that I was not one of the one hundred Edmontonians selected to attend the uber-cool TEDxEdmonton conference. For those of you who are not familiar with the TED organization, it is a yearly conference that brings together the best and brightest minds in technology, education, and design (as well as entertainment and humor). The sessions are captured and streamed free from the TED website.
I use TED as a resource regularly in our classroom. The talks cover a wide range of topics that we can use as springboards for class discussion and engagement. In fact, our classroom is now known as the one that “watches videos and has discussions everyday.” I want my classroom to be that classroom…the noisy one with the crazy ideas. I know that most educators reading this may not see this as all that “crazy,” but in our school it is uncommon for students to really come together as a whole class and talk about something, so I am very happy to see students coming together the way they are.
I like to be active in the communities I discuss in class, so when I found out that Edmonton was going to hold a TED event, I went crazy trying to get into it. There are only one hundred seats available and these must be applied for. As I said before, I was originally told that I was not selected. However, luck has prevailed for me in this case and I have been invited to go in place of another person who could not attend.
The lineup of speakers looks pretty interesting (and happily very Albertan). I’m most interested in seeing Cameron Herold and Sean Stewart as their fields of expertise (youth entrepreneurship and alternate-reality gaming, respectively) are interesting to me. I’m also interested to see other applications for smartphones as presented by Shawna Pandya and, of course, the wunder-kind wizardry of Grant Skinner (no cutting-edge Edmonton seminar would be complete without that :0).
At the end of the day, I hope I can share some of the inspiration with the youth at our school. If nothing else, I will have a good reason to be up early on a Saturday.
I will definitely post a review of the conference here. Stay Tuned!
S
Measuring your social influence
An Edmonton-based internet company has developed a very interesting experimental website. It’s called Empire Avenue and it’s a stock market for social influence. The site is currently in beta testing, but is regularly opening the doors for more people to try their hand at being influential.
At present, I am a bit uncertain about the site’s usefulness in the classroom. I can see applications in Social Studies and Economics classes, obviously, but I think Language Arts and CTS Media courses might also be a candidates for use of the site. What may be difficult is working with youth who are under the age of 18 and all the rules regarding information control (it’s likely less dangerous than using Google Buzz if you are worried about that sort of thing). Other problems may arise in the area of bullying (what happens to people with fragile self-images when they see their stock plummet on the day?)
As a social experiment, it may be nothing more than a very complicated popularity contest. I, however, would like to see this as a first step in measuring something that has been heretofore difficult to measure: how MUCH more do some people matter in society than others? That having been said, I don’t see Malcolm Gladwell on here yet. Maybe next week…
I am currently doing not too badly in the stock exchange and, if you are interested in buying shares, my stock symbol is SCM.
Digital Storytelling
The digital media class I am building at my school is meant to furnish students with the skills they need to be creative with digital media creation tools. The trouble is that much of the class time is necessarily focused on teaching students about the various tools and how to use them effectively. Since most of the students are in the course as an option, I rarely get the opportunity to see a student past this necessary but often tedious phase of tool instruction to the place where they can feel confident with the tool enough to focus on creative work.
Silvia Tolisano has recently released a free guide for teachers to use free and simple digital tools for students to build narratives. Some of the work she suggests in the guide may be like things that you do already, but it is worth noting that she has collected information on a variety of free or cheap solutions in one place along with some great lesson ideas.
I currently use Google Earth as the springboard for verbal storytelling in our homeroom block. It waxes and wanes in popularity but it seems that the students are most reticent when it seems more formal and “organized.” If we take the approach of “just talking,” students are much more likely to participate. I am looking forward to trying some of these other activities in my classroom and seeing how I can encourage more spontaneous narrative-building!