Marci Alboher has posted a great piece on the Shifting Careers blog at nytimes.com. In it, she wonders about how people use Facebook and other social networking sites to connect with a new type of friend, the kind of might not even be their friends in the real world. Which is fine, but how do you distinguish between the two classes of acquaintances? Are online friends worth as much as offline friends? What about online friends that you later meet and convert to offline friends?
I got into the Facebook thing this summer when I was getting ready to leave Edinburgh. Looking for an easy way to stay in touch with my new friends, I realized that they were on Facebook far more than they were using email or anything else. And it made perfect sense–with Facebook, you can send messages (what we used to call email), share photos, leave notes, play games, post videos. Pretty much anything you’d want to do online, actually, can be accomplished on Facebook. All it’s missing are a decent RSS aggregator and document sharing (a la Google Docs) and it’d be unstoppable.
Our school has spent a lot* of money on a fancy new portal system. The idea is to provide one-stop shopping for the information that various members of our school community need to succeed. For teachers, this means access to our school email, our attendance and grade reporting database, our Individualized Student Intervention Plans, our class calendars, &c. For students, it means access to their individual class pages, homework assignments, a digital locker for submitting work, and a calendar for all of their classes in one place. And parents can track their students’ grades and easily contact teachers.
It’s actually pretty cool, in theory. I’ve played around with it a little (not as much as I am supposed to have, as a member of the Technology Working Group) and have found it clunky so far. I have high hopes that it will become more useful. It needs to have the capability for teachers to add RSS feeds for their individual classes that aren’t either the local newspaper or Board of Ed press releases, and it should have some blogging and wiki capability, for starters. To be honest, it probably should just be run via Moodle or something equally free and useful.
But then I was thinking: why don’t we just use the system that already exists, and that most of our students are already using and are comfortable with? Leaving aside the fact that for some reason (and please, someone give me a good reason) it’s banned from our school network, why not use Facebook?
Think about it. It already has these capabilities:
Quick and easy private/group messaging
Public commenting
Media(photo/video) sharing
Mobile access
Automatic RSS feeds
Rudimentary RSS readers/aggregators
These, meanwhile, are the apps I think Facebook’d need in order to compete as an educational platform. If you know of any of these that already exist for Facebook, definitely let me know and I’ll try them out.
File sharing/dropbox (even better if it was something similar to Google Docs so students could collaborate on group assignments)
Some sort of homework calendar
Grade tracking
So I know I said I wouldn’t be writing so much about edtech stuff, but this has been on my mind. Apologies in advance to Dan and anyone else who finds my lack of restraint disturbing.
* We’re a very wealthy district, and it still seems like a lot. That’s what I mean by “a lot.”
I was tagged. I think I’m most passionate about getting rid of the stuffiness of school and replacing it with a sense of authenticity.
Therefore, I give you
The rules:
* Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative
Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most
passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short
title.
* Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
* Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.
I tag, if you are interested and would like to play, the following:
I was cleaning out my del.icio.us bookmarks just now and came across “Where We Might Begin With Teaching” by William Ayers. I hadn’t read it when I saved it, just tagged it as “to read,” but it makes a lot of sense. In fact, it says a lot of things that I really need to read right now, in late March, when I’m pretty much at my wit’s end w/r/t a lot of things that are going on here.
There’s an alternative to acceding completely or whining constantly, and it begins with thinking through and naming the commitments you bring with you into the classroom, your values, your pledge. These are not pure abstractions, but rather standards to hold in mind. A fundamental commitment might involve taking the side of your students, affirming the humanity of each and resisting anything that constrains or reduces them. Another might be to create in your classroom an environment that is a kind of republic of many voices, allowing every student a space to be seen and heard and known well as a person of worth and value.
Because teachers work in a fluid, complex, idiosyncratic world, and because there’s much beyond our immediate control, it makes sense to focus on these things that you can control. First, you can see your students as whole human beings, three-dimensional beings much like yourself with hopes and dreams, bodies and minds and spirits. You can see with your own eyes, your own curious and critical mind, your own generous heart. And you can resist the alphabet soup of deficits and the toxic habit of labeling kids that infects most schools. No one can make you see kids as creatures with labels clinging to them like barnacles, sharp and ugly. You have a mind of your own, and you can become a student of your students in spite of everything. This gesture alone can be full of surprise, and deeply satisfying.
It’s the third quarter, and it’s March, and here in Connecticut, that means that we’re stranded between our February and April vacations with nothing but CAPT testing, course selections, and preparation for senior internships to hold on to. The CAPT-less sophomores and juniors, the ones who didn’t bother showing up for testing, have been more or less mopped up, and the guidance department is working through its list of kids who haven’t stopped by for scheduling meetings. I ordinarilly wouldn’t have anything to do with the senior internship program, not after last year’s fiasco, but Dave made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, so I get to go to a meeting about it today.
I think, though, that the worst part of this month every year is getting sick of dealing with the same kids every day. I’ve had my sophomores since the start of the school year, and I feel like I know them by now. I know, too, that there are a few of them that, try as I might, I have a hard time digging. I don’t understand their motivation, what would make them do the things they do. I don’t understand why they pick on the socially inept, the mentally challenged, the tall, the short. I can’t fathom the selfishness that comes through when they come to see me for extra help, then, as I’m trying to explain to them what’s actually good about their writing, are off distracting other kids. And that makes it really hard to like them. I care about these kids, I care deeply, and I’m worried for them, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy their company. They’re damaged, and it is up to better minds than mine to try and fix them. All I can do is teach. And at times, I don’t even want to do that anymore.
There are new things afoot here, though, which give me some hope. No matter how old-fashioned, non-progressive, and embarrassing a lot of our school’s policies may be, we in the good ol’ English Department have a few tricks still up our sleeves. We’ve talked in the past week about portfolio-style assessment for English classes, which’d be great, and a little about new curricula for the 9th and 10th grade programs. These things are exciting to me, and I really hope that the momentum for change is allowed to continue.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to bring myself out of the late-winter funk that has dogged me of late. I’m thinking more and more about ways to go paperless* in my classroom, even though I don’t think I’m in line for a Smartboard or anything like that. We’ve got a fancy new portal system that kind of works, but I’m not sure I want to tether myself to something that’s unproven. I know a few colleagues have started using Google Docs with their students, which to me is a lot more promising. I also kind of like the idea of using the Google Calendar and some of the other apps. Will that make me a Tech Committee traitor? Do I really care?
Oh, one other thing that’s not even remotely related to any of this, but which still has made me rethink my teaching, reading, and writing: Check out the Australian jazz-esque trio The Necks. From what I can figure out, they tend to perform songs that are over an hour long, so this is a rare short piece (it’s a little over nine minutes). I love how free-flowing and organic their music is, and how they’re not afraid of repetition, attention to detail, and jarring statements.
* ie, no photocopying on my end. Students will still have to take notes in their own notebooks, though.
Gary Gygax has died. His wasn’t a name I’d thought about in years, probably since my freshman year of high school, but when I read the news during a little piece of downtime this afternoon, I had to pause for a couple of beats.
Gygax, y’see, was partially responsible for getting me to where I am today. As one of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, he provided adolescent nerds like me with a way to focus our frustration with everything that goes along with being adolescent nerds–teasing/abuse from peers, bemused looks from adults, etc–on imaginary quests and acts of heroism. I never was a serious D&D player, but for a couple of years, some friends and I would get together from time to time and battle our way through a world created entirely of words, where the results of encounters were determined by rolls of strangely-shaped dice.
The appeal isn’t hard to understand, especially if “being” yourself isn’t all that much fun: if you are, say, a bookish adolescent male with few social skills and no magical powers to speak of. What’s more, D&D offers its players a moral clarity rarely found in the real world: your character has an alignment; he or she can be good or evil, lawful or chaotic. Most players choose good; the paladin, a virtuous knight with magical powers, is a perennial favorite, although the evil-leaning dark elf is also popular. In practice, though, the transformation of player into character often turns out to be cosmetic: the fearless paladin and the sexy dark elf both sound and act a lot like a thirteen-year-old boy named Ted. And what Ted likes to do, mostly, is kill anything that crosses his path. It’s little wonder that Dungeons & Dragons was uncool in the 1970s and ’80s.
Growing up in the 80s and early 90s, there were plenty of apocryphal stories about kids who’d taken their roleplaying a bit too seriously, gone off the deep end, and sacrificed neighborhood toddlers to some strange god. This gave the game a bit of an edge, at least in the eyes of our peers, and perhaps a little of that rubbed off on us, the gamers. I remember one acquaintance being a little shocked that I played D&D but didn’t look like a Satanist.
By the middle of my freshman year, D&D had been replaced by pseudo-industrial music (Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, etc) as our group’s menacing pop-cultural affiliation of choice. Now, I wasn’t a really angry kid–my parents’ marriage was stable, everything I needed was provided, I was smart enough to get mostly good-enough grades (except for math) without trying terribly hard–but I was frustrated with the social order of high school and, by extension, the world. I got very little respect from other kids in my grade, because I wasn’t athletic and was a bit of a dork. I felt like my teachers insulted my intelligence, rightly or wrongly. I was too afraid to get into any real trouble, so I didn’t even want to go to the keg parties that I wasn’t invited to attend. I had my friends, my radio show (we had a radio station, about which more another time), the band, some books, and music.
That was enough, it turned out. As I progressed through high school and learned how to get over myself and actually try to be friends with some of the kids whom I’d hated for so long that I’d forgotten why I hated them to begin with, I set the stage for my own development into adulthood and quasi-maturity. By the summer after my high school graduation, our social groups had become, as they always do, more fluid, to the point where my participation in a scavenger hunt that devolved into a rather sketchy party wasn’t awkward or weird at all, for me or for anyone else there.
Progressing through college saw some logical extensions of my high school interests. Instead of gaming there was writing, culminating in a webzine that ran for several years before finally dying. My high school pit orchestra experiences led me to play in actual bands in college. And I think because I had the outlet for my negative emotions back in high school, I was comfortable enough with myself to take on leadership roles, to be social, to let go.
So thanks, Gary Gygax, though I suppose I ought to thank Trent Reznor as well, and Al Jourgensen, and whoever created WWPT, and everyone else who made high school bearable. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to let out my emotions harmlessly, for keeping me from doing something stupid, for preventing me from throwing away my opportunities. Thanks.
