When the hurly-burly’s done

Has anyone else (aside from Clay, who turned me on to it) seen the NYC Students Blog?  If you haven’t yet, take a few minutes and read it, then come back.  I’ll be here.

Anyway, am I told to be excited by the idea of a few high school students using a blog to organize protests, to call the system to account, and to pass information along?

Why don’t we have this in my district?

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.”

But I find myself entirely uninterested in matters ed-tech, ed-policy, or ed-anything related, aside from what’s going on in my own classroom.  The Twitterverse (cringe) bores the hell out of me; I’ve nothing to blog about; and too much of my time has been taken up by meetings about technology products that are supposed to make my life easier from a paperwork point of view but don’t give me anything to work with in terms of things my actual students need to do.  I had a whole blogging assignment set up for my new Am Lit II students, but I’m not going to make them do it.  I don’t know how I’d assess it (nor do I want to think about how I’d assess it), and to be honest, I’d much rather spend the time reading On the Road with them.

I think the problem is I’m just sick of all the technology stuff.  I’ve wound up on this committee (I think I’ve written about it before) that has put me in the position of basically being the tech support/training guy for the English department.  Fine, I don’t mind, but that’s not my job.  I’ve pared the list of Web 2.0 apps that I actually use down to a few: Google Reader (and I’ve eliminated 2/3 of my reading list), del.icio.us, and Facebook.  Everything I need is there. 

So, sorry.  Sorry to anyone who thought I’d be part of this big ed-tech revolution.  Sorry to anyone who’s been eagerly anticipating my next blog post.  I’ll keep this site up, and plan to keep writing on it, but I’m going to move, for the time being, more toward non-school and non-tech matters.  I need a break from this whole sphere.  Okay?  Okay.

Roger Cohen’s got a column in today’s New York Times calling for wider US availability of the Al Jazeera English news channel. It’s an interesting read. For me, though, the value of the column comes early on (emphasis mine):

America, and not just its front-line soldiers, needs to watch Al Jazeera to understand how the world has changed. Any other course amounts to self-destructive blindness.

The first change that must be grasped is America’s diminished ability to influence people. Global access to information now amounts to an immense à la carte menu. Networks escape control. To hundreds of millions of people accessing information for the first time, from central China to Kenya’s Rift Valley, the United States can easily look exclusive and less relevant to their future.

I don’t want to get all “Did You Know?” here–I’ve already presented the video, under official duress, to my colleagues. I do, however, want to challenge our district to actually live up to its admiration for the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and admit that things have changed, that the shifts have happened, and that we need to adapt or fail. There is no room for half-measures here.

In the middle of last week, I attempted to access Flickr from one of our office computers. I use photographs for a lot of activities, from asking my sophomores to brainstorm about segregation to inspiration for my writing students. I tend to get my photos from Flickr because it’s easy to use and I store my own photos there. Until the school district gives us enough online storage space for our own photos, I will continue to use Flickr.

Anyway, so when I tried to get to Flickr last week, I was presented with our district’s new filtering regime. We’ve had filtering in place for longer than I’ve worked in the district, but toward the end of last school year, the software they use was upgraded to something far more robust. Flickr was blocked because of, among other reasons, “photo storage” (which is exactly the point of Flickr, no?) and “nudity” (really? On Flickr?). Therefore: blanket ban on the site. I filled in the override form and am still waiting for a response, but I doubt I’ll get one.

Okay, okay. So one teacher can’t get to his photos from school. He should just print them out at home the night before, right? Yes. Absolutely. But what about all the other online tools that we can’t use from work? I can’t, for example, show my students any YouTube videos. Nobody reading this post from my school can watch any of the following, all of which I’ve wanted to use in my classroom in the past year or so:

And then there are the dozens of clips students have emailed me, clips that they have found because they were interested in what we were doing in class and decided to go a little deeper at home.

We have a new Acceptable Use Policy as of this year, and it’s one that finally makes sense (emphasis mine):

Despite every effort for supervision and filtering, all users and their parents/guardians are advised that access to the electronic network may include the potential for access to materials inappropriate for school-aged students. Every user must take responsibility for his or her use of the network and Internet and avoid these sites.

The bit about “filtering,” by the way, most likely refers to the fact that in any given classroom at any given time, you’ll find three or four or five students who know how to use proxy servers to get around our filters. If you’re one of my colleagues, or you work at a school with a similar fear of the internets, you should find out which of your students know how to defeat the filter. It’s useful information.

At any rate, the above excerpt pretty much sums it all up–responsible internet use (and our school’s motto is, if you can believe it, “Freedom with Responsibility”) means taking, umm, responsibility for your actions. To me, the rules should be simple: If you look at porn in the Media Center, you lose your network privileges. If you log in to Facebook when you’re supposed to be printing your Civics essay, you lose your privileges. Et cetera. That’s logical. What we’re doing, though, has as much do with teaching as it does with fishmongery.

I started this post with a bit about not being able to see Al Jazeera in the US. And I stand by that introduction. By blocking our students from being able to use the internets for useful things–for finding clips on YouTube that are directly related to the instructional program, for accessing scholarship (the filter blocked a literary biography of Eudora Welty a while back), for communicating (I’d love to have my students join up with Clay Burell’s students on their Ning, but, well…)–we deny our students a shot at relating reality to their education. Will some knuckleheads abuse the privilege? Most likely. And then we, as responsible and caring adults, will have to discharge our duty and work with them to correct their behavior. We can explain to their parents the nature of the offense, as all network actions are logged, and we can then justify the punishment. Case closed.

So who works at a school with no or little filtration? How does it work? What are some counterarguments? I’m trying to make a case for this in the not-so-distant future, so any input/feedback would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

I’ve got a lot on my mind right now, and I honestly have no idea where this post is going to go, so I’ll understand if nobody (including me) makes it to the end. Still, I think it’s worth a shot.

Thing 1 is the fact that 17/45 of my sophomores are going to receive Fs on their progress reports, which went out on Friday. This doesn’t mean that most, if any, of them will fail on their 1st quarter report cards, but as of Friday, I hadn’t received their first exploratory essays. They’ll hand something in, get minimal (but some) credit, strike a deal with me w/r/t their IEP-mandated extra time, and everyone’ll be happyish. That’s not the issue here.

What worries me is that these 17 students are doing exactly what I did from 6th-10th grade (especially 7th-9th). I basically refused to do homework, justifying my decision by declaring, vocally and silently, that I was bored silly with the way school was “done.” I found very little of any relevance in the experiences my teachers provided, so why encourage them? What, then, do I make of the grades and general low production levels in my sophomore sections? My writing students are crankin’ along–the essay writers are halfway through their third essays of the quarter, and the creative writers are starting their major stories. What’s up with the sophomores, then? Is it The Scottish Play? Is it the writing? Is it me?

Which brings me to Thing 2. Evan and I have a ton of interdisciplinary activities planned for these guys. One we’ve already started (the current events blog, which would be going better if learnerblogs weren’t hiccuping), but the others are on hold for the time being. I think we’re concerned that since the students have a hard time producing what we need them to do on paper (his failure rate is very close to mine, and for the same reasons), introducing usernames, passwords, and online procedures might make things even more unwieldy (less wieldy?).

So there’s tension there, tension between the frustration of dealing with a bunch of students who (despite being nice, kind, and intelligent enough in class) have opted out of doing the work I’ve assigned, and wanting to do what’s right for them by inviting them to use some new tools that they probably understand better than I do.

This morning, once our school’s internet connection finally stopped trying to rival Tom Glavine for reliability under pressure, I sat in a Learning Center into which no kids had been scheduled (I know, I was amazed too) and read Clarence Fisher’s post called “Tools At Work.” In this post, Clarence gets into all the ways in which technology helps him with his daily routine.

I won’t quote the post, because you can read the whole thing, but the essence of it comes with the last line: “This is what these tools are about.” They’re not ends in themselves; they’re means to an end. And what’s that end? Collaboration, communication, entertainment, reflection. The things that make us human and social. Do Facebook and email replace face-to-face conversations or the sheer pleasure of pen-on-paper writing? No. They augment them. The world doesn’t need Twitter, but since we live in a time when people want to know what their friends are up to, and are used to hearing about such minutiae as whether the President is clearing brush from his lawn or who designed the expensive dress some starlet’s wearing on the red carpet before yet another contrived awards show, who’s to stop the information flow? Your own resistance to social networking, assuming you’re resistant to it, isn’t a brave act of defiance in the face of humanity’s increasing mechanization; rather, it’s a misguided use of your anti-machine rage. Rather than fighting the culture of triviality and dehumanization by questioning the structure of society itself, you’re cutting yourself out of that culture’s still-human means of connecting people to people. It is fascinating to me that no matter what other apps people add to their Facebook pages, everyone still has a picture. The Wall, though silly, keeps people in touch. Fight it if you want, but I don’t really want to hear about it.

Thing 3, which I can’t figure out how to work in, but wanted to mention, is that the new Radiohead album comes out next week. What’s newsworthy isn’t that there’s (finally) a new Radiohead album, even though I stand by my claim that they’re frighteningly brilliant (even more so when you realize that, if they stay together as long as the Rolling Stones have, probably 30-40 years of this stuff ahead of them–they’re really just getting started), but the way the album’s being sold. Radiohead don’t have a record deal at the moment, so they’ve decided to sell the album themselves. If you can wait until December and have a lot of money, they’ll send you a box with a couple of CDs and some other treats. But if you’re impatient, like me, you can purchase the album in electronic format. How much will it cost to download the album legally from Radiohead? They haven’t set a price–you set it yourself. It’s up to you, the customer, to decide what you want to pay. Seriously. And if you can’t figure out why this is a major shift, give it another think.

So where does this all fit together? I don’t know. But something big’s happening–I keep getting the feeling that pieces of my life and my cultural space are intersecting in some odd ways. At last night’s Bob Dylan concert, Dylan’s band basically did live remixes of his classic songs, and Dylan himself turned even the most familiar classics (”It Ain’t Me, Babe,” for example) into unrecognizable growled assaults. Is he getting bored with singing his own songs every night? Or is he challenging the audience (”being Dylanesque,” as my concert companion put it) to think about the songs they grew up with in a new context? Is there a metaphor there, or did getting home really late do something regrettable to my mind?