Bud the Teacher

    Mary Lee offers this chunk of Robert Frost today:

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Oh, yeah.  I needed those lines.  Here’s a link to the rest of the poem. 

    Stephen Downes writes:

.  .  .  how we teach depends not only on the nature of the learner (though it
does that) and the nature of the content (though it does that as well)
but also on why the learner wants to learn and why the teacher wants to
teach.

And there is no single characterization that will
describe those motivations, and hence, no single characterization of
how best to teach, how best to learn.

    Yep.  He’s right.  But more and more, schools are looking for the one right way, for some good and plenty of not-so-good reasons.  School culture, as a whole (private, public, charter, online, etc.) too often looks for the one way, the one thing we can do to/with/for a student to make/help/force them (to) learn. 

    I’m guilty of that sometimes, too, even as I understand the truth of Stephen’s remark.   It’s hard to teach even twenty individuals at once with all of our competing motivations/concerns/frustrations/limitations.  And I’m lucky — most classrooms are far larger than mine.  A simplistic response to that is to say that a teacher struggling to meet everyone’s needs is possibly suffering from poor classroom management skills — and that might be a piece of the mix — but I submit that managing the needs of everyone in the room all at once is particularly difficult. 
    "Same, same" culture is a crushing force, and one that exerts more and more pressure upon the" teacher me".  It’s the same culture that makes worksheets, multiple choice tests and the like  "successful" teaching strategies.  Either the worksheet is completed, or it’s not.  The paper’s in, or it’s not.  Who cares why, right?  It’s easy to get cold and heartless about stuff like that when "everyone’s the same."  What’s good for the goose, right?

     "No exceptions ever" is bad policy.  So is "all exceptions all the time."  Teaching and learning are very, very messy.  How do we create systems that honor differences AND attempt to get maximum magic? (Call it efficiency if you want to, or high achievement if you prefer.  Or, simply insert your favorite accountability measure here.) 
    I wonder why so many of us leave after five years.

    Will reminds you, so I don’t have to:

This is your last reminder…presentation proposals for the First Annual K12 Online Conference
are due by the end of day Saturday, so if you haven’t gotten yours in
yet, you better get cranking. As of this moment, we have 34 proposals…

Click here to submit.

    So a student of mine and I are looking at Youth Voices.net, a collaborative project involving lots of students and an Elgg that looks pretty interesting.  (You can read more about it, and get involved if you want to, here.  Or here.)  We’re noticing that there are lots of photos embedded in students’ posts, and we’d like to do the same.

    We need to know the API information for Elgg so that we can use Flickr’s "Blog this Photo" opotion.  I’ve followed these instructions, and they don’t work for us.  Tried them in Writely, too, and got no results.

    What are we doing wrong?  If we can figure out the API, then we can use Writely with Elgg.  And Flickr with Elgg.  And so on and so on.

    Mr. McNamar’s got a problem:

My school has blocked access to blogger this year. I’ve been using it
for two years and would like to continue to do so. But, because
Blogger.com and the blogspot url needs "full site access," and because
the "next blog" feature in the top right, the filters will now block
access. Is there a way around this? Or has anyone used edublogs.org?

Send your suggestions his way. 

    Kevin needs your help:

I am working with two distinguished researchers/writers in the field of composition (Charlie Moran and Anne Herrington)
from the University of Massachusetts Amherst to develop a book that
examines how our view of teaching writing and composition is changing
with the integration of technology. Anne and Charlie have looked at
writing practices from a variety of angles, including writing across
the curriculum and genres. Now they want to add technology to the mix.

We are looking for classroom teachers in grades 4-13 who can write
about their experiences. We have just published a call for proposals in
English Journal and other sources but I wanted to use my web of Blogs to get the word out, too.

Visit his blog to read the formal call for proposals.  Then get writing and send in a proposal.

    I’m giving a presentation/workshop to a great group of teacher consultants of the CSUWP on Saturday.  The focus/topic is "Blogging &/or Podcasting 102."  Do you think they’d like to leave with their own blog, or should we work towards an online community ala Elgg?  I originally had intended to go the blog route, as I’ve done with that group in the past, but a conversation with a colleague this week has me thinking that perhaps a supportive online community gathering place might be a better way to go.
    What do you think?

    You ever make a mistake that gets in the way of the learning that you want to have happening in your classroom?
    Boy, I sure did.  And it’s been bugging me for the last week and a half.  Consider this post a confessional of my error, as well as a bit of free writing about how in the world I’m going to get out of the pedagogical hole that I’ve placed myself in.  (Okay, it’s not a hole, but it’s a danged ol’ pothole, and that’s frustrating enough.)
    See, after my first writing assignment in my 10th grade course, I found myself with several really good pieces of student writing.  Really interesting essays, the kind that demand to be read.
    I had originally planned for my students to publish these to our school Elgg.  But at the last minute, in a moment where I could see that my students, pushed to the edges of their patience by new classroom computers that almost worked perfectly and a Moodle that took them a little while to learn to navigate,  I made a decision that I thought was going to save time and create a neat way for my students to publish from right inside the Moodle.
    Instead of directing students to the Elgg, with an entirely new login and password and profile creation process (hurry up, OpenAcademic gang!), I sent them to the blogging feature of Moodle, hoping they could taste the sweet success of instant publishing.  I covered all the safety basics, making sure identities were appropriately protected, and it was easy to push their writing into a public place.
    Kind of.  See, while anyone can come along and read what my students wrote, and chose to publish, no one can comment on their work, because Moodle blogs don’t allow for that.  I’m sure I could (or someone already has) create a way to do commenting, but I need a simple solution.  Yesterday.  Comments are an essential piece of the feedback and publishing model that I see in my classroom.  I forgot that for about five minutes when I called an audible in the heat of a classroom moment.  Does that ever happen to you?
    The frustrating piece here is that when I created the Elgg, I created a simple solution.
    I just didn’t use the simple solution, because I was afraid that one more setup process would kill the writing community that I’d created.  Turns out the teacher can do a good job of that, too.      Just needed to vent.  I’ve discussed the issue briefly with my students.  They’re a little burned when it comes to publishing online right now, and I don’t blame them.  My bad.  Big bad, too, if I’ve turned them off to one of the best motivators for their future success as thinkers and writers. 
    The question is — what do we do now?  (My hunch is that we move forward anyway, especially when their next assignment comes due at the end of this week, trying to ease hurt feelings as I go.  It’s just so frustrating to slam smack into this wall when I saw it coming and had a plan.)  Any suggestions?

    Here are some quick questions for those of you either building or using Elgg.  I would like to be able to do the following things with an Elgg.  Can you tell me if they’re possible? 

1. Capture an RSS feed for all posts made to the site.  (Ideally, one for public posts and one for logged-in user posts.)
2. Capture separate RSS feeds for different tags on the site.  (This would help me to create a teacher or class specific aggregator.  Publishing a post becomes turning in homework or assignments when the proper tag is added to an entry.  Multiple tags for multiple classes and eyes, when necessary.)
3. See a list of communities somewhere that students can join.  (I understand that this feature might be coming — but I think it’d really help me create useful resources in the Elgg managed by teachers and interested students if I could point them to a page where they could sign up to join different communities.  Yeah, I know.  Elgg is supposed to work differently.  Small steps.)
4. Any chance I can stick a calendar into an Elgg in such a way as to allow everyone on the site to see what’s going on around the physical community?  (I’ve got to ask, right?)

    Okay.  Let’s try this again.  Comments are now unmoderated.  Feel free to comment away.  Responsibly, of course.