Academic Aesthetic

Chris Craft (a man who is quickly becoming one of my favorite bloggers) wrote a post yesterday that I find difficult to sum up in an introduction.  He had a few insights that spoke to me, partially because art and foreign language are both lumped outside that tightly knit group of “core” subjects.  (I continue to believe that a “core” subject should be any subject that prepares you for the real world.  For me, my art classes were some of the most important core classes I had.)

But one thing that sent a shiver down my spine was when he quoted another blogger named Christian:

“Instead, get kids to begin to define their stake in the world …. Otherwise, tomorrow’s ‘blogging assignment’ is merely yesterday’s boorish ‘PowerPoint presentation’ …“

My goodness, that’s scary!  For years I’ve fought against the idea of giving the students an annual PowerPoint assignment as a halfhearted attempt to fulfill some technology integration requirement, and to see today’s blogs become yesterday’s PowerPoints would be like taking Web 2.0 and turning it into Web Beta.

And yet Chris and I have a similar dilemma – how exactly are we supposed to get our students where they need to be with information literacy if we barely have time to teach them our official subject areas?

As much as I love my job, the kids I get to see most often are the ones in my art club.  Our weekly meetings give me only an hour of instruction time with the kids, so setting up the back end involved in getting students to start blogging on their own is much harder than it could be for a classroom teacher teaching the same grade level.

Well, I have three choices.  I can whine about it, forget it, or do something about it.  I’ve just finished my whining (and yes, it did make me feel better) and I’m too much of a geek to just forget about it, so It’s about time I start doing something, right?

The key thing I have to remember is that I’m not alone.  In some ways I’m in a great situation, because K-6 students have very few teachers.  For those grades that do team teaching I can collaborate with one teacher and actually cover every student in that grade level, and it’s the upper grades that are more likely to be taught in teams.

So there’s a way to divide the work load (and get more face time with the students), provided I can get certain teachers into the whole blogging thing.

Beyond that, there’s still a lot of work.  We’ll simultaneously have to drill the students on internet safety, show them just how easy it is to blog and comment on the blogs of others, and give them writing prompts that will encourage them to give answers that are more than just copied out of their textbooks.

Yeah, I never said it would be easy.  But the collaboration will make it easier, I’m sure.

I’m giving up.

That’s right, I’m giving up on Audacity. It’s a solid program with some nice features, but it just can’t top my copy of GarageBand. Purple tracks extending across the screen, how I missed you!

In any case, I recently received an email from Lance Rougeux of the Discovery Educator Network. He was inquiring about how many DEN members would still be attending the PETE&C Pre-Conference in Hershey, PA.

I must admit, I thought about it for a while. As you may recall from my last netcast I wasn’t too happy about the DEN’s recent layoffs, and to be honest just thinking about it gets my blood pressure rising even more.

But as I said back then I’m angry at the corporate penny pinchers, not Lance, or Steve, or any of the others that barely missed getting the axe themselves. I consider those people to be my friends.

So should I pass up an opportunity to see them again, just because I’m mad at their bosses?

I was close to saying yes, but instead I asked Lance what was on the agenda for the pre-conference. He replied with what I should stress is a tentative schedule, just in case you attend and are surprised to see a different list:

• 1 hour opening session from Will Richardson
• Hall Davidson‘s session Mega VCR presentation
• Google Earth
• Green Screen session using editable clips in unitedstreaming
• Podcasting
• Steve Dembo is either going to present on web 2.0 or more specifically about blogging

In that whole list there’s only one mention of something they’re actually selling, and it involves software that I don’t own. (Or more specifically, software I own but cannot run on any computer I have, since they gave me the wrong version.)

Now there are only a few edu-bloggers out there that I would pay money to see. Will Richardson is one of them, and Steve Dembo is another. The only thing missing from this list is David Warlick, but I guess you can’t have everything. (Sorry Hall, but if you have a blog I don’t know where it is, so I can’t call you an edu-blogger.)

And yet this pre-conference is free. I may not be an energetic promoter of the DEN any more, but this is too good an opportunity for me to miss.

And besides, it’ll give me something to share with that new group I’m starting up.

Oh yeah, about that group – it’s coming along nicely, and already up to 14 members! It’s no DEN, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Now if we can just pick a name for ourselves…

I know that some people might think I’m a hypocrite for starting this new community but not leaving the DEN. That would be true if the two were mutually exclusive, but the truth is that you can join as many educational groups as you want. I think of it as people who drink Pepsi still having an occasional Coke or RC cola if they feel like it. (Personally I prefer the “A-Treat” brand, but they don’t sell that around here.)

I know there are many people who refuse to have anything to do with the DEN because of what happened. That IS one of the reasons I set up the new community, after all, But I know that there are also many people who are more than willing to be a part of both groups, provided they don’t have to sell anything. That’s the part of the Venn Diagram that I’m in, at least while I still have friends that are cashing checks from Discovery.

But I’m still not wearing the lab coat.