From Local to Global

We've blogged before about Telannia Norfar, the innovative Oklahoma math teacher who tracked her first collaborative project experience on PBL Birdside View. Now, she's taking it up a notch and jumping into her first global collaboration with a math teacher from Australia. Once again, Telannia will be using her blog to reflect on the experience--giving us all a window for watching the project unfold. Hers is a story worth following. Although she has an eye on the big picture (i.e., what her high school students need to learn), she pays attention to the nitty-gritty of project-based learning and doesn't hesitate to write about challenges. She's also adept at making projects work with the tools already at hand, as she explains in this Edutopia article. Will be fun watching what unfolds when Oklahoma meets Australia.

Not the Slammer!

Brad Moon, who blogs as Geekdad over at Wired, has picked up on the ongoing Flat Stanley controversy. In a post called "Flat Stanley Gets a Lawyer," he shares a shot of the little guy behind bars. Moon's take on the trademark kerfuffle: "This doesn’t sit right with me and I shudder to think of what Hollywood, corporate branding and a marketing blitz could do to a grass-roots, classroom-friendly effort like the Flat Stanley Project."
Meanwhile, Flat Stanley Project founder Dale Hubert tells me he's still trying to work out a way for the project to continue. And--teacher to the core--he's mulling over ideas for educating kids about patents, trademarks, and media awareness.

Visualizing Migration

click on the image to see a larger view of the Minard Map

After a lot of hard thinking Jamie, a student in my PBL course, has focused her class project on US migration stories. After examining the Oregon Common Curriculum Goals and NCSS standards it was clear that 'regions' was a big topic for grade 5 social studies. But she had to ask hard questions-- What is essential about the study of regions? Is that a way to talk about diversity so we understand the complex fabric of our country? How are regions defined? Might my hometown in E. Oregon be more like Winnemucca, NV (another region) than Seattle, WA ('same' region)? Jamie overlaid geography standards relating to human movement onto this examination of regions and came away with this: I would like students to work together to look at the movement of people throughout time, why they migrate to our Northwest region, and specifically our community. These imprints on a region include its ethnic make-up, spoken languages, religious institutions, traditions, architectural styles, local food, music, clothes, and other cultural markers—all clues to the past, present, and future of that area and generations of its people. Thus, an essential part of understanding a region is its migration story.
Her plan is to engage schools across the country in shared study-- so they teach each other about (what they must operationally define as) their regions. Understandably, lots of technology may be employed, from Skype conference calls to ePals collaborations to Google shared spreadsheets to multimedia reports. I get carried away and wonder, what might we put in virtual time capsules? What would a population flipbook look like?
One more wrinkle I'm ironing out (hoping it helps Jamie and her teaching partner): Could kids mine population and demographic data to see waves of migration? Could they visually display data in an annotated timeline to show population change and also ethnicity or emigrant employment? My inspiration, my vision for this comes from the famous Minard Map showing Napoleon's failed march on Moscow. I've admired it in Edward Tufte's Visual Displays of Quantitative Information, and then in real life (OK maybe a copy) at the Finding Our Place in History exhibit at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore in May. Now I'm no geographer, but through a single degree of separation, I know a geographer! I just asked Jim Meacham, director of the University of Oregon InfoGraphics Lab, if he might lend a few brain cells to this problem.

Flat Stanley Saga Continues

Since I started tracking the troubles of the Flat Stanley Project, the controversy has been picked up by those in the tech world who think hard about issues like trademark and "infinite good." TechDirt's Mike Masnick has generated a lively discussion with his post, "Flat Stanley Learns How Ownership Of Infinite Goods Hurts Everyone." Meanwhile, Canadian teacher Dale Hubert, creator of the Flat Stanley Project, says hearing all this chatter is a little like "attending one's own funeral and overhearing the comments of the mourners." We can only hope that rumors of the project's demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Getting It Done in Hannibal, MO

Please meet us in Elluminate at 10:00 Pacific on July 24 for a tour of project teacher Terry Smith's classroom. This event is held in conjunction with the Reinventing Project-Based Learning Summer Course at University of Oregon, instructor, Jane Krauss. Find the event here and click on "event" to join the session. We look forward to meeting you there! Links to Terry's window on the world are found here on the course wiki.

Getting Off the Starting Blocks

During a poster session in the Global Gallery at NECC, I met a teacher who said she was eager to get her students involved in collaborative global projects. I talked up a few spectacular examples, describing just how far students can go when given the opportunity. But she was stuck on the starting blocks. “How do you find partners on the other side of the world?” she wanted to know. I told her about the Flat Classroom Project and several other wonderful collaborations that have grown out of the edublogging world, where like-minded teachers frequently connect. “I don’t have time to read blogs,” she said, then launched into a list of the many other demands on her day.

Making global collaboration easier for busy teachers is one of the goals of ePals, a free communications platform that includes classroom blogs, email, and other tools to foster connections. It’s the largest online community in K-12 education, with some 13 million students and teachers participating in 200 countries. Ed Fish, CEO of ePals, describes his strategies for getting barriers out of the way in this Spiral Notebook interview. By making it faster and easier for teachers to find partner classrooms, Fish says he hopes to release educators to focus their energy on the creative side of project design and implementation.

What I find especially powerful about ePals is the translation tool that allows communication among learners who don’t speak the same language. The tool translates text to and from Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, English, and Chinese. Users pick the language pair that meets their needs. Rita Oates, ePals vice president and a longtime educator, told me that the tool was developed to answer requests from teachers who wanted to be able to overcome language barriers. And it works: ePals participants speak more than 130 languages.

I can’t help wondering why more teachers aren’t taking part in these kinds of online projects. Have you steered clear of global projects because you don’t know how to get started? What help or support do you need to start bringing the world to your classroom?

Trouble in the Flatlands

A decade before Tom Friedman wrote The World is Flat, Canadian teacher Dale Hubert was connecting children around the world through his Flat Stanley Project. “I was building a social network before YouTube or MySpace,” Hubert told me recently as he reminisced about his years in a virtual place he calls "the flatlands."

Through Hubert's grassroots online project, thousands of children from more than 40 countries have made connections—to each other, to literature, and sometimes even to world leaders, astronauts, and movie stars—by exchanging their own paper versions of Stanley Lambchop, the boy squashed by a falling bulletin board in the 1964 book, Flat Stanley.

And now the popular project may be coming to a close due to legal troubles with the estate of Jeff Brown, the late author. I explain the situation in more detail in this story for Edutopia.

It’s too soon to know how the controversy will end, but Hubert is determined to find a way to continue connecting children with the wider world. Already, Flat Stanley is a popular guy on YouTube, Flickr, and countless classroom blogs. Hubert imagines incorporating more Web 2.0 tools to expand the global conversation. And he already has a back-up plan if he can’t keep the current project alive. His goal, as always in the flatlands, will be “authentic and meaningful communication.” Stay tuned.