We started our celebration with a look at a couple of the philosophical touchstones for TTT, mainly World Bridges and the National Writing Project. Jeff Lebow (WB) and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl (NWP) helped us with these starting points.
The goals of Worldbridges are relatively simple and straightforward, as follows, “Our primary goal is to foster understanding and cooperation amongst the citizens of the world. We value civility and respect, open source collaboration, fair distribution of income, and a sense of world identity.” As part of these efforts, Worldbridges seeks to foster positive systemic changes in areas such as education, the environment, and politics. It also supports reliable and fair commerce. And it promotes a “people’s forum” for more civilized discussion of problems, issues, and conflicts that pose significant challenges in united the people of this planet. Values supported by the Worldbridges organization include respect and civility, fair distribution of income, world identity, and open source collaboration.
Jeff Lebow began experimenting with Worldbridges ideas (initially called “World Explorer”) when starting his master’s program in Training and Learning Technologies at the University of New Mexico in 1993 after a year of teaching English in Thailand (Worldbridges, 2007). At that time, Lebow became excited at the possibilities of the convergence of intercultural interaction and collaborative and interactive online technologies. After completing his masters, he returned to Asia—this time Pusan, Korea—where he taught English as a university and began to experiment with online audio and video, which included covering the Nagano Olympics in 1998. After burning out on all his activities and attempting to envision and build a webcasting network his life took a turn, or as he puts it, “I decided to quit my job, shave my head, and go to India for a while to contemplate the next chapter, for me personally and for Worldbridges. After some quality offline time, I decided to give Worldbridges a shot.” In Lebow’s vision for Worldbridges, he sought for it to become a means for using Internet technology for a global webcasting network of people. And it has!
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And here's a paragraph about the National Writing Project's core philosophy by Art Peterson in 2004
The National Writing Project's core philosophy, "teachers teaching teachers," is perhaps most directly expressed in the invitational summer institute's teacher demonstrations. NWP founder Jim Gray writes in Teachers at the Center, his memoir of the writing project beginnings, "The most successful demonstrations communicate not only what the teacher does but also why the teacher thinks this particular practice works. The emphasis upon the why as well as the what is important: it provides a theoretical underpinning and it accents a considered approach to writing beyond mere gimmickry" (143). According to Gray, this demonstration serves as a "trial run" for the workshops future teacher-consultants will present during inservice work in the schools, but it is intended to be much more than a simple demonstration of a strategy or technique. It is intended to be a significant "genre" for the circulation of knowledge about practice.
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Enjoy!
Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.
Enjoy this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, recorded a week before the big day.
+Paul Oh helped us invite this amazing list of guests. They are listed below, along with one thing we've asked them in our conversation about Digital Learning Day.
+Natalie Bernasconi, Central California Writing Project and middle school teacher; presenting the Digital ID wiki http://digital-id.wikispaces.com/Welcome as part of California Digital Learning Day presentations in Sacramento on Feb. 1
+Gail Desler, Area 3 Writing Project and Instructional Technologist in Elk Grove, California; also presenting the Digital ID wiki as part of Digital Learning Day presentations in Sacramento
+Andrea Zellner, Red Cedar Writing Project, doc student at Michigan State University, who is working with Michigan State’s MA in Ed Tech program to “try something new” and document; artifacts from and about the experiences will be found here: http://dlday2012.tumblr.com/
+Leigh Wolf, Program Director for the MA in Ed Tech Program, is coordinating efforts with Andrea; here’s a link to a post at Leigh’s bloghttp://www.leighgraveswolf.com about Digital Learning Day.
+Tom Fox, Northern California Writing Project & National Writing Project, English Professor at Chico State University, will be presenting digital compositions created by his students at the Digital Learning Day presentations in Sacramento
+Jack Zangerle, Hudson Valley Writing Project, 8th Grade ELA teacher in Dover, NY, doing things for Digital Learning Day in his classroom
+Matt Dunleavy, former Tech Liaison of the Tidewater Writing Project in Virginia, and a professor at Radford University, currently working with Chris Dede from Harvard on an Augmented Reality project called EcoMobile, which will be presented in D.C. on Feb. 1 as part of Digital Learning Day activities there.
On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers
we continue our conversations about Open Educational Resources (OER) with this amazing cast of wonderful teachers!
I’m finding thatP2PU offers a fascinating space in which to operate. It’s a space with ethos but little structure. I’m building as I go. And wondering, from time to time, if this course meets my general metric for success in all that I do as a teacher – is it useful? Are people getting what they need from the course?
Several leaders in the National Writing Project--Paul Oh, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks--joined us from Washington DC where
they were working to lobby members of Congress today, Thursday, March 31.
Also Chad Sansing, Zac Chase, and Andrea Zellner joined us on the Skype conversation--as well as many friends in the chat. Chad has been organizing a
blogging effort going on around the country. Here’s what he is asking
supporters of the NWP to do:
Please add your voice to the chorus of educators from around the country who are blogging in support of the NWP.
We’re trying to accumulate 1,000 blog posts by April 8, when the next
Continuing Resolution for the federal budget expires. There are already
nearly 150 posts - moving stories of the impact of the NWP on the lives
of teachers and students - at the archive: http://coopcatalyst.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/the-blog4nwp-archive/ You can tweet or email your blog post URL to Chad Sansing (twitter: @chadsansing; email: [email protected])
who has been organizing this effort, or post it to this discussion and
we’ll make sure it gets added to the archive. Remember to try to tag
your posts with: #blog4nwp. FYI, we’ve gotten a few responses on
twitter to this effort from the press office of the Department of
Education (see: http://www.andrea-zellner.com/archives/629 and http://aetweets.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/blog4nwp-and-being-bossy/), so let’s keep it up!
Check out what folks have written to get an idea of what you might add
but more importantly take a few minutes to add your story (stories).
Listen to find out what we can do to help restore funding to the National Writing
Project. Then find your own ways to add your voice the the the chorus singing praises to the
National Writing Project!
Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.
On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Alicia Blair, a science teacher who lives near the beach in Mississippi, asked us to think of her the next time we pump gasoline into a gas-guzzling automobile. Later in the show her heart went out to an art teacher, April Estep, who lives 20 minutes from the site of Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mining disaster. Casey Daugherty, a co-director of the Ozarks Writing Project, observed, "We'll think of April every time we switch the lights on."
Sandwiched between these ongoing conversations about how to respond to the BP oil spill and similar disasters such as the Big Branch disaster, we talked about how to raise teacher voice and how to push out audio and video on social networks like Twitter.
This summer our guests brought twitter and social networking to and from their local Invitational Summer Institutes of the National Writing Project. Paul Oh leads us in this discussion of how the face-to-face, intense summer work widens when social networks become part of the mix.
Our guests on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers were:
Writing Project teachers have found Twitter to be a serious learning tool. Many sites across the country integrated Twitter into their summer institutes this summer, and teachers have built "personal learning networks"—groups of people who casually join together to communicate and collaborate on common topics—where they discuss serious educational issues.
Story behind the image:
As an ornithologist’s son, watercolor artist Paul Jackson grew up spending Christmases in the park ranger’s cabin on Horn Island, Miss. Over several weeks, he turned his outrage into “Fowl Language,” in which a least tern, stilt, egret, cormorant and other Gulf birds sit atop a dropping-streaked BP sign as an oil rig smokes in the background.
He posted a photo of the painting on his Web site while the paper was still damp. Within two hours, it was selling as a T-shirt on the art-sale Web site Zazzle.com.
The Columbia, Mo., painter has since created his own site, “Art vs. Oil Spill.” About 100 artists from as far away as India and Malaysia have offered works, with all proceeds going to nonprofit groups working to clean up the oil or oiled animals.
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