Last night, Bill and I headed down to Hoke County High School, where we presented LEARN’s online courses to students and parents at their GEAR UP event. There was a lot of enthusiasm in the school for sending students to college, and I think they did a great job of getting students out to the event, which was held at night and wouldn’t have been as well-attended in many other areas.

The keynote speaker spoke in the school gym. Click on the picture to see my favorite part of the school gym:

Our speaker was a graduate of Hoke County High, and he’s now in Charlotte, where he operates his own company and is a pastor. His speech centered on providing vision for young people, and was very well-received, but I couldn’t help giggling at one point in his speech, when he stressed that young people who surround themselves with negativity and negative influences will often end up negative. He was addressing the parents, telling them about how good books could be a salve for the negative influences, and said, “When negativity goes in, what comes out? Negativity. When you make sure to surround your children with books, when positive reading material goes in… what comes out? Positive reading material.”

Great debate on lottery and education. I even resorted to name-calling. When I get off work tonight, this may be where all my time goes. If you choose to enter, be nice. These people are my friends.

I have been getting geeked out on Creative Commons and I spent about two hours yesterday creating information for the LEARN NC teachers on how they can use Creative Commons to search for materials they can use. While doing so, I found the MIT open courseware site, and I think I almost lost my virginity to it. That site is amazing. Seriously. You could geek out so hard in there that the world would stop for a few minutes.

Monica Byrne is an MIT grad. I’ll have to rant and rave tonight in her last level 1 class about it.

My good friend Eric sent this tidbit over the weekend, and I have to say, I’m fascinated:

CNN.com: Students offered online PE courses
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/06/22/online.pe.ap/index.html?section=cnn_offbeat

I’m all in favor of online courses, and I’m quite certain that this idea has some merit behind it. In fact, the online course may well promote a more rigorous physical program than the average PE course. And certainly, the scheduling flexibility would be wonderful– I know kids really struggle with PE requirements when trying to build a well-balanced schedule that adequately prepares them for the workforce or for college.

But the news that PE has moved online raises several questions for me. I think my greatest concern is the problem of perception. I already wonder how online courses are viewed, and have tried to steer our program towards courses that I think students and parents could easily conceptualize as “online courses.” We’ve begun to explore more adventurous territory, tackling a foreign language (Latin) out of necessity, and an art course out of the belief that we can use online courses to create more meaningful offline experiences in online courses. But even those efforts have met with some resistance because it’s hard to envision what a course with a heavy speaking component would look and feel like asynchronously, and I think people naturally think of art as so hands-on that removing the immediate presence of “the master” would render the course impossible. So I can imagine serious concern about an online PE course.

My biggest question would not be the validity of the experience– there’s an abundant amount of information about health and wellness on the Web, and people are able to use that to create personalized workout regimens that help them feel better. I’d worry more about liability and supervision– part of the school’s responsibility during a PE course is to create opportunities for students to exercise and learn about fitness in a monitored environment. Does online PE take the capable teacher out of the equation and replace him/her with an untrained eye (or worse, no supervision)? If the answer is yes, I think you have a safety issue; you may have a student who ends up exerting himself beyond his limits and no reasonable capacity to catch that behavior. If the answer is no, what does the online course do that the face-to-face teacher could not do?

Still, it’s worth considering that we are definitely able to supplement or augment our physical education curricula with Internet-based tools, and hey, I may come around one day and trumpet the virtues of online PE.

(Note: The CNN article will expire on July 22, 2005.)

Jess, usually known for her solid people skills, responds to the question, “So, what do you think about all these people we work with?”

Moser launches a horseshoe. He was summarily schooled in the art of horseshoes.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryRSS.cfm?ArticleID=5725

This tidbit about electronic yearbooks is from eSchool News, which will require you to register with your e-mail address. (Not that I can condone this kind of behavior, but some people use BugMeNot.com to get into these kinds of resources.)

Reading about how kids are creating electronic yearbooks for their face-to-face schools has got me wondering what kind of role extracurricular activities might play in an online school. Would a yearbook be in order for the LEARN NC classes? Would students be as interested in the communal aspects of their “virtual” high school as they are in their face-to-face school?

It’s an interesting thought– someday, distance learning teachers may organize/facilitate distance learning extracurricular activities, like a chess club, yearbook, or film club. Would parents be as supportive of those activities?

newsobserver.com | Letters

Judith is a teacher for LEARN NC, and a really damn good one. It warms my heart to see this letter printed, because she’s exactly right– it’s disappointing to see people lament the “deterioration” of the English langauge without giving a nod to two facts: 1. Language is changing quickly, and cultural shifts in the Internet age will make this transition perhaps more jarring, but you have to consider that culture dictates language and it’s not going to be the other way around, and 2. If we have failed to teach kids proper grammar, it’s probably a reflection of the fact that so many academics producing educational materials are out of touch with why anyone would be motivated to learn that the materials don’t end up terribly useful.

Hooray for JD!

$2 Million Settlement Reached In ‘Chubby Bunny’ Case

Jeepers, it’s interesting to know how many times I risked life and limb to make people laugh. For a while, we played this game after just about every halftime at ComedySportz-Chapel Hill.

I think it’s important to know that the fact that the child was playing a food-based game was not the most disturbing thing about the article. It’s that the teacher was gone from the classroom long enough for this to happen (or, for the game to begin, for that matter). Schools that leave children, even high achievers or “good, responsible kids,” unsupervised have got a serious liability problem, and $2 million would not even come close to placating me if I lost a child due to a school’s negligence.

The teacher is now a principal. Part of me twinges a little bit, but I will bet this guy will be extraordinarily vigilant in every aspect of his professional life from here on in.

I guess if you hang around long enough, someone will put you on their board. I’m certainly not there yet, but I have been named to my first national steering committee– this one for the National Association of Comics Art Educators. The mission– to promote awareness of the art of comics in classrooms.

I’d used them as a resource a couple of times before. When I was researching my LEARN article on comics as a teaching tool, I corresponded with James Sturm, who is the author of the tremendous The Golem’s Mighty Swing, as well as one of the co-founders of NACAE. His focus seems to have been creation of comics art curricula at the higher ed level, particularly on a programmatic level. I also went back and forth with one of their board members, Scott McCloud, whose work I think I’ve pimped sufficiently in this blog.

While some of the past efforts seemed geared more towards higher ed, I’m on board to provide the perspective of a K-12 educator. The next phase of NACAE’s mission is to make comics more pervasive in school media centers around the country. I owe thanks to Ben Towle, who scouted me out and vetted me for the project (and I’m still not really sure how it happened, but I’m not complaining at all).

I am, of course, extremely excited, because I really can’t convey the depth of my gratitude to the comics industry for making me the reader I am today. Comics stimulated a deep and lifelong interest in reading for me, helped me acquire a ridiculous amount of vocabulary, and now provide me not only a wonderful hobby, but a shared vocabulary into the secret society of comics readers. (And if you believe we’re not a secret society, you’re soooo wrong. I’m out in public, but you’d be amazed at how many people I know quietly talk with great nostalgia about the comics they read growing up. Isn’t it amazing that a society that claims to put such a premium on reading would stigmatize such a huge literary industry?)

So, if you are one of the many quiet proponents, I hope you will check out NACAE’s website, and you can hop on their message boards under a pseudonym if you have something to add about the teaching of comics but aren’t quite willing to out yourself as a comics fan.

Notes for NACAE:
Development of curriculum materials for schools? Possible integration into learning objects models? See MERLOT as possible indexing for open-source materials.

McCloud’s texts are comics-form textbooks for the comics industry. Can/should learning materials be presented as such?

Broad literacy aside, what are some specific things comics can be used to teach? Supposing a teacher has not read any comics and picks up just any old comic book, what can we assume they might do with that comic in a classroom? McCloud’s texts probably provide insight but could be built upon.

What are some state and national standards that one might use comics to address?