Music Men

There were so many memorable moments from the Globaloria Summer Academy worth writing about, but only a precious few are preserved for posterity in video. It's lucky for us that one such moment was the spontaneous concert put on by our rock stars: Jim Allder, Kevin Warfield and Bob Turbanic -- a true highlight of the Academy. I'm happy to announce that thanks to the masterful uploading skills of our intern Trevor, these talented men have been officially launched into the glamorous world of YouTube celebrity!

Jim and Kevin's update of (and improvement upon) Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69" with a Web 2.0-centric "Summer of 2009" got things off to a lively start:



Watch Jim's rendition of "The Cat Came Back", and the group sing-along of "Summer of 2009" here. Also check out Jim's vintage clip from 1986 on his GEHS Band Blog.

The festivities concluded with an impromptu performance by Bob of "The Train Carrying Jimmy Rogers Home." This blew us all away:



For those who don't know the music of Jimmy Rogers, you can find a playlist here.

I'm only grieved that the video quality isn't worthy of its subjects. You guys will have to give us an encore at the August Academy!

For the musically inclined, I've listed below some web 2.0 music websites you may want to experiment with:

www.imeem.com
www.blip.fm
www.pandora.com
www.rhapsody.com

Your GB,
Rachel

Reports from the Blogosphere

After an eventful 24+ hour trip home (thunder storms in New York, stranded in Washington D.C., oy vey), I'm finally back at the World Wide Workshop headquarters and still feel exhilarated after such an amazing Summer Academy! It was such a pleasure to get to know you all.

I have a lot to share with you, but I thought it would be nice to first put the spotlight on what your reflections have been in the blogosphere since we all parted ways:

Denise writes:

"It is very motivating for me to be in a room with a group of West Virginia teachers who care and are willing to give up your summer time to take training that is so intense. You are willing to learn new curriculum and go out on a limb to offer a new class that you think will benefit your students. It makes me proud to watch everyone work and learn. It inspires me to be a better teacher because I want to keep up with everyone else and what they are doing. In fact I wish my own children could of had all of you as teachers because they would have learned so much."

The RED team honing their skills.

Bill offers a great tip for organizing Flash files, and reflects,

"We didn't do physical labor, break a sweat, or lift a finer for much more than typing and eating the incredible meals over the past three days but we had really worked our brains, imaginations, and our mental limits."

And in his inspiring Global Biology blog (which is now added to my blogroll along the right), Bill challenges us to consider what our legacy will be.

Tracy turns in a late homework assignment (tsk, tsk), but at least has a good excuse:

"I purposefully did not complete the homework assignment for the last day of the academy, because for me one of the most powerful learning moments has occurred in the past few days. I became a teacher because I connect with kids and feel like I have an understanding of how to teach content in a way that they can easily grasp. With the Globaloria program, I will have to completely revamp my teaching style."

The NED team learning Flash.

Great stuff! I look forward to hearing more from you all in the coming months, and please have fun with it! This summer is the perfect time to "tinker" with your blogs, and really get energy generated behind our blogosphere for a more vibrant virtual educator's community than ever before.

Your GB,
Rachel

My Powerful Learning Experience

Here's my confession: I am a horrible student. I swear to you I earned D’s and C’s in some classes in high school (same goes for college) and I believe I am currently the record holder of my high school for having been absent the most times for someone who still managed to graduate.

The reason for this can be traced to my "powerful learning experience".

When I was a sophomore in high school, I got it in my head that I was going to be a filmmaker. I wrote a script with my childhood best friend Hannibal (yes, his real name), about a young hero who was torn between his Spiderman comic book collection and a girl he yearned for. It was called “Call Her Mary Jane”, and even though it clocked in with a running time of about 20 minutes, it took a month of laborious filming (with a volunteer cast and crew) and meticulous editing to get it completed by the submission date of the film competition I was planning to enter. My amazing "Constructionist" parents had to help me pretend to suffer from a string of mysterious ailments so I could cut class and toil day and night on the film, which ended up proving to me I most definitely did not want to be a filmmaker.

Beyond that important discovery, I learned how to master number of editing and filmmaking programs (which has helped me ever since with learning new technologies), how to manage an unreliable teenage crew (which taught me to be an effective leader), how to construct narratives (which inspired me to pursue writing) and how to work hard and have fun at the same time.

I’ll also (perhaps presumptuously) take credit for launching the career of the young lady I cast as the love-object of my film, Dianna Agron, who used this role on her early resume to get her first real acting gigs.

I'll admit to an unfair ideological advantage. My dad is a close colleague and friend of John Seeley Brown, who was cheering me on and forecasting my future Oscar acceptance speech while I charged full speed into an early version of the...let's say...productive neurosis that would characterize my educational career. At the time, I was oblivious to JSB's influential educational philosophy, and only knew him as some dude with white hair who would hang around the house and, to my delight, generally authorize what my school Dean called "bad" behavior.

It strikes me now how much like Globaloria "Call Her Mary Jane" was. All the same frustrations with technology, creative struggle, hard, self-motivated work was in play. It's too bad that I had to actually trick my school so I could educate myself in this way. With Globaloria, the school is able to play a part in this kind of learning process. Educators can help to create the kind of studio space needed to develop the important skills project-based (or "tinkering") learning gives students-- rewarding kids for this hard/fun work, and not punishing them for it.

"Call Her Mary Jane" was the first large self-motivated project I worked on, and it led to a string of them through my high school and college career. I have always been able to leverage my "portfolio" of passionate work to find opportunities and achieve what successes I can claim in life.

Civics and Blogging

Ask and ye shall receive:

Given its popularity with team RED, the "shaming mechanism" of having the educators' blogs listed and organized based on their most recent update, is now updated and in-place on my blogroll . The new educators' blogs should all be now listed there as well. If you do not see your blog there, please comment with your blog address so I can add it.

The first day of the Globaloria Summer Academy was a blast. I got to unsheathe my baby: the Globaloria Guide to Blogging site. Like a beaming mother, let me draw your attention once again to all of the cool hyperlinks links I used there. Aren't they beautiful?

It was a whirlwind day: we learned how to wiki, set up blogs, game and brainstormed about civics. It got me thinking about different possibilities and opportunities we have to open the conversation about civics to kids with games online. Georgia Tech runs a great blog about News and Gaming, and one of my favorite thinkers about the synthesis of News and New Media is Jeff Jarvis' blog Buzz Machine, see also Publishing 2.0.

Finally, if you liked the video Idit showed us of Clay Shirky, you can read his blog here.

He gave the keynote address at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:



It sparked quite a few interesting reactions. What do you think?

Gaming and Art

In the May "Blogs of the Round Table" hosted by Man Bytes Blog, participants were asked to imagine what a favorite piece of artwork might look like as a game. You can read all of the responses here, but I'll highlight a few of my favorites below:

ihobo provides a thoughtful response, reflecting on the Impressionist movement, and taking this opportunity to ask "capital Q" questions about the nature of art.

Water Lilies, Monet (1916)

When I go to a gallery, I am seeking an experience beyond the rational – I do not greatly enjoy art that asks me to decode its puzzle, or otherwise rationally interact with it, to anywhere near the same degree that I enjoy a piece of art that transfixes me in a space beyond thought – an experience of emotion or transcendence that is wholly beyond conscious thought. That for me is the essence of great art. This brings me to the second problem: can a game actually access the transcendent experience of what great art means to me? And I suspect, perhaps that it cannot.

...

From the point of view of impressionism as a rebellion against the previously accepted forms, a direction could be found, but any non-game might be claimed to fulfil this goal. Unless I could find a way to capture the essence of the experience of an impressionist painting, I would feel I had failed to successfully make the transition.

Perhaps what this shows for me is that game design as a process is always for me a rational experience, while art for me is at its greatest when it transcends rational experience. And thus, perhaps my problem is not that there cannot be an impressionist game, but rather that an impressionist game is not something that I can personally conceive – it is in some sense beyond me. And that, perhaps, is precisely what I am looking for in art.

Other respondents took the bull by the horns and crafted dramatic plots inspired by art history. GB Games chose Michelangelo's "The Last Judgment" from the Sistine Chapel as his premise.

Click here for a high-res version of this painting

World Maker chose Nighthawks as his game inspiration.

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper (1942)

The Game Critique chose The Great Wave Off Kanagawa to orient the force of nature as the centerpiece of his game.

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, Hokusai (1832)

I love the idea of this challenge because it causes you to consider gaming as a medium of art--which it absolutely is. Obviously, programming a game requires a math/science aptitude, but the designing and conceptualizing of the game interface and premise is very much an artistic/creative endeavor.

Gaming is an expressive medium like any other art form; and it's an exciting one insofar as it's interactive. In gaming, the audience engages with art on a level of activity that no other medium parallels. This relatively new, technologically enabled, medium (just like photography and film before it) will doubtlessly tap into the talent of "great artists", many of whom remain to be seen. I wonder who the Kubrick (or Michelangelo) of gaming will be...