homoLudens

How very strange - the Shanghai Racquet Club. As Nico once noted,
“Americans are the only people who travel so far to not leave America.”But the DSL works. Time for shower. More later.

was a sign I saw on a real estate billboard in Shanghai in April. Now I
get a chance to live in one, complete with job offer: “??? a teaching
position at the Shanghai American School Summer School Program.” It’s a BAWP gig and there may be an opportunity for CMS integration.

On Friday and Saturday, April 30 and May 1, Fons Tunistra, Kevin Wen, me, Mindy Chiang and (hopefully) Isaac Mao will join a whole lot of other folks (including Orville Schell!) at a UC Berkeley conference entitled China’s Digital Future: Advancing the Understanding of China’s Information Revolution.
It’s a great follow up to our school’s recent Shanghai adventure. Fons
is staying on for awhile after the conference and there may be an
opportunity for a Bay Area (east or west bay) blogger get together.
Anyone interested?

I spent the morning encouraged and helped by Assistant Principal Jiang (to the right), Dong Hui H.S, to make a few first steps toward an online collaboration between our two schools. Dong Hui now has its first weblog.

In the great public education tradition of keeping expectations low
enough to lead to some semblance of happiness, we’re going at this slow
and simple. Five of Dong Hui’s first year English students started
postinfg to the new blog while I hung out chatting about big dreams and practical limits. Once
back in SF, I’ll try to get a few of our Gal students to reply to the
Dong Hui pioneers. Then we’ll think together online about what we want
to do beyond that.

I tried a Blackboard site for managing all this, but we had log in
problems on the UC Berkeley server. Manila
was an easy substitute, but has an equally serious limitation in not
handling Chinese script. We’ll start with English to English.

The best part of all this was spending five hours in the Dong Hui
server
room with English teacher Arthur Ying (below, right), server
administrator, Teddy (below, left), and the ever unflappable
Asst. Principal Jiang.  I was genuinely in China for those hours.
The rest of the time has felt like an endless commute by plane, bus and
taxi. Much more interesting than a tour of Yangjou, eh? And that
doesn’t take into account the thrill of back and forth taxi rides in
Shanghai’s rush hour traffic.

What will Shanghai be like? Auden & Isherwood, 1938: “And the well-meaning tourist, the
liberal and humanitarian intellectual, can only wring his hands over
all this and exclaim: ‘Oh dear, things are so awful here - so
complicated. One doesn’t know where to start.’”

Right to start a journey reminded that beginning means NOT knowing.

Among many other things:

That Terry Elliot should write every day because he can really write.
That Josh Allen was an English major and he runs a Frontier server.
That Tim ?, a finalist for the Chief Information Officer job in SFUSD, actually uses the web to get information. (Progress happening everywhere. Praise Buddha.)
That Mark Bernstein thinks long and hard about the things that I want to could think long and hard about, only he does it years before I even know that they are important things.
That Carol Tateishi really gets it about BAWP’s values and approach applied to blogging.
That the Gal Library CAN handle over 50 people comfortably, with a reliable wireless interent connection.  That Hank Macthay may have found a work-around for Chinese character support in Manila.
That Karen Claxton’s daughter Nina will be posting on her blog in a few days.
That arranging “coffee and???” for over 50 people is too much work for any one person.
That I have the best bunch of teaching assistants in the country.
That Terry Elliot should write every day because people want to read him.
That using public school facilities for an educational conference is an excellent way of keeping costs low, the atmosphere real, and the wireless internet connection fast.

To be continued???

responds to an earlier post about categorization, taxonomy and directories on the web. “What I like about Dave Winer’s idea is that it puts a directory at the hands of every person on the web. It doesn’t suppose that we will create the One True Categorization, and thus is less likely to succumb to the self-importance of ignoring the unclassifiable and inability to express relationships. Our directories relationships to each other wi[ll] help relate the rest of the web by proxy.” Well stated. I’d call such an individualized directory a commonplace book:  “A personal journal in which quotable passages, literary excerpts, and comments are written.” Read comments as MARC records and you get a layman’s view of cataloging. Now what does a catalog of commonplace books look like?

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The NWP’s Technology Liaison Advisory Committee is in town (Berkeley) for a planning meeting. We spent yesterday on our portion of the Annual Meeting, scheduled for November during NCTE. It’s still a treat to see how easily consensus can be reached with such a disparate group of educators. The values at the root of good Writing Project work, a profound respect for teachers as leaders and a firm commitment to run everything through the filter of classroom practice, powers all of it. As the founder, Jim Gray, has said, “‘Teachers teaching teachers.’ It’s a simple idea. Don’t screw it up.”

I’ve spent a bit of time in the last two years tilting my blog lance at the windmill of the national office’s enterprise-class technology program. Happily, BAWP’s founding of eBN turned my Rocinante in a more sensible direction, but yesterday I remembered something that I stupidly let myself forget: WP teacher consultants are independent thinkers. The trees ARE the forest. If you can demonstrate that something has value for their teaching -  an article on portfolios, a wall chart system for tracking book reports, weird technology called “content management systems” - they’ll give it a try. You don’t have to package such ideas as formally endorsed pilot projects. You just have to have a conversation and start the work.

And try not to screw it up.

On Friday, Bryan Bell designed what is, IMHO, his most elegant theme to date. It’s for the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP). The simplicity of the design serves the writing, just as BAWP’s own organizational design serves teachers of writing. Bryan says he’ll call the theme “digital paper.” That’s a theme (writer’s, not designer’s, theme) close to this blog’s heart, as seen in The Case for Digital Paper I and The Case for Digital Paper II. eBN and BAWP, with KCSOS’s help, are making ‘digital paper’ more and more accessible to teachers and students. I wanted to practice with Radio template copying, so it seemed right (write?) to take the theme name for a BAWP blog name. Voila - Digital Paper: The Blog. Tagline: “This is just paper; you’re the ink.”