The title of my presentation comes from a concept devised by an American urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg. My research on his work led me to an organization called Project for Public Spaces, a non-profit organization dedicated to creating public spaces and communities. Their diagram of the key attributes of great public spaces inspired me to try to relate their work to my experiences online.

Over the years, I have noticed that the online community that I build with my grade eight students every year often resembles a third place. I decided to investigate what contributes to this recurring development. I discovered that starting with the right foundations, ensuring that certain features and freedoms are in place before learning begins, can have a strong impact on the development of a classroom community and its potential movement away from what Oldenburg calls “second place” (a place of work) and towards a third place - an informal meeting place that can facilitate and support creative interaction.

This presentation is my attempt to explain how the right foundations can contribute to the emergence of a community that displays at least some characteristics of a third place.

(If you’re interested in the concept of third places, I highly recommend Teemu Arina’s presentation, Serendipity 2.0: Missing Third Places of Learning.)

We did not use all of the above but the ones that we did use helped in two significant ways. First of all, they made it easier to navigate around the online community by displaying links to all student blogs and to the most frequently discussed entries. Secondly, they also helped create a sense of community among the students by making all contributions (posts, comments, photos) clearly visible. It helped the students see the global progress of the community and their own place within it.

One of the most valuable features of this platform, however, turned out to be the ability to personalize the look of each individual blog.

For the very first time since I started using blogs in my classes (over three years ago), the platform I chose allowed my students to customize the look of their individual blogs. The software I used before (Manila, LifeType) allowed users to change the themes (I had to upload them first in order to make them available to my students) but did not give my students the freedom to personalize any of the specific aspects of each theme, such as the blog header, the background, or the colour and size of the font.

Unlike the other software we used in the past, 21classes allows every blogger to modify the background, the header, and the colour and size of all fonts - practically every little detail of one’s blog. The students can also choose from a variety of different widgets that can be embedded in the blog’s side panels (Calendar, About Me, My Favourite Blogs, Most Recent Comments, etc.).

So What?

As administrator of our 21classes.com portal, I was able to give my students the opportunity to pick a theme and then modify it. At the beginning of the term, when I gave them one class to get to know the community and the software, the students used it to learn how to modify their blogs. These are some of the questions and conversations that I overheard and jotted down:

How do you change the title?
You mean the header?
Yeah. That top banner.

How did you change your background to yellow?
You can upload a picture, too. See?

Can you change the size of the font?
Where?
In my title.
Sure. You can change the colours, too. Just pick a theme and then click on it. That opens a new page … here I’ll show you.

Look at …’s blog. She changed the borders. How do you do that?

In other words, they spent one hour and then also some time at home learning how to personalize their blogs. Most of them kept the same theme and modifications throughout the term. Some made minor changes on a regular basis.

Why is this important? I believe that the effort they had put forth to personalize their spaces contributed greatly to their sense of ownership and involvement as writers. Initially, I was concerned that this would lead to an undue preoccupation with the visual appeal of their blogs and distract them from the focus of our blogging community - writing and research. It didn’t. The students seemed aware of the fact that the visual appeal of the blog, no matter how inspiring, would not ensure readership. They knew that conversations emerge from interactions with and about texts.

The ability to create a virtual space that is uniquely one’s own turned out to be much more important than I had anticipated. It helped the students define themselves as individuals, not pupils who use a teacher-sanctioned tool to post work. When I compare student blogs from two years ago or from last year to the personalized blogs that the students created with 21Classes, I see a collection of individuals, not a classroom. I see evidence of personal engagement but no evidence of an institutional setting. The uniformity that the other platforms forced upon us was gone and what emerged was a creative and engaging mosaic. Take a look:

Some of the students modified their blogs to reflect the focus of their research, not their personalities. Take a look at the following examples (move your mouse over the photo to see explanatory notes on my Flickr site):

Blogging is about personal expression. The ability to personalize one’s space is something that needs to be an integral part of every community. I believe that it is an important building block that can help us build communities with our students. If a blogging community focuses primarily on creation then why not start by creating one’s space, one’s atelier where the process of creation will take place?

This reminds me of John Dewey’s statement that the self depends for its wholeness upon its surroundings (Art as Experience). In other words, what impacts the work of every individual blogger is not just the community itself or the connections made in the World Wide Web but also the immediate environment where he or she creates and “resides.” This immediate environment also allows students to become emotionally attached to their spaces. Without that involvement, Dewey argues, there can only be craftsmanship and not art. In other words, a blog I cannot personalize is a place where I have no control and no personal investment. This will greatly limit my ability to engage as an individual.

Perhaps I’m exaggerating but it seems to me that it is important to use a blogging tool that allows students to redefine their spaces as other than strictly academic sites of engagement. I have spent quite a bit of time looking at the screenshots above and have come to the conclusion that, for the most part, they do not look like school writing journals. Yes, you can see that the students are clearly engaged in school work and that there are certain elements that make these blogs similar (the “About Me” page or the link to the home page of our community), but there is also a lot of individuality in each blog. There is evidence of personal and creative engagement. These are (or have the potential to become) out-of-school learning spaces and not just school journals.

Of course, one can argue that it is all about contributions and ideas, not visual appeal. I agree. At the same time, I think it is crucial to allow all participants to create sites of inquiry that are uniquely their own. To some, this might mean using widgets. Others might choose to modify the header or font size. Whatever it is, as teachers we need to remember that it all starts with freedom - this is not just about creativity but also about stretching the boundaries and the control that characterize institutional settings.

I want my students to be able to say “This is where I write about things that I am interested in,” not “This is my school blog.” In other words, perhaps it’s time to liberate my students from the mindset of uniformity imposed upon me by the school and, instead of telling them to come to an online place that I have chosen, ask them to give me addresses of their own electronic spaces. Instead of saying, “Bookmark this URL, this is where all our blogs are going to be,” I could say, “Give me all your URLs - flickr, facebook, myspace, blogger - wherever you are - so that I can put them into one OPML file for all of us to share.”

I realize that due to various institutional constraints, many of us may not be able to use that approach for a very long time. Giving our students the freedom to build their own spaces, even within a teacher-sanctioned portal, is a good start.

Before the end of the year and the madness that comes with the final exams, in an effort to counteract this focus on grades, I encouraged my students to reflect on their independent research projects that they have been documenting on their blogs. Many of them took up the challenge and gave me an interesting glimpse into their learning.

Sooooooooooooooooo What?

This is unfortunately my final and last post. This is my so what. From my research, I have learned many things. First of all I have learned that children all around are suffering constantly and Canada is not involved in the coalition to prevent child soldiers. I have learned that the training is cruel and intolerable, an experience no child should go through. They are punished for expressing any fear or sincerity, tear shed will only cause blood shed. Overall I would like to continue researching this topic but due to the lack of time I cannot. I hoped I achieved my goal which was to raise awareness about this topic among my classmates. Hope you enjoyed following my topic. (Italics mine)

This is what happens when we compartmentalize learning into neat chunks. There’s nothing that’s stopping Chloe from continuing her research. I can make sure that she has access to her blog for as long as she needs to. She can also transfer her entries to a Blogger blog, for example, and continue her efforts there. Unfortunately, the one thing that school taught her very well is that learning ends in June, that it is organized into neat units, and that weeks and months of learning can be reduced to a single test or exam.

On Sunday, June 3, 2007, Michael wrote a reflection on his research on genocide and, specifically, the situation in Darfur.

When will we ever learn?

What have we learned now about genocide now? After all the things that have happened with genocide to people over the years all the death, people always forget the results of genocide. We have learned nothing. If we had this would not have happened in Darfur. This genocide has been started by: president Bashir, vice-president Taha, and security chief Gosh. These men are from the Sudanese government. They are supporting the janjaweed militia while lying about doing so. It is a massacre/genocide on all of the non-Baggra population. The Sudanese government is making sure no one finds out anymore and is trying to kill all witnesses of these things. Now this is agreed upon by everyone that this is a genocide. When the United Nations try to help the Sudanese government attacks them. What has begun at just Darfur is now beginning to spread all the way to Chad and Central Africa. This is a current situation that has already had a major effect on people in that area, already 450 000 are dead from violence and disease. This genocide is currently not very big and has not killed huge amount of people yet, but it is growing. Soon it will grow larger if it is not stopped soon. We must stand up and stop the wrongs happening in Sudan.

Both of the above entries show, in my opinion, that these two students engaged as learners. They researched topics that they were passionate about and they have both become experts. They certainly know more about their respective topics than I do. They have created on their blogs a cognitive trail of their efforts. They have created learning objects that I, their teacher, can now learn from and perhaps even use next year when discussing these topics in my class with another group of students.

Of course, I knew about child soldiers and the situation in Darfur - not to mention some of the other topics that my children explored this past year - before the research projects started. But through these blogs, through their research, I have learned more. I have also become engaged not as a teacher who needs to know what the students are doing in order to assess and evaluate, but as a human being whose thirst for knowledge was satiated by a group of fourteen-year-olds who set a goal for themselves - a goal of exploring issues they found relevant and interesting.

The fact that their goals were their own made a big difference.

Their work also made me realize that I can measure their success not only by how much they have learned individually but also by how much they have learned from each other and by how much they have taught me.

Here are some topics that they explored on their blogs:

Child soldiers

Darfur

Genocide

Children’s Rights

Current Human Rights Abuses

Nazi Human Experimentation

Anne Frank

War Diaries as a Literary Genre

Street Children Around the World

Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide

Domestic Abuse

Women and Children in the Holocaust

Fascism in Italy

The Warsaw Uprising

The Internment of the Japanese Canadians and Americans

Freedom of Expression Violations

Nazi Propaganda

This past year, through the research that they have been documenting on their blogs, my students expanded my understanding of all of the above issues. They have found many links that I eagerly added to my delicious account. They have expressed views that I had not come across before. They started multiple conversations and expressed themselves in what Darren Kuropatwa calls “galleries of thought.” They engaged as researchers interested in expanding their knowledge.

Too bad June had to put an end to that.

I don’t think blogs need to meet any standards of “behavioral requirements.” Once again, we’re making the same mistake: the technology, so the argument goes, needs to be adapted to who we are. No. It’s the other way around. As McLuhan, de Kerckhove, and many others never tire of pointing out, it is the technology that changes our ways of perceiving reality, it reconfigures our minds. Most of us are still stuck in the linear mode imposed upon us by print. As we continue to immerse ourselves in the electronic world around us, what now seems alien will gradually become second nature. We are still obsessed with the broadcast model. Every encounter with information is characterized by receptivity, not interaction. We tend to listen and not speak. (Stephen Downes talks about it here - he says that we must learn this new language, and begin to speak and not just listen, that we must adopt the open, conversation model.)

The participants in this study are used to seeing the world around them (especially writing) as a collection of lineally constructed “truths,” but what they need, what we all need to acquire is the kind of perception that reflects the kaleidoscopic and multi-centred world around us. What we need, in other words, is to ensure that education becomes spherical and acoustic rather than linear, that it focuses on discovery rather than compartmentalization of data. When that happens, we will no longer expect to see articles instead of blog entries or wiki pages. These open channels of communication will become a natural part of the acoustic, omnidirectional world of individual voices.

It’s all about acoustic vs visual space.

The link above points to a document I composed at the very beginning of my graduate work at OISE/UT. It’s a bit outdated but conveys the point well (I think).