Wikileaks, the TSA, and Ninth Graders: Want to Participate?

Hey, have you noticed anything in the news lately about some kind of leaking wiki? Or perhaps new and improved procedures at your favorite airport? Have you ever wondered if perhaps you could relate that to literature, and if perhaps high school students might have an opinion about these things?

Well, wonder no more. Anne Smith and Maura Moritz's classes will be discussing safety versus security in the context of Fahrenheit 451, 1984 and Little Brother:

We invite you to participate in a wonderful learning conversation with our ninth grade honors classes on February 3, 2011. After studying the world of dystopian fiction through classics such as Ray Bradbury�s Fahrenheit 451, George Orwell�s 1984 and the modern response, Cory Doctorow�s Little Brother, our students will engage in an intense discussion as their final project. We are inviting you to participate to help our students examine how these works play an enormous part in their world today through such relevant issues as Homeland Security, government censorship, information leaks, and safety versus security, to name just a few.

Our students will participate in a fishbowl discussion with live blogging and we will Ustream out the fishbowl discussion live so that you can hear the in-class discussion while participating in the live blogging.

So, head over to the post to learn more, or head over to the wiki to sign up to participate. We'd love to have you be part of this learning experience for (and with) our students.

Cory Doctorow Discussion Ustream Archive

Well, the technology worked fairly well for our Skype discussion with Cory Doctorow today. The audio on Skype wasn't perfect, but we could hear fairly well. And it froze up a couple of times for about 10 seconds, but then started transmitting again. We also lost the ustream once, which is why I've embedded two ustream archives below.

Part 1 (about 17 minutes) is the first part (amazingly enough) of our discussion. We actually start about 3 minutes into the recording, as I hit record before we actually got started just to make sure I didn't forget. Then Part 2 is obviously the remaining portion (about 41 minutes). We probably lost about a minute in between those two recordings. Given the audio issues on Skype, it's a little hard to hear on the ustream as well, but I think you can make most of it out.

Overall, I think it was a great experience for our students. Thanks, Cory, for being so willing to give your time and talents to help our students.

Discussing Little Brother with Cory Doctorow

Anne Smith and Maura Moritz's ninth graders are currently finishing up reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Previously they read 1984 and their task is to look at both books and answer the questions:

What have we learned - or what have we not learned - over the past 60 years [from Orwell's time to the present]? What does our future hold for us?

This has been a fascinating unit to observe. Anne and Maura have brought in additional folks to speak to different aspects of each novel. They brought in our Western Civilization teachers to help our students understand what was going on in the 1930's - 1950's that Orwell was reacting to and that influenced 1984.

As they moved on to Little Brother, they invited in different social studies teachers to talk to the students about 9/11 and The Patriot Act. They also invited in myself, Mike Porter (our district's Assistant Director of Instructional Technology), and Ben Horblit (a knowledgeable former student of Anne's who's now a senior) to talk about the technology in Little Brother and its ramifications. Then earlier this week Mike Porter, along with Dan Maas (our district CIO) visited to talk about rights and responsibilities surrounding technology use and school law, which was a very interesting discussion.

Now as they are finishing up Little Brother, the students will have the opportunity to question the author, Cory Doctorow, himself. As you may recall, I blogged last spring that some students who had chosen to read Little Brother on their own contacted him with questions, and that they then ended up with an hour long Skype conversation with Cory. He agreed to Skype again this year, this time with students from all four sections gathered together in our Forum to ask questions and listen.

Cory will be joining us for about an hour again via Skype and, if all the tech goes as planned, you are welcome to watch via ustream. We will be broadcasting from approximately 8:25 - 9:25 am MST (UTC/GMT -7) on Tuesday, February 2nd. Some of the students will also live blog over on Anne's class blog. As always, our focus will be on making the learning happen for our students, so if we have any technical difficulties, the ustream will not be our first priority.

Cory Doctorow Interview: Ustream Archive

Today was the day our students Skyped with Cory Doctorow asking him about his book Little Brother. Overall, it went very well. He spent about forty-eight minutes answering their questions (well, more like forty-one minutes, as the first seven minutes before the official start was small talk as we connected early just to make sure we didn't have any issues). He was very engaged, listened to their questions, and made some passionate arguments.



I've embedded the ustream below. Please note a few things. First, as I indicated above, the first seven minutes are small talk (although interesting as well, I think); the formal question and answer portion starts at about the seven minute mark.



Second, the audio quality starts decreasing about halfway through. Not sure if that was a Skype issue, or bandwidth issues on his end or ours, but you'll have to concentrate more as it goes on to understand his end.



Third, you'll notice there are three students asking the questions. This was actually a group of four students, but the fourth student was in a final exam so couldn't be present for this part. Due to scheduling conflicts, this was the best time we could come up with, so the students asking the questions, as well as about twenty-five other students in the audience, were all there in between their scheduled final exams.



Finally, this was part of an assignment where students are reading books that are sometimes controversial and then making a case for why the book should be approved or not by a school board. This particular group was presenting during the final exam period that was directly after this Skype call with Cory Doctorow. They purposely made their first formal question to him be why he though the book should be read by ninth graders so that, less than forty minutes later, they could pull up the archived ustream and easily play his answer (since it was at the beginning - well, after the small talk) as part of their presentation (which they did). Very. Nice.