But that was also back when journalism was a one-way street and limited to the printed page. Back when “news” didn’t make a high school paper because every issue was at least a week old when it landed from the printer. Being a high school journalism teacher in the 2.0 world is quite a bit different than hoping 500 or so fragile tabloid copies get into the right hands, and I have had a lot of fun this summer developing from scratch an online news site that has the potential — if not the practicality — to reach around the globe.

I’m wondering if it’s possible to accurately convey to the 30 students who show up in Period 5 tomorrow just what power I’m turning over to them. The power of this broad, instant reach. The power to make their voices heard like those darn persistent Whos in “Horton Hears a Who.” We are here, we are here, we are here! Do they realize, really realize, what the protection of the First Amendment and state and federal law confers on them? That their online news site cannot be shut down, taken away, denied? That their public forum cannot be excised from the course schedule by a hostile party, unlike “Publick Occurrences,” the first American paper, which was forbidden, burned and its publisher jailed back in 1690? That their adviser cannot be fired or forced out of her position (not in California anyway).

Is it possible to really communicate the difference that exists from just 10 years ago for ordinary people to be heard? My students were born in 1992-94. They’ve never really known a world without email and Google and PayPal. They don’t remember a time without FaceBook or MySpace or YouTube. It’s so easy to communicate now. Instantly. At no cost. With friends, with enemies, with strangers. The gatekeepers are dead, dying or irrelevant. Mostly anyways. The kids have no idea.

I will start class tomorrow with a welcome and an attempt to give them perspective. The first newspaper, handwritten and hung on street corners, was decreed by Julius Caesar in 59 BC and titled “Acta Diurna.”  The last news organization was born one second ago. And one second from now. There will be no end to them, and that is enough to make any journalist’s heart beat faster. I would not trade living in this era in this place for any other time in history.

And to The Foothill Dragon Press: welcome to a great big exciting fast connected world–it’s a nice time to be born.

(Photo Credit: “Yesterday News,” Creative Commons Licensed by Zarko Drincic on Flickr.com)

Okay, so which of these assignments would you pick if you could choose:

1. Write a 1,500-word essay explaining the theme in Animal Farm, using literary elements such as character motives, symbolism and imagery.
2. Give a 5-minute presentation that relates the theme in Animal Farm to some aspect of society today, making sure to draw clear connections to the events in the novel with the actions of a current government.
3. Take one chapter of Animal Farm and rewrite it by changing the plot to include one modern tool that was not available to the characters but that might have changed the course of their fate if it had been. That tool is the Internet.

I would actually assign all three of these, time permitting. The first one would be an in-class assignment that followed several lessons on theme, literary elements and a thorough brainstorming of those aspects of the novel. The second would be researched at home and presented in class, possibly by pairs of students. The third would be a group assignment, completed outside of class on the class wiki. Here’s how it might look:

The teacher divides students into groups, with each group is assigned a chapter from the novel. Each chapter is downloaded by the teacher from Project Gutenberg Australia, a site with free e-books, and placed individually on the class wiki. Student groups brainstorm during class the ways that having access to the Internet would have empowered the lower classes of animals on the farm. Specifically, in this chapter, what might the animals have been able to do to become less confused, to remember the past better, to gain a broader perspective, to check the facts, to compare prices of goods, etc…? How would this information have negated the growing power balance between the pigs and the lower animals? How would it have weakened the effects of the pigs’ propaganda? How might the animals have used the Internet to leverage information and prevent their original revolution from reverting back to the status quo? 

At home, the students would begin to change the plot of their chapter by going online and accessing the wiki. They could do this alone or in groups or by talking in real time over Meebo instant chat. The wiki would record each layer of changes to the story, showing who has contributed what and in what order. Over the course of a week, each student in the group would be required to edit the chapter a certain number of times at a minimum, say five edits. Some students would do more, and that’s fine, but the goal would be to achieve consensus about the finished chapter. The end product would be a collaborative work that maintained the tone and spirit of Orwell’s masterpiece but played with an alternate ending… all while indirectly analyzing and synthesizing highly relevant, modern issues (information as power, technology as the means of achieving justice, how information protects individual freedoms).

Once the chapters were completed, the teacher could have students do a number of things with the new products. If there were multiple classes, groups could read and discuss other chapters that parallel theirs (i.e if your group rewrote Chapter 3, what do other periods’ Chapter 3’s look like?). The teacher could set up online surveys and have students vote which chapters Orwell himself might have written (i.e. which best embody the author’s tone and the novel’s theme). The teacher could have students act out a dramatic scene from the new chapters. 

This assignment (which I thought up this morning while doing the dishes) seems pretty Google-proof to me. In other words, they can’t find the answers on the Internet (at least not yet!) and they can’t just copy and paste their way to a product. They have to really think before they write. The work would be original, collaborative and analytical (… if this happened… then what…). They would have to understand the characters’ motivations, as well as the “rules” of the fictional universe that Orwell placed them in, and, ideally, they would create new metaphors to replace the old. For example, if the pig Squealer is the metaphorical equivalent of a propaganda minister, then which character would become the blogger? Which the Googler? Which would hack his way through Napolean’s firewall? How would these roles change the characters personalities? Which characters, because they can’t read, would still be at the mercy of the totalitarian regime?

(CC Photo Credit: “Watering Hole” by TravelJunkieoz)

Here’s one example. Pretty much the most important questions facing any student the summer before they move away to college are… what dorm will I get, and who will my roommate be. Other nagging questions might be, who will my friends be, what are the other students like, will I fit in, what will my professors be like, etc… It’s all very anxiety producing, as we could sympathize if it were us leaving home and family to live alone with a stranger for the next year. But with Facebook, many of these questions have been answered two months before my daughter even packs her bags. 

Last week at her orientation, it was made very clear that the college is not going to give out roommate information and dorm assignments until some time in August. The kids would just need to be patient. So how does my daughter currently know what dorm, floor, and room she’ll be in? How does she know who her next-door neighbor is and who a half dozen of her floor-mates are?

Social networking.

She joined a group on Facebook consisting of freshmen who will attend her college in the fall. One of the students noticed that when you check the parking pass assignments on the university’s online information network, you can find your dorm and room number — even if you have no intention of bringing a car to college, ever. The information is there for all students. Within minutes, the kids clicked their way over to the parking info. and started piecing together their assignments. Over the last couple of days they have announced them to the Facebook group and are becoming acquainted with the people they will be spending the next year of their lives with, and possibly the next four years! The dots are connecting very quickly as more and more students announce their rooms. I’m not sure the university knows about the back door they left open, but the kids found it, and they’re collaborating.

My daughter has not met her roommate yet but thinks the girls on “her” floor are a fun bunch. She’s seen their prom pics, their graduation photos, read their blogs and seen members of their families. All of this, two months before school starts. Two weeks before any of them were supposed to know anything.

Ken Kay, president of Partnership for 21st Century Skills, says this in this video:

“So the coin of the realm is not memorizing the facts that they’re going to need to know for the rest of their lives. The coin of the realm will be, do you know how to find information, do you know how to validate it, do you know how to synthesize it, do you know how to leverage it, do you know how to communicate it, do you know how to collaborate with it, do you know how to problem-solve with it? That’s the new 21st century set of literacies, and it looks a lot different than the model most of us were raised under.” 

I would say they do, they are and they will! 

Who are you, reading this, anyhow? I try to picture you — are you sitting cross-legged in your yoga clothes on summer vacation like I am? Are you the only one awake still in your silent house, computer screen glowing and a cat on your lap? Are you on a train? It seems odd, this projection of self, nothing like my newspaper days when I believed, I don’t know, that the audience was somehow more common, Everyman-like, knowable. But you, you might be an expert in blogs, technology, schools, teaching or this Web 2.0 experiment. You might have been blogging for years.  It seems odd to write to/for you. But I guess teaching middle school has prepared me for odd undertakings, and I’ve learned to run with it. 

And I’m moving up to high school this year, to a school that has an excellent reputation for academics and that was created to make using technology a priority. The word technology is in the school’s name even, which goes to show that they were serious eight years ago when they founded it. I have wanted to teach at this school from the beginning, but I wanted to send my two children there even more and they did not want mom around, so I put the idea on the shelf. Last month my daughter graduated and the coast became clear. I’ve been hired — the only new hire for next year (gulp!) — as a 10th grade English teacher… six periods of English, emphasis on world literature. Now the fun begins.