Unexpected Lessons. When my class turned into a ‘newsroom.’

February 23, 2022February 24, 2022 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Today, no sooner I got to school, I saw an email to staff about a coffee truck stopping by. A fundraiser for the school’s Cheer team. Not your common or garden food truck (a converted horse trailer) Exchange Coffee is a company with an interesting origin story.

So as my students came to class — my Writing and Publishing class –I nixed the day’s assignment on my lesson plan and asked them if they like to work as an impromptu news team. Grab a camera and some mics I told them. Someone needed to prep for the story, to look up some background information of the owners of Exchange Coffee. Another began to write down possible questions on a small white board while two others tested the audio, and if the clip-on mic units were charged. Clip-on mics aren’t the best for impromptu stories, so one student, adapted our ‘dummy’ mic to the Hotec clip-on, so that it communicated back to the camera. We rushed downstairs. I asked the owners (who also make and serve the coffee) if it was OK to do a story about them.

Once that was cleared, I got the students to shoot some B-roll. A school bus rolling in. A weird half moon was rising as the sun came over the Queen Creek horizon. An engine roared –possibly a train or a noisy aircraft from the nearby Phoenix-Mesa Gateway airport. Sound engineer? Check. Camera person? Check. Reporter? Check.

As we began to roll, Don Meyer, an English teacher unexpectedly wheeled into frame, in full biking gear. Perfect! (I’ve featured Mr. Meyer on a podcast and blog post so I was confident this ‘customer’ would agree to being in the story.) The story was suddenly growing more legs. The ‘reporter’ began describing the scene, and got a interview with the owner/barista.

The audio quality turned out better than we expected. More than that, our reporter sounded like a reporter, despte just having 5 minutes of planning the story. The camera person got her right shots. Fifteen minutes to the bell, we switched off the tech and headed back to class to review the work.

NOW COMES THE LEARNING PART. I will play back the recording, and over the next few days and have the students critique their work. Could they have done anything different? What about lighting? What about camera angles? What if this was an ‘incident’? How would they handle it? Could they have interviewed customers? Could they have got a different camera angle – say from inside the truck?

Publishing in a digital world is tricky business. It’s never static. Stories, like lesson plans are always in flux. The best lessons are learned on the job. We are often poised at the top of the Bloom’s taxonomy pyramid, ‘creating original work,’ investigating, revising, reconstructing knowledge in the moment. Sometimes a coffee truck hijacks the lesson plan. You adapt and run with it.

Tomorrow I have invited an author, Jessica McCann, talk to the class about the writing craft, about fiction, and picking out details for a story. Does a video story or podcast have something in common with a novel? We’ll ask!

NEXT WEEK, my students will be working on podcasts. Who knows where this –and what unplanned events – will take my class. Stay tuned. Didn’t I mention – my class starts at 6:30 am? I might need more coffee!

‘Colors of Colombo’ gives voice to the voiceless.

February 4, 2022February 4, 2022 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

A Web developer and a journalist walk into a juice bar. The book that they just published paints the city I grew up in, in stunning light.

If you’ve lived here, you’d know when to duck a ball flying in your direction from a raucous cricket match. (The clue is often a pair of Bata slippers making do for a wicket.) Or where to find isso vadas, or chinese rolls; where that bicycle-tube repair guy on Galle Road sits under a piece of plastic; or what time the knife sharpener and choon pan tuktuk might arrive. These ‘experts’ and entrepreneurs however, are easy to miss because they just blend into the cacophony that is Colombo. Sadly many of them are hidden in plain sight like faded wall posters. But no worries – Nazly Ahmed has them in his viewfinder. He pulls up on his motorbike and takes in the details with his trusty camera. Lucky us!

Colours of Colombo is a glimpse into that other side of Colombo, the lives lived in the shadow of the luxury apartment towers, and by unkempt beaches. It may be too small-scale a book to qualify for a coffee-table piece (which is my only beef with the collection. Visual storytelling like this ought to be seen in large format.) But the colours that pour out of it let us pay attention to those slices of life that are left out of tourist brochures. Who else would focus on a road sweeper in Mattakkuliya surrounded by grit, casting an ominous shadow? Or the tuktuk driver taking a nap like a cartoon strip framed against a giant piece of graffiti? Or the saravita seller’s serene, weatherbeaten face? These lead characters are part of the daily docudrama played out across the 15 zip codes of a city I once called home. Sadly, many of them are in transit, or worse, anonymous. Their names don’t roll in with the credits. Nazly (the photo-hobbyist and web developer) and Kris Thomas (the writer) have taken pains to put many names to faces, giving voice to the voiceless, a secondary, magnanimous accomplishment.

Reading this book made me wistfully attempt to recall those who’ve remained nameless in my childhood. (Your list is probably as big as mine.) The vedamahathaya down Havelock Road who once reset my dislocated elbow; the smiling lady outside St. Peter’s College who sold us ambarella achcharu through the iron gates. The tuktuk driver who religiously showed up on Sunday mornings to take my mother to church. The rickshaw man who transported my cousin and I to school and back. The kiri-karaya from Sagara Road. Their legacy is not found in my photo album. But they were itinerant actors who were part of a city drama never forgotten.

Nazly and Kris don’t just take us back in time. They freeze the frame. I was glad to see that they all but ignored the parts of Colombo that privileged folk –and Instagrammers – go after. The bars, the buffet tables, the coffee shops. Yes there are some waterfronts in shimmering light, but some beaches (like one in Bambalapitiya) are murky. Shanties stand out against a backdrop of affluence. The other waterfront (a once hyped floating market), they note, is abandoned.

By an unhappy coincidence the book comes out in a time when Sri Lanka is facing its biggest crisis. Colombo, where all the machinations of the political economy are worked out, is experiencing power cuts. A lighting effect –and irony –any photographer would not miss. We could be optimistic and see Colors of Colombo as a glimmer amid the virus of poor governance.

Writing and publishing 100 Books in 5 weeks. How did they do that?

January 3, 2022January 3, 2022 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

When students sign up for a computer class, I tell them it’s a trick — they really signed up for a communications class that happen to have computers.

*Inside pages of ‘Ciphers’ published in December 2021. More here.*

In the last week of Fall semester my seventh grade students wrote and produced more than a hundred eBooks. A week before finals, many of them were burning the midnight oil proofing their chapters and fixing the ‘widows’ and orphans’ rather than cramming. They uploaded their final product as a PDF to Flipsnack, hit the ‘publish’ button and saw what five weeks of their creative writing project looked like.

Let me throw in some context about this assignment. Each semester my students take on a capstone project for which they have to prove that they understand document formatting. And by that I mean layout, design, fonts, margins, line spacing and all those nitty gritty features found on the ribbon of the most common applications they use — Google docs, Microsoft Word, Google Slides and PowerPoint.

I give them a few guidelines, and a 24-page template for the eBook created in Google Slides. Yes, Google Slides! An odd choice indeed for page layout. Having experimented with Microsoft Word and Google Docs several semesters ago, I discovered that PowerPoint or Slides are more flexible when it comes to formatting. Text boxes, drop-caps and margin control for instance work well.

There is considerable writing to be done, but the goal is to combine creative skills and mechanical tasks: To let students become storytellers, while making the text appeal to the eye. All this while doing the heavy lifting of research, copy editing, and design. They are shown how to design their book’s front and back cover in Canva, and import the PNG files. As for that back cover, I get them to create their own logo, insert a real barcode, and solicit two or more book reviews from their peers — reviews they place on the back cover. They must also write a blurb for the book (something a publisher or PR firm would do) and a short bio of themselves. The back-cover itself is one week’s worth of work! Authors may only use royalty-free images from sites that are in the Creative Commons. That means no Google Images.

They came up with their own book titles. And they were free to choose any genre, any subject. Many opted for fiction, but you’ll be surprised at the variety of non-fiction this year. I’ll get to the titles in a bit.

I’m sure you’re thinking — this is asking a lot of a 7th grader! And for anyone wondering why publish an eBook in a computer class, let me put it this way. Yes, my students are required to learn touch-typing and improve their speed and accuracy. We do this each week. But toward the end of the semester I tell them (half in jest) that they were tricked into believing they signed up for a computer class — when in fact they walked into a Communications class that happened to have computers. Not the other way around. The rationale, I tell them, is that the only purpose of ‘learning’ computers is to help them communicate better. Whether it is learning to code, making stunning presentations, designing a book cover, manipulating images in Photoshop, designing a website, or writing term papers or professional reports, the goal is always communication. The only reason you produce work for an audience — your teacher, a customer, an organization — is to communicate an idea. An eBook pulls together several of these core skills.

At the outset, when I tell students the book involves five chapters I hear a few groans. But very soon, I begin to see their story growing, the sentences inch-worming across a paragraph. The question I am always asked is if it’s OK to add a chapter or an extra page or two. Funny how they want that bar raised!

Apart from the usual Zombie Invasion, Horror, and a few about dragons and cute animals, I noticed an explosion in creativity this year. (Something I wrote about in an article on Medium, titled, “Start a Little Library, Side Effects Will Vary.”) I put it down to COVID, unleashing a fresh batch of creative juices. Consider these, handpicked to give you a sense of the diversity.

One book is set in an ‘Escape Room’ with some creative plot twists.
Another trippy alien mystery, ‘The Last Drop’ is scary. (it’s not about blood)
Like something intriguing? There’s a book titled, Ciphers with a techy, creative bent.
One on Beautiful Artwork is a truly aesthetic layout.
Interstellar is about space, but is not about that movie. It deals with the thermosphere and Braneworld Theory. (I had to look that term up!)

I was surprised to see a story on the ‘Witch Trials’ — with surprise angle. The author recounts the story of one of her ancestors caught up in the trials in Salem! How often do you get historical fiction with a personal angle to it?
A delightful book set in London is based on the urban legend of one ‘Spring-heeled Jack.’

As I have found out with each class, a writing project like this has surprise endings. Many students who never considered writing tell me they have become passionate about it.

Check out the podcast about this story, below.

Science Rocks. Clouds, too.

November 9, 2021November 9, 2021 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

The accompanying podcast relates to a previous post, To Teach Is To Learn Twice. It drops you into that class to hear why, with head in the clouds so-to-speak, science can be exciting. I promise you, you won’t be disappointed.

Richard Attenborough on Education

October 26, 2021 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I was touched by Sir. Richard Attenborough’s story about why education should not be taken for granted.

Last year, he was granted an honorary degree by the University of Leicester, my alma mater. I never knew he didn’t actually go to college, though I knew he –and his brother David – were Leicester boys. We take education too much for granted, don’t we?

Listen to the first 6 minutes of this and you’ll know what I mean.

Richard Attenborough has a great sense of humor combined with humility. I know this for a fact because I was lucky to interview him while at the BBC, back in 1989 at Capital Radio studios in London. I wrote a post on that, back in 2014.

But this speech gives me more perspective. The man was really educated in the school of life – in the arts, in travel, in acting, in being in front of, and behind a camera. Yet he knows why we should never take knowledge for granted.

“To teach is to learn twice.” Or thrice.

October 15, 2021October 15, 2021 / Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

So learned something about dark matter and Type 2 civilizations last month. From students. At 6:30 in the morning. This period is what’s known as a ‘zero-hour’ class in high schools like mine.

I had been invited to observe making presentations in a STEM class. The air was thick with magnetic fields and an ‘Oort cloud.’ It was followed by animated discussions that went on as casually as if they were discussing the pros and cons of Chick Fil-A. I tried remaining the fly on the wall, but the enthusiasm was too contagious to keep me on that wall. I found myself raising my hand to ask questions — reversing roles. I was that kid in the corner waiting to be called on!

You’re probably wondering about this Oort Cloud I mentioned in passing. A fascinating concept by Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort. According to one source, it is “a theoretical spherical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals that is believed to surround the sun.” I had never heard of this, so I raised my hand and asked the the student to explain planetesimals.

This, by the way, was a 10th grader who’s excitement could be mistaken for someone who had just won a NASA trip to the International Space Station. Unfortunately, it’s audio. You’d have to visualize the enthusiasm bouncing across the classroom. She barely glanced at her slides as she went on, which is what good presenters do. (Many students — and, sadly professionals — use a slide deck and do just the opposite.) She seemed to have installed the bullet points in her head; they were flung across the room with the velocity of teenager adjectives.

So here’s the larger point I’d like to make. I’ve been involved in STEM for many years, and it’s taken me on detours into Space science and, of course, robotics. But I now see STEM less as a destination, and more as an on-ramp. Even if these students may not be donning lab coats or invited to be part of some audacious project at SpaceX, just wrestling with complex topics like Type 2 civilizations and black holes give them the mindset to take on new challenges that will present themselves. I teach at a classical school where these same science students head to their next period in which they wrestle with the Iliad, followed by another class where they write papers on Hell, purgatory and Hamlet, or write a research proposal on the black plague. I know this because students come to my lab to work on these assignments. It’s a great way to learn from students.

Joseph Joubert, to whom the quote “He who teaches learns twice” is attributed, also said “It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.” I’ve debated the validity of STEM versus classical education and have come to this conclusion: It’s not an either-or argument. Our students must scrutinize the so-called ‘givens,’ and learn to defend topics they are passionate about, despite push-back. In academia we use a fancy term for this — a growth mindset. To me, it’s all about learning from unusual sources.

Twice, if I have to.

This was posted to Medium.com

Could AI have us for lunch?

September 29, 2021September 29, 2021 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I spoke to someone who uses two phones, but he uninstalled Twitter on both. He considers himself a ‘voracious’ consumer of podcasts but is careful about staying too long on the grid. Oh, and he recently co-founded an AI company — a software-as-services outfit.

Isura Silva is certainly no technophobe, nor is he a cheerleader of everything that Silicon Valley burps up. His insights into why technology could do our bidding, and not control our lives is refreshing. But I wanted to not just pick his brain on how he got to this place — into AI — but to understand his entrepreneurial mindset; why he is so optimistic when everything seems to be crumbling around him.

Isura considers social media as being potential forces of good. He and I disagree on this topic quite a bit. But he knows the downsides, first hand. So he aggressively filters the noise. He says he could slide back into technology controlling his time if he doesn’t take an aggressive stance. But there’s another area that Isura and I don’t see eye to eye – that AI could actually be beneficial to humanity, he believes. Which is why he co-founded an AI company in Sri Lanka. Sure, AI might free us of mundane tasks, I argued, but what about the dark side, of algorithms and machines replacing what makes us human?

“AI will eat the world,” Isura declared, understanding the irony.

Well, that’s exactly why I often talk to people like him. That’s why he’s featured on my latest podcast, and a longer version of our discussion here, on Medium.

Ignoring education is business as usual. Building ‘ghost schools’? That’s foreign policy.

September 21, 2021 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Photo by Yves Alarie on Unsplash

It’s so normal to put education on the back burner, it’s hardly news. You hear this from most teachers in many parts of the world. Governments always have bigger fish to fry – fighting nation states through proxy wars, purchasing fighter jets, for instance.

Many years ago –nearly 14 years in fact– I wrote about a new blog begun by the US State Department in its attempt to be more transparent. Field officers wrote about their work in countries like the Sudan and Afghanistan. Dipnote, as it was called was a breath of fresh air. But that hope was quickly dashed. Subsequent administrations lost the plot. What’s all this got to do with education?

Consider the story of ‘ghost schools’ by Buzzfeed News reporter Azmat Khan. Building schools in a country torn apart gave the US nice little project to look like it was doing some nation building in Afghanistan. Until it was discovered that this was money spent in vain. Ghost schools is a powerful metaphor of smoke and mirrors. And while the US was doing this, teachers in the US were working in poorly funded schools, many in trailers known as ‘portables.’ Students, likewise were struggling to juggle two jobs and school during the pandemic. It’s as if we raided our own country to use the funds to destroy another, and then rebuild what we broke. Here’s a disturbing comparison: Upgrading US public school facilities needs almost $200 billion according to the US department of education. An F-35 fighter plane costs $36,000 per hour. Per hour! All this while there’s a lot of hand-wringing when it comes to paying a teacher more than, say, $45,000 a year.

Put those two numbers on a slide and show it at your next community meeting.

So what’s my point? Since they can’t get foreign policy right, it’s time channeling some of those funds to domestic policy.

What my students asked a Googler.

September 3, 2021October 19, 2021 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Yesterday I brought back our Technology Speaker series for the new semester.

What better way than to start off with a Googler, Patrick Krecker. It was timely as I had just completed teaching units on the roots in the Net. How none of what we access on the Web (or Google) would be possible if not for a man named Tim Berners-Lee.

Web history aside, Mr. Krecker responded students questions. Pointed questions that let him take on some hot-button issues that come up for discussion in my class. Such as What does Google do with our data? Why is there so much hacking these days? What’s ransomware?

Patrick talked about security holes, and the ongoing pursuit hackers and the role of ‘white hats.’ I was glad he personalized what coding in his job involves (He says has written about 200,000 lines of code) given that coding is making its way into many schools now, to get students better prepared for what lies ahead.

As for me, I learned new terms and concepts, too. Things like ‘double spend,’ ‘deprecated software‘ and something known as ‘cross-site scripting‘ which refers to the injection of malicious scripts or code into ‘trusted’ websites.

Patrick has a gift for explaining complex ideas with metaphors. If you like to listen in to his conversation with my students, here’s a link to the video, which is also on my class website.

Listen to the ‘Radio 201’ podcast of this event:

___________________________

Patrick and I used to work at Decision Theater, at ASU about 11 years ago. It’s wonderful to see how far he’s moved along into a field he was always passionate about. Thank you Patrick for this wonderful experience in my class this week.

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Author: Angelo Fernando