Clay Burell has written an interesting post about global collaboration, in which he explores the possibilities and impediments associated with “flat world” classroom projects. He has also set up a 1 to 1 Flat Classroom Project Network Forum, at Classroom 2.0, which invites teachers from 1:1 schools to discuss future projects. Clay is the brain behind the innovative 1001 Flat World Tales project, which involved students from three high schools (from South Korea, Hawaii and Canada) in a collaborative creative writing project. He writes how 1:1 “schools are prime candidates for “normalizing” flat classroom collaboration across the curriculum”. While every student having their own laptop isn’t necessary, it certainly makes these types of projects more likely to succeed.

While 1:1 laptop programs have recently attracted some negative PR, most schools who have taken the decision embrace a 1:1 environment do so because they value collaborative and constructivist approaches to learning and the development of post-industrial skills, such as multi-modal literacy, critical thinking and problem solving.
Web 2.0 has made global interaction so much easier. Projects that allow communication outside the classroom, school, region or country have the potential to engage students in a way that hasn’t been possible before and to add an authenticity to outcomes/standards such as “students become global citizens”.

My class, along with a school in Shanghai and Serbia, began a second Flat World High Schools project, which unfortunately hit some considerable bumps. These included three different sets of holidays, which meant that there was a six to eight-week lapse, which fatally undermined the flow of the project. From my end, our three-week holiday was followed by an excursion week and exams and the whole endeavour came to a halt. Having said that, students in my class were still checking out the site, reading other people’s stories and comments this week even though the project had stalled and there had been little activity for weeks. This demonstrated that in terms of engagement, students are very excited by the prospect of global collaboration and communication with students from other countries. I’m sure this is probably the case for most students, but as a school in regional Australia (five hours from a major city in any direction), we are aware that we are geographically isolated in a national and international sense and this is a reason why using laptops (especially when they are the students’ own) to facilitate genuinely international communication is potentially very powerful.
The main problem, other than a lack of planning, was that this was essentially an “extension” project that was in addition to syllabus content my class was covering. One of the main impediments to initiating these projects succcessfully is that teachers, and students, are “time-poor” and that’s why working with teachers who are teaching in the same area may be a way to address this issue. For example, imagine if students studying World War One or the French Revolution could interact and discuss these topics. Or students reading “To Kill A Mockinbird” or “Hamlet” were able to analyse and explore concepts together, and compare how their cultural contexts can lead to different interpretations and critical readings. There are many teachers who can see the value in these projects but I think they are unsure about how to get them off the ground. Many are asking how to make these projects part of “mainstream” classses and I think that modelling successful projects and sharing tips and guidelines on planning and implementation are practical ways to do this.

Image: http://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/2006/09/leading_teams_i_1.html