Befuddled

The recent elections for the European Parliament have given the Pirate Party of Sweden the right to have one of their number join the Parliament. While the name of the party is intriguing (think what they must do on Talk Like a Pirate Day), their origins are even more interesting.

The party seens to have been set up in response to Swedish efforts to shut down the file exchange site, Pirate Bay. There’s no official link between the Pirate Party and Pirate Bay but the Pirate Party has expressed support for Pirate Bay as it fights the government sanctions in court.

The Pirate Party wants to see a radical reform of copyright laws where all noncommercial copying becomes legal and file sharing is encouraged.

This, if enacted, would be a seismic shift in copyright law. It seems to suggest that anything I or you create can be copied, downloaded or otherwise passed on for free as long as the person passing it on is not making money off of it.

I have to wonder how a writer, artist, producer, singer, etc could possibly make a living doing what they do if anyone could copy their work and pass it on for free? What would our the incentive to financially support singers or directors if we could have their work for free? What would an artist’s incentive to work and create new songs or movies if you could legally buy one DVD and copy it repeatedly, passing it on for free to all your friends? It would destroy any market for their work.

I can’t help buy wonder if the Pirate Party has thought out the
implications of their stand. They sound much like high school students who think they should be allowed to have everything for free simply because they are technologically able to get it for free. “The worker deserves his wages.” How will those who have toiled be paid so that the people who don’t feel like paying can have their toys for free?

This past week I was part of a pretty massive undertaking that we’ve dubbed the Red River Regional Heritage Fair. The Fair covers most of Greater Winnipeg and is a one day Social Studies-related event that brings in student projects that delve into all kinds of Canadian history and heritage topics.

This was our biggest fair ever with about 350 projects and 400 kids participating from 30 schools spread across at least five school divisions. It took place at the U of Winnipeg’s Duckworth Centre from about 8 in the morning until about 8 at night.

For me as co-chair, registrar, and web master of the Fair, it was a cool event because I got to see our really pretty impressive team in action. We’ve got a good bunch who’ve learned a lot since we started doing this five years ago. No one shirks, and everyone works hard.

As co-chairs of the Fair, Marie and have been learning to let as many tasks as possible go to our planning committee instead of us. Partly that saves our sanity, but that also gets our entire committee actively participating in organizing the Fair. That, I think, gives them a greater sense of ownership. Running our Heritge Fair isn’t just about the leaders, it’s about the entire planning committee.

Our Fair is also a simple enough project that everyone involved in the planning can see how their little part (judging, finding sponsors or workshops presenters, registering the kids, etc) can see how their small part works to affect the whole process.

Besides just creating a great experience for our students, part of the appeal of this Heritage Fair is working with a great team. That feeling is often lacking in my role as a classroom teacher because teachers tend to work more or less independently of each other, often ignorant of the overall picture. (I don’t say that as a criticism of my school. Most schools seem to operate this way in my experience.) Not only do we work independently as teachers, we often ask our students to do the same.

I’ll admit that elementary teachers and students collaborate more than us secondary types. Still, there’s more we could do. This is, I think, part of the reason why the Web 2.0 technologies have so many teachers excited. There are so many more ways to have the students collaborate within their own class, and even for classes to collaborate outside of the school. At our very core, human beings are social creatures – not unlike their Creator – and this social need to learn and work together is met in part with wikis, blogs, Twitter, and other online tools.

If you don’t believe that we work and learn well as groups, just try it.The kids will love it.  One of our grade 5 teachers just did some very simple blogging with her students. She was told that this was the coolest assignment they had done all year. Those guys will be so surprised when they get to start working with a wiki in a few days.

Teamwork with our Heritage Fair was cool, and now the challenge is how to continue that in school. Those cool Internet based technologies are certainly part of the solution in getting the kids to work together. Encouraging cooperation among teachers may be more challenging. I’m up for the challenge.

Every year about this time I’m busy trying to put together our Regional Heritage Fair along with our great team of volunteer teachers, museum staff, business men and others. Being the guy who registers the kids and assigns them to workshops, I spend a lot of time at a computer in the weeks leading up the Fair.

With Google Docs I’ve set up an online form to register the kids. This saves hours of typing the names of kids and their projects off of hand written registration forms. It also allow me a convenient way to assign the kids to workshops since I can download all the information into an Excel spreadsheet and manipulate it any way I want.

When I’m done assigning students to workshops, I print off name tags for the kids using the mail merge function of Word. Then I’m racing to print participation certificates for 380 kids using the mail merge in MS Publisher.

Before I joined the planning committee for our Heritage Fair, all of this was done manually (well, with a computer), with names and such being cut and pasted from one document to another. It was time consuming, and I’ve learned enough to speed up the process a bit.

What I find interesting is that some of the local schools run trackmeets, etc, and I still see phys ed teachers having the kids register manually, on paper, and then they typing up the results.  With a Google Doc form all that could be automated.

Our school registrar gets the kids to sign up for courses for the new year by filling in sheets of paper and handing them in. She then inputs that data into an appropriate program and spends hours and hours at it. With a Google Doc form, so much of that process could be automated. I’ve suggested it, but there’s been no change so far.

There is a reluctance to use technology, perhaps a fear of it. I should point out that our planning committee nixed my idea to have school pay registration fees for our Heritage Fair online using PayPal or something like that. It seemed like I was the only one who’d bought something online because the rest of them thought the process for online payment was too complicated.

I’m not sure how you get people to adopt new and ultimately simpler ways to do their tasks, but I’m still trying. The battle goes on.