“Play is the child’s work” is a line made famous by the early childhood educator, Maria Montessori.

I interpret that to mean many things. But perhaps most importantly I believe it to mean that through play, children – and I would say youth and adults, too – make meaning of their world. This idea is related, in my mind, to the iterative nature of learning. I think it’s not coincidental that we describe brainstorming and experimentation as “playing with ideas,” or that we say we’re “playing with language” when we draft and revise and draft again.

When I taught second grade, years ago, we had many ways in which we all could play. One involved large-ish wooden blocks in a variety of shapes, from one-foot-long skinny rectangles to short arches. We used the blocks as a choice-time activity in the mornings, and that led sometimes to entire cities being constructed from the builders’ imaginations. Other times, we incorporated the blocks into our instruction, like when we studied the Brooklyn Bridge.

In all cases, though, we built based on our previous experiences, built to embrace new ideas, built to experiment. Then tore down and started over again. Where play ended and work began, and vice versa, was seldom clear.

This is of course the story of a second grade classroom. It’s not like anyone is clamoring to put wooden block areas in middle or high school classrooms.

But I would say that some of us are clamoring to put the equivalent of wooden block areas in middle and high school classrooms. The desire to facilitate learning through game development and game design is one such push. Game development is dependent upon the creative impulse of play, as well as iterative design. The point, though, of learning programs like Scratch and GameStar Mechanic is not simply to develop games; rather, it’s to understand systems-thinking and possibly even build and create mechanisms for demonstrating knowledge about history and science and any other subject area.

These programs sit at the intersection of work and play.

I recently read an article about the Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, known as the father of modern video games and famous as the creator of such seminal games as Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers.

Miyamoto is credited with wresting videogames away from the world of developers and programmers and implementing compelling narratives, ones that still resonate today. And where did he get those narratives? From his childhood playing: in caves, among streams, and in his mind’s eye.

Miyamoto told Sheff not only about the cave but about dares among his friends to make forays into neighbors’ basements and yards, or about a neighbor’s bulldog that would charge him each time he passed by, jerking on its chain, or about getting stuck high in a tree or wondering what was at the bottom of manholes. He filled his games with his childlike interpretation of the world as a carnival of quirky perils and hidden delights.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/20/101220fa_fact_paumgarten#ixzz1pV6VwaRb

It’s this interplay between play and work and work and play – like that which happens in  block areas, or in video game development, or during the negotiation of rules on the playground – that constitutes my kind of learning environment. And I think that might hold true for lots of kids, too.

If you’re hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it’s because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism.

That was written about three years ago in a much-talked-about Atlantic article, “End Times,” which essentially predicted the end of the print edition of the New York Times and possibly the end of the Times altogether.

Clearly, the Times has managed to survive. And, apparently, even begin to thrive with its new paywall structure in which anyone can view a limited number of articles per month at its website for free but after that you have to pay in order to view more. Those who subscribe to the digital edition have unlimited access. And those who subscribe to the print edition like me – I get the Sunday newspaper delivered – also have unlimited access to the web edition.

I remember when the Times’ paywall plan was announced. Many of the people I admire and respect and follow in spaces like Twitter howled and said they would no longer read the Times. They pointed to the freely available online news content created by individuals via blogs and social media, to sites that detailed breaking “news” about specific topics, and news aggregation spaces that seemed to curate any content you might want to read.

I’m sympathetic. It’s true, bloggers and social media and news aggregation sites are changing the landscape of journalism and challenging traditional notions, which is leading to an evolution that I think is exciting and good. I personally get breaking news more reliably via Twitter – either people I follow or through hashtags – than I do traditional institutional news outlets.

But I also think there must be support for the large, traditional institutions that have the resources to do the kind of time-consuming, investigative reporting that is not always possible for individuals. And I’m willing to pay in order that some portion of the news I read or listen to or watch is created by journalists who have been trained as journalists. This desire is analogous in my mind to my desire to have children taught by teachers who, for the most part, have received educational experiences or professional development that help them understand pedagogy and curriculum and child psychology.

I continue to monitor the non-profit experiments in journalism, many of which seem to be fighting their way towards acclaim and success. Pro Publica is a great example of the recognition that investigative journalism, done well, may not be a moneymaker. Funded primarily by a foundation grant, Pro Publica gives its work away to major news outlets for free under a Creative Commons license. Other non-profits, many of them here in California, such as the Bay Citizen and the Center for Investigative Reporting, continue to try to find a business model that will work in this new landscape.

Meanwhile, traditional newspapers from the Los Angeles Times to The Washington Post scramble to survive as they confront the reality that they’re competing with emerging news sources that are both hyperlocal and global in ways they are unable to match.

I, too, as I said, search Twitter hashtags for the latest news. And use apps like Pulse to scan a variety of stories from a variety of news sources each day. And I know The New York Times is far from the truth when it claims that its editions carry “All the news that’s fit to print.” Still, I think more than nostalgic longing for a bygone era will be lost if theTimes is unable to adapt to the new media landscape and goes under. I think we’ll have lost a tremendous hedge against the stories that purposely go untold.

So though the Times is a for-profit corporation, I’m willing to plunk down my 20 bucks or so each month to pay for the content I receive, much like I pay my member dues for my local public radio radio stations. I want these outlets to survive and provide the kinds of in-depth reporting on far-ranging topics from those places where lights aren’t often shined, except by journalists.

I’ve been on a whole bunch of trains in the past two months.

I rode the Southwest Chief from Chicago to Newton, Kansas, and saw a beautiful sunset over the fields of southern Illinois. I’ve taken the Chicago subway from O’Hare Airport ($2.25 will get you downtown – a much better deal than a shuttle ride on the misnamed Kennedy expressway). I’ve even watched the landscape of Japan – cities as well as farm fields – whiz by from a comfortable seat on the famed bullet trains of that country.

And today I’ll ride the Bay Area Rapid Transit into work.

I had the good fortune to talk with Erin’s grandfather, Clyde, about trains a couple of weeks ago while Erin and I were in Oklahoma visiting her family. Clyde was a station agent, among other things, for the Sante Fe railroad in outposts sprinkled across Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri. Clyde’s wife, and Erin’s grandmother, Rosalee has told stories of pulling in mailbags from steam-powered locomotives that passed feet from where she stood.

Trains still crisscross Oklahoma today. But they’re carrying freight.

Clyde remembered a time when you could ride a trolley from one nearby town to the next. When Union Station in Kansas City, a beautiful beaux-arts structure with a grand waiting area that is now less a passenger terminal and more an entertainment complex, was a central hub of activity in the midwest.

Clyde, like most people, does not believe trains will ever again carry even a fraction of the passengers they once did, especially not in the sparsely populated farming and ranching country of the midwest. The unveiling of the Eisenhower Interstate highway system more than 50 years ago sealed that fate, as did a long series of miscues by Amtrak.

Laying down new tracks is too expensive, Clyde points out, despite all the talk of high-speed rail in places as disparate as northern California and central Texas. And the current recession saps whatever will our elected officials may have once had for building a modern greener national transportation system that relies on trains, versus cars and planes.

More’s the pity since I for one like trains. They stop in small towns with crossings that cause everyone to pause for a few moments. They let you see – really see – the country you’re passing through. They’re communal. They have snack cars (sometimes).

Read more of my train rantings – this time about the No. 7 Flushing line – at 100wordstory.org.

And, despite whatever other things a mother of four who also worked full-time had to do, she would always pause to point out the letters that my childish scrawl had accidentally formed. “There’s an m,” she would say encouragingly. “Here’s an n.” It was invariably m’s and n’s. But I didn’t care. I could write and, most importantly, my writing could be understood by a grownup.

My mom is not a native English speaker. She immigrated to this country after the Korean War and still has difficulty mastering the diabolical nuances of English. Both spoken and written. My mom to this day will send me letters she has written so that I can copy-edit, make revisions, help her convey intended meaning.

She would never call herself a writer.

And yet, here I am, profiting intellectually and professionally from this act of scribbling – more digitally these days – and sharing those scribbles with others.

Why do I write? Perhaps it’s to show that the son of a Korean immigrant has mastered the language, has assimilated the hell out of himself. Or maybe it’s more simply that, like a child, I’m still amazed that anyone can make meaning out of my m’s and n’s.

“21st century teaching”

“21st century learning”

“21st century workforce”

“21st century skills”

What hasn’t been labeled “21st century” these days?

As so many have already pointed out, we’re more than one decade in. So the adjective, as a representation of forward-thinking, is rapidly losing its relevance. But the general idea is that of a reality that reflects our increasingly digitally immersed lives.

I’ve not heard, however, much use of the phrase 21st century social justice.

In fact, I’ve never heard it uttered even once.

Why is that, I wonder? I firmly believe that most if not all teachers, most if not all people in fact, that I come into contact with on a day to day basis would say that they believe in the importance of social justice, in solidarity and equality and perhaps even aspects of social redistribution of wealth, like social safety nets. It may in fact be the reason they entered the field of education in the first place.

Perhaps “social justice” simply represents old-school rhetoric. Maybe we ran out of steam as we tossed around the “21st century” label. Or could it be that for many, social justice as a concept has meaning – represents an immutable set of values – that transcends any one time period or external circumstances?

I would argue, though, that social justice by its very nature is informed by the social and cultural context within which it’s being viewed. Social justice today means something both similar and different than what it meant in the previous century. Different in the sense that it signifies today equal access to and understanding of the tools of digital creation and communication, and therefore power. And when I say “understanding,” I don’t mean simply the knowledge to make and communicate using these tools. But also the critical understanding of how these tools are used to disenfranchise the very youth who employ them just as easily as they are used to promote and amplify their own participatory voice. That every digital act represents a value system.

Here’s one example of what I’m talking about: Redefining Romeo and Juliet: Reclaiming the “Ghetto”

I’m curious: What do you think social justice today looks like? What should it look like?

Valerie was a wonderful colleague, a world traveler who had lived in Dubai for many years – not typical for Amherst, Massachusetts. Well read and always up on the news. But when I heard those words, I knew she had misinterpreted. I had enough hubris to say to Valerie, “That’s impossible. I’m from New York City. I know. If one of the towers collapsed, hundreds of thousands of people would be dead.”

I imagined a tower toppling over, in the way that my second grade students used to knock down the wooden block structures at the end of choice time. I imagined the World Financial Center obliterated. And I rejected the idea.

My principal walked in soon after and said only, “We’re under attack. The World Trade Center has been attacked.” Then she walked out, presumably to make the same shocking statement to another adult.

At that point, I tried to dial up various news sites. CNN, the New York Times – all returned only spinning hourglasses. So I started listening to NPR. And heard the reports as the second tower fell.

I thought of my family and called my sister, who lived – and still lives – on the Upper West Side, in Manhattan. She and her husband worked in mid-town. I thought of my friends, like Adam, who worked down in Soho and lived in Brooklyn. Much much later, when I finally got through to them, I heard about Adam’s panicked trek, along with thousands of others, across the Brooklyn Bridge, amidst the ash, towards what they hoped was safety. I heard about how my sister and brother-in-law desperately tried to reach each other by phone. Later, Lisa kept remarking on how beautiful the weather was that week, and how surreal that felt.

I grew up in Queens, went to high school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Moved back to Brooklyn for a number of years as an adult. Of course in Manhattan we all steered by orienting ourselves to the World Trade Center. But even in Brooklyn, even as far away as Flatbush Avenue, at the north end of Prospect Park, you could see the tops of the twin towers. There they were less a guide and more a reminder of the enormity of the city. Brooklyn, at least this particular neighborhood in Brooklyn, might be full of three-story row houses. But not too far away are two of the tallest buildings in the world.

When I made it home that day, I again listened to the radio. I didn’t have television and I could only sporadically connect with MSNBC, and no other news services, online. It wasn’t until the next day that I saw footage of what happened. And, like everyone else, began to mourn fully the loss and the destruction. But it was radio – NPR specifically- that brought me in touch with the rescue efforts and the grieving and the country’s political and military responses.

Now, a decade later, I’ve had the great good fortune to work on a radio program with Heidi Epstein Ojalvo, of the New York Times Learning Network; Jennifer Lemberg of the Holocaust Educators Network and the Gallatin School at NYU; Corey Harbaugh of the Third Coast Writing Project; and Cindy O’Donnell-Allen, of the Colorado State University Writing Project.

We developed together an online radio program that focused on teaching about September 11th. I could tell you how smart and thoughtful they each are, how they bring compassion and passion to their work as educators, how they each have a unique story to tell about their experiences related to September 11th – Holly, for instance, as a teacher 4 blocks from the World Trade Center at my former high school, Jennifer as someone who works with students who have never in their lives discussed 9/11 in an academic setting.

But instead, I’ll just say that you should listen for yourself.

What my mom does not usually mention is the Japanese occupation of Korea, which officially began in 1910 and lasted until the end of World War II, in 1945. My mom, in other words, lived her entire childhood – until the time she was 13 – under colonial rule.

During that period she, like everyone else in the country, was essentially forced to give up her Korean name in favor of  a Japanese one. Japanese was made Korea’s official language, taught and spoken in school. In fact, my mom says, Korean was forbidden and could only be used at home. These actions were part of an assimilation campaign enforced by the Japanese as part of their annexation of Korea. The goal was to create a uniform culture based on Japanese – and not Korean – institutions.

The author Richard Kim wrote a stirring fictional account of this period in his book, Lost Names, which I read several years ago after having the good fortune to meet and work with Mr. Kim’s wife, Penny. The story, told from the perspective of a young boy, focuses on the anguish experienced by his family and his community as new names are imposed on them.

Of course, when my mom arrived in the United States in the late 1950s, she and my father decided to take on “American” names – Leah, for my mom, which was a close approximation of Lee, her Korean surname prior to marriage – which they believed would help ease their assimilation. Though I’ve never asked my mom – and I should and now will – whether she sees it as paradoxical that she gave up a name in one instance that she longed to keep in another, I think what she would say is that the critical difference is it was her choice to make in taking on an American name and identity.

I was recently reminded of Lost Names - the historical moment it portrays, questions of name and identity, of choice and coercion – when I came across the website, and movement, My Name Is Me.

From the About page of their site:

“My Name Is Me” is about having the freedom to be yourself online. We want people to be able to identify themselves as they wish, rather than being forced to choose names by social networking websites and other online service providers.

Websites such as Facebook and Google+ ask you to use a name that conforms to a certain standard. Though their policies vary, what they would like you to use is the name that appears on the ID in your wallet, your employer’s records, or on the letters your bank sends you. They don’t understand that many people go by other names, for a wide variety of reasons.

Unlike my Mom’s experience, when she was forced to take on what essentially was a pseudonym, the opposite is happening today in social media spaces: we no longer have the right to choose a pseudonym and still participate in these enormously influential institutions. In both instances, our ability to identify ourselves in the way we want, and in many cases need, is being suppressed.

Researcher and blogger danah boyd describes this as an abuse of power.

I would agree.

By the way, my mom’s Korean name: Kyung-Ok.

I’ve known New York City Writing Project teacher-consultant Paul Allison for almost as long as I’ve been part of the writing project. And in all those years, he has never ceased to amaze me as he pokes and prods and stretches – sometimes to the breaking point – the frontiers of digital technologies.

Last week was no exception. Paul, who hosts the weekly webcast, Teachers Teaching Teachers, decided to experiment with Google+, the new social networking tool unveiled by those people up in Mountainview.

Paul created a Google+ “hangout” featuring a videochat, in essence, with up to 9 members of the Cooperative Catalyst blogging community of educators, including Chad Sansing, TC from the Central Virginia Writing Project and co-founder of the Coop. It was in essence, in form if not content, a TV talkshow with guests from all over the country. Paul worked with his friends at EdTechTalk, specifically Jeff Lebow, which provides the TTT web infrastructure, to record the chat, which immediately after the show was published to YouTube and is the video attached to this post.

The video is poignant and democratic and explanatory and heartfelt – and meandering. Like you might expect from any hour-long conversation. The incredible thing to me, though, is not just the content but the fact that this multi-faceted and multimodal resource exists for others to access. And that it was so easily created using free tools.

Anyone with a Google account (which someone recently estimated on the low-end at 200 million people) and Screencast-o-matic to record the videochat conversation can now let loose and create multimedia artifacts with multiple voices from across the country or across town – without so much as one edit. Whether that’s a good or bad thing depends on your perspective I suppose.

For me, the possibilities for positive results seem endless. Another person I’m in conversation with, for instance, wants to try Google+ hangout as a means to facilitate writing response groups that transcend geographic boundaries.

How might a tool like this benefit your work – in the classroom (and at your writing project site, if you’re a writing project teacher)?

I’ve noticed that in working with developers, they often use the term “sandbox.” By that, they mean a place to build, test, experiment and play without any significant consequences. We’ve used a sandbox to check out how an experimental sign-in system would work in this new system, for instance. In other words, the sandbox is a place to create a draft, tear it apart, rebuild and, most importantly, learn with others on the way towards a final product. Because before you go into production, the expectation is that you’ll first try out whatever it is you’re hoping to implement to remedy any bugs and come up with a workable solution.

Developers understand, in other words, that we need a place to iterate. And in these iterations, they expect failure. It’s through failures in the sandbox – a low-stakes arena – that we’re able to make needed refinements. It’s through questions raised about one’s experiences in the sandbox that developers can then assess what will work best for users.

Naturally, as a former early elementary teacher, I can’t help but think of school in relation to this metaphor. There was a time when I had in my second grade classroom a block area, where kids could build and tear down and play and imagine. For a while, I had a water table, complete with sand, where kids could create scenarios and hypotheses, act or test them out, then smooth down the sand and try again the next day. Usually, my kids had choice time in the morning where they could use these areas to play – what feels like a dirty word in school these days – but more importantly to engage socially to solve problems, work collaboratively and develop plans that they then tried to enact together. We also used arenas like the block area to build in relation to units of study. We examined bridges one year and we worked on building bridges with these large, wooden blocks. We studied water, and we used our water table to experience the properties of water.

I can’t help contrast these experiential arenas that are designed to promote learning through iteration – through repeated “failures”, in other words – with the current high-stakes winner-take-all mindset. Needless to say, there were no tests to measure a student’s block area aptitude or water table acumen. Not that I couldn’t have devised them.

I worry that our students are being led down a path of right/wrong when really, as the world of coders and developers know, there are often many possible solutions to a problem. And usually the best way to find the best solution is to play with others in the sandbox.

Special thanks to Paul Hankins, Crystal Howell and Melissa Techman, who help me clarify my thinking about all things, but specifically about sandboxes during a recent twitter conversation.

The building, that imposing, iconic structure with marble lions flanking the entrance steps, is 100 years old. So the library pulled out its greatest hits, in essence, and is proudly displaying them (free of charge).

The list of artifacts is a list of our cultural and political history. There is an original copy of the Declaration of Independence, one of 10 in existence. A musical score penned by John Coltrane. An original copy of John Audobon’s Birds of North America, opened to a stunning full-sized painting of Carolina parrots. A typed letter, full of offbeat nonsense, from Groucho Marx to the New Yorker’s Harold Ross. Virginia Woolf’s last diary entry and her walking stick found floating in the River Ouse after she filled her pockets full of stones and drowned herself. Tibetan Buddhist prayer scrolls. Photographs of Malcolm X, along with one of his notebooks penned after a pilgrimage to Mecca.

I went from one glass case to the next, amazed by what was before me.

What transfixed me most, though, were those objects that represented the process of composing. A draft of Native Son, with paragraphs crossed out, words rearranged, editing marks inserted. A notebook kept by Jack Kerouac during one of his epic road trips to the east coast. His lyricism leapt up at me. This was the non-fiction On the Road, or at least one chromosomal piece to that puzzle. A lock of Mary Shelley’s hair, which was enclosed in a letter to a friend. Annie Proulx’s notebook with a beautiful watercolor landscape she created alongside her words. A set of manual typewriters, one of which belonged to T.S. Eliot and had above it a draft of The Wasteland, ostensibly typed on that very machine.

I happened upon the library as Erin and I were trying to figure out what to do on a rainy day in Manhattan, before dinner with my family. As we walked from one exhibit to the next, thinking that there couldn’t be something to top what we’d just seen (“Original cuneiform tablets. Interesting. OHMYGOD! The first Guttenberg bible in the U.S.! WOW!”<endless repeat>), Erin took note of these artifacts of the writing process. And she lamented the loss to history of typewriter drafts and handwritten editing marks – the loss over time of something as unique and personal as handwriting itself.

I hope writers will continue to keep handwritten and hand-drawn notebooks. If only so that during the New York Public Library’s main branch bicentennial, the public is treated not just to decaying iPads and digital audio transcripts and youtube video documentation, but also to the hauntingly gorgeous quality of ink and paint on paper.

Here’s to our students, the newest generation of writers, who are even now creating the artifacts of history.

(Laura Miller has written a great piece at salon.com about the exhibit and libraries in general: Why Libraries Matter)