Borderland

A home repair project has me thinking about literacy lessons, student blogging technology, and the pros and cons of do-it-yourself design. The do-it-yourself method has always been my approach to practical problems.

A great thing about living in rural Alaska is that construction permits are not required unless you’re financing with a bank. This is obvious when you see some of the houses around here. Until the power grid was extended to where we live we did without a lot of modern conveniences. We brought our water home in plastic jugs from the laundromat. We used an outhouse for our elimination needs and we built a nice sauna to bathe in. We used propane for refrigeration and cooking. We used kerosene, and a 12-volt system for lights. We heated with wood. It worked, but it was work.

Kids in diapers made the advantages of plumbing more obvious. We had power for about two years before we began to think about using it to run a pump, and so we began to think about running water. The laundromat got expensive and the time spent there was a drag, so we upgraded the house to conventional standards. We got a bank loan and contracted out all of the work on the house. I tried to stay out of the way, but I ended up doing several jobs, like building decks and installing the wood floor. What I didn’t learn, and didn’t want to learn, was plumbing.

It seems ironic to me that Drupal’s development site home page is called Community Plumbing since plumbing was the reason for the major upgrade to the house, and I’ve settled on using Drupal as my classroom blogging platform.

Plumbing has been on my mind today. This is the day that I’ve been long expecting-I become a do-it-yourself plumber. I’m tearing up and patching the floor because of a slow leak under the toilet. It’s not a big deal, except that it’s taking a lot of time, and it will come out looking like a repair job.

The connection with literacy teaching and blogging comes in here. For teachers who want to do more than simply implement the curriculum-as-received there is some additional work to be done beyond the normal practical preparation. If you want to use weblogs as a publishing medium with your students, you will need to figure out how to go about it, and the first thing to think about is whether you want to host a site yourself or use a system that is maintained by someone else. See the Blog Tool Options wiki to compare.

Because this is a do-it-yourself commentary, I should say that there are pros and cons to any choice you make. Like with my plumbing problem, I could have called a plumber to fix the toilet, but he would not have done anything worthwhile with my floor. I’d need a carpenter for that, and since it’s a custom floor, it would cost me a lot of money to have someone fix it. One thing I’ve learned, if a carpenter agrees to do a half-assed job because you don’t want to spend the money to have it done properly, then you probably don’t want that carpenter anyway, and you might as do the lousy job yourself, which is why I’m fixing my own toilet and my own floor.

It’s going to look rough, but it will work. The same thing will happen if you build your own website. And you will have the added satisfaction of knowing that anything that goes wrong with it is your own fault, plus (with Drupal, anyway) you can add lots of features like categories and user levels, moderation for comments and posts, image galleries, and custom URL’s for any page. You can have students work on collaborative books, AND each kid can have their own blog. All you have to do is learn a little bit about domain hosting and setting up a database. Not so simple, you say? Maybe not, but with some time and desire it can be done. I know.

This is exactly the same thing that will happen when you decide to abandon the text book and the basal and teach reading on the fly. You have to read a lot of research and hunt around for resources. You need to review everything ahead of time, and you need to expect that things will frequently turn out a bit rough. This is how it is for me, at least. And with that I have the satisfaction of knowing that I don’t need to use the boring stories or the meaningless vocabulary exercises that are provided by the publisher. I can follow my instincts and run the classroom like the expert I’m paid to be. This is rough on substitutes and parents who want to know what you’re doing next week. Uh…depends on what happens this week.

You can do it all yourself. It will work, but it’s work. And you’ll know why.