Today I had a meeting with @JayElf and @MissMissShelly over Zoom, and it was great!
One of the things we did together was to change the prompt of this activity. We realized that the previous prompt of “meet someone” was too vague and could make people feel lost, so we rephrased it and made it a bit more concrete by giving examples of things to do / discuss, and suggesting more places to interact (besides video calls).
I generally love working with friends on the same project (that’s how I get things done), but I’m particularly amazed by the process of collaboratively writing and revising a text, because you can clearly see how the sentences improve at every suggestion through an iterative process of quick negotiations.
This might be a little tangent, but it actually reminded me of the collaborative writing used by the children of the Barbiana school in Italy in the 60’s. Something very interesting about that process is described by don Lorenzo Milani in a letter to Mario Lodi. Here is my translation / adaptation from Italian:
Each kid has a very limited number of words that they use, and a very large number of words that they understand well, and whose value they know, but which would not come to their mouth easily. When they read aloud their 25 individual proposals, it always happens that one child (not always the older) has by chance guessed a particularly good word, or turn of phrase. All those present (although they had not been able to find it at the time they were writing) suddenly understand that the word is the best, and they want it to be adopted in the unified text.
That is, the text is at the cultural level of these kids’ ears, not at the level of their pen or their mouth.
As a non-native English speaker, I can totally see that difference between the level of my ears (recognizing) and my mouth (expressing). This also reminds me of Vygotsky’s idea of the Zone of Proximal Development
Anyway… the most enjoyable part of our meeting came later. While we were experimenting with new ways to share the slides in LCL Chats, I was encouraged to fly across the screen like superman! We shared lots of laughter and then a very serious reflection on the value and importance of being silly together.
I hope you’ll also enjoy learning and laughing with peers!
Italiano - العربية - Español - Türkçe - 日本語 - Português - Français
, and maybe we can arrange a video-call together : D
. I appreciate you mentioning Vygotsky, too. I sometimes reread some of his and his students’ work (Bozhovich, Galperin)
