Christian Long just posted a recap of our conversations about the physical space of the Science Leadership Academy. Christian sells himself a bit short in the conversation — I’d argue he knows quite more than "a little bit" about education and kids and school planning. In fact, I think Chris flat-out knows his stuff — I thought that just from reading his blog, and after several phone calls (I think they may have been longer than an hour, Christian…) it’s confirmed. Don’t let his humility fool you, he’s good at this stuff. And he’s spot-on about how powerful this all can be:

2 hour-long conversations last night reminded me not only why Web2.0 technologies (blogging, et al) is so critical (as he justly pointed out in the post I mentioned above), but that the ‘act’ of school design can be a stunning gateway into a powerful conversation about why learning matters. It wasn’t a matter of just where the Principal’s office would go (Chris — keep fighting for the door to the hallway and moving it closer to the heart of the hallway), or whether the library is called an ‘information media center’ or whether you get hub-n-spoke style science labs (Chris — again, fight for this if you see it support your pedagogy!).

No. It was something deeper.

You see, 2 guys who haven’t met, who know a little bit about education and kids and school planning and what learning spaces can truly be, who have these crazy blogs, who accidently discovered they know a few people in their larger professional circles, who were staring at floor plans of a school soon to be ‘built’ in Philadelphia while one was in NYC and the other in Texas did what matters most.

As he says in his last line: something powerful is going on.

And this goes back to the most important piece of all this for me: What does it really mean for our schools that our learning communities have just grown exponentially? The conversations Christian and I had changed the design of a school and challenged me to question my assumptions about what I saw going on in that school. It was active, inquiry-based, project-based learning — just what I want my students to be doing. (Will the design of the school be my performance assessment? Are the teachers and students of SLA my assessors? That’s a fun thought.)

And in a silly moment that only could happen in the world of Web 2.0, I was so excited after my first conversation yesterday with Christian that I had to find somone who would understand what a powerful moment it was… so what did I do? I logged into Instant Messanger and started chatting with David Warlick. He, of course, got it. And yes, this is new communication, new literacy, new learning.

So now I’m wondering where this will take our students… I’m realizing how much I want my teachers to be part of the conversation — my teachers should read Tim Fredrick’s blog, and Will Richardson’s work and we all should subscribe to the WWWEDU (We-do) mailing list but they (we?) should start our own blogs where they reflect and question and write… and they have the opportunity to be read by others out there and have the kinds of experiences I’ve had with Christian.

And then comes the moment where it really gets fun — so should our kids. We’re going to have SLA-Web be the virtual center of the school, with SchoolTool and Moodle forming major parts of the backbone of the site. But where I want to push us now is to make more and more of the work of the school transparent and visible. This is what we moved away from at Beacon a bit… as we struggled to find ways to create reasons to make the student work part of the site as something other than a showcase. Not that I knock showcasing work, it’s vital, but I don’t think I found the way to give Beacon faculty the rationale to do work like what Abby Lublin did with SophTales. To me, that was one of the most powerful projects I’d seen in a long time. And it gets to the heart of what we’re talking about with the ideas of new literacy. Powerful stuff that allows our kids access to the wider world beyond the walls of our schools.

We have to find the ways to create the space for the kids to get their voices out there… and to hear what people say back to them. I wish for every kid at SLA (and every student) to have a moment like I did Saturday night… just full of so much energy that I didn’t know what to do with myself because of the energy of a connection made over a few phone calls, a half-dozen emails, a hundred blog entries and a few thousand miles.

Good stuff. Something powerful is going on.