EduGlu Sandbox

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, originally uploaded by glynnish.

I don't know about you, but to me it's a fairly tried and true structure for a collaborative hands-on exercise. Get a bunch of people to contribute little bits, then try to make it come together into some kind of cool sharable artifact in the end. When it doesn't work, it's a spectacular flameout, and I've been there. But when it works... I have fond memories of the Small Pieces exercise way back in the olden days, or the time I turned a pathetic cry for help into a pretty successful (it was fun to do, anyway) public lecture with a lot of help with my friends...

A couple weeks back WFMU DJ Tom Scharpling used a similar formula for his weekly three hour radio show. He threw open the phone lines to his listeners, urging them to contribute lines for a collaboratively-written song that was to be recorded before the show ended by indie rocker Ted Leo.

If you want to listen, the exercise begins at 15:00 into the show and goes for nearly 90 minutes of frankly up-and-down radio... and the song itself gets unveiled at 2 hours, 39 minutes.

WFMU's The Best Show on WFMU with Tom Scharpling from 6/3/2008

(After a couple weeks the above player will expire, you will need to use this RealAudio link...)

As the show unfolds, it seems to have all the hallmarks of a trainwreck in the making. Most of the lyrical offerings seem awful... and Tom's usual equilibrium between mocking and encouraging his callers definitely starts to tilt to the dark side... But man, Ted and the Pharmacists really nail this one. Ted takes a dog's breakfast of words, whips up riffs and and arrangement, records it, masters it and gets it back to Tom an hour later. Phenomenal. And the crowd goes wild...

From what I've read of the many blog posts on Edupunk (and I feel compelled to read every single post that's been flagged by a Google alert), I am now compelled to distill and articulate a Clear Learn-ucational Principle (CLP) on how these observations can be directly applied in the classroom, by anyone. How's this... You can have a half-baked activity, and uneven participation, but with a smart, funny, not necessarily patient and supportive facilitator (Tom) and a powerful synthetic force blessed with genius (Ted) you can still create something beautiful. And loud.