Question 182 of 365: What is the benefit of an extreme position?

Carnivals were a common occurrence during my childhood. The Blossom time parade and carnival over memorial day was perhaps the most memorable. Every year it meant something else. For a while, it meant games and prizes. For one year (before I realized that roller coasters made me feel quite ill), it meant rides. For a couple of years it meant finding a date to go and hold hands while walking through the grounds. And later on, it meant singing the Battle Hymm of the Republic with my choir at the cemetary after the parade was all over. This carnival changed many times for me, but all of the elements stayed the same. It never got any bigger or smaller. It was just a fixture of a single weekend every year.

Less of a fixture were the other carnivals in the towns surrounding Chagrin Falls. I would sometimes venture to the Holloween carnival in West Geauga or the 4th of July festivities out by one of the local lakes. These events never were set in my mind as having a single purpose for any given year. They were always about something other than what was completely comfortable for me. The haunted houses were never my idea, nor were the 4H style animal areas of many of these fairs.

The most uncomfortable situation at one of these “other events” was when a friend of mine wanted to go up to one of the religious tables and have folks give her tracts and preach directly at her. I waited a few paces off while the man attempted to save her all over again. When he was finished with his prepared speech and had handed over at least 5 different pamphlets, she we left the oversized barn. My friend told me that it was like going to summer camp, church, and a retreat all rolled into 10 minutes. She was transformed, at least for a few minutes, by the extreme position and unbridled passion that the man exhibited. It was then that I realized the power of fanaticism.

While I relied on my standard issue carnival every year, it was only at this significantly different event that my friend could be changed. It wasn’t that she went in looking to be changed, but afterwards she felt as though there wasn’t any other purpose that mattered. That carnival would now always be about the table in the barn with the man holding out his tracts and spitting his absolute truth, for both of us. I couldn’t make it be about something else because of the way my friend looked and how uncomfortable it made me feel.

And perhaps, that is why the events that cause us to feel transformed are not the ones that we would want to look back fondly about as if they were the backdrop for all that we are. They are not the events that stayed with us, year in and year out. They are not the moments that we can make into whatever we want because there was something that reached out and grabbed our attention and bent it toward a single purpose. Sometimes these transformations are good, and sometimes they are hideously bad.

I guess that is why I don’t think that going to the same conference or event every year will bring about real change. I don’t believe that people are ever going to create something divergent if they don’t seek out opportunities to find fanatics or be fanatics without the need to temper their opinions for a wider audience. Sometimes, we need a specific purpose without having to explain how it relates to all of the other work that we are doing. Sometimes we need to get caught up in the moment without worrying about how it looks or the implications of what it might mean for the future. Sometimes, we need to let ourselves be changed.

So, what are those divergent events? Who are those people that will leave me feeling so energized by their obsessions that I can’t possibly ignore them? More recently I have seen the gradual expansion of the same ideas. I have noticed the evolution of what has come before. I wan’t someone to make me feel uncomfortable, to approach me with tract in hand and challenge me to look away.

Right now there is too much backdrop. There is too much yearly festival and not enough fanatics. The soap boxes have been shaved down to almost nothings so that everyone just looks like a carnival employee trying to get you to try the latest game or ride.

I’m not looking for pure excitement. Instead, what I am after is simply something different enough to change what I think. I’m tired of what I think. I’m tired of following these ideas to their logical conclusion. If they really matter, they will be sharpened by a fanatical change. If they don’t matter, they will go away and I will start working toward something else.

The benefit of an extreme position is that we remember them. Always.

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Question 74 of 365: What do we do with another notch in the belt?

I turn one year older today.

And as my brother’s fiance kept telling me, all of the special birthdays are gone. All of the ones that mean something in and of themselves. No bar mitzvahs,quinceaneras, driving privileges, voting abilities, or drinking allowances left (not that I had all of those). Each year only serves as another notch on the belt. And I am okay with that.

Just as it has been for a number of years, I have resorted to thinking about my age in my own terms rather than the ones prescribed to me. I no longer rest on my age to progress me through life. I no longer count on society to push me into being an adult. I choose my own milestones, and I celebrate them as frequently as possible.

And the notches aren’t the same anymore either. I believe in the power for a single event to change my life, for a single decision to set in motion the rest of a year or longer with both intended and unintended consequences. The notches I make now aren’t the small notches that time makes. They are big and unmistakable. They are ones that speak to where I have been and what I have done. I burn my notches as if I were branding or I cut them deeply, with precision, knowing that I can never take them back.

So, this year, I am working on a few notches that will set in motion the next few years of my life. And no longer being bound to measure my life in years, that feels pretty good.

As I look back on what I wrote about my intended notches in 2006 I notice a few things:

1. I will have a child. (Two, now)
2. I will have a master’s degree. (Nope)
3. I will have a book published. (Working on it. As I type, in fact.)
4. I will have a salary that makes my family’s life comfortable. (I hope so.)
5. I will have a cd pressed. (Totally fallen off the radar.)

And that is the funny thing about notches. Until you actually make them, they aren’t worth a whole bunch. They are the same goals that everyone else is making. They are the same aspirations that drive millions of people to go after more experience. Yet, until you have them accomplished, until the strange and finite events have transpired, they don’t really exist. They aren’t really yours.

So, while it may be a small notch today in getting one year older, know that much bigger notches are coming. And when they do happen, I will be taking the careful time to make them known through the careful process of scraping off the top layer of leather and watching the shavings fall to the ground, then digging in deeper and making exacting cuts against the well-worn grain until I can see through to the light of day, my knife having done an admirable act in connecting me with the other side.

Oh, and I’ll probably write about it too.

Virtual attendees unite.

I was thinking some more about Sloodle and Second Life in general
today and a thought struck me: why don’t all conferences have a SL or
Open Sim component?

Why do we struggle to pull together people from all over the state,
country and world into 2d places like blogs, wikis and aggregator
pages when all we need is a decent SLurl to direct people to in order
to connect? Now, I know that the WebHeads in Action do Second Life
events all of the time, but as far as I know they do not have a
face-to-face component. As for the face to face conferences I have
been to, not one of them invited those watching the elluminate or
usteam feeds to join in on an SL roundtable.

Do conferences need to artificially separate those who can see one
another with those who cannot?

Why can’t we put the usteams into a SL environment? Why shouldn’t we
allow the hallway conversations to happen for virtual attendees?

In other words, I would like to do this soon. Anyone already tried it
successfully?

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Create your own MobileMe (Sync Everything, at all times).

An aside: it is too bad that every post I write seems like an attempt to get back into the habit of posting, but I suppose until I start blogging consistently again, that is just how it is going to have to be. I have missed way too many things that I have been thinking about to ever fully catch up, but perhaps I can start anew. Anyway, here are my latest thoughts.

Before I go into the details of how to sync yourself completely, I want to tell you why I even undertook this idea. Well, our school system uses an extremely proprietary e-mail and calendaring system called firstclass. Every person that uses firstclass in our schools is locked in to using the firstclass calendar for appointments and things of that nature. But, because I have seen the light of using Google Calendar (open API, shared calendars, embedding, etc), I refuse. In fact, I was so obsessed with the idea of converging the two that I speant an entire weekend (when I wasn’t having fun with my family) on getting Firstclass to sync with Google Calendar, and then eventually my new blackberry that the school district provided for me.

So, this is how you sync everything:

Calendars:

Contacts:

Now, for the details…

(Update: I didn’t put this in the initial post, but I think it is worth mentioning that Firstclass does have a way to sync with both Palm Desktop Software and SyncML directly, but since my district hasn’t set either of these up, I thought it was important to try and find a better way of doing things… there are also third party services that do some of this, but I want a FREE workflow)

In order to get your first class calendar to talk to anything else, you will need to export it as a iCal file:

Now, you may look at this picture and ask, why I wouldn’t just export it as a blackberry file and skip all of the steps in the middle. Well, there are a few reasons. One, if I did this, all of the events would be duplicated every time I exported and imported. Two, because I am on a Mac I do not have any blackberry desktop software to make this sync work.

So, onward we go to iCal. First, you will need to set up your Google Calendar to sync with iCal, using this handy dandy tutorial from Life Hacker.

Now that you have your Google Calendar set up to sync, simply import into iCal your latest and greatest export from Firstclass:

Now, if this isn’t your first time doing this, you will end up with a lot of duplicates. If that is the case, just use the iCal Dupe Deleter. This is also a good tool for deleting duplicates from Google Calendar if you have ever found yourself with too many of one item.

Now, you have synced completely to your Google Calendar and you are ready to sync to your blackberry. Simply point your device to this address and download your over-the-air sync application.

You can now enter an event in Firstclass, iCal, Google Calendar, or on your blackberry and they will sync with one another. Pretty cool, right. But, we are not done. If you would like to have your calendar in an even more universal Format, you can put it on a SyncML server, like Funambol.

All you have to do is download their blackberry application and you can sync to your heart’s content there.

For Contacts:

I understand that MobileMe does a lot more than this, but I believe that if we can create a FREE workflow for each one of our teachers, students, and administrators that syncs information to the place that they need it, we will be able to have the conversations that truly matter. We will no longer be stuck trying to find information, it will always be ours. Although you may not geek out at all that I am proposing, I think there are some pretty heavy implications for continuity in the systems that we are creating. If you have figured out any more syncing tricks, please leave a comment and add to the value of our collective research.

Live Blogging With AHS students.

On
Friday, I had the distinct pleasure of listening to some of the most
unique voices in the discussion over Dan Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind.
These voices did not come from an “expert” being paid thousands of
dollars for a breakfast engagement. They did not come from a literary
analyst who picked apart Pink’s prose with perfect clarity and wit.
They came from Arapahoe high school students that were eager to create a conversation, expansive and intense. Check out the discourse for yourselves.

We
took a look at one of Pink’s chapters specifically: Story. I especially
liked how the conversation evolved over the course of the hour that we
blogged. It seemed to start from a place of pure story, then it evolved
into something about the future of the workplace. Then we got very
theoretical. We started talking about how story can influence memory
and how memory influences story. Even though Pink devotes quite a bit
of time to this idea, I really like the way the students were able to
incorporate it into their thinking. It really got me to start
reflecting on what the purpose of crafting learning environments can
be.

If we create an environment that is ripe enough to learn
within then we are creating an experience; we are crafting the story of
that learning. In turn that learning becomes a memory, one that will be
told over and over as a story if it is good enough. So, in truth, we
are trying to create learning memories for students, ones that they
will hold onto long after they have forgotten the names of their
classmates or what day of the week it was on. We want to create
memories that are so lasting that the events take on mythical
proportions, they start living on as stories of their own.

Is
there a way of analyzing the ways in which we tell stories about our
high school experience to our friends from that time period? Is there a
way to know whether or not those experiences were learning based or
extraneous (not that they were bad things, mind you)? My question to
those students, and to anyone who reads this blog is what is a learning
memory that you have? What is the one experience in an authentic
learning environment that you will never be able to forget?

(Special thanks to Karl Fisch for setting up this amazing opportunity. More of this kind of collaboration and conversation is needed desperately.)