All Educational Twitter Chats in One Calendar

Update [05.20.2011]: Sarah Kaiser made one of these too, and it may be more up to date than the one below.

I few weeks back I recognized a need for all of the hashtags and twitter chats to have a single calendar that could be added to my own Google Calendar. I looked around for such a thing, but all I found was a really nice list of every chat with dates and times. I have compiled this list into a Google Calendar that I would like to share.

Here is what I would love to happen:

1. Other folks would comment on this blog post and ask for me to share the calendar with them directly so that they can add their own educational chats and information (including links and documents that might be important) about the chats in the description section of each chat.
2. Anyone who wants to, can add this calendar to their Google Calendars so that they can stay up on when these great educational events are happening each week.
3. We share this calendar (with all of its contributions) to any new teacher, administrator, parent or student that gets interested in the educational conversations happening on twitter.

If all of those things happened, I believe the communities we are all trying to create will have a much better understanding of what the entire community is up to. We will be able to pay attention when it is time to do so, and learn from one another much more easily.

Without further ado, here is how you can access the calendar:

Embed:

Here is the code for you in case you want to embed it too:

<iframe src=”https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?title=Educational%20Twitter%20Chats&mode=WEEK&height=500&wkst=1&bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&src=9k50j34spec6pailr59uo2becg%40group.calendar.google.com&color=%23060D5E&ctz=America%2FDenver” style=” border-width:0 ” width=”600″ height=”500″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”>

HTML Page:
Use this if you want to see only the calendar without adding it to your own Google Calendars.

Calendar ID:
Copy and Paste this into your Google Calendar to add the whole calendar: 9k50j34spec6pailr59uo2becg@group.calendar.google.com

iCal Address:
Use this one if you want to add the calendar to another program besides Google Calendar (iCal, Outlook, etc.)

Please let me know if I can provide this calendar in any other format. I’m looking forward to the conversation about the conversation.

Question 206 of 365: Where is the open book?

Every time I put my son down for bed, he sees fit to be totally uninterested without a good amount of singing of songs and reapplying blankets. In between each one of these tries at sleep during which he may or may not actually close his eyes, I head over to the bookshelf with all of my old novels on it. As my son considers sleep for the twelfth time, I open up The Great Gatsby or if I’m feeling slightly more ambitious, Plato’s Republic. I read through all of the passages that I have highlighted or notated, which is quite a bit.

Each of the stars next to a given paragraph is enough for me to jump right back in to the person that I was when I first read the book. And as my son wakes up and goes back down with severe regularity, I keep on coming back to the fact that I have absolutely no way to retrieve those moments of insight without opening up each one of those volumes and reading that exact underlining, with scribbles that only I would understand.

Every time I stumble upon something that meant a great deal to me in a book I haven’t read for years, I feel this pang of regret that I didn’t read it on a digital device with syncable notes and sharable annotations. I look at a lot of the works that I read as an english major and how many of them are in the public domain. Each one of those I could have downloaded as an ePub file and opened up on an iPad or Kindle, had they only existed.

I know the intimacy of books is desirable, but sometimes I just wish that I could export those intimate moments and savor them more regularly. I don’t want to have the parts of me that I left on those pages get left behind. I want them at my fingertips.

And I know I could use Evernote to scan in or take pictures of those notes, but I really think that misses the point. If I am only copying over the pages that mattered then, there is almost no hope that I will read the entire work again and discover new things about the author and myself. I want the whole context of these notations. I want the whole story of why I starred entire sections. I want to search through and find the threads that bind together all of my braces hanging in the margins like unfinished picture frames ready to be hung in my digital memory.

I believe that this kind of work will happen when I am not responsible for digitizing the content itself, but only the annotations. I mean that all of the books I read as a student must be available in Google Books or some other easily searchable format. Then I want q scanner that only looks in the margins and maps it to a page number and a paragraph.

It would look something like the formula that a good friend of mine wrote in high school for knowing what page number he should be on in his very different version of Jude the Obscure. The class set was larger print, but my friend’s copy was an antique. He used his graphing calculator to concoct a formula for going back and forth between his book and ours. It worked flawlessly. I want the same thing for my notes. I want a way to map the words I wrote with the ones that my famous counterparts penned. Only then will I be able to look at the little diagrams I made up in the 9th grade with anything but nostalgia and regret.

If I want my past to live into my ore went I need a way to map it to something living. All of the books on that bookshelf are dead. Without commenting and liking or metadata, those words are not going to assemble themselves into something of value. And I want to find that value again, if for no other reason than to see exacltly who I was and how all of that has changed now that I am reading exerpts wle my son sits in his room, screaming because the door is stuck on the inside.

Because, it has changed, believe me.

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Question 205 of 365: Why don’t we clear the board more often?

I have been to a few emergency rooms, mostly for highly nervous new parent reasons. Near each one is a board with names on it. Ussually this board has ailments, procedures, and where patients are at any given time. It tells of upcoming surgeries that require a certain level of expertise. This type of board has been highly popularized by shows like Grey’s Anatomy and other hospital dramas. It always struck me as a very public way for everyone to know what was going on in the hospital on any given day. No one can hide from the responsibilities that the board requires. The board dictates your schedule. Every day, new patients arrive and old patients are erased from the board. More than once a day, the entire slate is wiped clean and the whole process starts anew.

I wish this board existed for more than just hospitals.

Instead, we lower the stakes. We move the boards into more private areas like meeting spaces and classrooms. We let notices stay there for weeks or months with large “do not erase” signs around them. Or, we digitize the process and make it even more secretive in our email inbox or content management systems. There is no feeling that we must clear the board or people will die. There is no feeling that everyone will know exactly what we have been up to because our names are tied to the procedure to which we were assigned. In essence, the board is inconsequential in our working lives. It doesn’t dictqte order or urgency and we don’t feel the need to clear it nearly as often.

But what if we did put up such a board in our schools and workplaces? What if we put the things that we were doing up for everyone to see and then cleared them away with a medical efficiency? I would like to see the progress and the stories that get told then.

If I had to guess, most people wouldn’t spend their time on menial work. If their tasks were going up on the board, everything we did would become important. If we had to write up there what we were learning about or what we were about to tackle on any given day, we would see just how urgent our procedures can be.

And when we needed help for a given procedure, we could elicit help from one another simply by adding one another’s names to the board. We could focus on the collaborative spirit that is required in a hospital in order to keep patients alive. There would stop being a competition between who has harder or more important work because the task for each day is not to complete your own work, but to help clear the board. If you have a free moment, help someone else clear the board. If you have something that needs doing, write it up.

I don’t clear my email inbox as often as I should because there is nothing making me do it. It isn’t life or death and there isn’t any help if I get stuck. But if every one fo my job requirements were up on the board, waiting to be cleared by a team of highly skilled people, you had better believe that I wouldn’t still have an unreturned email from last December just with a draft that has been saved 5 different times and then abandoned because something more interesting came up.

I get that I am not saving lives by creating learning objects or by talking about social media or asking better questions through video. But hqt doesn’t mean that the ambition and pride that doctors feel for clearing the board is unavailable to me. I just have to make my system more open to people walking through my emergency room. I need to allow others to help me, too.

If I simply keep my work as public as possible and not try to own everything, I believe that more will get done and I will feel better about it as well. Or maybe I will jut better be able to put myself in the shoes of someone in ER or House.

Question 204 of 365: When do we almost die?

It strikes me that we almost die far more often than we actually do.

Most of the days that I drive to work I think about what it would be like if I made an enormous right turn into oncoming traffic or into the highway median. I don’t think that this is morbid or abnormal, rather I believe that it is a healthy part of me staying alive. If I can envision the crumpled minivan on the side of the road, I can avoid it . If I can see exactly how it would flip and wrap around a tree, I know that my family is safe. I can almost die in my head hundreds of times.

I live in a place that feels safe. The only people I see outside in the neighborhood are kids and parents, playing with toys and basketballs and bicycles. I see people walking and running, too. I see tended yards, except for mine. I see people wave. I’m sure that all of this seeming safety is an illusion, but I take it because it keeps me almost dead, rather than entirely dead much more often.

I am passive when it comes to confrontation. I would take pretty much any route there is to avoid a fight. I stay alive tyhrough this process. To put it another way: I almost die in every conversation, but somehow I manage to avoid it. It’s not to say that I deal with a lot of violent people, but anything can become a fight. Anything.

Whether by accident or intentional behavior, I have managed to stay alive since I was born. It is a streak that is unmatched by anyone younger than me. There are so many things that could kill me, but so far I have managed to escape each one. Sickness hasn’t done it, nor has being impaled on anything overly sharp. I don’t intend on being beaten to death or splattering to the grown after a wrongly orchestrated bungee jump. All of these things will be almost deaths for me and I will treasure them. For as long as they remain as such, I don’t have anything to worry about.

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Question 201 of 365: How hard and how fast should we jump on the ice?

The Chagrin river never froze over completely. At least, not in my memory anyway. It was always halfway frozen in the winter, allowing for a few ducks to sit on the frigid water as it took them closer and closer to the falls beneath the Popcorn Shop in my hometown. Halfway out onto the river, the ice was thick enough to stand on. Or so I thought.

Two of my closest friends decided to venture out onto the river as far as they would dare. I followed with a lot of apprehension, but eventually I was able to join them a few feet away from the bank. At first they were only interested in stomping around in circles and hearing the faint cracking underfoot. Then as they saw the ice hold more and more of their weight, they began to jump . Up and down they went and I did my best to be uninterested. I knew what was coming next. I knew that it was only hubris that was standing between us and the freezing cold water. But I couldn’t help from joining in. I knew that at any moment we would become enormous popsicles, but right then we were dry and warming up from all of our jumping.

I can’t believe it took us more than 5 minutes to break through, but we spent the better part of half an hour trying to prove that we were as dumb as the people watching from the park were beginning to suspect. And as we fell through the ice, I remember thinking that we deserved it. We had tempted the gods of the river, and we were right to freeze to death.

Luckily, one of my friends lived just a few blocks away. So, we ran as fast as we could, the water freezing against our skin. Our clothes were stiff by the time we made it. As we dried off with some of the warmest and most comforting towels I have ever known, I knew that no amount of explaining would ever allow others to see why we had to jump on the ice together and feel it crack under our weight. I knew that it wouldn’t be possible for my parents or my friend’s parents to see why jumping was our only chance to make sure that we were alive in all of the ways we wanted to be.

And I put it to you that I still cannot explain it. I still cannot decipher our total lack of understanding for what it was we were attempting. What I can say is this: Every risk I have ever taken is some version of that day.

Every risk, so long as it is worthy of consideration, but be two things: a collective act and have the possibility of catastrophe. Solitary risk isn’t of interest to me. It doesn’t hold my imagination at all. Without friends around to watch me fail, there is little hope that I will ever be able to learn or have any kind of humor about that failure in the future. I also believe in total catastrophe as a kind of performance art. I often tell my wife that taking two trips from the car to the refrigerator to put away the produce is much more fulfilling than taking one. I say this because there is a much higher likelihood that I will stumble my way into something interesting if I can take my time with each bag. I am just clumsy enough that the practice of taking two trips doubles the possibility of me falling headlong into the refrigerator, or better yet, a good idea.

I am not interested in advocating for jumping on thin ice, however. What I am advocating for is a kind of free will that doesn’t disallow jumping on thin ice because it is a monumentally bad idea in the eyes of pretty much everyone. I am recommending that we all, from time to time, embark on some hideously bad ideas in the hopes that we can gain insight. Oh, and we should write about them and share stories, too. That way, anything so absurd as to cause each of us to thank our lucky stars that we weren’t involved will be the push we need to go out and try something truly insane, and perhaps spectacular.

Question 199 of 365: When do we stop asking for medicine and band-aids?

I had a favorite medicine growing up called Triaminic. It was the wonder cure-all. Pretty much anything that was wrong could be fixed with a little Triaminic. It had this syrupy sweet cherry flavor that wasn’t overly thick. It didn’t have the aftertaste of a Robitussin or the fleeting quality of a Tylenol. It was what I asked for by name whenever I stayed home from school. It was an elixir, a special potion which could give me back both health and confidence with a single spoonful.

I eschewed band-aids, though. They were for kids that couldn’t handle the wonderful sensation of picking at a scab. I don’t know if my kids will ever know how much I loved to pick at the places on my elbows and knees that the sidewalk had found and rubbed up against only days before. They won’t know because they love band-aids. Every time they get hurt (and many times when they do not), they ask for a new band-aid. Many times we go through several for every cut. It is almost as if they continue to get hurt just so that they can get me to put the sticker with medicine on them. Almost.

They too are magic. Band-aids for my kids instantly turn crying into thanks. They instantly cause the world to once again be in its right place. My children find the littlest wound or oldest scab and find it detrimental to their continued play, but as soon as the Band-Aid enters the equation, there is silence. The smiles return and off they are, bounding through to the play room. They are ready for the next adventure because they got patched up.

At some point I stopped asking for Triaminic and my parents stopped offering. At some point, my children will too stop begging for hello kitty Band-Aids. These wonderful fixes will lose their luster. They will no longer be good enough. But, what is that point? How long can I keep the quick fixes in circulation. How long can I keep the illusion going that anything can be solved with a simple capful of medicine or a few easily removed adhesive tabs?

And once that simple trust in these remedies is broken, it is all we can do to try and get it back. I think that our entire lives are spent in figuring out ways to make Band-Aids and Triaminic work again. We search for quick results and a simple answer to the most complex professional and personal problems. We try the same things over and over in the hopes that some of the magic will return. We “sleep on” our biggest decisions as if the mere act of sleeping will somehow provide insight. We have recurring meetings as if the fact that getting the same people together will produce innovation. We make budgets as if the fictional numbers will somehow keep our wants in check.

I know that there is no cure-all. That it is all snake water and workarounds. I know that time and working toward a better life is the only medicine at all for the present. I’ll take them, but they taste much more bitter than my Triaminic ever did.

Question 198 of 365: When is sleep inappropriate?

I observed classrooms for years before I became a teacher. Sometimes I would observe the interaction between students or the way in which a teacher would discipline others. I would watch the passing of notes and the distracted looks of those who longed to be outside. I could see the worst anger boil up within a student who received a bad grade.

There is only so much you can watch, though, without taking part. You can’t sit back and watch alliances form without becoming a part of the warring factions. It doesn’t do to stay aloof, waiting for the discussion to come around to what you are interested in. But there are times when observation is your job, so you must. For the sake of objectivity, I would watch the teacher drone on and the students sit and stare.

This was how I observed myself to sleep.

I watched a facilitated discussion on a book that i had never read, and i slowly laid my head down on the teachers desk at the back of the room, pretending to read on my lap. This is a move I had perfected in middle school, but I had never used it as an adult. At least, not until I was under the drug of observation. It was the constant lull of disinterested students who were forced to speak about a book that they hadn’t read either that relaxed my muscles and lowered my eye lids.

I woke up and realized what I had done as the classroom was staring at me. I apologized and everyone laughed. I never felt so much like a kid as I did in that moment of being caught in my disinterest. And feeling like a kid without your permission is awful.

I am not okay with observing myself to sleep anymore. I’m not okay with letting a situation be responsible for my stupor. I’m not okay with being disinterested in life to the point of losing conciousness.

I obsessively participate. I wring out experiences until there is nothing left. I pluck every moment and listen as my life screams with pain and pleasure and hope and failure.

Moodle For Learning Day 1

I have had no formal training in Moodle. Everything that I know has been gathered carefully from all of the amazing questions, projects and problems people have proposed to me. In this way, everything I know how to do has been learned in context and with a true purpose of helping someone else or myself. I propose that this course be constructed in as much the same way as we can possibly make it.

First, let’s establish the learning space a bit:

1. An Online or Hybrid class meets wherever you can gather enough people together to learn something. Our class’ environment will be in our central moodle classroom, your individual classrooms, in our backchannel, and in our own personal writing/brainstorming space (mine is this blog). The reason why we keep multiple spaces is so that we can learn to accept the one truth of online learning (and especially of Moodle): Everything is the same, even if it looks different. Furthermore, everything is possible, even if you don’t know how right now.
2. Our central Classroom is right here. I made a short link of it: http://bit.ly/moodle4learning. If you aren’t enrolled, enroll. If you don’t have an account, create one.
3. Our backchannel for questions, comments, reflections, and general conversation is at http://twitter.com/moodle4learning. If you would like to post, you can do so by texting #4learning and your thoughts to 3037206269 or by simply logging in to twitter and posting with the hashtag of #4learning. We will keep this backchannel so that our course can have a real purpose and real audience outside of our district.
4. You have two options for the class. You can go along with us a bit and work on the different facets of Moodle at the pace of the group, or you can go through the self-paced portion of the classwork and set up your own classroom. The benefit of hanging around with the rest of us, is that we will form a community to help one another out. The benefit of going at your own pace is that you can go at your own pace, whether that is ridiculously fast or unnervingly slow.
5. You will get as much out of the environment as you want to. It is not my job to make sure that everyone accomplishes the same things or learns the same materials. It is my responsibility that everyone who attends and completes this course will be able to create a course of their own that they (and the community of learners involved within it) can be proud of.

Second, let’s figure out what an online class is all about.

I happen to believe that online learning is all about three things:

1. The Content
2. The Action, learning process, reflection, etc.
3. The Submit

We need to spend some time brainstorming what is possible within those three things. And we need to keep coming back to this diagram as we start to expand our knowledge of what is possible. Post your own diagram in our Discussion Forum or in the Backchannel (or both).

Third, let’s figure out what problem you are trying to solve.

It isn’t enough to just know how to set up an online course. There is very little satisfaction in knowing how to create a course in Moodle just for the sake of it. There really has to be a basis for what it is that you are trying to do. So, we need to at least craft a problem or question that will be the one we are trying to go after throughout the next two days.

Good example questions are:

• How can I create an engaging presentation for my students so as to cause them to act and get excited about creating their own?
• What is the best activity for essay writing revision?
• How can I upload all of my already created content and have those be interactive enough so that I don’t have to recreate everything?

Please put your question into the Backchannel so that everyone can share in the learning.

Thank you for joining in on this journey. Moodle is the primary tool, but better online courses is outcome we are after.

Question 192 of 365: Where is the crazy?

Crazy people are everywhere. Not just the run of the mill crazy, either. I’m talking about completely out of their head insane, unable to reason their way through modern daily life, wringing their hqnds of all connection to reality, playing the fool way too well for it to be considered acting.

The reason I mention this is simply because I don’t think I have been doing a good enough job of rooting out the crazy in my life. Not for years, in fact.

When I was about 14 or so, I realized that being bored was a choice. I realized that I didn’t have to sit through whatever someone was talking about without letting my mind wander on to more interesting and productive things. Whenever I was alone and had little to do, I would just start writing. Whenever I was in the presenence of a boring subject, I would read or doodle. People who kept on complaining of boredom just weren’t interesting to me. Whqt I realize now is that they are, in fact, crazy. Or, they are about to become crazy.

It is my belief that crazy is a result of not thinking enough or not being able to find something engaging to occupy your time. Not having passion is just plain crazy. And it leads people to do the worst things imaginable.

Like blaming folks for how they try to experience the world around them. Like shaming others for grieving or for feeling or for thinking about much of anything at all. Passionless people are incapable of perspective, and that is what makes them crazy. It is also how you can pick them out of a lineup.

Sitting in a meeting or even in talking to a relative, if you get the sense that someone else can’t consider another point of view, you may want to check their crazy level.

We used to play this game called colored eggs on thenplayground in elementary school. It was a type of tag, where everyone would line up and think of a color out of a typical crayon box (64 crayons being the max that we thought was okay to try for) and then one person would stand opposite of the line and start to guess all of the colors. If the person guessed one of the person’s colors that was standing on the line, the person whose color was guessed would have to run to the other side of the playground without getting tagged. If the person was caught, they would become one of the taggers until there wasn’t anyone left on the line.

There was one boy who never chose any different colors. He always picked the same one: goldenrod. He thought that he was so brilliant in his choice that he would brag to everyone else at lunch about it. He would say, “you are never going to guess what I’m going to be today.” and then when we got out on the playground, the guesser would inevitably go through the more common colors first to try and get as many people off the line as possible. And there this boy would stand, completely confident that he was going to outlast everyone.

He never did, by the way. To my knowledge he never technically won the game. More of the time, he would claim victory because we had to go in from recess and he would still be on the line. We never guessed goldenrod because we didn’t much care about capturing him. We didn’t understand why he didn’t pick a different color so that he could play the tag part of the game. That was the fun part. Thqt was the part that got your heart pumping, that actually helped you to make friends.

When I look back on it now, I can tell that the boy was crazy for choosing goldenrod every day. He was crazy because he had to have his way rather than to join in. He had to have the obscure color rather than learn what the game was about.

The crazy is in each of us, when we find we are in a rut. It is in us when we are stubborn. It is in us when we stop looking around and seeing the differences between us that make us interesting enough to want to sit down and talk to. It is us when we allow ourselves to be bored.

I need to do a better job of rooting out my crazy, whether that is within myself or in the people around me. Otherwise, I might as well be choosing the same color for every day of my life.

Question 191 of 365: What is the skeptic’s option?

Everyone who asks questions is a skeptic in one way or another, which is to say that everyone is a skeptic.

I once found my bicycle up in a tree in the woods. It had been placed there by some naughty older kids. They wanted to play a trick on me, although I am quite sure that they had no idea who I was. They just saw my bike in the woods behind my friend’s house and decided that it belonged in a tree. They carefully perched the handle bars on one branch and the back wheel on another. It hung about 8 feet up in the air, which was pretty far out of my 5 foot height at the time. So, I walked home.

I was skeptical about whether or not I would be able to convince my mother that this wasn’t my fault, that I hadn’t been careless about leaving the bike in the woods in the first place. I asked myself questions about who could have done such a thing, all the while cursing both the people who had done it and myself for being so trusting of an obviously hostile world.

If Twitter and smart phones and Fail would have exited back then, you can bet that the entire escapade would have been chronicled first by the older kids as a viral video contender and then by me so that I might chronicle the improbability of my bicycle in the tree. I would have tweeted something like “So, my bike decided that the beaten path (or any path) wasn’t good enough for it.” I would have put the twitpic in there too, just for good measure. There would not be much skepticism just then about what had happened or disbelief by my mother. We could have looked up the whole thing and probably gotten a geotagged play by play, complete with facebook profiles on each of the perpetrators because their faces would be tagged.

I tell this story not so that you can pity my former self, but rather so that I can outline just how little skepticism there is for the things that we can see, and how this is bleeding into ideas well.

Right now, it is very easy to like something on the Internet. It is easy to share it and to link to it. It is easy to do pretty much anything except for be skeptical. Sure, there are contrary opinions and lots of snarky comments on Twitter, but don’t really found those and true skepticism. Skepticism is looking something directly in the eye and stating for everyone to hear that you don’t believe it.

I want the ability to not believe again.

Now, all of my choices are to either support or not support (and most of the nonsupporting options are burried in comments). I want the ability to not believe as well. I want to be able to stare wide eyed at the things that hold untruth and disbelieve them. Imwant q universal skeptic button.

This button will be the equivalent of the Facebook “like” button, but instead of converting to page promotion or demotion, it will have the effect of allowing me to highlight the most offensive portion of whatever I am looking at and call it to account. Any time that someone hovers over that text in the future, it will have my record of disbelief and whatever comment I cared to make on why it was untrue. The button will be in ebooks and blog posts, on videos and podcasts too.

The skeptic button will finally make the process of making a case against an idea easier because it will cobble together each and every comment offered and aggregate it for a common purpose.

In the end, I dint want to like/dislike things or even merely comment on them. I want to believe them or disbelieve them. The things that I believe in should be shared in all of the spaces that I inhabit and the things that I do not believe in deserve to connect me with all other nonbelievers. I feel as though we would have a common bond, a network of skeptics.

Right now we are scattered. Someday soon, though, we will rise up and state our intentions for making belief a part of our metadata. We will make asking questions a part of every online interaction.

We will look up at the bicycles in the trees around us and we will start to walk home together to tell someone else the story from memory.

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