It is my hope that within this course you are not only getting the bare bones understanding of how to construct a Moodle course and of Moodle’s capabilities, but also that you are able to tell your learning story to others who may run into similar obstacles. It is important that we tell these stories in order to preserve for our students and for one another that it was not a light bulb that we turned on one day when we decided to use Moodle.
I would like you to think through your experience from yesterday and your experience last night in editing your first Moodle course. I would like you to tell the story of that experience within our backchannel. Remember, the phone number to text is 3037206269 and just make sure you put #4learning in the text somewhere. Or you can login to twitter and post with the same hashtag.
It is difficult for me to find many things that I would actually want to stick a grade on and call students to account for their contributions. The reason for this is that I am more interested in the process of creating content and sharing information than I am in affixing a letter to that process.
If we are simply responsible or putting up our assignments online and letting them “grade themselves” we are doing ourselves and our students a disservice. We need to think about what requires a grade and what only requires a check. We need to think about what we are resourcing and what we are collecting. Accountability is not the same as obsessive marking things off of a checklist.
Everyone can become an expert on at least one thing in Moodle. While I asked you to become an expert in embed codes, I knew that many of you would struggle with this idea until you saw how it all worked (and perhaps even afterward).
An expert is someone that knows the inside and out of a given idea and may be able to even provide help to others who are looking for an expert in your area. I would like you to claim an area of expertise that you think you might be able to tackle today. This does not mean that you will have to be right each and every time someone comes to you, but it does mean that you will have to sit down with the question asker and figure it out together.
Please use the spreadsheet from yesterday to claim your area of expertise and we will continue to add things that require experts: http://bit.ly/4learningresources
Thanks again for coming on this journey. Let’s dive back in.
There is a difference in knowing what you are good at and know what you are good for.
I once wrote a poem during a study hall in high school. At the time, I was proud of it and I thought that I was good at it too. It was about how I didn’t think I was capable of loving my girlfriend. I remember one line being “I’m almost certain.” I showed this poem to my girlfriend the next day. I thought it was beautiful. She started to cry. She didn’t want to know that I would never be able to love her, or that I had made a mistake, even if it was honest and poetic. I was good at writing it, but what was I good for? Really, what was I good for in that moment?
Other moments like that plague me. I once said to some friends of mine that I wouldn’t hug my parents if I was being given an award for which they were to join me on stage. I said this because I couldn’t see anything other than my selfish and childish perspective. I was good at compartmentalizing, and I still am. I’m just not sure what I was good for just then.
Then there was today. Today I said a lot of things about networked learning and about how to use a Learning Management Systems. I said them well. I was good at saying them. I also thoroughly confused nearly everyone I talked with at one point or another. I didn’t and couldn’t answer all of the questions that people had. I didn’t and couldn’t resolve every problem that others encountered. I said it was because I wanted to get them to their muddiest point because that was where learning happens. I think that’s true, but I’m also good at making up things that sound nice like that. The frustrated and tired looks by the end of the day did not give me a concrete idea of what I was good for.
And yet, that girlfriend and I still talk on occasion. We got over my being good for nothing because she knew that the things I was good at were enough for a friendship. My parents and I have gotten over that rough patch too. I would hug them without hesitation now. It took me understanding that the things I was good at, they are good at too, that we aren’t all that different after all. I may not have been good for much as their teenage son, but as an adult I provide something to them (not just grandchildren) that they can’t easily replicate. I’m good for crafting the new story of our family together.
I guess that is what I am good for in Professional Development too. I’m good at showing others how to start writing their own stories. I’m good for those stories getting off the ground. I’m good at presenting information and taking people through a process from one idea to the next. I’m good for those ideas growing and maturing into the repositories of knowledge that we all crave so deeply.
I know what I am good for only by seeing the ways in which people would like to use me. If I can see the role that I can fulfill for others, then I can see my use. And being useful is the only way that I can be good for others. Otherwise, I’m just good AT a few things. And that is when I write insensitive poems or make unfeeling statements or lead people off into the woods by themselves to die without a compass or map as to how to navigate.
Good for > Good at
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.
I happen to believe that online learning is all about three things:
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).
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:
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.
I could have left the -ish off the question and had it be something completely different. I could have talked about all of the ways in which we need to frame our ideas and link to them and craft a language around them. I could have gone into what it takes to brand a concept from brainstorm to launch. But, that I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to talk about how to massage an idea into what will eventually become. I want to talk about the things we wield.
Our weapons of choice.
What is it that we use above all else to coerce others into doing what we want. We may not be proud of it, or carry it around without a sense of power and responsibility. But, we do it all the same. We pull it out when others question our authority or passion or motives. It becomes our signature and the threat behind which we can hide.
Most often, my weapon is that of obscure expertise. While having never been formally trained on much of anything to do with technology, it so happens that I can wield the most inane details about social networks, web applications, or learning management systems. People come to me believing that the problem they have is so intricate and difficult that they would not be able to parse it out themselves. When, in fact, there are very few things that I troubleshoot or tutorialize that could not be figured out with some simple trial and error. And yet, when I figure them out, there is a sense that I have brandished a fine tool and precisely killed off the beast that was plaguing them.
There is also, hidden within each request for help, a certain fear that everything could come crashing down at any moment with a flick of my wrist. It is a fear of unknown knowledge and unfathomable technologies. If the iPad is magical to people because they can’t understand how it works, then I am the biggest wizard around because everything starts from that singular lack of understanding.
I’m just not sure it is a good weapon to brandish. I’m not sure that being a wizard is what the world needs.
I feel like it might be better just to waive a flag, a rallying cry for everyone else that tells of my quest for the best insight and connections possible. Wouldn’t that allow for less coercion? Wouldn’t that allow for more stories and less commands?
I am under no illusion that people who do not have critical information at their fingertips are in need of some help. It just makes more sense to create the environment with flags instead of guns. That way, no one gets hurt and every time the wind shifts, we will know which way it is going. With a gun, you can only stand in the way of wind and see the everything pass you by as you try to point and shoot at nothing.
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.
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.
I’ve been rereading Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. recently. I always forget how good that book is until I take another look at it. While the idea that I am most drawn to in the book is that of the false religion (self-proclaimed by the creator itself.), the one that seems to keep on haunting me is the idea that one of the characters was a pure research man. He was someone who didn’t bend to the wants of the people around him for fulfillment of a job. Rather, he studied only what he was interested in studying. Sure, he created the atom bomb and a new way for ice to form, but he didn’t do those things necessarily on purpose. He did them just because he got interested in them. At least for a while.
He was a pure researcher in the sense that he wasn’t required to produce anything of use. He was just paid to think and create.
I sometimes wish for such a job, free from the constraints of a requirements document or a meeting schedule. Pure research sounds like heaven, but then I realize what I would be giving up.
If I never bent my will to those of other people, I would never get anything done. It is only through other people asking me to do things and putting up fictitious deadlines in my way that I have a sense of worth.
I am not one who can toil away and never come up with something great. I have to convince myself that the things I create are great, and then I must convince other people too. Pure research gets in the way of two people having a conversation about where to go from here.
I feel as though we may be setting one another up to lust after pure research, always reaching further into the isolated extreme in order to attain it. We may be so much after the sense of freedom that comes from not answering to anyone or anything for your thoughts and whims that we make believe we have already attained it from time to time. What I mean by that is that we get lazy because there is only so much passion that people can devote to the next big thing. We become entrenched in the drama of offering solutions to other people’s problems. So entrenched that we become complacent in getting ourselves out of bed. We believe that just by thinking after something and experimenting within ourselves that we have created something of value.
But we haven’t.
Pure research creates some of the most interesting and useful products and projects, but on the whole it is a mirage. The beauty of creation is in making it useful and relevant. The conversations and implications of what we create are often more important than the things themselves. If we ever forget that, we will slip into the position of head quack of our organization.
We can’t become what we can become if we only want to follow our own interests. It takes two to tango, you know.
On a warm fall night in Manhattan. kids are buzzing around CBGB. From across the Bowery. it could be any night, any fall from the last twenty years-young discontents and their older. slightly mellowed fore-bearers jacked up on caffeine/nicotine/alcohol/other waiting to get their collective rocks off at the seediest, oldest, and best punk club in New York City. But there’s something different about this night, noticeable from the median and then rapidly more so as one approaches the entrance. These aren’t the violently pierced. mohawked. leathered. pleathered, and glassyeyed punks of yesteryear. There isn’t a single Ramones jacket or safety pin in sight. Nor are they the dirty-jeaned, big-booted collection of indie-rockers. diehards. and straightedgers of punk’s more recent milieu. The kids here are different. Shockingly. bizarrely so. The kids. it appears. are all right. There are young girls in powder blue, midriff-baring tank tops emblazoned with the word “rockstar” emerging from idling SUVs. waving goodbye to their parents behind the wheel with a dismissive nod. There are clean-cut high school boys wearing baseball hats and overly long shorts and khakis. Serious looking fifteen-year-olds smile awkwardly and switch off their cell phones. There is backslapping. There are high-pitched giggles.
It’s a young and different crowd. in from the suburbs and out in the big city tonight for a concert. Here to watch their version of punk ascend triumphantly and not notice the differences. To sing along wide-eyed and happy. To feel better at the end of the night instead of bruised. It’s November 2001 and I’m attending my very Dashboard Confessional concert. The city is unseasonably warm and wary-what happened two months before still hangs heavy, but not heavy enough to weigh down the enormous anticipation that’s building inside CBGB’s scarred innards. Before the show. I run into a friend who attends NYU. She laughs when she sees me. “l never figured you for an emo kid,” she says. “I didn’t either.” I answer. just there to keep her friend company-her friend who, at is a good three years above the room’s median age. She seems embarrassed to be there-or at the very least to be asked about it. “Are you a big fan?” I ask the friend. “l think he’s really good,” she says.
Just then. the lights dim and the girls recede into the crowd. Some fellows in white T-shirts to my left climb on the back of chairs and start hooting. I catch a glimpse of a small Asian-American teen in glasses standing just below the stage furiously scribbling in her journal. oblivious to the diminishing light. Nervous applause ripples through the crowd. lt’s the awkward hum of a classroom when the teacher leaves to get help resetting the fraying reel. Just before the juvenile boiling point is reached, a surprisingly short and compact dark~haired man walks out onto the stage alone. He musses with his collapsed black pompadour hairdo. swings his acoustic guitar to the front. squints into the expectant crowd. and flashes a rabbity, nervous smile.
“OK.” Chris Carrabba says. “arc you guys ready to try one? The crowd erupts. and, as the first few notes are plucked. what was once a disparate collection of homework-dodgers is transformed into a head-nodding choir. Carrabba’s voice is a bit yelpy in spots, chasing the high notes like an affection-starved pet nipping at the heels of its owner. He has two full sleeves of tattoos on his arms. one of which strums out chunky acoustic chords. “You look cute in your blue jeans / but you’re plastic just like the rest . . . dying to look smooth with your tattoos / but you’re searching just like everyone.” And the audience sings with him. Every single word. with some lingering behind and some charging forward. lt’s like an extremely successful bout of responsive reading. except the hypercharged and ecstatic look on the kids’ faces says they’re not just echoing-they’re emoting.
When the song ends, everyone screams, as much for themselves as for the shy-looking fellow on stage. The guys next to me are practically falling all over themselves. One of them, baseball hat perfectly molded to his head, arms thrown around his friends’ shoulders, screams oul. “We love you, Chris!” The songs go on and on-and the crowd’s voices never diminish. Halfway through, some of the guys are doing harmonies. lt’s hard to tell whether it’s CB’s notoriously low stage or Carrabba`s small stature, but with each successive number the crowd seems to surge up higher and higher-both in volume and mass-until by the end the two sides are meeting each other from the start of each song. Occasionally. Carrabba builds to at refrain and then merely steps away from the mic. letting the devotees in the blank. Someone walks past me towards the back, retreating from the stage, crying. But there is no moshing. no physical injuries. I’ve never seen such wellbehaved teenagers in a rock club. Song after song with titles like “Again I Go Unnoticed” and “This Ruined Puzzle” have the kids around me glassyeyed with glee and reverence.
After a few more rousing choruses. It’s over.
This to me is a kind of sincerity revolution. An experience without snark or sarcasm. It represents what it is that I believe is right about coming together and creating a community within a moment. It is a reset of the disillusionment that came before, and it is better than I could have ever said it.
I have been to a Dashboard Confessional concert, on the very same tour that this exerpt was referring to. It was every bit as sincere and hopeful as these words portray. I didn’t get why that was important until now.
We need some words to all sing together. Not comment on the words and stand back, aloof. We need to all speak in one voice and be carried away by the possibilities of the moment, rather than chase away any possiblity of knowing one another intimately. It isn’t a religion or following a single figurehead. It is a movement away from ego and toward consensus. It is a movement toward belonging and away from being obsessively right.
It is for emotion and connection.
It is against skepticism and stalling.
At some point the things I am passionate about in education, technology and business will have their watershed moments. I just hope they are more like the vignette above and less like the selfish present that seems to deepen within every moment.
You see:
I don’t want to be guarded. I want to sing. With you. About things that allow us to be together. Without parenthesis or ironic twitpics.
