Starting the Classroom 2.0 Talk-casts

I was pretty busy this last month organizing our first live CR 2.0 workshop in San Francisco, but I have had a couple of days this week to finally pull together something I've wanted to do for a while: regular audio (and soon video) virtual "meet-ups" for Classroom 2.0 members.

The schedule for these talk-casts is on our wiki at http://www.classroom20wiki.com/LIVE+Conversations. I've scheduled sessions starting today (!), and you are also welcome to add and facilitate any events you would like that pertain to Classroom 2.0. Once we have a good grasp of the different audio/video/whiteboard/desktop-sharing programs available, we could even do some training sessions for those who want to moderate. (Elluminate has generously agreed to provide access to their web meeting software for these meetings, but until that's in place I've set up to use Talkshoe.com for our first sessions. I've also put in some notes on the best way to use Talkshoe, which you can see by clicking on the link in the "medium" column.)

Today's session will be just an introduction and for fun, especially since it's Valentine's Day here in the U.S. and we might get limited participation from the more romantic crowd! :) Tomorrow's session will be on "Creative Commons, Open Content, and Copyright" in education. Then I've listed some others for next week that would start us on a series of discussions about different Web 2.0 programs in education. My thought is to create enough variety in topics that most of our members will find something they want to be a part of--or listen to later (we'll record the sessions so they are available afterwards). I've also scheduled one for next week that should accomodate non-North-American time zones--and could use some feedback on doing that regularly, or even having a separate organizing facilitator.

I'm particularly interested in encouraging folks who might want to start and facilitate their own series of Talk-casts--say, ""Web 2.0 in the History Classroom," or the like. If you think that might be you, email me separately and we can organize that on the wiki.

I'll look forward to talking to those who join the calls!

[Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/storm_gal/]