My two children want to know why I want them to steer clear of water fountains and high touch museums right now, and I explain about the flu coursing through our communities, and how quickly things spread when we all share the same physical space. “When you push that button, you come in contact with every other person who touched it, and all the germs they came in contact with before they pushed the button.”

Contagion gets a bad rap, though; on cyberspace, “viral” can have a healthy connotation.

A teacher at my school asks me how to do X or Y. I look on Twitter for that key word. I find a tweet with a very helpful link to a Diigo page about X or Y. I save the tweet, retweet it, save the link in Diigo, follow the person who bookmarked it, and take the learning back to the teacher who asked me, and explain my process to her so she can do it too next time. We set up her Twitter account, her Diigo account, knowing, like me, she might lurk a while. But I help her populate her network a bit with some of the great folks I follow, knowing that someone from one of my ISTE groups or a MOOC I took or an educator with the last name Couros eventually will write something that catches her eye, and she will click until she hits an inspiration she feels compelled to share or a question she needs to ask, and then it’ll be her tweet out there, getting someone’s attention, maybe someone who had been a lurker… and so on.

It’s that season when pushing buttons can cause things to go viral. Atchoo.

I’ve been catching all kinds of learning, and spreading, it, too, I hope. Bless you!