Beginning together

As an educator AND learner, I believe that what we can learn together  far more effectively than by learning alone. This course is about that kind of learning -  like the collaborative world of our students!

So let me start as I mean to continue.  Some of you will have seen my effort to get something interactive into our core course platform. Interact delivers the official core course content that that has been approved for ETL523. But it's just the beginning - the springboard from which to jump into your own learning, and from which you will be inspired not only to develop your own knowledge and interactions about digital citizenship, but will also ensure that the quality of your assessment tasks best reflect what you are discovering and teasing out for yourself and for your school.

So you'll understand why I am having a conversation with myself - I have copied and pasted below what I said in  the more static blog interface found in Interact.  I'm moving it here, so that you have a full record in one place of the conversations and information that I will share with you during the course - and which I hope you will use to have lively discussions in the Forums, and online.

This blog interface will allow me to add whatever we need in terms of ideas, input, support, etc to 'add value' to the core course in our Modules. As a blog, you can subscribe to it in your RSS reader too (if you are familiar with RSS). But, it's easy to locate in Interact, and embeds right into Interact as well, so if you forget the link - it's there for you!

In addition, it shows our most recent Digital Citizenship in Schools Diigo Group  links, in case something catches your interest.

It also shows you the Digital Citizenship Page in Facebook - which is of value to those of you who have a Facebook account.

ORIGINAL MESSAGE BELOW

Hi everyone,

As you know, I am new at CSU, so along with our learning together, I am also experimenting with various tools in Interact to see what we might to to enhance our learning experience together.

So you'll also know,  if you've followed my profile information, I'm a blogger and feel like a global citizen most of the time. In fact, I feel that I need to be able to 'communicate' with you as easily as I do on my blog at http://heyjude.wordpress.com/ - but of course, I don't want to have our conversations there - not really!

I was reading a post, and watching some videos in that post - which I then added to the Diigo group for you.  I had an idea - lets see if I can pull the Diigo feed into our  Interact online learning space as well.  OK - that worked - you can see that I have added Digital Diigo to our navigation bar. It only links to a text version - but the benefit is that if any of us adds a comment to a link we add to Diigo, it actually shows quite clearly. OR - it's easy to use the visual link to jump to our own group.

I HOPE you all contribute something to the group :-)  It's a new one, and a worthwhile addition to the curated collections on Diigo - you will be the innovators and friends of that group almost from Day 1. (Early next week, I will add some instructions to help for those who want a hand).

I'm in experimental mode this week (I'm new too), so if you have some feedback, I'd love to hear about it. Here is an interesting video about digital learning - short but useful for highlighting change in learning.

If you are ready to to think more broadly about the way the new culture of learning is evolving then the  New Culture of Learning book is one to add to your reading list.

More soon -

Cheers, Judy