HOW TO USE THIS BLOG
Your first task is to understand how 523 works.
At the very top of the page you should see the WordPress Bar (if you don’t see it, you’re not logged in yet, so go back and follow the instructions in your invitation email). This Bar is always present and gives you easy access to essential course tools such as the ability to create new posts.
You’ll immediately discover that there are no other menus on the 523 site – there’s only a cascade of posts with some tools to enable you to find the right one(s) – hopefully quickly. Those tools are the major innovation in this new implementation of 523: they enable what is called “faceted search“, which means you can search, sort and filter the content stream all at once. So you can:
- Filter: There are two filtering tools:
- Category: Select all the posts in any 523 substream simply by clicking on the appropriate Category (more on this below).
- Rating: Select posts based on a user-generated 5-star rating system (more on this later).
- Sort: Sort the current list of posts by title, publishing date, 5-star ratings and recommendations.
- Search: Enter any search term or phrase to select all posts that include these.
So, for example, you could search all posts on “Augmented Reality”, then filter the results to look at those posts in the “Knowledge Mill” substreams, then sort the remainder by ratings, or date, etc. There are only a few hundred posts in the new 523 so far, so it may seem like overkill, but this power will become essential as we transfer more of the thousands of posts from the old site and contribute more of our own.
If every you get lost within these tools, simply click the ETEC523 banner and it will take you right back to the top.
Take a bit of time to explore the different parts of the weblog so that you become familiar with the overall navigation.
523 posts are organized into three (3) tributaries comprised of about fifteen (15) substreams or “Categories”. It is important to understand what these are about, both so that you can navigate the stream and that you can apply the right Category to any new post of your own, so it won’t get lost. Here are the tributaries:
- COURSE:
- All of these Categories relate to course materials. The posts here can’t be rated and they aren’t open for discussion – they exist for guidance only. To avoid possible confusion, 523 students should never apply any of these categories to their own posts.
- Announcements: Daily or weekly updates and information from the instructor.
- Content: Reading materials, etc, to set a direction for each week of the course.
- Instructions: This post is one of a set of background instructions to guide your work.
- All of these Categories relate to course materials. The posts here can’t be rated and they aren’t open for discussion – they exist for guidance only. To avoid possible confusion, 523 students should never apply any of these categories to their own posts.
- KNOWLEDGE MILL:
- This is the ‘formal’ content curation stream of the course. You might consider it a library, but it is more dynamic than that: you will be posting new content here as well as reviewing, rating and recommending existing content to make it fresh and valuable. The concept of a “mill” is much more appropriate to the mission than “library”, “repository”, “archive” or similar term. Knowledge is constantly moving forward and we are all part of that motion. There are three substreams to organize our exploration of mobile learning:
- Mobile Technologies: For posts primarily related to the technologies underlying mobility.
- Mobile Culture: For posts primarily related to the relationship between mobility and human culture.
- Mobile Education: For posts primarily related to mobile education, teaching and learning.
- Every Knowledge Mill post should be categorized into just one of the above categories. In addition, when a Knowledge Mill post is also a course assignment, students should apply one of the following categories:
- ➤ (A1) Analysis: Launch posts for analytical publishing projects (A1) authored by individual students.
- ➤ (A2) Movable Feast: Launch posts for student group OERs exploring specific areas of mobility, which is Assignment 2 (A2) in the course.
- ➤ (A3) Mobile Forum: Launch posts for forecasting projects (A3) authored by individual students for the Mobile Forum during Week 13 of the course.
- This is the ‘formal’ content curation stream of the course. You might consider it a library, but it is more dynamic than that: you will be posting new content here as well as reviewing, rating and recommending existing content to make it fresh and valuable. The concept of a “mill” is much more appropriate to the mission than “library”, “repository”, “archive” or similar term. Knowledge is constantly moving forward and we are all part of that motion. There are three substreams to organize our exploration of mobile learning:
Creating a New Post in a weblog is just like in most social networking sites: you are creating a message to which other people can respond and comment. To create a new post, place the mouse over New on the top of your screen and select Post in the drop down menu. You can also Add New Post from the Dashboard.
You will be presented with a template that you can fill out to write your post. Start off by giving your post a title: this will be displayed on the weblog page. Then, use the Post field to type in the body of your posting. You can edit using either the wysiwyg editor (Visual) or use html (Text) and format your text with colours, links or embed media (images). For videos, you need to paste in the URL of the resource and the link will automatically be embedded in your posting. If you are going to embed a video, you have to already have the video hosted somewhere on the web.
As this is a public weblog and a professional network we strongly encourage students to enhance the appeal of every post with some appropriate featured image which will appear next to a summary of your post when people are browsing the site. To set the Featured Image, find or create a copyright-free image and click the “Set featured image” button in the Document menu within Settings for the post.
Also in the Document menu within Settings for your post, be sure to select the right Category for your post. Normally any post should only be assigned to only one (1) Category, and that shouldn’t be one of the tributary categories (such as KNOWLEDGE MILL or MALL). The only posts that should normally have two (2) Categories are posts submitted for assignments.
Once everything for your post is set, click “Save Draft”, “Preview” or “Publish”. Don’t worry, if you need to edit your post after publishing it, including changing Categories, you can do so within the Dashboard by finding your posts and editing the one you wish to change.
Responding to somebody else’s post is just like responding or replying to a message in Connect. To do so, look for the template at the bottom of the post that allows you to enter your own comments. Simply fill in your comments in the provided text field and then submit. Your response will then be connected to the original posting and will form part of the thread of replies that will grow as others also respond to the original posting. Once you try out responding a few times, you will quickly get the hang of it!
More specific instructions for responding, reviewing, rating and recommending are provided in the Participation Guidelines post in the Instructions.
There is no email implemented within this weblog. If you wish to connect with your instructor please email them directly. If you wish to connect with a specific student or students, simply ask your instructor for an introduction. We have set up a Chatter category for you to use to ask any general or content related questions that you might have.
If you’re not used to WordPress, or even if you are, you’ll want to develop a strategy for managing the flow of this course. There will be a lot of posts, replies, reviews, etc, and it will be easy to get overwhelmed and lost without a strategy.
You may also wish to consider an offline RSS reader, a web browser RSS plugin, or an app for iPad or Android to help you manage your reading of both course content and colleague interactions. There are many of these and they change quickly, so we aren’t recommending any specific one.
TECHNICAL MATTERS
523 is the first MET course to require its students to have a web-enabled smartphone; or at least a tablet or laptop as a complementary or alternative device.
Although HTML5 is still being refined, the course will reside in the mobile web, meaning that all operating systems such as iOS, Android, Blackberry, Microsoft, etc, will be compatible. However, it is inevitable that many applications arising in the course as sources or examples will be native to specific devices, and therefore we will develop alternate means to capture & share such resources equitably.
Another ‘not ready for prime time’ deficiency in our objective is that WordPress, despite being one of the most versatile content platforms ever, is itself still quite limited in terms of being able to serve a regenerative mobile learning experience.
Finally, given media versatility and the penetration of smartphones, it is reasonable to expect that every student involved with this course will be able to participate fully across multiple devices and platforms. Please contact your instructor if you have any specific questions or concerns regarding this expectation.
Blog Support
523 is hosted in WordPress by UBC Blogs. If you have any issues with the operation or performance of the blog, or your ability to contribute to the blog, please contact UBC Blog Support.
CMS Support
You will be assigned either author or editor role in the UBC Content Management System (CMS), which will enable you to add, edit or delete posts. Support on using the UBC CMS can be found at: http://support.cms.ubc.ca/
CWL Support
Each time you log on to your weblog, you will have to enter your Campus Wide Login ID (CWL) and your password. If you lose or forget your ID or password, contact the IT Help Desk: http://www.it.ubc.ca/contact/helpdesk.html