Flight Path

My Current Context

I am Technical Support for FanshaweOnline (FOL) our college’s Learning Management System (LMS) system, (Desire2Learn (D2L)) in the Faculty of Human Services, Health Sciences and Nursing at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario Canada. The role includes:

• build courses on FOL
• educating the faculty on how to use FOL
• educating the faculty on how to use other educational technologies.
• advising leadership team  on issues relating to educational technology
• resolving small computer issues like networking to printers
• working with support staff in developing better information/work flow

My leadership team is directing me to find ways to educate our educators on educational technology. So in this course I will be working within the context of teaching faculty digital literacy in higher education.

Content while designing for this course.

I recently attended Learn 4 Life Digital Literacy Conference in Second Life held by some of my UK peers and now part of my network. It was a wonderful thought provoking session and has helped turn my head towards digital literacy. Web 2.0 is a new era where, unlike web 1.0 where we only took in information, we now have a 2-way system:

• take in
• push out

We take in, transform, remix, remodel, refine from our point of view (our cultural point of view) and then push out by participating in social media like blogs, wikis, twitter, social networking sites and social bookmarking.

To be successful in this digital era, we need to learn the digital grammar as well as the syntax of media. We need to learn the mechanics of using media while participating in social networking and critically assessing digital resources.

This course maybe focused on the mechanics of digital media but I also want to build an environment where faculty can learn:

• how to use tech tools effectively with teaching and learning
• how to transfer the skills learned in one tool to another – teach user interface transferable skills
• how to build learning communities with these tools
• how to participate
• how to recognize authenticity
• how to use knowledge to define the new ways of working

Learning the Mechanics of digital environments.

With teaching both students and faculty about technology, I find that I am a very digital literate person. I twitter, blog and belong to a few social networking sites. I can create a website from scratch using html and css. I can create a database from scratch and refine it to meet the needs of my leadership team and the support team. However I do not know Moodle. I do want to learn the mechanics of Moodle, explore it’s capabilities and compare it to Desire2Learn with the intention of bringing some best practices from one LMS to the other. I am hoping to get into the backend and maybe do some php and my sql coding but that may not be possible with UBC Moodle server. I know we have some experts on Moodle in this class and I hope to learn from thier experiences while sharing my own expertise.

Learning from my peers in this course.

I love to learn from others and see things from their points of view. Working with my faculty, who are not digital literate, has taught me how differently people approach things. It will be great to socially interact in a digital forum with some of the novices in this class. It will give me some great experiences that I can bring into my work environment.

Resources

I have a membership to Lynda.com and often use her video tutorials to the learn the mechanics of software. She has a section on Moodle, twitter, podcasting, screencasting and many many more that I intend on viewing. If you haven’t heard of lynda.com, you should definitely check it out.  She does offer some free videos as teasers on Moodle. I often use her site to problem solve issues.

I use w3schools.com as quick reference for  html and css. It is always fun to take a quiz to see what I know and don’t know.

I use delicious.com to bookmark any tutorials on CSS and HTML Please feel free to use any bookmarks I have. I often use delicious to find new resources by using it’s social bookmarking capabilities.

I rent server space from bluehost.com and host several websites on it. I have a WordPress blog on this space and I plan on installing and building my own Moodle site on this server. I did build a Joomla site (content management system) on my server for a client but recently moved it to their own space on bluehost.

If your interested in learning more about digital literacy start by watching this video.

I really like Howard Rheinholds definition of digital literacy.
digital literacy = attention + participation + collaboration + network savy + critical assumption (crap)