As you begin your journey through higher ed, maybe for a second or third time, and maybe after a long time out of formal education, you will change and grow. Your views will change. You will become less confident in your previously-held ideas and conceptions about the world. You will begin to see events and ideas with a new, and more deeply thought-out perspective. Learning requires you to change. If you are not changing, you are not learning and you are not spending your tuition money wisely. Sometimes, it is hard to look back and recognize how you have changed because the changes are subtle and they happen over a long period of time. Part of the structure of this program is that your own work is hosted on your own domain, your blog in WordPress. The reason for this structure is to allow you to explore your own growth and development over the course of the program and to reflect on the impact of those changes. At regular points in each course, you will be asked to respond to specific questions or report on various activities on your blog and then to reflect on the process of completing that work. We hope that you will come to see your blog as a testing ground for your ideas. We don’t expect you to have a complete understanding of everything at the beginning of your course or program. That would be silly. We do hope that you will learn to narrate your process as you work through your program. Now, that may sound like an odd request, but it is rooted in sound andragogy<\/a>. You could think about narrating your process as reflecting on your work in a format that allows your colleagues and instructors to learn from you and for you to learn from them as well. Narrating your process isn’t about being correct. It is about expecting to be wrong about some things and working towards a more correct understanding. It is about helping your colleagues as you all work towards a more correct understanding. It is about making the extremely difficult process of changing your mind visible to yourself (and others, if you choose to do so).<\/p>\n For this activity, you will need to start thinking through a structure for your site. WordPress has powerful content management features built in, so you have a significant amount of control over how your site is structured. First, view the following videos on the UMW DTLT site:<\/p>\n Then refer to the WordPress documentation page First Steps With WordPress<\/a> and read about creating categories. Next, start building a structure in your site. We recommend that you build the structure using the two taxonomies built into WordPress, categories and tags. Some people choose to organize their content with pages and sub-pages, but this strategy can quickly get unmanageable as you have less flexibility with pages. Pages are meant to be static. Your site structure should flow from the purpose for your site. For example, a student building a professional portfolio in order to graduate from the Education program will likely create categories in alignment with the Learning Outcomes for the program and the professional standards of the TRB. Or, a faculty member building a portfolio to support their application for tenure or promotion will likely align categories to the requirements for that process. Faculty members thinking about creating a portfolio or CV may want to watch this video about being a scholar in public<\/a>. Once you have drafted a structure (it will change over time), start building at least one main menu to organize how that content will be displayed on your site. You may have to create some ‘dummy’ posts and assign them to your categories to be able to see how they will look on the site. Finally, for this activity, please create a new post that describes the choices you made while creating the structure for your site. What challenges did you encounter? How did you work through the challenges? What would you do next time? You can read my posts in response to a similar activity here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\nGetting Started<\/h5>\n
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