{"id":1143,"date":"2018-09-01T10:00:43","date_gmt":"2018-09-01T17:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/?p=1143"},"modified":"2020-04-21T05:35:06","modified_gmt":"2020-04-21T12:35:06","slug":"getting-going","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/getting-going\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Going"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thank you to those of you who have been posting this week! Your insight and wisdom is much appreciated.<\/p>\n

If you are having difficulty with getting signed up for WordPress, or with any of the other web tools introduced in the Digital Skills Unit, please don’t hesitate to reach out. You can find me at my TWU email address as colin.madland[and you know the rest].<\/p>\n

For those of you who will be engaging with the course this weekend, this post will be a bit of a preview for you as I’d like to highlight some things that your colleagues have been posting so far.<\/p>\n

One of the declarations in the Manifesto for Teaching Online, which you will encounter in the Annotating U<\/a> activity is<\/p>\n

Can we stop talking about digital natives?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As you read through the hypothes.is annotations, you’ll likely notice Adrienne’s comment<\/a> that the statement itself is likely to be offensive to both Native Americans and Canada’s Indigenous Peoples, and I echo her concern. At the risk of diminishing her point, and by way of background, there is a popular view that digital literacy and digital skills are somehow reserved for younger people who grew up in a world where digital technologies have never not existed. We need to get beyond this idea. A person’s age does not determine their ability to learn digital skills any differently from other skills.<\/p>\n

I have been helping a group of 3rd and 4th year university students create portfolio websites in WordPress and their questions are pretty much identical to the questions I get from seasoned faculty who are just getting started with WordPress. These so-called ‘digital natives’ may be extremely adept at navigating SnapChat or Instagram, but that doesn’t mean they can learn how to use a spreadsheet or create a WordPress site more easily than an older person.<\/p>\n

I think you can also see a counter-example in Ray’s post about hypothes.is<\/a>. Ray, from the MA Lead faculty cohort) makes a couple of oblique references to his kids and grandkids being skilled in digital environments and himself being a little daunted at learning WordPress. However, I noticed immediately that Ray started out his post by stating<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting to compare the 2011 and 2015 statements.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then he goes on to analyze some key differences between the two versions of the manifesto at a level that indicates significant analytical skill. These skills have been honed over a long career requiring those skills<\/a> in many different contexts. So, despite Ray being a relative newcomer to WordPress, he was immediately able to call upon his more developed skills and apply them in a technological environment to share his thoughts with a very broad audience.<\/p>\n

Adrienne and Heather (also MA Lead faculty) also demonstrated this same ability in their respective posts here<\/a> and here<\/a>. I know personally that both Adrienne and Heather, like Ray, consider themselves newcomers to WordPress, but in the few short months that they have been actively working and experimenting with WordPress, they both have come to a point where they have added value to this course already in sharing their learning.<\/p>\n

Thanks to all who have contributed so far! I encourage you to reference each other as I have done here by linking to each others’ posts in your own posts. The more we do this, the more valuable the network of learning will become.<\/p>\n

For those of you setting up Feedly this weekend, there are some links for you to add.<\/p>\n