Unit 3
Technology Introductions
Unit 3 (Week 3)
Thursday, Sept. 16 - Wednesday, Sept. 22
Things to do this week…
- Meet in Zoom [badge label=“Thursday, September 16 - 11:30 AM PDT” url=“https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=LDRS+663+Meeting&iso=20210916T1130&p1=1109&ah=1&am=30”” /]
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Read Facilitating Learning and Change in Groups
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Read What is a Group?
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Read Comfort Zone to Performance Management
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Read Core Competencies
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Watch Liberating Structures
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Visit What, So What, Now What? W³
📖 Please complete these items by [badge label=“Wednesday, September 22” url=“https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=LDRS+663+Meeting&iso=20210916T1130&p1=1109&ah=1&am=30”” /]
Unit 3: Teaching and Learning with Technology
There are some critical digital literacies that you will need to begin or continue to develop during this course. These skills and competencies that you will be developing are not intended to to be merely for the sake of learning so-called ‘21st-century skills’ that are much ballyhooed in education circles. Rather, the unique structure of TWU microcampuses and the FAR Centre learning model require robust technological infrastructure to support our processes from initiating a course design project through the design, development, and production of learning materials and environments, to the ongoing maintenance and evergreening of courses deployed in widely diverse locations across the world. You will be required to interact with this infrastructure in order to access course materials; communicate with the faculty member responsible for the courses you are facilitating, as well as with administrative departments at TWU; participate in the process of localizing learning activities; and supporting the work of your fellow Academic Facilitation Specialists in other locations.
Key Questions
- How can you maintain a connection to the greater TWU community?
- What role do you play in maintaining and revising learning materials and support resources?
Learning Outcomes
When you have completed this unit you should be able to: - communicate clearly and professionally in a digitally mediated, asynchronous environment using a variety of tools; - install and configure software on your computer; - contribute to cooperatively generated learning and support materials in a git-enabled environment; and, - compose text-based materials with embedded media using GitHub-Flavored markdown.
Overview
For the next two weeks, we will be exploring some technology tools that can help make the management of remote learning environments easier. As you know, there are two general cohorts of learners in this course, FAR Facilitators and generalists. Those of you on track to work as FAR Centre Facilitators will be asked to engage with the GitHub/Grav workflow, but if you are here from an outside organization, you may choose between the GitHub/Grav workflow and learning WordPress. Admittedly, WordPress has a much shallower learning curve, and it also will have much broader immediate applicability to other contexts.
We will be helping you set up an individual website in either Grav or WordPress that you can use as you continue with your studies.
Visitors and Residents
Key Questions
- …[what do YOU want to know?]
- Are you a digital resident or visitor?
- How can technology help us start with community and relationship vs. content and mastery?
Provocation
Digital literacy has almost nothing to do with age and the idea of ‘digital natives’ (younger people being able to use technology more easily because they grew up with it) is the wrong way to think about digital literacy.
It is likely that you have encountered and may believe that there is a distinction between digital ‘natives’ and ‘immigrants.’
[details=“Note”] Marc Prensky, who proposed this idea, is the one who thought it would be a good idea to refer to people as ‘natives.’ We recognize that this term should not be used to talk about people. [/details]
The essential argument is that kids these days have changed in that they have this innate ability to use and learn technology because they have grown up using technology, and those of us whose formative years pre-date the advent of the internet are forever at a disadvantage compared to the kids. You can read a bit more about the idea on Wikipedia, linked below. There is also a link in that article to Prensky’s original article.
Digital nativeAside from the problematic framing of learners as kids, there are some distinct challenges with the idea of digital literacy being a fixed trait rather than a matter of comfort, familiarity, and a skill that can be practiced and learned. It is no secret that more young people are comfortable using social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, SnapChat, Weibo, WeChat, and the like, but that does not mean that those people are more able to learn technology than older people or that they have an innate ability to do so. Have you ever asked a 1st-year university student to use a spreadsheet to create a budget or a gradebook with embedded formulae? It is more likely than not, that you will encounter a distinct lack of skill in completing this task.
Residents and Visitors
I’d like to introduce you to a different way to conceptualize your relationship with digital media, and that is that you may be a visitor in some web spaces and a resident in others. Places on the web where you might be a visitor are those places where you, quite literally, visit, but importantly, don’t leave a public trace of your time there. You don’t spend any time interacting with people, but rather, you take a rather utilitarian approach by visiting a site, doing a thing, and leaving.
Alternately, there are places and spaces on the web, where you reside as a persona, where you interact, socialize, and leave traces of yourself online. For some, that may be Facebook, where you keep in touch with friends and family, or Twitter, or maybe it’s a listserv you subscribed to back in the 90s, or your blog, or someone else’s blog or social site. The important distinction is that these are places where you connect with other people; where you are socially present.
At the same time, if we can imagine the visitor <–> resident continuum on a horizontal axis, there is also a personal <–> professional (or educational) continuum on a vertical axis, leading to 4 quadrants where you might situate your technology use.
The video below explains a process to help you think about where you reside on the web (7 mins).
I’ve shared my VR Diagram below…keep in mind that this diagram represents a set of tools that I have been using for a decade or more and that I have invested my career in educational technology. There is a lot here, but yours might look significantly different with only a few tools here and there. The main thing I would like to communicate with this idea of visitors and residents is for you to think about which technologies you use as a resident, and then to think about where your learners reside on the web. From there, we can begin to plan for tools we can use that afford us and our learners the opportunity to reside there.
It is certainly notable that I am very much a visitor in Moodle! This does not mean that I don’t spend much time there, I spend a significant portion of every day working in Moodle, rather, the work that I do there leaves very little trace of my personality. You will (hopefully) see Moodle as much more of a place where you reside. But this foregrounds the question of whether Moodle is actually designed to promote residencies. Certainly the forums allow for users to project their persona into the system, as do a few of the other features, but the system itself is very heavily templated. There are profiles that can be edited, but users are limited to one very tiny image and virtually no opportunity to determine for themselves what they want to share. There is little room for customization, and every time a course ends, every single user must recreate their persona in a new course site (or five).
For many, or most, of you, Moodle is a perfectly reasonable place to reside and you are able to make learners feel at home there. We encourage that. And just like our physical homes, the quality of the community that lives there isn’t determined by the features of the house itself, but by the people who share the space and how they structure their time and interactions.
If you don’t already, I encourage you to subscribe to this excellent podcast called Teaching in Higher Ed by Bonni Stachowiak, or, just take 47 minutes to listen to this episode in which Bonni interviews Dave White about the idea of visitors and residents.
Digital Visitors and Residents, with David White - Teaching in Higher EdA couple days ago one of the people I look up to as an educator published a blog post which I believe provides a fitting summary of this particular unit.
Technology is not PedagogyIf you would like, take some time to engage in the following optional activity.
Optional Activity
I hope this activity will help you think about how the tools we use shape and sometimes determine the nature of our interactions with learners. Do the tools you use fall on the visitor or the resident end of your continuum? What about the learners in your classes?
[details=“Click to open”]
📖 Read Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement
📖 Create your own Visitor-Resident Diagram of your web presence using the tool of your choice.
📺 Share your Visitor-Resident Diagram in a tool that falls into the ‘Professional-Resident’ quadrant for you and send me the link so I can add it to a feed. Include a short reflection on what your diagram tells you about your web presence. Feel free to interact with others’ diagrams!
:fa-share: Alternately, you can share a link in the Unit 4 Discussion forum.
[/details]
Privacy
FIPPA, Privacy, and Consent Resources
It is second nature to most to take selfies and share them on Instagram, Snapchat, etc., but once you move into the role of an educator in either a public or private context, you must adhere to the laws set out by the B.C. Office of Information and Privacy Commissioner. Their office has put together guidelines for both public bodies and private bodies. TWU, as a private body is not held to the same standard as public bodies, but we should strive to meet the same standard. The guidelines for public bodies to better understand what the rules are is linked below and how to get consent is detailed on page 4 of the BC Cloud Computing Guidelines (PDF) and you can review the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act here.. TWU also has a privacy policy, available here.
Each public body will have their own process (which may range from not allowing tools to pressure to integrate networked learning tools from outside of Canada), so it is important to understand your own setting and the law. You may find some administrators or staff breaking these rules or not aware of them. It is important for you to enter your field and uphold the law, regardless of the culture you enter. This does not mean that you do not engage online or outside of Canada. It means that if/when you do so, that you understand the steps, which are not much more complex than the consent you would get normally for going “on the Internet,” as is described in most settings, but you must name the date consent is effective and, if applicable, the date it expires. It is important that you work with your school district on the consent process. You can see an example of how K-12 school districts are addressing access to cloud tools outside of Canada here (Coquitlam) and here plus here (Victoria). You must also name each tool individually. It cannot be “blogging.” You must name WordPress.com or Blogger, etc. If you use Flipgrid, you must name Flipgrid. Consent must also be informed, so effort must be taken to ensure that those signing consent understand the implications – that their data may leave Canada, how it may be harvested, and to know about the U.S. Patriot Act. One archived resource by the Canadian Treasury Board provides significant detailed information about the Patriot Act here. It is helpful to also review section 4(b) of the B.C. Digital Literacy Framework which is applicable K12 contexts but helpful for others.
Additional resources can be found here:
Privacy Education for Kids by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Information Security Awareness by the BC Government
FIPPA, Privacy, and Consent Competencies
Learners should ensure that they: - Are aware of the OIPC, FIPPA, and the Cloud Computing Guidelines and follow them - Understand what constitutes personal information - Understand that privacy online is a personal choice and must be respected - Understand if that you assume an “educator” hat, you have a duty for those under your care, their parents and families, and your colleagues with regard to their privacy and protection of personal information - Are aware that the Canadian federal government states that the chances are remote that the US Patriot Act will access personal information of Canadians, but recognizes that it is our responsibility to protect privacy preferences and to ensure that consent obtained is informed consent. Some families may be involved with restraining orders and need to be private for their safety, but the reasons for privacy may be preference. Either way, it is not our business as to the reasons for privacy preferences, but it is our responsibility to uphold preferences. - Understand how media moves through networks into US cloud-based services (e.g., back-ups on iTunes, syncing with Dropbox, messages with personal information is sent on Gmail, Google Docs, blog RSS subscriptions, etc.) - Understand that these acts do not prohibit participation in networked tools outside of Canada and many public bodies are in need of staff and leaders who model networked literacy and positive citizenship online for their community - Understand what appropriate consent looks like for public bodies and is aware of what alternative steps are to support learners when consent is not obtained.
FAR Facilitators
If you are planning on being a FAR Facilitator, please work through these activities. Of course, if you are not planning on being a FAR Facilitator and want to work through these activities, you are more than welcome to do so.
If you are not on the FAR Facilitation track, feel free to skip down to ‘General,’ below.
GitHub
!!!! The following instructions are specifically for those in LDRS663 who are planning to become FAR Centre Facilitators. If this is not you, you are welcome to dive in and learn this workflow, but it may be less applicable than WordPress.
Getting Set Up
We’re going to take a little break from the so-called ‘academic content’ of this course and dive into some technical skills and digital literacies that you will need to succeed in a TWU microcampus. Keep in mind that the skills needed to use this workflow can be learned. It might take some more work for some of you than others, but you will all get there. Be patient. Ask for help from your colleagues and instructors. Be persistent. You’ve got this.
Andy Samberg Smile GIF by Brooklyn Nine-Nine - Find & Share on GIPHYGitHub
Throughout this course, we will be using a web application called GitHub to manage a large portion of your coursework. We also rely heavily on GitHub and the workflow that you will learn during this course to manage course materials that are ultimately displayed in Moodle or WordPress for students. GitHub is a web tool that allows distributed teams to cooperatively contribute to documents and to track projects. You might be familiar with Google Docs, which is a collaborative tool for creating and editing documents. GitHub shares some similarities with Google Docs, but there are also some important differences.
These differences will become apparent as you become familiar with GitHub, but for now, just keep in mind that GitHub doesn’t have the same ‘real-time collaboration’ that you see in Google Docs, where multiple people can edit the same document at the same time and everyone can see everyone else’s changes in real-time.
If this all sounds overwhelming, don’t worry, we will walk you through each of the skills that you will need to navigate in GitHub.
Why GitHub?
Good question! GitHub will admittedly require you to learn some new ways of thinking about and interacting with software. The lingo in GitHub and the interface might seem obtuse and unnecessarily ‘jargony,’ but as you become more familiar with the capabilities and affordances of the tool, it will become second nature.
We are not using GitHub in order to make your life difficult! We are using GitHub because the structure of our organization requires robust technological infrastructure to manage our work, which is fundamentally decentralized with multiple interested users in different part of the world. For any given course, we will engage with the following groups and users:
- instructional designers
- subject matter experts
- editors
- production staff
- media producers
- librarians
- marketing and communications
- department administrators (Deans, Chairs)
- GLOBAL support staff
- university administrators (committees, Provost)
- teaching faculty (usually, but not always, the SME)
- Academic Facilitation Specialists
- Micro-campus administrators
- partner institution administrators, and of course,
- learners
This wide variety of stakeholders means that we need to be very intentional about how we manage our workflows.
Using GitHub
GitHub and similar tools allow distributed teams to collaborate and track changes and versions of large, text-based repositories. Git, the software that is at the foundation of GitHub was created to manage the process of creating the Linux operating system, and it is now the industry standard for large software development projects.
One reason that Git is so good for large, distributed projects is that it preserves a record of every change that happens to a particular file and who made that change. It also keeps track of whose change happened when so that users can sort out any conflicts. It is admittedly a different workflow from what most people are used to, which is likely composing .xml files in MS Word (did you know you are composing XML files in MS Word?).
However, you are here to learn how to use Github, so let’s get on with that.
First, there is some lingo that you need to become familiar with.
- repository (repo): a collection of files and folders, similar to how project folders are organized on your desktop
- clone: downloading all the files in a repo from GitHub (on the web) to your local computer
- commit: saving some changes to a repo
- push: sending changes to a repo from your desktop (local) to GitHub (remote)
- fetch: checking to see if your local copy of a repo needs to be updated with new commits from the remote
- pull: updating your local copy with changes from GitHub
- fork: creating an exact copy of someone else’s repo in your own account
- pull request: sending a request to the owner of a repo to merge your suggested changes with their repo.
It is ok if these don’t make much sense right now, but they are a necessary part of a git-based workflow and they help to maintain structure and order in a project.
Software
!!! It’s important that you follow these instructions carefully and completely. Skipping some steps might cause unexpected results.
GitHub
Register for a free GitHub account.
!! You will be sent an invitation to the ‘Trinity Western Online’ organization in GitHub.
- Click the link in the email invitation that you received to go to GitHub.com and fill in the ‘Sign-up’ details.
- You can find more information on the GitHub Help Pages
- Make sure you choose a free plan.
- To complete the sign-up process, you will need to verify your email address.
Install Git
Git is software that you need to be running on your computer in order to do some of the other things that you will learn how to do in this unit. You will only need to install git on each computer once, and then you never have to worry about it again. You will never ‘see’ git as an app on your computer. It runs in the background.
0.1.0.0.1 Go to git-scm.com
- click the ‘Download x.x.x for Windows/macOS/Linux’
- follow the instructions peculiar to your computer system. You can use the default settings suggested by the installer.
Install GitHub Desktop
GitHub Desktop is software that is used for cloning a GitHub repository (repo) to your local computer so that you can edit it using a text editor like Typora or Atom. It is also how you push your changes from your local computer to the remote repository in GitHub.
! Jargon Alert! A GitHub repository is just a set of text files, usually organized into folders, just like you would keep all the Word files you use for a course inside a folder for that course.
Go to desktop.github.com and click ‘Download for Windows/macOS/Linux’
Search for ‘community’ and choose the TWUOnline/far-community repo.
This is a private repo, so if you don’t see it, send an email to elearning@twu.ca and ask to be added as a contributor to the repo.
Typora
Typora is a plain text editor that allows users to edit the files in a GitHub repository. You can go to typora.io to download and install the beta version for free. Typora does not connect directly to GitHub, so once you have made your changes, you need to use GitHub Desktop to commit and push your changes.
Atom
Atom is also a plain text editor, similar to Typora, TextEdit, or NotePad, but it is connected to your cloned GitHub repo, so all of the changes that you save locally on your computer can be merged with the GitHub repo from directly within Atom.
0.1.0.1 Go to atom.io
Download and install the appropriate package for your system.
To create a new page in Grav, right-click a previous page and click ‘Duplicate.’
!! You will need to rename the folder as well as the ‘docs.md’ file within the folder.
Task Checklist
Ok, here is what you should have completed so far:
:fa-check: Sign up for a free GitHub account.
:fa-check: Download and install Git.
:fa-check: Download and install GitHub Desktop.
:fa-check: Use GitHub Desktop to clone the far-community repo.
:fa-check: Download and install Typora (recommended) or Atom.
:fa-check: Open the far-community repo in Atom.
Site Setup - Typora
!!!! The following instructions are specificlly for those in LDRS663 who are planning to become FAR Centre Facilitators. If this is not you, you are welcome to dive in and learn this workflow, but it may be less applicable than WordPress.
Now that you have installed the software that you will need and you have cloned the far-community repo to your computer you need to open it in Typora.
Click ‘File’ and choose ‘Open.’
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Alternately, you can click ‘Open Folder…’ in the bottom left corner of the window.
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Select the appropriate repo and click ‘Open.’
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Tap the title to open the folder, then tap pages to see a list of all of your colleagues’ sites, as below. As of the first writing, you will only see Colin’s site as 03.colin-madland and the master site as 99.MASTER. Subsequent cohorts will see all previous cohort sites. You may choose to use a pseudonym here.
Duplicate ‘99.MASTER’
Using Typora, you need to complete a few tasks in your Finder (macOS) or Windows Explorer (Windows). Use whichever file navigation system is appropriate for your context to navigate to the ‘far-community’ repo, open it, click ‘pages’ then right click on ‘99.master’ and choose ‘Duplicate’ from the contextual menu.
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You will end up with a copy of the folder…
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Edit the folder title.
You can complete this step in your Finder/Explorer window or in Typora.
Change the number 99 to the number that corresponds with where your last name is in alphabetical order in the list of sites. You can duplicate a previous number, so if your name falls between 04.colin-madland and 05.chisako-takano, you can use 04.your-name or 05.your-name. You will learn how to re-number sites in a later step. Then, after the . add your firstname-lastname all in lower-case, hyphenated, and with no spaces and hit ‘Return/Enter.’
Edit
subsite.md
Complete these steps in Typora.
Inside your new folder, you will find another list of folders and files, as below:
Click on the subsite.md file to view its contents, which should look like this:
The content you see above the dotted line is called the Frontmatter and it tells Grav how to display the file. This particular file is critical to your site because it controls a bunch of settings for your entire site. Here are the changes you need to make:
- Change
title: Mastertotitle: Your Site Title. You can choose any title you’d like, but don’t use any punctuation. - If you would like your site to be unlisted on the community hub, change
hide_from_subsite_list: falsetohide_from_subsite_list: true. - If you want a different homepage for your site, change
subsite_home: blogto the name of one of your other folders (without the preceding number and ‘.’)subsite_home: about-me, for example. - If you want to unpublish your site, change
published: trueto, you guessed it,published: false - Feel free to play around with the
true/falsesettings. - Although you are welcome to keep
subsite_list_description: 'Master of the Interwebs', you can also change that to something more suited to your taste.
Update the content-inject
Click on the plugin:content-inject and you will see it expand into the following:
Change the path from (/master/blog/_important-reminders) to /firstname.lastname/blog/_important-reminders).
The content-inject plugin is ‘injecting’ the content from the file /firstname.lastname/blog/_important-reminders
You can edit the alert.md file to change the injected content.
Site Setup - Atom
!!!! The following instructions are specificlly for those in LDRS663 who are planning to become FAR Centre Facilitators. If this is not you, you are welcome to dive in and learn this workflow, but it may be less applicable than WordPress.
0.1.0.5 To create a new page in Grav, right-click a previous page and click ‘Duplicate.’
!! You will need to rename the folder as well as the ‘docs.md’ file within the folder.
Now that you have installed the software that you will need and you have cloned the far-community repo to your computer and opened it in Atom, you should see the folder in your Project list on the left panel of Atom. Tap the title to open the folder, then tap pages to see a list of all of your colleagues’ sites, as below. As of this first writing, you will only see Colin’s site as 03.colin-madland and the master site as 99.MASTER.
Each numbered folder in the pages folder represents a single site in the community. You will be able to customize your site with your own header image and pages as you see fit.
The structure of the Community Hub is identical to the structure of each course hub. The significant difference is that we have several course hubs with each academic discipline area having its own hub, such as ldrs-master and arts-master.
0.1.0.5.1 Duplicate 99.MASTER
To get started on your own site, right-click on 99.MASTER and choose ‘Duplicate’ from the dropdown menu.
0.1.0.5.2 Edit the title.
Change the number 99 to the number that corresponds with where your last name is in alphabetical order in the list of sites. You can duplicate a previous number, so if your name falls between 04.colin-madland and 05.chisako-takano, you can use 04.your-name or 05.your-name. You will learn how to re-number sites in a later step. Then, after the . add your firstname-lastname all in lower-case and with no spaces and hit ‘Return/Enter.’
You will see your new folder in the list of folders, and it will be green.
0.1.0.5.3 Edit site details.
Click on your folder in the list to see its contents. The numbered folders are all pages on your site. Down at the bottom, there should be a course.md file, click that to open it in the editing pane of Atom.
You will need to change two things in the YAML at the top of the page.
The title should be changed to your name and course_list_description can be a short phrase you want to use as a sub-title for your site.
Then you need to change the link to the content-inject page to match the title you chose for your site when you duplicated the master.
[plugin:content-inject](/master/blog/_important-reminders) needs to be changed to [plugin:content-inject](/firstname-lastname/blog/_important-reminders), exactly as it is in the list of folders.
When you are done this step, you should see this on the course.md file.
Publish your site.
Now that you have started the basics of personalizing your site, it’s time to publish it to the Community.
Click the Git panel in the bottom, right corner of Atom.
At the top of the panel, you will see a list of Unstaged Changes indicated for now as files with a green ‘+’ beside them because they are new files. At this point, you have saved the changes to the files on your computer only. If you tap on one of the files, you will be able to see what changes you are proposing.
Tap Stage All in the top, right and the files will move to the Staged Changes panel. This means that you are ready to send them to GitHub.
General
If you are not in the FAR Facilitation track, please follow these instructions to set up a WordPress site.
WordPress Privacy
Now that you have thought about privacy in our digital world, it is time for you to make some decisions about how you would like to ‘be’ online.
You are invited to document your learning in WordPress. This means that your work would be posted online on a public site. Keep in mind, though, that you are NOT required to post your work publicly. The steps below can help you decide how comfortable you are with sharing publicly.
Please review all 5 steps below to decide on your approach. ##### Decide if you are comfortable posting your work online.{-}
If not, you can document your learning offline (with technology) by changing the privacy settings on your blog or using Word documents and offline video. We would ask learners to consider using an online blogging tool with no identification/using a pseudonym, so as to develop network literacy, which is important in supporting learners, who are growing up in networked environments, but the preferences of learners will be respected and supported.
If you are comfortable being online, then proceed to step 2.
Would you like to use your real name or use a pseudonym?
You can claim your name online and own your presence by using your full name. With increasing catfishing and identity theft online, it can be helpful to have a presence that may compete with any fake profiles of you that are out there or to have a more dominant presence so posts or pictures of you by others may get drowned out. That said, you may wish to create an identity without your personal information (e.g., West coast teacher). The choice is yours.
With that decision made, proceed to step 3.
Decide if you would like your blog to be hosted outside of Canada or inside of Canada.
We strongly recommend that you create a blog at create.twu.ca which is built specifically for students and faculty at TWU, is hosted within Canada, and is completely free for you to use. We also have created a template for you there, which will make getting started easier. You will not lose access to your site at create.twu.ca after you finish at TWU, but you are free to export it and publish it on your own space and on your own domain (e.g., http://yourname.ca or http://westcoastteacher.ca) with a web hosting company for a reasonable annual fee. Some of these companies host outside of Canada (e.g., Dreamhost), while others host within Canada (e.g., Canadian Web Hosting).
Be sure you review the resources under the privacy tutorial on this site or talk to your instructor about the implications of your options. You should also review the resources at the BC Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner along with the Cloud Computing Guidelines, which outline how to get consent.
With that decision made, proceed to step 4.
You also have to decide if you want to make your blog public or private.
You can set an entire blog to be private or simply selected posts can be set to private. You can set a password or invite people to gain access. We have provided instructions for adjusting your privacy settings on the tutorial page for opened.ca.
!! Important! !! If you choose to make your blog private, we will not be able to syndicate your posts to the course site. You will still be able to participate in the course, but please contact your instructor if you choose to make your site only visible to registered users of the network or your site.
And last, but not least…
Finally, you have to think about where you and your content will end up.
The wonderful thing about WordPress is that you can import that exported file into another WordPress instance (it sounds hard, but it isn’t and we’ll show you) or if you want to later set up your own domain and with your own WordPress installation. You may also import it into WordPress.com, but be aware that if you made posts with personal information knowing your site was hosted in Canada at the time and simply contained regular consent, without the specific consent for hosting outside of Canada, which requires you to name each tool, etc., you might not have consent to switch to WordPress.com. We often advise learners to post as if they will be on the cloud outside of Canada. To be honest, if you have a public blog, your friends and colleagues may be using U.S. cloud-hosted tools like Feedly to curate and read your blog posts or they may repost/quote your content on their U.S. blog. There are many educators who use U.S. software in their teaching and to support their learners. Just be sure to review how to get consent as per page four of the BC OIPC Cloud Computing Guidelines linked here.
Creating a Blog
Once you have done all the reflections on these 5 steps, you can move forward with creating a blog. Please visit :fa-link:create.twu.ca, click the green ‘Sign up here!’ link and follow the instructions. Once you are done there, you can return here to continue with the next section to get your site set up.
WordPress Resources
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We are here to help you create your site, so do not hesitate to ask for technical support. To get started on creating your site we suggest the following steps: The first Steps:
:fa-check: Log in if you have not already logged in; get familiar with the administration interface and click here for more information on it. The administration interface is also where the Dashboard in WordPress is located and you can get more info about it here.
:fa-check: Remember: When you are in the site administration area of your site, you can get tips on what you are doing by clicking the “Help” menu on the top-right corner.
:fa-check: Review your settings, start by changing your Site Title under Settings>General. You need to hit the “Save” button to save your changes. More information about General Settings here.
:fa-check: Add a new post]. You can pick one of the existing categories by checking a box on the sidebar of the authoring interface. You can manage your categories here. You will need to hit the blue “Publish” button on the right hand side before your post appears. Information on managing the privacy settings on individual posts is here.
:fa-check: Edit your about me page by introducing yourself and sharing a little about yourself.
:fa-check: You are welcome to change the images and upload your own. Here is information about using images from Google.
WordPress Tutorials
When you’re ready to start customizing your blog and putting content in, check out some tutorials available to you:
:fa-wordpress: Beginner’s guide for WordPress by WPBeginner
:fa-wordpress: Learn WordPress website by WordPress
:fa-wordpress: Digital Tattoo Project at UBC – learn digital literacy skills. Check out the menu sections and consider looking at the publish section.
The video below, created by a UVic student, shows how to use blog post categories to make a menu.
If you are confused about anything it is always good to do an initial Google or YouTube search, or reach out to your learning pod or your instructor.
Photo by Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash
Assessment
By the end of this unit, you should be able to…
General
📖 Create and configure a WordPress site.
📖 Create and publish a post and page on your WordPress site.
📖 Include media and hyperlinks in your posts.
FAR Facilitators
📖 Install Git, GitHub Desktop, and a Markdown editor on your computer.
📖 Clone a GitHub repository.
📖 Create and configure your own subsite at far.twu.ca/community.
📖 Create a new post on your site with media and hyperlinks.
📖 Begin composing and styling your posts in your text editor using Markdown.