Digital skills for collaborative OER development/Announcement Session 2
Dear DS4OER participants
Welcome to Session 2 of the syllabus on Developing wiki skills. These instructions are for your Wednesday 15 and Thursday 16 April 2015. If you have just joined us, you will find copies of the instructions for Session 1 on the course site.
Recap
I hope that you found the course orientation useful in setting up your PLE. By now you should be familiar with:
- the layout of the course site,
- have established your course blog and tested a microblog post on WEnotes below, OERu forums or Twitter. (Remember to include the "#ds4oer" anywhere in the body of your microblog post so that we can harvest these contributions for the course feed.)
- Created an account on WikiEducator which you will need for Session 2 and subsequent authoring of your OER.
- Completed the optional new OERu participant survey.
Register your blog
Important: Please remember to register the url of the public view of your course blog. This is needed for harvesting your blog posts which are tagged or labelled using the "ds4oer" course code. In the case of a blog, you need to tag or label your post using the "ds4oer" course code as opposed to including the code within the body text of your post. (See how to add a label on Blogger or how to add a tag in WordPress.) Note that posts to Twitter and WENotes will appear immediately in the feed, but it can take up to an hour for your blog posts to show up in the feed (assuming you have registered and tagged you blog posts correctly.)
Yes, a few participants may be thinking that a course forum would be easier for our interactions. However this is a course about digital skills and you will retain ownership of your conversations on the web using technologies you choose rather than losing access to your forum posts a learning management system when the course is finished.
Instructions for developing wiki skills
Basic wiki skills are a key capability required for our course because we will be developing and assembling our OER materials using a wiki. In this course we learn by doing and you will demonstrate your basic wiki skills by developing your own user page in WikiEducator. You will start using the VisualEditor which is similar to a WYSIWIG editing environment and relatively easy to use.
- Work through the learning materials where we introduce wiki technology
- Complete the Wiki skills challenge
The most important tip is to remember to click the save button. If you remember to do this, we can fix all mistakes because the wiki keeps a detailed history of all edits.
Need help?
Post your questions on WEnotes below, OERu forums or Twitter including the url of the page where you are having problems. (Remember to include the "#ds4oer" anywhere in the body of your microblog post). Let's leverage the power of peer-learning by helping each other. If you know the answer to a question, help a friend by responding or fixing the problem directly on the wiki page. Bear in mind that as an international course, your facilitators may be in a different time zone and could be sleeping when you post a question.
Most of all have fun! Be warned, wikis can be addictive.
Your facilitator
Wayne
UNESCO/COL/ICDE Chair in OER.
