Learning in a digital age/LiDA101/Announcements/Session 0

Dear participant

To get the most from your OERu learning experience, we recommend that you establish a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) before you start this course. A personal learning environment refers to the range of tools, communities and websites you will use to support your learning and interact with fellow OERu learners.

These instructions are for: Independent study (recommend 2 days)

Today, you will:

• explore what a PLE is,
• establish a social media account on Mastodon, and
• set up a course learning blog.

These tools will form the start of your own PLE. As we progress through LiDA101, you will add more tools to your PLE, but we’ll leave these additional tools for later in the course.

Below, we provide a brief overview of the OERu learning environment, a list of key resources and activities you should complete and information on how to get help.

Remember, LiDA101 is a course focusing on building digital literacies for learning and you may encounter new technologies you haven’t used before - so at the beginning you may need to take a little more time to complete the tasks. However, the course provides step-by-step support to help you in building these digital capabilities - if you need more time, that’s fine. Work at your own pace and you will be rewarded for your efforts.

Good luck and we look forward to seeing you online!

Best wishes Your LiDA101 Team.

OERu learning environment

At the OERu, we believe that 21st century learners will be better prepared for digital futures by learning how to learn on the Internet rather than learning via a single, closed website. The OERu technology platform is an online network of personal learning environments that connects participants with online learning resources and with each other.

The OERu learning environment is comprised of three main components:

1. An OERu course website hosted on course.oeru.org which contains all the learning materials - for example https://course.oeru.org/lida101
2. A collection of “best of breed” open source interaction technologies where learners can post comments and interact with each other. These technologies are listed in the OERu technology wheel below and will form part of your PLE by the end of this course.
3. A summary course feed which collects relevant posts and contributions from these distributed interaction technologies in a central place on each course website - see for example the LiDA101 course feed.

For more information on the OERu technology wheel, consult the course feed page on the support site.

Resources for this session

Work through the learning pathway to Establish a personal learning environment.

Key activities for this session

1. Play the scavenger hunt game on Mastodon
2. Complete the LiDA photo challenge
3. Set up your course learning journal blog
4. Complete the declare yourself challenge

Need help?

For general support on using OERu technologies, please consult the support site and guidelines for getting help.

If you need course specific help, post your questions using the general forum for LiDA101. Remember to include the url of the page where you are having problems.

Let's leverage the power of peer-learning by helping each other. If you know the answer to a question in the forum, help a friend by responding. Bear in mind that as an international course, and academic volunteers helping out on the course may be in a different time zone and could be sleeping when you post a question.