Learning in a digital age/LiDA101/PLE/Photo challenge

“	In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.	”
—Alfred Steiglizt

Learning is a social activity and, in LiDA, we encourage learners to share learning experiences aimed at improving skills and building confidence in using social media. Learning online can be lonely, and the photo challenge is a way to connect socially with your peers through creative expression of the concepts you encounter on this course.

The LiDA photo challenge

This is an optional activity where we invite participants to take a photo for each learning pathway illustrating your engagement with digital technology during the course, and to share a personal caption or reflection on mastodon.oeru.org or Twitter. Here are a few ideas for the photo challenge:

1. Selfie of you using digital technology
2. Something that made you think about learning in a digital age
3. Free hand (self-drawn) image or mind map illustrating relationships among concepts you are learning
4. Something you found valuable
5. Something you are finding difficult
6. Something you enjoyed doing
7. Something new you learned
8. Something old but valuable
9. Something collaborative
10. Something enjoyable

This is a fun way to share our perspectives of digital literacies and learning in a digital world. Creative captions will probably attract likes and boosts from your peers.

Choosing a platform to share your LiDA photos

You are free to choose your preferred platform for sharing your LiDA101 photo challenge creations. In both cases, you will need to create an account if you don't already have one. The following table summarises the key differences in helping you decide which platform to use.

mastodon.oeru.org	Twitter
Open source Hosted by OERu Decentralised Federates with other public instances No advertising 500 character restriction "Toots" will be automatically harvested for the course feed.	Proprietary Hosted by Twitter.com Centralised Does not federate with other sites Twitter stream includes promoted advertising. 280 character restriction "Tweets" will not be harvested for the course feed. (Note: Twitter terms of service do not provide unrestricted permissions for OERu to harvest tweets).

Support resources

• OERu support resources for using Mastodon
• A beginner's guide to Mastodon
• Posting photos or GIFs on Twitter
• Using Twitpic.com to share photos

Instructions

1. Your LiDA photo is incorporated into the Declare yourself challenge where you will upload and share your photo in your first blog post for the course.
2. For the rest of your course, you should share your daily photos by posting them on mastodon.oeru.org or Twitter. (Note, in the next learning pathway, we will show you how to use these technologies as a social media backchannel for the course.)
   • You must include the following hashtag in the text of your tweet: #lida101photo
   • Remember to post a personal reflection or creative caption with your photo - this will be the body text of your post.
   • Show interest, gratitude and engage with fellow learners by "liking", "boosting" and/or replying to LiDA photo posts you find interesting. (See #lida101photos on mastodon.oeru.org or Twitter.)
3. You retain the copyright of your images. Unless you specify otherwise, you agree to share your LiDA101 images under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license