At the moment we are actively building the materials for this course on github so please consider this more of a rough draft than a working course. If you are interested in collaborating on the production of this course, would be interested in running a section of this course at your school, or would be interested in taking this course when we launch it, please feel free to join us on github or let me know by email. Just email ian at this domain name: edtechgarden.org
In this course we will expand on the personal website building materials presented in our “Reclaiming a personal space for educationa online” course by building an online course site for use in teaching your own class. You do not need to have taken the previous course to follow this one. We will again be using the WordPress software and a Reclaim Hosting account so if you have gone through the previous course some of this material will already be familiar but we are starting from scratch here so all are welcome to join the class.
This course charges no fee, offers no grade, and is run in a public place where any who are interested can review the material. As such there are none of the traditional requirements that come with a course offered in a formal educational institution. However, there are still signs of success and there are still prerequisites that are worth considering.
Prerequisites include:
a) Internet connection
b) Time
c) English language skills
d) $25-32 USD/year
The funds listed in d) are the current rates offered by Reclaim Hosting for your own domain name plus personal hosting for the year. They are competitive but you may find other options for less and, depending on what you are looking to get from your online space, you can also sign up for a free service like wordpress.com, medium, or tumblr. We will discuss the reasons this course focuses on Reclaim’s paid offering in depth later on.
I mention all of this to make clear from the outset that putting something online is not the same as making it universally accessible. If you are interested in the reality of online education, and especially if you are a teacher considering including online activities in your courses, it is important to recognize that access to the internet is a real barrier for many. In the US, many students who have internet access have it only as part of their cell phone plan.
For anyone who is interested in seeing what online participation looks like for a student whose only internet access, and likely only computer access, it through a smart phone, I challenge you to take this course only using your smart phone. Like most educational technology, everything in this course should work on a small screen but the experience will most certainly be different.
To me, success in this course consists of three things:
1) Build yourself a platform
2) Contribute something to the group
3) Publish something to improve the course for next time
Because we are not actually giving grades, we can define what each of these points means as flexibly as we want. I especially want to encourage those of you who are less comfortable with some of the more common assigned participation formats in courses, i.e. chat sessions, mandatory “response” postings, etc, to try out some different kinds of contributions that you may have seen in other online contexts.
For instance, if you find value in what someone else has written you could find some links to sources that support key points in the discussion or even well written arguments that run counter to that piece to present a more full picture of the ideas under discussion. Or you could spread the initial piece to people and communities that you think will be interested in it, translate it to make it accessible to new communities that might not have previously seen it, or even create a shareable list of links to all the materials produced by participants in this course. Just think back to other online conversation you have seen and anything you were happy someone did. Any contributions made in good faith are welcome.
We can be as flexible in defining these points as we wish but I do take them seriously as markers of success in the course. One of the big differences between this course and a simple HowTo website is that we are all going through it together. While this course may not be a substantial time commitment compared to formal classes, I do hope you will treat it as a significant commitment.
edtechgarden