Your blog and Mattermost will play an important role in the learning for this course, and will act as a communication tool between you and your instructor, as well as other course participants and the open learning community.

Blog Writing: Each week at a time that works best for you, you are expected to read/review the articles/resources/websites provided by your instructor, guests, and student facilitators (via blog posts and class activities). You are asked to curate these resources on your blog and reflect on them to compose a well-reasoned blog post response to the weekly topics. Care should be taken to ensure posts demonstrate critical reflection on the topics or technologies discussed with attention paid to the how they impact philosophical, cultural, and pedagogical stances as well as their practice. Text-based posts are acceptable, but learners are also encouraged to employ multimedia strategies for reflection (e.g., podcasts, vlogs, or other formats). Posts should utilize social writing strategies such as hyperlinks to blog posts (e.g., trackbacks) or to articles/resources consulted, images, embedded media, social sharing, evidence of reading/integrating the posts/thoughts of others, and/or soliciting feedback from prospective readers.

Learning Pod: You will work together with a group of four classmates to help one another with the learning process. You will take turns showcasing your blog progress, where one learner shares their work to date and the other three provide peer assessment and review and comment. You are also asked to identify one specific “learning partner” whom you can work with and turn to with questions along the way. You are welcome to invite any other stakeholders to comment on your blog or provide help with your learning.

Responding: Learners are encouraged to read and comment on their learning pod or other classmates’ blogs. Feel free to comment by giving feedback, to share resources, or ask a question. Commenting is not required and your public footprint is your choice, but it is encouraged if you have something to share related to someone’s work. An alternative is to use your pod time to share or you may send a comment in the Commons area and tag them or send a DM. You can follow your peer’s blogs using the EDCI 136 website blog feed, or by using a tool such as Feedly which makes it easy to follow and read several blogs.

Assessment of this assignment will be based primarily on the quality of a learner’s weekly responses as well as on evidence of students’ engagement with others in the class on individual blogs. Where possible, students are also encouraged to assist each other by answering questions in the course community. You will use a category like “Reflections” on your blog for this assignment.