First Steps to A Farm of One’s Own

This post’s purpose is to help the Fleming College Sustainable Agriculture Program take their first steps into the Farm of One’s Own project. It is here as an example of what a post on a WordPress domain might look like.

First off, one thing you can do to add some excitement to your posts is to use Creative Commons Search to find pretty pictures that you are free to use because of open licensing. Like this:

But make sure you give attribution! Photo credit: “100_3695” flickr photo by dugsong https://flickr.com/photos/dugsong/4164468894 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

by the way, that featured image of the boots at the top gets attribution, too! “Clagett Farm Fall Festival 2009” flickr photo by krossbow https://flickr.com/photos/krossbow/4004610129 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

You can add your own images, too, of course! You may even want to be cool about it and openly license your images for others to use!

Another thing you can do is easily pop YouTube videos into your posts. All you have to do is copy and paste the URL into the page and it will embed itself! See it in action below:

And then you have a nice little video embedded right into the page. You can add your own videos to YouTube in order to do this, or use videos already on Youtube. Hopefully the video you post hasn’t broken any copyright rules by being posted. You may want to look into that.

Below is an example of a YouTube video embedded right on in the page. It is relevant to this post because it explains something you need to know about WordPress. It explains the difference between a ‘page’ and a ‘post’.

Another thing you can do is link to other posts or pages. Maybe you will want to link to one of your classmate’s domains when you are writing about where you got your inspiration for an idea, or perhaps to the original Farm of One’s Own page, or even another post on your own domain.

Your FoOO domain will be your space to grow as you reflect and share your Sustainable Ag experiences. You will also teach & learn with your peers as your domain takes shape.

Phase 1 of this project will be for you to reflectively blog while you are off on your co-op experiences. This will be a way to keep in touch with and learn from your peers and see all the other farms your peers are working with. You may even get lucky and not have to do a ‘what I did on my summer vacation’ presentation when you get back, because we will all know about each other’s experiences already!

So, let’s get started with these start-up instructions: Getting Started with WordPress SAG (Thank you to Dennis Vanderspek from COMM 201 for the starting point instructions btw)

The Open Ed Workout

Open Education is like going to the gym. Lifting the same weights together isn’t really what we’re doing (unless we work directly together) but mostly we’re just lifting our own weights and working out in the same place. We’re in the Open Ed Gym getting ideas from each other’s workouts, generally working towards similar goals and gaining inspiration and motivation from each other.

What’s in your Open Ed Workout? Domain of One’s Own? ds106Virtually Connecting? Bryan Alexander’s Book Club? Open Learning 17NetNarr? Antigonish 2.0?

#FeeltheLearn

photo credit “Workout” flickr photo by Carlos Varela https://flickr.com/photos/c32/3173303193 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Petition to Adopt Reddit into The Open Ed Family

“Fishing spot” flickr photo by Patrick McConahay https://flickr.com/photos/pat_mcconahay/15106445506 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

The way Reddit works is really quite conducive to open pedagogy. I think, if I’m understanding the meaning of this saying properly, it is one of those things that is ‘of’ the Internet and not just ‘on’ it. The structure wasn’t designed specifically for educational purposes, but it sure does a better job of it than most things designed with ed-tech in mind.

Here’s how it works, put simply:

Subreddits:

are subdomains with their own topic/category/culture/set of rules. r/hockey is a place to talk hockey. r/Toronto is a place to talk about Toronto (helpful if you live there!). r/Askscience is a place to ask science questions that you hope somebody who knows more than you to answer. r/shittyaskscience is the same thing only with deliberately shitty answers, just for fun. There is a whole suite of ‘shitty’ subreddits, which is hilarious. Subreddits can be whatever the community wants and you can create your own.

Posts:

You can post a link, image or just some text to a subreddit. See something cute and educational anywhere else on the Web? Go post it to r/awwducational

Comments:

Each post basically gets its own discussion board by default. Know some more info about that cute thing on r/awwducational? Add your knowledge and link to more in-depth info. Or just ask for more detail if you don’t know.

Voting:

Each post, and each comment, can be upvoted or downvoted. The stuff with the higher +/- in votes is higher up, with the idea being upvoted stuff is the best stuff. It doesn’t always work that way as hive-minds can get carried away, but it often lets you find the quality stuff more quickly. You can also sort by new comments or controversial etc.

And all those things together gives us what?

What we end up with is a place where we can create our own community, easily contribute ideas and things, discuss, and vote on (to give more/less visibility). If the Open Education community were to post the awesome things that they find or do on Reddit (say, anything that someone would Tweet out) what we would have is a stream with a little more permanence than your Twitter feed. If Twitter were a rushing creek or waterfall, Reddit could be a slowly plodding brook or river full of life meandering through it.

The most interesting Subreddits seem to grow organically. Here are some neat communities:

Explain Like I’m Five

Cool Guides

A whole bunch more

Thanks for the inspiration to blog, Gardner!

 

 

Magic Realism Bot

Daily Create # 1882 Spawn a story that the Magic Realism Bot started. Okay! This should be pretty normal.

What? Well I have some advice for the Irish Shopkeeper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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