Fifth Post: on Thing4

Thing4 challenges us to use digital media to get ourselves organised.  The suggested tasks include setting up Evernote, Diigo and Remember the Milk.

I set up an Evernote account a few weeks ago, and am still learning about its capacity.  So my goal is to use it more often and become comfortable with it.

I will look at Diigo and Remember the Milk and decide if they are useful to my role as a rural health advocate.   I’d like to look into Doodle too!

I do a lot of pro bono work on rural health issues, and have just heard that I have been appointed to the Advisory Committee to the National Rural Health Alliance.  I commence pro bono (or volunteer) with them at the end of July.  I am also active as a health advocate on rural health and am active in a number of peak bodies from NCOSS to Health Consumers NSW, and the Australian Women’s Health Network. I won a scholarship to act as a rural health advocate to a symposium at Macquarie University and appeared on a panel and spoke to rural health issues in health research design: the current trend is to bring health consumers (patients, clients) in as co-designers of research, and the symposium examined how to make this a reality rather than wishful thinking.  So I have lots of pro bono work to organise and to be effective in – I want to serve my community effectively and with passion and zest!- and I am thinking that I will use what I am learning here at CSU in my health advocacy work.  It seems congruent too with the Values of CSU and the idea of using university learning to serve the public good, and also with our inspiring Yindyamarra ethos.

I took a quick look at something recommended by 23Things and that is the Educause “7 Things You Should Know About”, and I downloaded the one about social media and the one about Antagonish 2.0 – I haven’t read them yet but I will commit some time to this.

I have also taken some time to watch the 3 video in Thing2 again and to consider them.  David Whites work made the biggest impact on me, as noted in an earlier blog post!  But I am also reminded how much a bit of revision, and re-visiting the earlier Thing exercises, deepens learning.  So another goal is to do some more revision and revisiting rather than just surging quickly forward into other Things!  Goodness, I better make a list – and use a digital tool to do it and organise my professional development at CSU!

 

 

 

 

Fourth Post: about three to four things about Thing2 in 23 Things

I appreciate David Whites perspective (Thing2) that ageism pervades the “digital native/immigrant” model of digital learning.  I appreciate his spectrum of “visitors and residents”, and the context-rich features of it.    I remember many young students, teens and early twenties, asking me how to set up a virtual journal in the Moodle LMS.  I remember hearing young students asking at the School Office for me (I was a lecturer in the School of Health Sciences at UniSA), and the staff saying with a smile “That’s her!”.  A few minutes later the young students and I were sitting on the carpet just alongside the counter to the School Office, devices and papers spread around us, while I talked them through the set up of virtual spaces and places for the subject I taught.  Other students came by, joined in and we had a spontaneous small tutorial in full flight.  Later I was approached by the Subject Coordinator and told the Head of School had seen us and asked him who I was.  A little later at a social function the Head of School saw me there, went to the Subject Coordinator, and asked to be introduced to me.  Little had I known that squatting on carpets in front of the School Office surrounded by young noisy playful excited tertiary students was noteworthy by Heads of School.

 

Later still I met him again in a restaurant, when we were celebrating a colleagues passed PhD , and he told me he had hundreds of casuals working for him and did not know all their names and only some of their faces because there were so many and most taught online.

 

I remember a Wagga student, early twenties, telling us he had grown up on a remote farm in the far north west of NSW and had never had internet access, and that with the boom-and-bust economy of farming families and the resulting fluxing poverty cycles in rural and remote communities, he had never purchased a computer, mobile phone or devilish devices and so had not developed the digital skills and knowledge he now needed to manage the online environment we expected him to be a “native” of at Charles Sturt University.  He had no prior knowledge of either the hardware nor the software capacities available.  Of course, he soon did, with the help of a mentor or two.

 

So ageism has no place in the digital learning community.  David White is helping confront this.