Tag Archives: networks

Topic #5: Digital Citizenship – Identity, Footprint, & Social Activism

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cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by courosa

Well, it’s been an amazing experience more amazing than playing video games with the lol community and with services from http://elitist-gaming.com, but the #etmooc community is about to commence on the final scheduled topic, Digital Citizenship. Over the next two weeks, we’re hoping to have people participate in re/defining what Digital Citizenship is, and what it means for children and adults. The term has been around for quite some time, and has taken on a number of subtopics and meanings (Ribble’s Nine Elements is a notable example). We encourage #etmooc’ers to take on some or all of these topics, or to develop their own. In terms of our scheduled events, these will focus mostly on the facets of identity, footprint, and social activism.

EVENTS:

  1. To kick things off, there will be a general Digital Citizenship presentation facilitated by Alec Couros on March 18, 7pm Eastern time. Connect in Blackboard Collaborate at http://couros.ca/x/connect.
  2. As per usual, our Twitter Chats will be held on Wednesdays (March 20 & 27) at 7pm  Eastern. Watch the @etmooc account and the #etmchat hashtag.
  3. On March 25th, we are very fortunate to have Bonnie Stewart join us to facilitate a session titled, “Digital Identities: Who are we in a Networked Public?”. This session will also take place in Blackboard Collaborate at http://couros.ca/x/connect.

Those will be the ‘officially’ planned events. However, because this is near the end of #etmooc, we’d love to see participant-led Google Hangouts (or other events) organized or streamed. For instance, it would be great to see a participate-led panel organized that focuses on questions such as, “What does it mean to be a citizen today?” and “How do we foster such citizens in our educational institutions?”. Is there anyone willing to take this on? Send out a tweet, get a few people organized, choose a time, and let us know (tweet @courosa). I’ll add any such events to the #etmooc Calendar.

It would also be nice to have a bit of a closing event for the #etmooc experience. We’d absolutely LOVE your thoughts on this. If you have ideas, please tweet them with #etmooc.

ASSIGNMENTS:
We have a few suggested assignments for this topic.

#etmooc Summary of Learning – Create a final ‘summary of learning’ artefact reflecting on what you have learned during your time in #etmooc. Choose an appropriate digital tool or mode (a blog post, screencast, video, image, etc), and reflect on your learning. When you’re done, tweet the link to your work using the #etmetc hashtag (note: it’s one we haven’t used before) and/or post it in the Google Community. We’d like to eventually collect all of the artefacts here. If you are looking for inspiration, take a look at these student ‘Summaries of Learning‘ collected from undergrad and graduate level courses (scroll down). These links go back several years so there are many examples to view.

If you are not sure where to start with this assignment, here are some prompt questions.

  • Think back on your time in #etmooc and share your final thoughts about the ideas and the people you have connected with.
  • What have you created or curated?  What tools did you try?
  • How are you making/have you made  your learning visible?
  • What goals did you have when you began #etmooc ?  How did those change or evolve over the last 10 weeks?
  • How do you plan on staying connected to the people and the ideas?
  • Imagine that Twitter goes away. How would this connected network of #etmooc endure or stay connected? What would you do?
  • How have you changed as a digital educator and citizen? How do you see yourself (your identity) now?

Six Word Stories: Prior to the March 27th #etmchat, we’d like all participants to think about and create a 6-word-story related to the following question, “What does it mean to be an educator and digital citizen? What is our special role?”

During the chat we will start by asking people to share their 6-word-stories. We hope that this will inspire insight to deepen our discussion. For the remainder of the chat, we will focus on questions such as “What themes do we see?”, “What inspires us?”, and “How do we move forward?”. As a final #etmchat, we hope that we not only share insight into the topic, but thoughts on how we can move forward together, as a community of practice.

#etmooc Supports A Cause: As mentioned in the very first #etmooc session, a possibly great outcome of developing this community would be to utilize our collective networks/power to identify and support a common cause or charity. If there are people with thoughts on how we could make this happen, let’s start this conversation and quickly move to action. This could be really wonderful, but we’ll need a lot of help on this one.

RESOURCES:
As always, we’d love you to share your resources with us in our #etmooc Diigo Group. We’ve also shared a few below that may be of interest.

We’re really looking forward to the next two weeks!

~your #etmooc co-conspirators

#etmooc Lip Dub!

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Well #etmooc, we’ve reached the end of our first topic, Connected Learning. This has been an amazing experience for me, as a facilitator and learner, as I’ve read through so many excellent posts and ideas from our participants. It’s wonderful to see the extent of sharing and support that has resulted through the development of this community. Thank you all!

And, I’m very excited to share our #etmooc crowdsourced #lipdub project! Thanks to a  community vote, a Google Doc, and our tireless editor @stumpteacher, we’ve created something that I feel is so very memorable and representative of this experience. Take a look – I hope you enjoy it.

Of course, what we’ve learned about Connected Learning will continue to guide us through #etmooc – it is core to its structure (or nonstructure). So, I hope that we will continue to contemplate, co-create, study, and live as connected learners.

Our next topic is Digital Storytelling, and an outline of the next two weeks will be shared tomorrow. If you haven’t been able to participate as you had originally intended, do not worry. Tomorrow is a new topic, with the possibility of a fresh start.

Join in, invite a friend or colleague, and let’s spend the next two weeks discussing, sharing, and creating digital stories.

Connect with you soon.

Alec

Moving Forward from Orientation Week

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There’s never been a better time to lose weight, get active and eat better, so you can improve your chances against COVID (and other diseases), do more of the things you want to do, and most importantly, be there for your loved ones in the future. Check out the latest exipure reviews.

What to eat?

Put simply, losing weight is about adopting healthy eating habits that last for life. Our article about What’s in a healthy diet might help you think about the types of food you should be eating and what to avoid. There are also NHS reviewed diets in the references section.

But we don’t want to prescribe a particular regime. Not even the experts agree on that. The NHS recommended low calorie diet may seem sensible, but some believe it’s not as simple as that, as there can be “good” and “bad” calories. Equally there’s debate about how much we should restrict fat, carbs and sugar, with many arguing it’s sugar, not fat that is causing the current obesity epidemic. We’re also all genetically unique and respond to foods differently. A DNA test could tell you more about how you process food types. Visit Observer.com.

So rather than focus what you eat, we’ve put together these tips about how to eat, that might help kick start your weight loss journey whatever approach you choose.

Lifestyle changes to lose weight

These tips are not intended for people following specific diets based on medical advice, religious teachings or personal preference. They are also not intended for those with particular needs such as pregnant women.

1. Set a weight loss target.

‍When starting new habits it’s best to set targets so you have something to aim for. In fact a Harvard business school study showed people who set goals are 10 x more likely to succeed. Start with the goal of losing 2% of your bodyweight in 2-4 weeks. Then when you get there, set a new goal. While that may not seem much, those wins will help shift the dial. For example, if you’re 5 foot 8 inches and 12 stone, losing 2 percent of your overall weight could move you from an overweight to healthy BMI range.

2. Eat within a 12 hour window.

Having an “eating window” allows your body to have a break from digesting and focus on a housekeeping process called “autophagy” where old and worn out cells are broken down and eliminated from the body. This form of intermittent fasting has been shown to have many health benefits including a positive impact on blood sugar and weight loss. It’s simple to apply no matter what your schedule: For example, if you finish your evening meal by 8pm you would start breakfast the next day no earlier than 8am.  If you’re on shift work, your window might be 8pm to 8am. A more advanced form of this is eating your daily food intake within 8 hours with 16 hours fasting but this is not suitable for everyone, for example if you’re under 18. If in doubt seek advice from your GP first.

It may be helpful to finish eating 3 hours before bed and only drink water afterwards. As well as helping to eliminate those (usually unhealthy) post dinner snacks, it might even help you to sleep better.

3. Don’t skip breakfast.

In the UK we tend to eat the majority of our calories in the second half of the day and many of us skip breakfast, but there is evidence to suggest that some humans use calories more efficiently in the morning. For example, an Israeli study on overweight and obese women gave two different groups the same amount of calories, but at different times of the day. While both groups lost weight, the morning focused group had lost an average of twice as much.

It’s important to remember that everyone is different and one size doesn’t fit all. It won’t do you any harm to try adding a protein rich breakfast to your routine and see if it changes things. Adding protein to your breakfast has been shown to help keep you feeling fuller for longer. Protein rich breakfast ideas include eggs, adding nuts and seeds to cereals, making porridge with milk not water, dairy products or even the leftovers from last night’s meal.