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Vincent Yong SAPL

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There are times when I am in self-reflection in my home due to 'stay home' policy, I wonder why the corona virus pandemic has hit our present generation, who live in the era of technological advances. The last global pandemic happened about one hundred years ago in 1918. The Spanish Flu influenza pandemic affected one third of the population then with estimated 50 million death with a death rate of 2% (statistics from healthline.com)[1]. From the first time it happened in China, the virus has now spread to every country. At the time of this article, USA, Italy and Spain has overtaken China in terms of number of deaths. The worse is that it has affected the way we live our lives, confining us to our home. It's a lock down and fearful feeling for my family and myself. The enemy is COVID 19 and the environment outside the four walls of my home is the battlefield.

COVID 19 pandemic is like World war I and II war for our previous generations but this time the enemy is invisible and all around us. The 'no mercy' enemy is in the air we breathe. The reason we do not see the enemy and the enemy does not cause immediate suffering and death, causes many people are taking the COVID 19 virus lightly. They are willing to go outside with unprotected PPE and still socialize in group gatherings. That was the scenario 3 weeks ago. Now, the world has declared war on the COVID 19 pandemic, the world is turning into small pockets of aftereffects nuclear leakage towns like 'Chernobyl empty district'. World War III that many in the world expected to be a nuclear war is now a reality but in the form of COVID 19 pandemic. It is turning every country into ghost towns, every economy into recession and every medical facility into 'frontline' pandemic emergency centers. The war on pandemic is real and scary.

In the university, it has created a ghost town through the dwindling of students' physical presence on campus. In the beginning, everyone was taking the virus lightly, there were many who were skeptical of the Corona virus (the initial name of COVID 19). Within a week, the virus spread to 5 to 6 countries, mainly in Asia and Iran, and Asian students with affiliation to the countries were worried about their relatives back in their home country. In the 2nd week, cases of COVID 19 were detected in Europe and North America, namely US and Canada. At this stage, COVID 19 was declared by World Health Organization (WHO) as a global pandemic. This sent that everyone in the university to a paranoia mood. The university and SAPL faculty began to send out 2 emails a day, then every day. Activities and classes on the University began to slow down, then cancelled and finally all classes were remotely, through online class. On April 2, the whole university and our faculty was shut off from students. The security patrol cars, that usually gives fine tickets to illegal parking, have shifted their focus on ensuring no students are in the University. Only students with critical research access are allowed on campus. SAPL, MacEwan Hall and the University of Calgary, my 'home' where I spend 80% of my time a day is now out of bound for students and I have to be home-bound, self-isolate and practice social distancing in target to 'flat-line' the COVID 19 pandemic.

In the beginning, I felt that the 2 meters away from each other, social distancing and self-isolation was an over exaggerated action. As days goes by with the pandemic claiming more victims, the university initial instructions became the government's call. It was then, I realize it was how serious the COVID 19 pandemic is. Wearing the surgical mask outside, in public area, that attracted stares and cynicism in the beginning, turned into frantic search and buying for N95 mask and surgical mask. Some governments in the world have enforced the law on their citizens to have mask when they are outside their home. How can one forget about the toilet paper, sanitizer and vitamins C panic buying from the supermarkets? Every shelves of these items were empty. Bags of rice, meat and fruits especially oranges followed suit. People were going mad, into a frenzy hoarding and crazy buying pattern. Fortunately, the supermarkets in Canada did not take advantage of the non-logical demands of the customers by increasing the prices overnight. Human reactions were moving from the thinking being to a more animalistic nature during this COVID 19 pandemic. The global pandemic is forcing the fittest of the survival mentality in the community.

New jargons like flatten the curve, homebound, social distancing and Zoom have begun to sound familiar and pop up in our daily lives. Slowly we are drawn into these ways of living our lives. I am truly moving into the millennial and Gen Z worlds, all communications on smartphone, laptop and the dependence on internet. It is truly new to me, but I feel that can achieve more outputs with less interaction and 'noise interruption' that exists in the normal traditional communication methods. After the pandemic, I am afraid that I am so familiar with this 'virtual way' of communication that I lose my personal face to face preference in human interaction. Life will indeed change for me after this pandemic with the little experience and steep learning curve of online classes. Love it or hate it, the virtual world is upon me! I am in the midst of a new REVOLUTION, not led by my idol, Che Guevara...but COVID 19.

[1] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-deadly-is-the-coronavirus-compared-to-past-outbreaks

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Random Observations from Afar - A wannabe 'stand-up comedian' graduate student rattling about his unpredictable encounters and surroundings. Through the lens of a critical mind, motivated by positivism, he harbors the hope to be the fertilizer to grow the 'DARE TO DREAM' seed of a better world and pass it to the next generation.

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There are times when I am in self-reflection in my home due to 'stay home' policy, I wonder why the corona virus pandemic has hit our present generation, who live in the era of technological advances. The last global pandemic happened about one hundred years ago in 1918.

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I'm Kathryn Blair, a second-year PhD student at the University of Calgary in Computational Media Design. My work focuses on exploring the role of algorithms in society through interactive installation art.

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Kathryn Blair - Just another UCalgaryBlogs.ca site

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I'm Kathryn Blair, a second-year PhD student at the University of Calgary in Computational Media Design. My work focuses on exploring the role of algorithms in society through interactive installation art.

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Concerned about your content in WordPress?

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Concerned about your content in WordPress?

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Pat working from home

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My very own website, yayy!
http://damilolamomodu.ucalgaryblogs.ca/

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I am a researcher, a teacher and a mother.

A researcher intrigued to discover how early life events affect development an influence behavior later in life.

A teacher excited to learn more with each new class and their unique students. Thrilled to contribute to the students growth in a horizontal process where we all learn together.

A mother of 2 amazing kids that show me everyday how magic and fun the learning process can be, giving me insights to be the best teacher/researcher I can.

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Cristie Noschang - My journey: as a teacher or as a researcher what inspires me is the passion to learn!

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I am a researcher, a teacher and a mother. A researcher intrigued to discover how early life events affect development an influence behavior later in life. A teacher excited to learn more with each new class and their unique students. Thrilled to contribute to the students growth in a horizontal process where we all learn together.

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My template site - Just another UCalgaryBlogs.ca site

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My name is Andre Popinhak. Currently, I'm a Ph.D. candidate at the Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering.

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YAY!

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My name is Tamara and I am a postdoctoral scholar at the Cumming School of Medicine. I have teaching experience but I am certainly not an expert! I want to learn about and be exposed to some of the latest and greatest technology platforms and get some ideas on how I can incorporate technology into my teaching. I also am hoping to understand some strategies for managing and keeping on top of the forever changing landscape. One interesting thing about me? I don't live in Calgary 🙂

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tamaramccarrontemplate - Just another UCalgaryBlogs.ca site

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My name is Tamara and I am a postdoctoral scholar at the Cumming School of Medicine. I have teaching experience but I am certainly not an expert! I want to learn about and be exposed to some of the latest and greatest technology platforms and get some ideas on how I can incorporate technology into my teaching.

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- Now let's talk about some Models for Teaching and Learning with WordPress. To begin, let's first talk about the relationship between WordPress and your Learning Management System. As you build your course, there's two primary types of content you're going to have. Content, that's okay for it to be open and available to the outside world and content that you need to keep secured and locked away and not available publicly out on the internet. The relationship is the setup by your Class Site. Now we can use WordPress to be able to create our Class Site and we can also use WordPress to house our Open Content but we can also use our Learning Management System to manage all of the Secured Content. That way from one site, students are able to access both types of content. In order to get to the Secured Content, they just need to be able to log in to your Learning Management System. Throughout of this title, let's keep this concept in mind that anytime we're referring to our Class Site, it's a site that's managed on WordPress but it has links to both of these types of content in these two different systems. Now let's get some models for teaching and learning with WordPress. And the first one I'd like to talk about is the Content Distribution Model. In this model, the Class Site is created and managed by the instructor. The students are consumers of the content that's delivered through the Class Site. The next model we'd look at is the Collaboration Model. Here, once again, we have our Class Site that's created and managed by the instructor. Students are able to consume the content that's produced on that Class Site. But the students also have authoring accounts on the Class Site so they're able to contribute content out to the main class. The next model would be the Student Ownership Model and this is a big paradigm shift because now, the students are creating and managing their own sites. They own a content that they're producing and that content is hosted on a site such as a wordpress.com site, your local camp is WordPress installation or they may have their own sub domain or their own full domain on the internet. The Class Site is still created and managed by the instructor but it becomes a central hub for all of the content that's created by the students and it is syndicated into the main site. Now before the syndication can take place, there's a step that needs to be taken and that is a Request for Permission to Syndicate because the Class Site is open and available on the public internet. The instructor needs to make a request to the student to acknowledge that, "Hey, this is your content "and we're going to syndicate it on to this main site." The students can then choose how they want to agree to that syndication. They can say, "Sure, go ahead and syndicate "all of my content on to the site." Or, the students can decide that they want to restrict some of the content by simply password protecting that content and then they give the key to that password to the instructor so the instructor is able to access the content that the student creates as part of the course but the instructor is not able to share out the intellectual property of the student. With this model then, all of the students are able to consume all of the content that's been created by all of the other members of the course. The next model we'll look at would be the Open Connected Course Model. Here, we take the idea of the students owning their own site and we expand it out so that the instructors are also creating and managing their own sites and open participants out on the internet are participating with the course by managing their own sites and all of that content can be syndicated into the Class Site which, once again, becomes a central hub of activity for the course. We also need to have this Request for Permission to Syndicate that's sent out from the Class Site out to all of the individual owners of their site to make sure that everyone agrees to have their content syndicated together. Once that agreement is made, the content produced by the satellite site can then be syndicated into the main site and everybody is able to learn and grow together. This model is the one that we're going to use for building our course in the rest of this title. Now there is one more model that I want to talk about and that's the Student Centered Model. In this model, we once again change the paradigm. Now, the Class Site is no longer the central hub. Classes, instructor sites, and other sites out on the internet becomes satellite site to the students site. So from the student's perspective, their site becomes the central hub of their educational experience. They need to still make request out to all of their instructors, to their classes, and to other people that they're going to syndicate content from. And likewise, those request may become in the other directions as well. So if an instructor or a class is going to syndicate a student's content, that request still needs to be made. Once all of that has been agreed upon, then students are able to consume content from all of those other sites. And as the students produce their own content, that content can then be re-syndicated back out to all of these different locations. This is a direction that I think education is moving towards in the future and WordPress is a great platform to begin having this conversation. So for the rest of this title, if you're following along as an instructor, the whole course is created so that you can create any of the different models of courses that we've talked about. If you're a student watching this course, you can actually build your course in the Students Centered Model. Just realize that every time we're talking about the Class Site from the instructor's perspective, if you think of the site as your own site from your own perspective, then everything should work out for you. Just be sure to get permission from any site owner that you're going to syndicate content from before you syndicate it.

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WordPress for Education - Models for teaching with WordPress

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Now let's talk about some Models for Teaching and Learning with WordPress. To begin, let's first talk about the relationship between WordPress and your Learning Management System. As you build your course, there's two primary types of content you're going to have.

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Click on the "+" at the bottom right, paste your URL here and share your new site with others!

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Click on the "+" at the bottom right, paste your URL here and share your new site with others!

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My Template Site - Just another UCalgaryBlogs.ca site

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My name is Laura, I'm a Scientist in the field of Biophysics. I love teaching and technology and I'm currently working as a Learning Technologies Specialist at the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning.