Welcome to the Course!

Hello, MALAT learners! Welcome to LRNT 526.

You have two instructors for this course, and we'll take it in turns to communicate with you via this platform and in our one-on-ones. You can expect us to share grading, mentoring, and advice-giving, and you can come to either or both of us as needed.

I'll introduce myself here! I'm Brenna Clarke Gray. I am a learning technologist at Thompson Rivers University and I have lots of experience with classroom teaching, hands-on faculty support, and thinking and writing about the ethics of edtech. My favourite topics are scholarly podcasting, open education (including imagining how to make universities themselves more open), and applying ethic of care thinking to edtech. I'm excited to talk to you more about these topics or whatever gets you excited in our field.

I'm honoured to be co-teaching this course alongside Anne-Marie Scott, someone whose work I have long admired and who I'm very fortunate to call a friend. I will let Anne-Marie tell you more about herself when she posts, but I have learned the most from Anne-Marie about procurement processes -- like, how do technologies get into our classrooms, and what values judgements go into that process -- and taking a feminist and equity-minded approach to edtech. We're all lucky to be learning alongside her.

Anne-Marie and I both come to this class a little sadly -- we are first-time instructors for this course, and we are joining the MALAT team because our colleague and friend, Irwin DeVries, who usually taught this course, has recently passed away. Irwin has built a fabulous course and for the most part we are offering it following his past practice. We're going to do our best to do his memory justice, but we know there will be bumps along the way and we'll be grateful for your patience.

We will normally meet every second Monday, but on account of Easter, we're going to have our first class meeting on Tuesday, April 2nd. We hope you'll all be able to join us. In this first meeting, we'll go over the course structure, answer any questions you have, and give you a chance to work with Julia Szucs, Team Coach for this course. The best way to prepare for our first meeting is to famliarize yourself with the course webspace, Moodle, assignment guidelines, and then think of anything you'd like clarified.

So looking forward to meeting you all!