Welcome to The Landing!!

Athabasca Landing has many of the features of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as other social media like blogs, wikis, and social bookmarks. However, it is better able to control privacy settings and allow you to connect with and to create groups with members of the Athabasca community. It's a shared learning commons where everyone can share whatever they wish (within reason and the law), with whoever they want.

The best way to learn how to use the Landing is to use it!!. But we offer the following suggestions for quickly learning how to use the Landing.

1. Complete your Profile.

Your profile (accessible from the "You" menu) allows others to find your interests and experiences and to see what you have been contributing to the Landing. You can make each item you include as public or as private as you wish.

Besides completing as many of the profile fields as you wish, you may edit the widgets that are exposed on your profile page. Widgets can be used to show all sorts of stuff that you (or others) have posted or would like to share, and let you build a kind of dynamic home page for others to see. This page is what (selected) others will see when they are searching for contacts and connections on the landing. Please at least add a photo (it doesn't have to be of you if you don't want to show your face, but something that lets people recognise you and your posts is very helpful to forming a community) and some basic info as soon as you can! 

2. Add Widgets to the Dashboard. 

The Dashboard (found under the "you" menu, is your customizable interface to the Landing - it's a personal view that no one else will ever see. You can set it up (use edit page- top right) so that it displays the components of the Landing that you are most interested in following, using widgets. As you start to join groups, follow what others are doing and being involved in discussions, you are likely to find this a really useful jumping off point to keep up-to-date and to access things or sites that interest you more easily.  If you wish, you can make this your starting page for the Landing by configuring it in You|Configure my tools

3. Customize the Settings (to the right on the Top bar).

Here you configure some of your tools (for example import or export Twitter content) and set notifications. Notifications makes the system let you know when content has been added to groups or features that you are interested in following. You can have the Landing send emails to your account, to your internal Landing email to both or to neither.

4. Find people to follow and groups to join

Select the Groups option to find groups that might interest you. You can search for keywords (tags) that might interest you or just browse around. Open groups can be joined right away. To join a closed group, you must request membership and wait for the group owner to approve it. If you can't find a group on a subject that interests you, why not make one? Anyone can do it and there are lots of people on the Landing, some of whom might be interested to join it. You might want to post a message to the Wire to advertise your group.

To find people on the Landing, either search for them if you know them by name, or use YourNetwork|People on the Landing to browse the members of the site. You can use tag searching to find people who have filled in their profiles.

Once you have joined a group or two and/or followed one or two people, looking for possible connections under Your Networks, People you may know is a really useful way to discover others. It bases its recommendations on people who are following those you follow and people who are members of the same groups as you, so it only works once you have started following people and/or joining groups.

The Landing can feel chaotic at first because no one is in charge, and there are millions of different ways to use it. Take the time to explore, finding recent posts, exploring recommended content, checking out the tags that people are using to see whether any are of interest. Once you find something you like, look for the similar posts (normally shown at the end of each post) to find others that might interest you.

5. Participate and Add: 

Finally, you are ready to begin adding content, by selecting any of the tools under 'Create and Share' (such as pictures or bookmarks), creating content as short wire posts or longer blogs, adding people you are following, creating or joining groups, adding pages and discussions and other making use of the other tools available on the Landing. Don't forget to provide tags to describe what you are posting - it makes it easier for others to find them, and for you to track what you have created.

We hope the Landing serves to enrich your experience of Athabasca University and helps with your formal and informal learning.

This is a public page. Please note that any comments you add to the page will also be visible to the world.