First, Welcome to the Psychology Department Personal Learning Landscape! Hopefully this is the beginning of a long, productive process of learning and sharing.

This help file assumes you have already registered on the site and have logged in. You are now a member of a very flexible and extensive learning system. Basically it is meant to be a place where you can place the fruits of your learning labors during your time as a student at Canisius, where you can engage in discussions on topics that are important to you, where you can grow from the work and interests of others.

The key to success will be your use of all the site has to offer. The tabbed links at the top of every page (My Work, Advisement, Interest Groups, Wiki) are a good place to start. My Work will take you to a listing of all content you have added to the site. Empty right now, it will hopefully grow in the coming months! Advisement goes to information about courses, minors, and advisors. Calendar is a place where the department can put information about upcoming events. Interest Groups is probably the most important feature of the PLL. Anyone can form a group where the members can share information about a common interest. All members of the PLL are by default made members of the Psychology Club interest group. Other groups can be either open to general subscription (anyone can join) or only open under invitation. Last, the Wiki link takes you to the Psychology Department wiki site. Lots of useful stuff is put on the wiki, so take a few minutes to explore it.

The PLL is all about sharing, and to do that you need to become a contributor by adding new material. There are a number of ways to do that. Here is a graphic of the page that you see when you click on the Create general content link on the left.

So many choices! As you can see, you can add just about anything that can go online to your account. Feel free to try the different options to become acquainted with them. Go ahead and experiment by making a trial posting. You maintain control over what you put on the site and can later delete or edit anything you add. When you first start, the most likely alternative is the blog entry. Each blog entry can have attachments added to it. Here is an example of how it might be used in a course. Your professor assigns a paper and you write and save it using Microsoft Word. To submit it to the PLL, you open a blog entry, give it a title, and in the body section type in some information about the paper. Then attach the paper using the Attachment link option. You can also copy and paste the paper from Word and retain most of the formatting, though the result can look sort of funky sometimes. This is just one of many things you can do on the PLL. As time goes by, information help files and videos on all the possibilities will be placed on the Welcome Back document, so come back often!