We believe what makes #DigPINS great is what happens in the conversations and interactions between participants, facilitators, and guests. It is hard to articulate this experience or provide it as a “template”. You can check out our blog and pages on course structure for a little more on how we create the experience.
However, each week or topic of #DigPINS has guiding questions, activities, and readings – you can think of this as the “content” of the experience. This page has an example of content from a recent deployment of #DigPINS at the St. Norbbert College in Summer of 2019. This example is shared to give you an idea of what a weekly topic looks like. If you would like to run #DigPINS on your campus feel free to take this example as a starting place. If you would like collaborate with others who have run #DigPINS in the past feel free to contact us.
We suggest that week 2 of #DigPINS focuses on the topic of Networks, because participants benefit from exploring who they are online before examining their place in their professional networks online.
Week 2 starts July 1st!
Thank you everyone for your contributions, reflections, and conversations so far. #DigPINS is the kind of learning experience that works best when we interact and learn from one another, so thank you for all of your sharing.
Some of the guiding questions this week include:
- Who do you interact with online?
- How do you find and join networks?
- What are your current networks?
- Can an institution, organization, office, or department have a digital identity and participate in a network? How is that different from an individual?
- What are the affordances and limitations of particular networks?
Personal Learning Network (PLN)
#DigPINS explores digital networks from the perspective that who you interact with, and how you interact, informs and shapes your digital identity. We form one network as a group doing #DigPINS together; there is a larger network of all those who have taken #DigPINS in the past at St. Norbert, and in interacting with our colleagues at Kenyon College, University of Michigan-Dearborn, and University of Southern Maine we will branch that network out even further.
As we begin to talk about digital networks, we start to talk about being more resident in more public places. One way to think about building connections in a way that is meaningful from an academic context is by thinking of it in terms of the Personal Learning Network or PLN.
For instance, Autumm Caines, Joe Murphy, Damien Michaud, and I are part of a larger network of folks who work around instructional design, educational technology, and digital pedagogy. There is a lot of overlap in our PLNs and this week we will introduce you to some of the people that we learn from online.
Things to do this week:
Watch this video from our facilitators:
Develop your network –
Check out the list of suggested twitter accounts (and hashtags) from the #DigPINS facilitators – follow accounts that look interesting to you
Start looking for environments and individuals who are working in the public in areas that you are interested in professionally and academically. Connect with ones that you feel an affinity towards
Write your blog post and tweet it using #DigPINS – We do want to continue having conversations in Slack and on the blog, but this week you should start working in the public more (disclaimer: if you have concerns about working in the public due to security or privacy talk to me). Maybe consider not just promoting your blog post in Slack but posting it to twitter – don’t forget to tag #DigPINS. Our main prompt for the week is to consider people and environments for building your PLN and share your process for finding and connecting with them. We have three main tools that we are using Slack, the blog, and Twitter. Note that they all have various levels of how public you can be on them. If this is not apparent to you please bring it up on Slack for further discussion or reach out to me personally.
Play the Nicky Case narrative game The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds to dip your toe into the world of network science. Note that this experience has lots of little call-outs with extra information – read and interact with what you are drawn to.
Video call with Rajiv Jhangiani July 5th at 12pm CST (1pm EST) – Ravij is Associate Vice Provost, Open Education at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia, author of Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science, and the co-founder of the Open Pedagogy Notebook.
Prep for video call – To prepare for this call and to get familiar with Rajiv’s work you should read/watch Open Educational Practices in Service of the Sustainable Development Goals, on his blog. We will be having a call with him July 5th at 12pm CST (1pm EST).
Register for the call – You can register using this google form.
Read – Critical Digital Citizenship: Promoting Empathy and Social Justice Online by Maha Bali
Read – Hatching a PLN by Terry Greene
Alternate readings (if you want more)
- Personal Learning Networks: Knowledge Sharing as Democracy – Alison Seaman
- Digital Identity in a World that Never Forgets – Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt
Looking forward to Week 3
Next week we will be doing a video call with Dave Cormier and doing a public annotation of a recent blog post of his using hypothes.is. If you want to get a head start on next week you can read Dave’s blog post Who is going to help build a pro-social web?
