I’ve made it to Open Ed 2018 and I’m excited to present a lightning talk on Friday at 3:30 – 3:45 with Sundi Richard and Joe Murphy on our collaborations with #DigPINS. If you are at the conference please consider coming by and if you are not I’m hoping this blog post will give you a glimpse.

If you don’t know, DigPINS is a faculty development experience, much of which happens in the open, where we collaborate with small cohorts of faculty in a fully online experience to discuss issues of Digital (the Dig) Pedagogy, Identity, Networks, and Scholarship (the PINS) over anywhere from 3-5 weeks.

We have released a template of the curriculum as a model that can be found at https://digpins.org so that is one place to get started but that is just content… #DigPINS is really an opportunity for collaboration and community as we will discuss in the talk.

It basically works from a position of someone at an institution deciding that they are going to run #DigPINS with a cohort of faculty – this could be an instructional designer, a librarian, a technologist… but someone interested in faculty development around how we learn in online spaces. This person needs to pick dates, register people, promote it and ultimately design the thing. Like I said a template is available at https://digpins.org but, again, that is just content. One of the big design decisions is about choosing the open digital environments and the backchannel (This is the ‘closed space’ that we are calling out in the title of this talk).

We have found that the backchannel is important for faculty who are just getting started. They have to have a safe space to communicate and collaborate outside of the public eye while considering and challenging themselves with these heavy notions and the very idea of ‘going open’.

The facilitator should have experience with each of the themes (the PINS) in theory and in practice.

This past summer Joe and I ran the first DigPINS cohorts in conjunction with one another creating the first inter-institutional cohorts. We had a total of 17 participants and we had to be flexible with one another. We had our own backchannels and our own open hubs.

There are lots of ways to join – the big one is to run your own iteration at your own school with your own cohort but people can also dip in as individuals with any of the open activities and of course on the #DigPINS tag on Twitter. This January there are plans for all three of us to run it with cohorts from January 2nd till the 28th.

I’m embedding our slides below – if you need more info don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.