DigPINS is not a “click here” workshop, but we will be exploring a set of tools which can help you find and share information and community on the Internet. Our goal is to give you time and space to explore these tools, think about their affordances and costs, and make your own decision about what does or doesn’t work for you.
Blogs
This site is part of our toolkit! Every week, I’ll post readings and activities here, and you’ll be asked to write a blog post reflecting on our work together (or other topics as relevant). You’ll also be asked to read what other folks are writing and talk with them in the comments section or the backchannel.
Our partners each have their own website, and you’re encouraged to leave comments on those sites as well. (We’re aggregating the blogs from all the sites over at discuss.digpins.org so you can watch one website instead of 4.) When it’s time to write your own post, remember to check that you’re here at kenyon.digpins.org.
Slack
Slack is a text based chat program that we’ll be using as our private discussion space. If you want to bat an idea around before putting it on the open web, that’s the place to do it. You will need an account, and you will stay most connected if you download the app and turn on notifications or at the very least log in once a day. While you may not get immediate responses on Slack, at its best it should be a place for faster discussion than a blog or forum post.
Autumm Caines, our facilitator at University of Michigan – Dearborn and one of the authors of the curriculum, has made a video introduction to Slack which may be useful.
Hypothesis
Hypothesis is a social annotation tool for the web and digital documents. You will need an account and a browser plugin is optional. This tool allows us to collectively mark up a text that we are all reading in-line with comments, questions, and even video and images. We’ll have a group annotation activity, but you can also annotate anything that interests you, and if you make your annotation public and use the #digpins tag, it can work as a way to share information. (If you check out that hashtag now you’ll see a mix of things the facilitators have found interesting and some of those group annotations from earlier iterations.)
Synchronous Video Calls
Typically each week facilitators organize a synchronous video call with the participants and often invite special guests. You will need a camera and microphone to be able to participate; this could be a webcam on your computer or a smartphone/tablet. We’ve tended to use Google Hangouts or Google Meet for these, though we’ve also used Zoom for some sessions.
Social Media
Throughout the course participants are encouraged to join in on live Twitter chats with some established online communities, as well as the ongoing asynchronous conversation using the hashtag #DigPINS.
Week 0 Focus Areas
Digital Tools
