Welcome to the first week of #DigPINS!
We have activities, readings, and a video call this week. Each week we encourage you to blog about your thoughts from that week’s interactions and to engage with one another in our Slack channels.
If you did not get a chance to review week 0’s orientation materials, that’s fine, but for this week you should be sure that at minimum you have access to Slack and this blog. More info on that is found on the digital tools page of Week 0.
Remember your goals
Having a clear goal is part of being successful in this kind of learning community. As Yogi Berra said, “you can observe a lot just by watching,” but you’ll learn more if you set some targets for tools you’d like to try out, topics you’d like to explore, or activities you’d like to do. So we encourage you, in these early weeks, to spend some time thinking about your goals for the next month of DigPINS. You can share those goals on your blog post, in the backchannel, or privately with the facilitator or some other cohort members.
DigPINS starts with an exploration / reflection on one’s own digital identities. Together, we will think about and discuss the digital identities that we have or would like to develop.
There’s no “right way” to form a digital identity. Rather, we’ll share what spaces we occupy online, and discuss what has worked for each person, what hasn’t, what fears and goals we may have, and possible ideal identities for given contexts, as well as what we would like to avoid.
Identity is how you see yourself, but it is also affected by how others see you, what spaces you share, and what actions you take in those spaces.
Some of the guiding questions include:
Who are you online?
What social traces do you leave?
How would you like to shape your digital presence and identity?
This week, think about how you are going to get to know the others in our group. How will you share your impressions, questions, and insights around this experience? How will you respond to other’s impressions, questions and insights? When we share physical space, we tend not to need to think about this as intentionally. In an online space, we need to consider how we’ll send the important, subtle messages we can send face-to-face with cues like the way that we dress, the way we hold ourselves, the way we decorate our spaces, et cetera. How will you reach out and show who you are?
THIS WEEK’S ACTIVITIES
Digital Identity Analysis – As a way to analyze, reflect on, and talk about your digital identity we are asking you to make a Visitor and Resident (V&R) map and share it with the group, or more broadly on Slack and Twitter if you so choose. To learn about how to make a Visitor and Resident map, start with these video and reading resources – Visitor and Resident Typology and Video on VR Mapping.
Many (most?) of us have more than one side to our digital identities; some of us may even manage multiple “digital identities” if we’re responsible for the digital presence of projects or groups (like I am for the Center for Innovative Pedagogy). Feel free to map whatever’s interesting for you to map, and to share what’s comfortable for you to share.
You can choose how you would like to make it but for me it’s easiest to just draw it out on paper and then take a picture of it to share. (If you’d rather play with a different drawing tool, of course feel free.) At minimum share it in our Slack #identity channel but if you are looking to share more broadly post it on Twitter using our hashtag #DigPINS, or embed it in your weekly blog post.
*Optional but very cool – If you are looking to go even further with exploring your digital identity, some of the originators of the V&R mapping have moved away from V&R and started a new mapping process they are calling the Digital Practice Triangle. How does the triangle compare to the 2×2 matrix?
Synchronous Video Call – We have two dates (thank you everyone who filled out the Doodle poll). To keep the calls balanced in terms of numbers we have divided the group in two. You should receive a calendar invite with your call time and the list of the call that everyone is signed up for is in the #common-room channel in Slack.
Readings for the week
Why Academics Need a Digital Persona – Laura Pasquini
In Praise of Living in Public (this article is a great introduction to the idea of context collapse) – Bonnie Stewart
Blogging – Write a post here with the #DigPINS community as your intended audience (or one of your intended audiences). Your post will appear both here and at the discuss.digpins.org site – so while it’s perfectly fine to imagine a Kenyon-specific audience, it’s possible people will ask you to explain local context. For that matter, as part of interacting with a blogging community, you should scan other people’s posts and try to leave a few comments or questions to encourage people and start discussions with them.
So what to write about? The Visitor/Resident map leads to reflective writing pretty easily; the readings may also spark some analysis or reflections. If you’re having some blank page syndrome, those may be good places to start. Perhaps there’ll be a conversation in Slack or elsewhere in your life this week which you want to bring to the blog, or something you read recently or come across this week which connects. (We’re always looking for new potential readings for future iterations.) We’ve had some very good reflections in the past along the “who am I and why am I doing #DigPINS” lines. And of course, the whole reason for the Slack backchannel is so you can bounce ideas around with people; feel free to post in Slack to workshop some possible topics.
In a previous iteration of #DigPINS, I put together some thoughts about blogging which might be useful as you think about form and tone and try to find the courage to hit that blue “Publish” button. (This remains the step I’m really bad at, but a published blog post is almost by definition better than a perfect picture of a blog post which only exists in your head!)
(If you’re interested in trying out different blogging tools, let me know. I’m happy to help think about what your options might be for blogging post-DigPINS and how we can integrate a different tool with this one.)
Ongoing Activities
Slack – Most of you have already gotten into the Slack team. To get started introduce yourself with a few sentences around who you are and why you are interested in #DigPINS in the #common-room or #kenyoncollege channel in Slack.
Slack will be our main mode of communication. To get the most out of this experience you should check it daily. You don’t need to post daily – you can if you want to, but we want your interactions to be organic.
If you feel comfortable, the best way to stay in contact is to download the app; make sure the notifications are turned on.
Some things you could/should use Slack for:
– Posting quick informal thoughts on readings or concepts
– Responding to others’ quick informal thoughts
– Sharing other links that you come across
– Promoting your blog post each week
– Being notified that others have posted blog articles
– Asking and answering questions
Twitter – Think about a twitter handle and sign up for twitter. Not sure what you want your twitter handle to be? Bring that up for discussion in Slack. Remember that Twitter is a public forum.
LOOKING FOR MORE?
We only have so much time, and #DigPINS is designed to be a quick and low-time commitment experience. Digital Identity is a huge topic and if you are looking for more information this curation of articles, tools, repositories, platforms, and security and privacy resources by Lee Skallerup Bessette from a workshop that she led at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute is a great resource.
Featured Image: “Citrus Identity Crises” by Alan Levine. CC-BY at https://flic.kr/p/rmUM8F
