Springing in to DI: A blog post-a-day in March
It’s March 1, around 8:30 p.m., and I’m trying to launch, with the same enthusiasm that I felt at the Annual Meeting in November, a DI blog post-a-day project throughout March. The minutes are ticking away at the end of a long day, but I feel a commitment to this idea that grew out of an engaging DI workshop, which reminded me of the many ways to connect with this remarkable database and community of learners regardless of time restraints and other distractions.
Following the Annual Meeting, I developed the resource “Digging Towards Discovery” that aimed to capture the richness and depth of the workshop, and even more importantly the discoveries that occured in the short amount of time participants had together. The experience reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s claim about women writer-scholars in the Modern age: with a room of their own, time, and some resources, just look at the work that could be accomplished. Through the experience, we were all reminded of the many different ways to engage with Digital Is and the types of relationships that could be formed in the process.
Connecting with DI is like fostering a relationship and depending on the contact–frequency, duration, depth, etc.–the relationship changes. Each time I engage with the site, I “know” it in a new way, and through this blogging project, I want to think more about this process of “knowing” and knowledge-building and how it might contribute to my own growth as a learner-teacher-scholar as well as how it might be used to grow the site.
So here I am blogging about my relationship with DI. Tonight, after some distance for a few weeks, it is like coming back to visit an old friend. I know what to expect, and it doesn’t disappoint. My resources and curated collections remind me of the paths that I have forged throughout the site before–they provide a site map of my history with DI.
And yet, when I search for my latest contribution, I see that I have to scroll through a number of new resources–people have been busy, and there are new contributors and contributions. I am beginning to crave more time to dig in to some of these new resources and to follow the connections as they lead me to other resources, themes, and future collections.
On nights like this one when I don’t have the time I need to dig in to DI, I commit to carving out some time tomorrow or the next day to think more critically about the resources, to join the conversation, to contribute, and to renew my relationship with DI.
