NERCOMP is helping sponsor an interesting new professional development opportunity that might appeal to DHers trying to instantiate their work into an academy that doesn’t yet know how important DH is. It’s basically an intensive support structure for people developing projects that improve learning in their organizations; it is comprised of a 1-week intensive project-development workshop with training in workplace learning theory and a year-long scaffolding made of coaching support and quarterly gatherings of the cohort for refreshers and collaborative troubleshooting. You might say “this sounds like something for a company or an IT organization or a library, but not for my academic department,” but I actually think academic departments and schools need to ask themselves how well they do as learning organizations (for those who aren’t students) and could benefit from an experiment or intervention or two. I describe it more thoroughly here.
I propose for this session to discuss the academy and the kinds of projects we think it will support, share some of the workplace learning research (if folks are interested), and think we might collectively brainstorm possible projects, venues, or teams, and we’ll capture all thoughts and feedback in a document. There’s also room for participation in the administration of the academy (i.e. volunteering to join as a coach or in other kinds of supporting roles).
