pedago.me (2016-Present)

pedago.me is an idea(l). A community of practice focused on learning experience design. A crowd of practitioners and creatives with a slant toward blended learning and digital experience design. We look at tools and technique as much as theory. Trainers. Teachers. Designers. In the trenches. We are academic, but distinctly vocational. This project evolved via the work and discussions of my instructional design team (graduate assistants) at the CU Denver School of Education & Human Development (SEHD). The team was brainstorming ideas of community, knowledge sharing, and making genuine contributions. Eventually we challenged Susannah Simmons to take the lead on crafting a vision and bringing our ideas to fruition. Susannah and I worked closely together (with lots of input) in getting us to this point. monkey-thinkAnd so. pedago.me is (will be) an aggregated home base for learning experience designers using a ds106 style content-pull (rss). A web site. Like ds106 we draw from our community and provide an organized collection. We actively invite and recruit learning experience designers to join us – to contribute to the pool. In so doing, pedago.me curates articles, how-to guides, and demos of exemplary digital pedagogy design. And thinking. In so doing, learning experience designers may have their portfolios presented with full attribution, and we curate a multi-authored knowledge-base for the greater good. Thus we are a repository of effective practices, exemplary design, tutorials, guides, and cross-institutional expertise. A searchable knowledge-base and community of practice. Ideally, pedago.me will serve as a resource hub. We are working with the community to identify what this means exactly, but we have some ideas. We may facilitate meet-ups, twitter chats, and professional development opportunities. Possibly a slack channel. We may aggregate job openings in this field from multiple sources and provide job-search element for aspiring learning experience designers. We may position the site as a place for employers to find learning experience design talent (a portfolio of #lxDesign portfolios). Maybe a newsletter. We may facilitate mentorship in the profession to connect the new with the experienced. We don’t know yet. Unaffiliated and unbound by any single entity. We do know that we want pedago.me to be organic and let the community guide itself. Evolve naturally. And although we are launching this out of the SEHD, we prefer pedago.me to be organic and agnostic – unaffiliated or bound by any single institution. Unaffiliated or bound by any single learning management system (LMS), toolbox, policy, procedure or teaching philosophy. We want to explore and entertain all of it. Co-conspirators: @thelearnersway