At the conclusion of IDEA 9106 for the semester, it might be worth seeking comments from all class participants on the role of the BLOG and opportunities for further development.
This is my personal SWOT analysis for what it is worth …
Strengths
- provides a forum for collaboration
- utilises the skill sets and experiences of the class group
- provides a new experience for most of the class who have never actively participated in a BLOG before
- allows the opportunity for ongoing interaction and feedback with Paul and the class group on many varied design topics outside of the limited class time
- everyone has the ability view each others submissions and benefit from other opinions and points of view on the designerly acts
- feedback comments on postings were well considered and beneficial to improving future submissions
Weaknesses
- the appearance and functionality of the site was controlled by relatively few administrators. I appreciate you doing it New Pete don’t get me wrong, but I think an opportunity was missed to incorporate individually developed BLOGs into the course – see below
- little opportunity for individuality or personal design considerations to reinforce the intent of postings
- organisation of the BLOG was typically long lineal streams of text based information which feels at times somewhat 2 dimensional and self-referencing
- navigation through the information not always intuitive
- split of information between the Google Groups site and Word Press site
Opportunities
- I am a firm believer that information received is made much more pertinent and is better retained if it can be put into practice at the time of receiving it. The BLOG process could have been an opportunity to put all thirteen Designerly Acts into immediate practice, with the act of creating a BLOG recorded and analysed in terms of the Designerly Acts. What better way to consider ‘researching’, ‘exploring’, ‘modelling’, ‘discovering’, ‘presenting’ etc than actually enacting them and consciously evaluating how you personally approached this task against the theory from class.
- to enable this, one central web portal point would be required, which could be the current Google Groups site, from which multiple individual BLOG sites could be formed and cross-linked. This would then allow each class participant to research available options and tools, model their proposal in which ever format they think relevant, explore the potentials of the medium, discuss their findings in class and eventually present and celebrate their final BLOG creation.
Threats
- I don’t perceive any threats in the use of the BLOG. It has proven to be a powerful communication tool which I believe has enhanced everyone’s learning from the Design Thinking course in a way that traditional printed hard copies delivered down the level 4 “death chute” could not have achieved
What are everyone else’s comments on the BLOG???
I think the objective/aim of the blog were not clearly defined in the beginning.
Firstly, you wanted a blog were each person could contribute to the content and the layout. Being able to contribute to the content required the software to be set up. But in order to change/modify/enhance the layout/look, you would need to be able to change the coding, and that use dummy content. Using a third-party blog and not hosting it ourselves greatly restrict what can be done as well.
What I propose would be
- Have google docs/wiki/wordpress to be a place where you can post articles/news/changes/ideas etc (as it is currently).
- Have a second blog that is set up from scratch (or based off a 3rd party software) and users can edit/change this according to what their ‘design’ ideas. It is probably duplicating the blog, but one is used for communicating and one is for ‘designing’.
- Perequisite would be for the students to be able to do some sort of programming or such. The design of the blog would be limited to just drawings if no-one has the technical skill to implement it.
Thanks for starting this Jono. As I still have a couple of essays to read, consider and comment upon, I won’t say much now, but I would like to encourage further comments.
I appreciate that more ambitious things can be attempted, having been through the experience once. I am inclined to retain this blog and use it in some way next year. I think the best move is to start afresh in the open-ended manner adopted this year, so that next years class will be free to determine the nature of the 2010 blog. However I will be better equipped to guide matters than I was this year. I won’t have so much writing to do each week either.
More later
Paul