Great observations, and marvelous news about the project.
May your design discussions be short and your usage
scenarios prolific! (01)
(I just spent last week at a seminar on O-O analysis,
and design, including Use Cases, CRC, UML 2.0 notation,
and design patterns. A whirlwind week! Having users on
hand throughout the process is a definite theme in
agile/XP circles, and I'd darn glad to see it!) (02)
Ted Kahn wrote: (03)
> Folks,
>
> I wanted to put in my two cents worth on this (and hopefully, not a
> "Three-Penny Opera").
>
> First, mea culpa--I haven't filled out the survey. I'm on deadlines for
> two proposals, including one due at NSF next Monday...I will try to do
> this, but I'm time-bound for the next 4-5 days.
>
> The issues Jack, Tom and others have raised about the nature of the
> collaboration and conversation that I have seen in this list are
> important ones . As Jack knows, I've been running and co-creating a
> web-based Bay Area Science Education Collaboratory for science teachers,
> and I've learned a couple of design principles about collaborative
> online communities that seem to hold for across several projects:
>
> - (1) collaboration is different than cooperation--it's focused on
> designing or making something together, or making something happen.
> Conversation and meaning-making are a necessary part of this process,
> but if you want to get convergence and leverage of collective
> intelligence, talents, and diversity of experiences, the best way to do
> this that I have found is to be really making something
> together...(Michael Schrage's book, "No More Teams" (initially published
> as "Shared Minds" in the early 90's) is one of the best books I've read
> about this issue.
>
> - (2) the shared product being designed needs to be a participatory
> design effort with real users--and it needs to be designed and have
> feedback from other people outside of the design team re. its
> usefulness. In technology products and services, we frequently have
> what Geoffrey Moore calls a "crossing the chasm" problem--i.e., we
> design things and systems for the early adopters and innovators (who are
> a slightly extended community of those of us on the design teams, since
> we, too, are motivated to do something new, interesting, and
> innovative)...but we're not the majority of people who are the user
> community. Their value premises and motivations are different--and we
> will always run into the "chasm" between the early adopters + innovators
> and the early/late majority on a normal bell-shaped "adoption of
> innovation" curve if we don't involved people from the mainstream as
> co-designers.
>
> This issue leads to a whole discussion about the role of :"assessment"
> of efficacy, effectiveness, and learnability --and the process I've
> learned that best addresses this is cycles of rapid prototyping, use,
> evaluation and reflection...but it has to involve real users from the
> mainstream majority.
>
> I'm involved in another very exciting distributed educational
> collaborative design effort now with the NMC (New Media Consortium,
> nmc.org), which has received a major grant from the federal Institute of
> Museum and Library Services (IMLS.gov) to create a next-generation, open
> source multimedia authoring and publishing environment for non-technical
> people in both museums and colleges/universities. It's based on a system
> called Pachyderm, which was originally created by the SF Museum of
> Modern Art (SFMOMA), and this effort involves a core team of 15-20
> people from 14 institutions around the U.S. and Canada--5 art museums, 5
> colleges/universities, 2 university libraries, NMC and me (DesignWorlds
> for Learning) as an external evaluator. The way we're doing the
> collaboration is via a lot of blogging (using TypePad), listserv,
> collaboratively creating use scenarios and user personae, and am
> ambitious distributed open source sw development, testing and evaluation
> process. It's a 3-year grant, with a 1:1 matching financial
> contribution by all the partners, and the sw development is already
> ahead of schedule (we just started last month)...the great thing is that
> this product will be made available totally free of charge to all
> non-profit museums, colleges, universities, and potentially, K12
> schools, when it's completed in 2005-2006. If you're interested, take a
> look at:
> http://www.nmc.net/projects/lo/pachyderm.shtml and
> http://www.nmc.net/projects/lo/pachyderm.shtml
>
> -Ted
> ==============================================
>
>
>
>
>>
>> Henry K van Eyken wrote:
>>
>>> Having filled out the survey, I do well understand Jack's sentiment.
>>> There is a bridge to be built between his and Tom's. They are different;
>>> not opposed.
>>>
>>> Henry
>>>
>>> P.S. And for a first attempt, I think Josh did an admirable job.
>>>
>> And I, too, think the questions to be an admirable first attempt. But,
>> I wonder about a few things, like, what is the nature of a
>> collaboratory in the first place.
>> Does a collaboratory require/need/want leaders?
>> Who asks the questions?
>> When a collaboratory performs self-assessment, how is that done?
>> Indeed, what is a collaboratory?
>>
>> Would Tom's "fair sample" best be generated by circulating the
>> meta-question "what questions should we be asking of ourselves?"
>>
>> To be fair, my questions here are typical of reactionaries, and most
>> groups have at least one of them, and I also think that Eugene and
>> Chris have done Doug Engelbart's vision proud in starting blueoxen in
>> the first place.
>>
>> Jack
>>
>>
>> --
>> This message is archived at:
>>
>>
>http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=yak&i=3FB2317E.6010001@thinkalong.com
>
>>
>
>
> (04)
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