Asynchronous
decision-making – fascinating to participate in the process of deciding a
technology to focus on for Activity 15.
· Clear instructions in the activity are crucial
if there is a tight deadline – otherwise it is easy for people to misunderstand
/ go off on unnecessary tangents. Also, it is easy for people to get stressed
and panic if they are not clear on what needs doing.
· The group dynamics are also fascinating – in
the absence of a nominated person to be in charge, we can observe how we handle
coordination. There are none of the cues we would get if we were all in a room
together. People are courteous, my sense is that no-one wants to be directive
or bossy – we would all clearly rather trade some efficiency in the interests
of maintaining a democratic approach.
· Doodle for voting is a new discovery for me – I
like it. But again it risks over-simplifying the decision-making dynamics.
There are implications for our choice of technology that impact on the second
stage of the activity – in a face-to-face environment we would naturally expect
some people to argue ‘for’ their chosen technologies, and we would have a
natural expectation that by doing so, those people would be accepting some
responsibility to see through the whole activity. But that doesn’t happen so
obviously in an asynchronous online environment.
Engaging with forums
I notice that I can
read entire forum threads and be left with no sense of what I just read.
When I have a specific
task or activity to do that requires me to read the threads, then I get a lot
more understanding from them.
E.g. I’m just trying
to understand Activity 15 part 1 – I’m trying to draw an overview of everyone’s
comments. I’m also noting technologies I want to return to later when I have
more time – it is very enriching that people mention different technologies in
their posts, but given the lack of time it feels impossible to look into them
all now. Reading the posts with this in mind, all sorts of things now become
apparent that I didn’t pick up at all when I just read them.
Patrick I've read your points here and on the previous blog about the feeling of being in the forum with interest. I would agree with much of what you are saying, it can be hard to get a sense of a conversation with lengthy sometimes wandering threads. Do you think this might in part be due to the nature of some of the activity threads, where everyone posts an unrelated post? Do you have ideas on how we could address this? (BTW I like your technique of listing the tools to come back to here, where you can find them when things return to normal in your life post-H817)
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