Learning Journal Week 15

[Activity 10: Reflection]

I’ve enjoyed this week. It was great to connect with the rest of the people in my group online at the end of week 14, albeit I could only hear voices, and at the end of week 15 we managed to connect by video as well (although one of the team was away so I have yet to properly connect with him).

My contribution to the group effort of articulating the context

Creating the personas was enjoyable – the simple act of attaching photos of faces gave them a whole depth of character in my mind that made describing them quite straightforward.

It was also great to comment on my team-mates personas – David’s were very interesting because they provided a whole immigrant perspective that was new to me and I found broadening. Asanka’s were so thoroughly researched that for a while I wondered whether she lived here in Malaysia as well.

We did the ‘factors and concerns’ document as a shared wiki – I think that went fine. Asanka did the first draft which was a very helpful foundation to add to. She focused specifically on her personas, but I found it easy to broaden these to categories of ‘learners’ and ‘teachers’, as we had all created one persona in each of these categories.

I found the ‘distilling the forces’ document harder to apply my mind to, I liked the visuals of the forces map more, and I enjoyed examining Asanka’s version and then printing off all the different documents and trying to sketch out by hand a ‘consolidating thought map’ which, for me at least, helped to make clear the different groups of people impacting on our context. We discussed this on our call on Tuesday and I think the others liked this too.

David did a very helpful first draft of ‘framing the challenge’ – I tried to draw out specifically the concerns we are trying to address and the tensions we are trying to resolve between different forces.

What have I found challenging in this process?

I very much like the fact that we are experimenting with a fairly freeform way of organizing ourselves, but it is also challenging as I am so used to organizational project management norms. I do want us to try ditching these norms, as I want to use H817 to experiment with new approaches.

That said, our weekly calls work fine when 2 people are on, work OK when 3 people are on, but start to work less well when all 4 of us are on, as we either talk over each other or we all stay silent for protracted periods out of courtesy – maybe when all of us are on a call we should think of having a rotating chairperson just to help make it run a bit more smoothly – especially if any of us are time-constrained and need to limit the call to less than an hour.

What have I learned from this process?

I can sense that a repeating theme of the experience of this block will just be the continuous reinforcement of the fact that more heads are better than one when you are creating new things or solving problems.

I ‘know’ this already, but I’m still surprised at just how refreshing, enriching and broadening it is to combine the views of many people – which suggests to me that in practise in my day-to-day work I may not solicit other people’s views and contributions as much as I should.