Team call 14 June 2013

Good to have this call with Asanka and David. I also had a catch-up call with John yesterday as I couldn’t make the team call earlier that day.

We also all had a call together on Tuesday 11^th – so 4 calls in the space of 8 days.

Interesting what this says about the value of synchronous discussions.

Points from the call

·      The prototype  is looking pretty good.

·      Lots of disconnects in the prototype –e.g. Asanka has introduced a ‘forum’ tool in week 6, and feels she should now work backwards to earlier weeks to have forums available there as well. Very commendable that she wants to achieve consistency, although in the interests of time I think we were all relaxed if she doesn’t have the time to do these changes today before we open the prototype for evaluation.

·      Asanka will open the prototype at midday today.

·      Asanka also thought that the instructions to our reviewers were too general (IE just asking them to work through the whole prototype systematically) – and we would be better to give more detailed instructions, perhaps asking evaluators to focus on specific activities.

·      We discussed some confusion around the TMA template – are we supposed to be writing about our experience in an H817 context? I said I think we are supposed to imagine we are a design team working in the context we have imagined (an NGO course for teachers of immigrants/refugees) – so a lot of our context will be real (using the digital storyboard, needing to have team calls across different timezones etc) and a lot will be imaginary (the NGO, the trainee teachers, the refugees etc). Similarly, the ‘protagonists’ will include ourselves, the trainee teachers, the personas we imagined etc.

Learning point

·      I threw together a draft set of heuristic protocols and instructions two nights ago.

·      I was quite apologetic to the group about this, as I felt this was a very rough, early draft – more for my benefit to help me get my thoughts in order rather than something useful for the team to collaborate on.

·      I even felt it might be easier for the team to start with a fresh template.

·      In practice, the team has taken my draft and quickly enhanced and added to it – it is fine now.

·      The learning point for me is to realise that, in this collaborative work, perhaps it can sometimes work fine to post something in quite a rough form for people to refine and develop.