Time for some probing!

http://www.innovationexchange.com/

I came across this sitetoday. Seems interesting and might be a good site for SID?

Alright that done, I've been plotting a workshop for teachers and the international people here at Laurea SID.

Should hold it soon and I hope the targeted people are all willing, and have the time to do this.

My aim is to extract web and knowledge sharing experiences from the participants. This is going to be a sort of participatory design process, well atleast the research part.

The way I'm going to go about doing this is not just by asking them questions about their web and knowledge acquisition/sharing habits but give them a task that they have to complete as a group.

This is how it will go:

I collect my participants and ask them to send me confirmation e-mail along with a list of websites/applications that they frequent.

When we gather I divide them in groups and present them with a task (design brief).

One group could act as an authoritative group. But all groups work towards the same goal, only the methods could differ.

The workshop could be held for two days. Some part of it would be without meeting in one spot - will take place online.

Step 1: To conduct research - online, out there, amongst themselves... collecting useful data in various forms and formats.

Step 2: To collate this data for everyone to see and respond to the research materials, add to it, modify it etc.

Step 3: To collaborate, storm-the-brain and come up with solution(s)

Step 4: Present the (documented) work to the rest.

What do the participants take back?
My fellow interns shouldn't wonder what they are doing there if it's going to be extremely boring.
Teachers could probably learn some design process if they don't already know it.
The other people can learn design research too! There will be some learning and fun in this process, I'm sure.

How will this benefit me? Firstly, I can observe how people go about doing the task - what are the social softwares and otehr applications and methods they use and most importantly in wht way.

After this I will have to have a one-on-one with a couple of them to further involve them in this process of design!