Design for dreams, not providers

I’ve been designing my first ever commercial collaborative spaces at work over the past month or so. By design I mean coming up with a whole heap of web 2.0 ideas and storyboarding them into one place so someone can build a mash-up containing and feeding in all sorts of stuff for us. It is a really exciting time for me because the way I see it, this is an opportunity to make some positive changes in my organisation. Situations like this don’t come around every day (supportive team, funding, momentum, minimal red tape, no prior e-Learning history), so I want to make the most of it.

I was fortunate to have a really good teacher when I was studying e-Learning and she instilled in me very thoroughly that we need to design for what we want to achieve, not for what a piece of software can do. I would dare say that it is the best piece of e-Learning advice I have been given and has shaped my practices in other e-Learning projects I’ve been involved in. I generally start to design my work and ideas based on the premise of “wouldn’t it be great if…”. This avoids the “build it an they will come” (no they will not, trust me) mentality which is so often associated with e-Learning failure.

So… for this project I have looked at what we want to achieve, what we currently do, what we could improve, and how we can use technology to help us achieve our learning outcomes in a spectacularly engaging fashion. This has resulted an approach which is centred on learning through technology, rather than technology “transmitting learning”. Why do I say this? Because we had to go through a process of conscious thought about what we actually need and want. We had to be creative, we had to educate ourselves as to what was possible, and then we have expanded this with our ideas. We didn’t decide on a piece of technology and ask ourselves how we could make it work. As it turned out we decided on many pieces of technology all in one place, known as a “mash-up”, defined here on the Servitium technology’s blog.

This inital process meant that when we met the varied providers, we could do something which some of them didn’t expect – we could talk in an educated fashion about what we want, we could even show them a basic storyboard and some examples of specifics. This meant that as a customer, the power was back in our hands, and the providers could provide some valuable consultancy. We weren’t wandering through the darkened forest of e-Learning eating poisonous berries, we were having a picnic in a sunny park somewhere in e-Learning suburbia.