I was sifting through my Bloglines feeds and came across a slideshow via elearningpost, by Leisa Reichelt. It’s quite timely, as our small team has been looking into refreshing our approach to supporting – and leading the way for – teachers to design and develop online learning in their subjects. Here’s more on “us”…

So, I checked out this one:

http://www.disambiguity.com/waterfall-bad-washing-machine-good-ia-summit-07-slides/

…then was keen to see what else Leisa had done and spotted this one:

http://www.disambiguity.com/social-project-management-at-enterprise-20/

I began this post when I got to this slide which outlines a Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

The following points have me breathing a sigh of relief that others are also thinking along these lines!

• individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• working software over comprehensive documentation
• customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• responding to change over following a plan

In these points I see interaction, responsiveness, collaboration and action, which says to me that we should try refocusing our design process to be FIRST a communicative one, rather than a content-driven one. That is, not WHAT you want to do, but start with the WHY then look at the HOW, before settling on the WHAT.

Project based work and developmental projects really do require a high level of organic activity, to allow room for creativity and growing of an idea. Often, we’re (especially managers insisting on outcomes and deadlines) easily caught up in paperwork, processes and attempting to work with others who have so little time to ponder, explore and indulge in creative activity (because of paperwork and processes!!), that we end up forgetting why we were doing all this in the first place!

I shouldn’t talk in the third-person like this, because really, that’s been my feeling over the past few months – why am I doing this educational design work again? What is it achieving? Well, after some time letting such thoughts and issues percolate, it seems to be that now the time is ripe for some change!

I have attempted to look at our work processes using this diagram to sort of “draft” my own thinking, as we continue to discuss this as a team. I’m liking the emergent bit (think emergent design) and probably need to flesh that notion out more…

Oh, and thanks to Leisa for helping me to get my thinking back on track! )

technorati tags:Leisa_Reichelt, disambiguity, user_experience, educational_design, emergent_design, organic_process, Gliffy_diagram, work_flows, developmental, online_learning

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