Case Story: Wood for the trees

Summary
Group / workshop	Making stuff together	Status	seed
Project details...

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

User group and the work context
7 project partners across 5 European countries with limited opportunity for face-2-face interaction
Technological setup (and frequency of use) :
Project blog – semi-formal public dissemination of project activities (medium)
PBwiki – multipurpose tool for organisational issues that range from setting to-do lists to sharing project documents (medium)
Googledocs – for shared editing of project documents (low)
Google calendar - for marking key dissemination events and deadlines (medium)
Group mailing list for all project partners - general discussion and often the default space for group conversations to begin (high)
Moodle VLE – a course delivery space for the induction course aimed at teachers but also some use of the discussion space and wiki for PM (low)
Flickr group - for documenting and sharing in-world activities (low)
Telephone conferencing - for audio meetings (medium)
Tagging - to formalise and aggregate data (low)
Aggregation of personal data feeds using widgets/tags/RSS (low)

Task

What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

the project is in the process of designing a coherent platform built from from a range of distributed social tools to support project management and partner collaboration during the lifetime of the project. The forces in play might be summarised as geographical distance, language differences, digital literacy and working practice, level of prior experience and individual/partner expectations
ideally the electronic environment will also be used to manage and deliver the teacher training programme that the project is aiming to develop

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

hold an early face-2-face project meeting to discuss user needs and possible social tool-sets and services that could be adopted
assign responsibilities for their instantiation. There was open acknowledgement that not one single tool could fulfil all the requirements of project management, communication, co-operation and course delivery
set basic ground rules for their use e.g. production of a tagging handbook to help aggregate personal and public data
draft a set of guidelines for use that is open to contribution from project partners
negotiate the use of these tools through email correspondence and telephone based conference calls
conduct an iterative review process of the tools ‘in use’ and evaluate those which are effective and those which are not

Results

What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

multiple social platforms were created and basic content added but not everyone was immediately active.
constant mailing ensued about the ‘correct’ use of each of these platforms yet this did not solve what were identified as an unmanageable number of content locations
partners did not feel engaged by the tagging handbook and this resulted in minimal contribution to the site guidelines for tagging use
there was a clash between the use of open tools such as ‘blogs and wikis’ and closed tools such as Moodle. Open tools were favoured and Moodle was not fully adopted by the partners even after an initial flurry of activity. A discussion forum is now being added for the project partners that will be independent from the Moodle platform
the wiki was spontaneously adopted (despite initial resistance) through its value as a place for immediate action, particularly during a two day face-2-face project meeting. Expanding the use of the wiki to other project processes became a contentious issue as debates around public/private were raised i.e. which processes should remain internal?

Lessons Learned

What did you learn from the experience?

simple tags work but tagging handbooks do not seem to work (lack of literacy and discipline?). Registration of user-defined tags may work and is being adopted as a way forward.
guidelines are needed to orientate project partners and individuals towards document and information locations and to set the ground rules for use - though these guidelines may only serve a limited purpose
technologies are appropriated to serve unexpected needs - through use it is clear that certain technologies are able to support all of the project partners whereas others do not fit with normal working practice and end up left to one side e.g. extending Moodle for document management and internal discussion (as opposed to simply for the development and delivery of the course)

‘purpose’ is an emergent property that grows from user behaviour and activity across the available tools‘easiness’ is a driver of project partner toot-set use. Applications that mimic Office kinds of document handling are the most used as well as what might be described as owned tools e.g. blogs
the external facing Pbwiki was appropriated as opposed to the internal facing wiki inside Moodle.
using multiple platforms requires discipline and acceptance that user behaviours will eventually shape the environment that emerges
project partners need to be flexible and understand the above property and be willing to adjust accordingly

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.