About This Page

This page was used in the "Enough Talking - Let's Use The Next Generation Technologies!" workshop session at ALT-C 2006.

It was used by discussion group 1 to keep a record of their discussions. In the first exercise the groups identified what they wanted to get out of the session. In this exercise they used the 'six thinking hats' approach to address the issues from six perspectives.

Exercise 2: Six Thinking Hats

What is our goal?

• play with the technology to find out what it can do

Data oriented hat:

• what are the candidate technologies? - what is needed to allow us to be able to play with them?
• how do we find the data and what the gaps are?
• ask people who might know; Google for info; look for blogs, etc.
• if we want to play with them, are they 'fun' things?

Intuitive/gut reaction/emotional hat:

• each try a differnewt one and get gut reactions to the technologies
• a lot of what we have seen is funky and cool and drew us in - not able to fully engage as don't have wifi access
• we have just asked the question on Gabbly
• some didn't like SMIL - appealed to the 'inner geek' for some people - is it mature?
• Gabbly seemed like any other chat - attaching to a webpage so all can look at same time is good idea
• has to be easy to use to be successful (intuition or self-evident?) - look at what is popular that we haven't used

Pessimistic hat - why won't it work?

• no university money to do it
• could be subversive
• will they really be used for swapping ideas or just to fix up the bar time?
• feel that we always lagging behind and running to catch up
• will it reach the older generation of teaching staff? - but not all students are young
• is it all a new labour type spin or is ther depth there?
• pushing costs off to students who have already paid for their education?
• don't have control over things like del.icio.us - need stuff on own servers etc.

Positive hat:

• wikis good for reflection in groups - learning from mistakes before encounter them in real lfe
• puts value on student experiences - making them more like scholars
• linking formal and informal learning
• trouble with these linear workshops - we keep thinking back to the pessimistic ones
• contributions can be anonymised

Creativity hat (alternatives) to reaching the goal:

• not do it in a workshop ;-))
• systematically 'play' with the technology - more organisation; learning from others experiencing the same issues/problems
• share uses and experiences of using technologies - buddying with others so not doing in isolation
• trying to use two or more technologies together - new ways of linking things together - need for mobile uses

Process control hat (big picture, overall context):

• means to and end - disseminating the technology and drawing the students in - keeping our eyes on the ball
• is multi-directional ways of looking at things
• share ideas with students and get their experiences to improve our trial and error