Assignment Description
Project 4: Social Networking for Learning
Introduction
Have you ever been stuck in place because you didn't have the skill or knowledge required to move forward? Or realized that you have to learn something and didn't know where to begin? In this assignment you will apply problem-solving techniques to this situation. You will become familiar with a variety of existing social networking, collaboration and communication tools and services and combine attributes of these into something new.
To help get you into the mood, imagine these scenarios:
- Your boss just picked you as the company liaison to a new acquired subsidiary in Japan. You realize that you know almost nothing about Japan and would like to appear more ready to work comfortably there without creating an international incident.
- You picked up a guitar at a garage sale for next to nothing and would like to learn how to play. The social aspect of playing with others appeals to you, too, but all of your friends are non-musical.
- You're learning how to develop web sites using PHP and have a desk piled high with books. You've reached a sticky point in your understanding and can't seem to get past it on your own.
- You've just been laid off and an old dream of yours of starting up a consulting business has come back to the forefront of your thinking. You come from a long line of employees and have no role models for becoming self-employed and entrepreneurial.
Task
Working in teams of three or four, come up with a design for a new organization that helps people connect for the purpose of learning. Your final deliverable will be a mini-business plan which describes the services provided by the organization, staff and other resources needed, a comparison with existing services and a plan for marketing. The plan will include a name and logo for the idea which has not already been trademarked and for which the domain name is available. You will present your plan in the form of a written document and a 10-minute PowerPoint presentation on May 11, the last night of class.
Process
We'll begin as a whole group to identify and clarify the problem. What exactly are we hoping to solve? We'll use the Fishbone Diagram technique described on page 45 of the Higgins book to accomplish this.
You'll be given time in class to sort yourselves into groups. In the interest of making this a more job-like experience, you should take this opportunity to break out of your comfort zone and make a point of working with at least one person that you haven't worked with before. To maximize the likelihood of creativity, each group should be diverse in terms of gender, major and background.
|
Phase 1: Getting the Lay of the Land Within each group of four, you will be assigned a letter. This letter will be used to divide the work to be done at each phase of the project. Your first task is to become an expert on one aspect of the technologies and institutions already in use either for learning or social networking. Note the questions at the bottom of this section, which may help guide you in your explorations. A: Knowledge Exchanges
B: Free University Courses
C: Social Networking Services
D: Folksonomy You'll spend time perusing your assigned sites and making sense of them. Each letter group will compare notes so that you can explain to your teammates the following:
When the letter groups are comfortable with what they've learned, we'll reform the teams to share knowledge with each other. |
|
Phase 2: Analyzing the Possibilities Now that we've begun to define the problem and have identified existing services that might contain elements of the problem, it's time to break the problem down into separate attributes and make as complete a list of attributes as we can. Reconvening your group, and together following the process described on page 66 of the Higgins book as Attribute Association Chains, generate as many possibilities as you can under the following categories:
Record your thoughts in Moodle (Assignment 4 Phase 2 ...) so you can refer to them next week. When you've gotten a very long list of attributes, you are almost done with Phase 2. It's time to put this in the back of your mind and let incubation work its magic. Feel free to check out what other groups came up with in their brainstorming... WEEK 2 Now, after a week of letting your unconscious mind stew about it, it's time to narrow down the possibilities. We'll use morphological analysis (Higgins, page 147) to narrow the field. Looking at the reports that you generated at the end of your deliberations last week, complete this form by picking out the most promising elements in each square. Come up with three combinations that hang together and make sense as a package. When time is called, your next task is to look at your three possibilities and evaluate them. Which combination will be the most potentially successful? Which is the most innovative? Which will be the most fun to develop further? When your group has reached consensus on this task, Phase 2 is over. |
|
Phase 3: Synthesizing and Innovating To succeed in a marketplace of ideas, your new service must have brand name, an image, and a coherence about it. Your next task is to come up with a name that ties it all together in a memorable, interesting way. The most important criterion is this: your project must provide a genuinely useful service that meets some well defined learning need for some real users whose characteristics you can describe. Your service should make the world a better place by making a number of people smarter. We'll use the Brainwriting technique described on page 125 of the Higgins book to generate some name ideas. Then we'll divide each group in two to work in parallel. One group is to do some checking of the name itself, the other is to generate ideas for a corporate logo and decorative graphics for the web site. Naming Team Check the HyperWhoIs site to make sure the domain name (.com if it's a business, .org or .net if it's a non-profit) is available. Also verify that you can trademark the business name and any other new words you've come up with to describe its services. Check TESS: Trademark Electronic Search System to see if anyone else has nailed down that name. If you can't get both a trademark and an appropriate domain name, look for variations. Visuals Team Take a look at The Logo Factory's design tips, from a company that designs logos for other companies. Also check out 10 Steps to a Better Logo, Eight Critical Elements of an Effective Logo Design, and Corporate Identity: 15 Trends Shaping Logo Design. Sketch out some ideas that capture the name and spirit of your service.
|
| Phase 4: Communicating Your Idea The way that start-up companies take their thinking from a concept to a working enterprise is to put together a business plan. We won't be doing a full-blown plan, but it would be helpful for you to see what one looks like. Here are two useful resources: Small Business Administration Business Plan Basics Business Plan Outline - by Linda Pinson For our purposes, we'll only need a portion of these categories. To complete your mini-business plan, create a Word document with the following sections:
Also prepare a short PowerPoint presentation to present a summary of your plan to your peers. |
This assignment counts for 20% of your course grade and will be scored according to this rubric. It is due on May 11, the last night of class, when each group will share their PowerPoint presentations.