After the LL Design Conference – Part 1: Sessions and Lessons
In my previous posts I have reported on the preparation for the Design Conference of the Learning Layers (LL) project. Last week this conference took place in Espoo (at the Otaniemi campus of the Aalto University in the special building “Design Factory”). Now it is time to summarise the results and draw conclusions for the forthcoming work. Below I try to give a picture of the main sessions and the key results:
1. Building upon the Critical Path Analysis
This was the first joint event of the consortium after we had finalised the Critical Path Analysis (CPA) that was required by our reviewers. We could now see that it was an exercise worth doing. Instead of building upon separate tools and dispersed design teams we were now focusing on more integrative “tool arrangements”. We could now see better the tool arrangements responding to the ‘learning stories’ that addressed different developmental challenges (working with documents, physical artefacts, learning episodes, complex working & learning challenges).
2. Co-Design of the Learning Toolbox is taking further steps
Concerning the co-design sessions, I was mainly participating sessions that focused on the development of the Learning Toolbox (LTB). To me, these sessions were characterised by a new reunion of developers, co-designers and users in a live situation. Last year we had had an interruption of live workshops and face-to-face meetings due to administrative reasons. Then, when these were getting removed, new developers entered the stage and ‘interim managers’ had to hand over the tasks and bring them into cooperation with other developers. At the same time the application partners and other co-designers were tied up with other duties. Therefore, we only now got a chance to update each other on the results of the Alpha Beta Camp as well as on the plans for the forthcoming Field Workshops in Bau-ABC. In this respect it was important to make agreements on joint working meetings, to draw a timeline for the spring activities and to tune ourselves into the DevOps-culture of co-development during operative activities. Also, it was important that Raymond Elferink could give us a clear insight into the current phases of technical development and how the workshops can be linked to it.
3. Bringing different evaluation approaches into mutually complementing ‘package’
During the preparatory phase we had had some conversations in which consortium-wide efforts to shape an overarching evaluation approach had not met local efforts to evaluate the implementation and impact of tools. Although I did not attend many of the sessions on the evaluation issues, I got an impression that important progress was made. Crucial for the consensus was the point made by Jenny Hughes (Pontydysgu): “The results of local evaluation measures (on the implementation/impact of tools) are input for the consortium-wide evaluation of our achievements.” This gave us the clue, how to work together regarding the collection of data and reagarding the timing of evaluation measures.
4. Working with multiple roles and tasks in the exploitation activities
Third major element in the Design Conference were the group sessions on exploitation activities. Gilbert Peffer and Raymond Elferink had prepared a game-like exercise for drafting exploitation activities. Some of the groups were based on tool arrangements (Learning Toolbox, Healthcare tool arrangements, AchSo!), some on joint services (Social semantic server) and some on collaborative groupings (LL Centre of expertise). Thus, some of these groups were very strongly grounded on the co-design work whilst others had to look forward with a bit more phantasy.
I do not wish to go into details of this exercise – partly because I was in a group that mainly focused on the healthcare sector (which gave me the role of an interested observer), partly because we had too little time to wrap up the results. However, it is worthwhile to emphasise that this exercise pushed us stronger to think about the transformation from project work (fulfilling our duties as project partners) to sustaining the results and achievements beyond the life-time of our current project (with new resources and groupings of interested parties). During this exercise I noticed that we had here and there some controversies of the roles that we are playing (owners of tools/innovations, partners, proto-customers, mediators, customers …). Some of the differences were settled in a short while, some needed more time. To me, the striking point was that this exercise helped us to think of our changing roles more thoroughly than the similar exercises in previous consortium meetings. Moreover, after drawing conclusions from this exercise we are in a better position to work further with the Business Model Canvases (with which we started working in Tallinn). Also, this exercise gave us a better perspective to work with consortium-wide and project-based follow-up initiatives (for which we have to get ourselves prepared alongside the project tasks).
5. “Datenschutz” – Policies for Data privacy/ Data protection/ Confidentiality …
Whilst the above mentioned issues were the cross-cutting themes that shaped the whole event, this is clearly a corollary issue – not to be forgotten. We agreed that during the pilot phase we need a minimum amount of documents to clarify these issues for ourselves and our counterparts (organisations and indidividual users). Partly these issues have been covered in the Ethical clearance processes that our healthcare partners have gone through (under the auspices of the University of Leeds and the NHS). Partly these issues can be covered by adapting the respective light-weight documents of other similar organisations (like the FutureLearn consortium for organising MOOCs). However, the main thing is that we can address these issues alread in the pilot phase. Furthermore, we need to prepare ourselves for the transformation to follow-up phase, when we need legally well-grounded policy documents for the successor-organisations and/or follow-up projects that take our tools and services further.
Altogether, we got a lot of food for thought for preparing our forthcoming field activities. Also, we got some new coordinates for sectoral coordination and planning meetings. And finally, we got some inspirations to learn more from the neighbouring tool arrangements. Let us see what all is emerging out of this!
More blogs to come …
