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If I had an idea, I would have probably joined online communities. The type of online communities I would join would depend on the context of design challenge itself. These can include your purpose and goals, so whether you want to reach out to the world. However, also includes your lacks, problems and orientations, in which the specific online community could help you. Some online communities for example concentrate on how to market and finance, while the others are concentrating how to find enthusiastic people. So it really depends on either your lacks, or your purpose.

The reason why I would want to join an online community is because it makes work easier and faster. Even though group work has its disadvantages, I think it definitely expands your learning through collaboration. The process whilst ‘getting there’ is the biggest learning experiences such online communities provide.  Besides that working in/with such online groups will stimulate action, process, and your motivation. I would join work team, as they play a big role in gathering the people to collaborate online. This was my group, and I very much enjoyed researching different platforms and tools platforms offered, to guide our client. By working together with an online community, your design challenge gets much more realistic and specific making the project easier for you. In all, I would have worked with an online community as you get to experience yourself how processes are done through online. In a world where technology is improving rapidly, you perhaps need to work with an online community or know about them.

What was learned/experienced? What should we work on? At the start of this project while discussing roles, I volunteered to become the project leader as no one had volunteered for its challenge. Personally, I didn’t mind since we needed to move on. From then, I tried my best to contribute to my team in ways like organizing and structuring our research, making it easier to understand, dividing tasks, motivate others, explain and update others and engage discussions.

I have learned a lot from this course. As an individual, I learned how to deliver a presentation in front of my group or groups of people, work together, and assign roles, basically learned about responsibilities and aspects of leadership. Especially a role like this contributes a lot to learning I find, since you develop your communication skills so much amongst each other. Besides all these, I also became aware of the disadvantages of this role; leader. It is a risk to take this role, since you could be easily disliked. I’m glad I didn’t face situations like this…I hope! Leadership requires so much responsibility and hard work, where in some cases you even have to sacrifice some of your personal time as your group relies on you. It is a brilliant learning experience for sure, and I think everyone should have a go at this role to develop.  As a team, we learned how to collaborate in an effective way where each one of us was able to show their skills at the end; some in design, some content wise, where as the other structure. So, as a team we learned about each other’s strengths and weaknesses which could help all of us in the future (3 years together!), as we would know who to approach to assist in particulars. Other than developing skills, ‘communication wise’ we also experienced/worked with Basecamp (also a great advantage). As a whole class, we have generally gained knowledge about networks and tools. We have learned about the NGO’s and their problems. We learned about the advantages and disadvantages of Internet facilitations. We learned about different platforms and the tools they provide. We also learned about weaknesses of such platforms, and analyzed/thought about improvements and solutions for such problems. The meetings with Nancy provided us a learning experience where we could visualize the problems and experience. In addition, our class also became closer with each other due to the blog reflections. Blog reflections contributed on evaluating ourselves and others, which I consider plays a big role in the learning process. Coming towards the end of this course, I can conclude that this course provided the main branch to open innovators, which is NETWORKS. As an open innovator, it is essential for you to understand how networks work (including their limitations) for the future. At the beginning, the purpose of this class was not so clear but as you experience this course, you understand. Furthermore, I would also like to point out that as a class, I feel that we should work on self-esteem and confidence, which usually is the problem with many students.

For example, my group is fantastic when it comes to sharing opinions, ideas and discussing, but when it came to presenting many-lacked confidence (this is slowly changing). Eventually it was the leader presenting which I didn’t mind. But forgetting about the roles, as an individual student or friend I would want to motivate and encourage others to become confident and be able to perform since they need presenting skills for the future. So to help with that, I’m in!

The role my instructors/teachers/coaches have in facilitating my and my fellow students’ learning is the motivation they gave us to reach answers ourselves. The teachers guide us through the process subtly, not exactly giving the answer but pushing you towards discovering your own answer. This freedom of exploring your own way and your own answers through actually provides us so much learning experience! However, this typical Dutch way of learning may challenge people who have different cultures where they are exactly told what to do. This is the reason why quite a few of us were confused, or doubted ourselves whether we were on the right track. But as I keep saying; through time, we all will get used to this special way of learning provided by the teachers. And when we do get frustrated my coach especially is really active on motivating us when we doubt ourselves whether we are on the right track. I really appreciate this! This independence provided by the teachers also contributes in facilitating to teamwork, within our team as well as outer. Because we get this freedom and don’t get concrete answers of teachers, we start questioning this amongst ourselves to help and support each other. There is more team collaboration, because it makes us get more dependent to each other. Therefore we also start listening to each other better. Ideas are literally shared amongst each one of us. So confusion in a way helped :D And of course my peers help in facilitating: different cultures->different ideas and solutions ->more insights-> more easy and fun learning!

What I would love to experience is to actually consider this as reality, and make it happen. I would have preferred that we had one real-life problem, where each group contributed to within their task. So, for example the problem is found by the group-idea&network, then they present it to the group-funding then they present it to the workgroup (researching how they can reach people and facilitate network and communication along the lines of the problem) Then, group-work would present and introduce this to the innovation/ideas team who will carry out the investigation and design a real-life product online. Then, this will be presented to the marketing people etc. This way, we perhaps could have solved a real-life problem by having a huge plan how to do it online. It would have been A BIG learning experience where we collaborate and actually experience how each group functions. 

In my group we are slowly making this wanted-experience happen by hopefully collaborating with certain groups that may want to work along the lines of our problem and research.

What can you contribute as a peer facilitator? I will be motivating my team, as well as others by sharing ideas and experiences. We are all here to learn, so I will definitely share any of my research/plan/knowledge.

So now we are on the 3rd/4th week of our experience with Basecamp, and I can say that by time things really do sit in place! Listening to each other’s preferences and choosing Basecamp to work, was a very good decision over Facebook!

Personal preference on how you want to use something, in this case online networks, of course influences your tool choices within (in this case) a platform. For example, personally I prefer to reach people (includes family, relatives, teachers) easily and quickly. So contacting them and relationships in general for me are very important. Therefore, I use Facebook because I believe that nearly everyone has Facebook and due to its simplicity, popularity and ‘addictive-ity’, you can find lots of people online. So since I know this, if I want a quick respond, I use Facebook messages and chats. I even contact teachers through Facebook just because the tools it offers me work quicker and easier (for me). It does have its limitations; it’s informal. And lots of people see it informal as well. But it is also very ironic how this said ‘informality’ is causing success for some companies and even beginners so infant-risers. For example, I know a lot of people who went from advertising on Facebook to opening a store simply because they made a lot of profit first online. These clever people knew how to reach their audience. So some people take advantage of this informality and they succeed, and make profit. Maybe the target audience likes this informality? Does informality change within context then? Or are we becoming more open, and prefer informality? (its not laziness I’m talking about here, I’m talking about people who claim Facebook equals informality yet still manage to make business through it)

  Coming back to the informality, teachers do often reply I should prefer a formal way but trust me it works! I got a quicker reply on Facebook than my friend who sent an email! Anyhow, this relates to; what if my group had different preferences? Or what if people prefer other ways of contacts like teachers? My personal preference is Facebook due to its effective relationship building tools, but most of my group members preferred Basecamp because Facebook was too distracting. Since I am a fast worker, I prefer simplicity, but to be a group we perhaps needed to develop and use tools primarily on individual participation, projects and context of a platform. In conclusion, I decided that it would provide a learning experience and it would be a challenge; so we all inclined to use Basecamp to work on.

Our decision was based on research, which included different platforms and what each can offer (tools/apps). However, friends (their experiences) also promoted this platform. Thus, answering how I proceed as I steward the technology; by effectively researching and experiencing.

To close up, looking at others’ preferences and perspectives plays a very important role in changing your views. This is simply because;

1.     You research; discover new platforms or tools through each others experiences, that you may not know about or skipped. 

2.     As a result, it could help you to analyze which platform would be better for what purpose to achieve your goal.

This is what we have done as a group, listened to each others research and came up with working with Basecamp. And yes, sometimes it is challenging because the platform may be new as well as the tools offered could be complex. At the end, you just need some time to get used to it.

First of all, I must say that the first couple of weeks (especially the first week) were in fact difficult for me as well as my group to really cooperate effectively due to confusion. Even though we had assigned roles to each other, since some of us are not used to this working pace. it was difficult.

 It’s been three weeks now, and I feel my group is improving on stabilizing. People are getting much more used to their roles now, as to what they would have to do. I will also keep on motivating my group since this really helps!

*Sorry for the late post, internet failed* Before this course, I only use to have a Twitter account and Facebook account. I would also use other platforms to find information. Now, due to this course I am using tumblr to hopefully share and give information on other researchers.  However also for the past 2 weeks, my group and I started using some online platforms to experience and analyze it as part of our research. In total, we used/are using about 4 online networking to contact each other and to work collaboratively together.

Even though our group could only have used e-mail to contact each other, we decided that it is not enough to communicate. We first opened a group on Facebook to be able to chat, share documents, pictures etc. We decided on this platform because nearly everyone nowadays has Facebook and it is quite simple and easy to use.  However, Facebook wasn’t such a good idea to edit documents at the same time as a group, and so it lacked this online tool. From the experience we had with Nancy on the platform, www.meetingwords.com; we decided we should all edit the document/report there. So we had opened up the document for this project on that platform, and now we had 3 places online where we could work.  The problem we faced was exactly this; 3 platforms! When we had the next lecture, we encountered that each one of us had used one of these platforms assuming we would be using the same platform. So for example, two people had done their task on meetingwords, where the other one had send me their task via email, and where the other two had worked on Facebook.  This of course caused miscommunication; we didn’t know who had finished their task. We fixed this problem by ‘collecting the tasks’ and re-editing what was done to the actual document, which of course took some time.

As if this confusion wasn’t enough, we decided we challenged ourselves to try out basecamp to complete our project :’) 

Having to work via 4 online networks is challenging! 

What do you/we need and want to learn as you/ we explore the application of online communities and networks to open innovation design?

 I have formulated this question to; What should you learn about online social networks that could help in being a better open innovator? And have shared it on Facebook and twitter. With the replies I received, my answer;

The exploration of online social networks, will allow us to learn how to share, get inspired, gain more knowledge, and look from different perspectives and insights, from the people who share the same interest globally. We therefore should learn how platforms work since, this way we will have a variety of information, thought and analyzed differently, so more variety of ideas to consider. This ‘open’ collaboration will then allow open innovation.

I also want to learn how technical architecture affects human communication, and whether it is enough for open innovators to communicate only through social networks. 

a) How can I be more inspired and inspiring as an open innovator? And how can I use and create social media, platforms, communities help me achieve this? 

My goal in IDE and afterwards, is to become an international industrial designer that can contribute to helping solve world problems/issues. I will be very collaborative, curious, open-minded and will be very close to people to be able to solve problems. After a lot of research I will do on the particular given problem, to be able to solve it I would need inspirations/insights and ideas.

I will create and use a lot of platforms to reach different people, groups and communities all around the world that are interested in sharing their thoughts, ideas about the topic. This way I will gain inspiration from online networks.

 BUT