14th lesson plan 25th April 2007

Computer lab

I skipped the topic of Project Information Management. It’s a bit boring to the secondary school level students and not very important in their project planes. The topic of this lesson is Project Risk Management – how to recognize dangerous events, analyze them and plan contra reactions.

The goal of the lesson is to get familiar with risk management methods and to list the events that can jeopardize project scope.

Research goal is to control can they find answers to questions through tagcloud.

During the lesson I controlled student’s previous knowledge. The learning material contains some questions related to issues that are studied earlier. For example what are the methods for generating ideas? I expect that they can find the answers based on their personal tagcloud. The goal is to control can the student find the answers through the tagcloud? This is one important skill for successful examination.

Before that I had to change the formulation of the questions until they are compatible with previous content (initially the terminology was different). I also checked beforehand does students have relevant tags? For generation of ideas students used following tags: brain, brainstorm, alternatives, CNB, ideas, project, project management. The most frequent tag was ideas (the content about generating ideas was tagged by 9 students, the tag “ideas” was used 6 times). I expect that some of the students can find the correct answer.

During the investigation of the tagcloud I discovered that while clicking on tag “ideas” I can get long list of bookmarks. Most of them are not related with this course. Not even related with project management. Software development idea: user (student or teacher) can filter the list of bookmarks. He can see choose between content of this course (specified by the time and the list of the students), this subject (running course and all previous courses) or all materials tagged with this keyword. In some level the interdisciplinary view is good but I believe students are mostly interest about their own (bookmarked and tagged by them) content.

It seams that del.icio.us is not suitable learning environment for use in several similar sources. For the first run the functionality of the del.icio.us is enough and simplicity is perfect but in the future it can be problematic. E.g.:

How to bind structure of course with timeline? The latest content is on the top of the list. What happens’ if teacher change the planes of the lesson? The saving date will be changed and the order of documents will be wrong. To start everything again under new username? 10 usernames all together! maybe is possible to hide existing bookmarks. To make them personal bookmarks? Is this possible when somebody is tagged it already?
How to separate new group from existing one? New study group can see tags created by previous group. In some level it can be educational but it is the risk that students simply copy the tags without thinking.

I would like to find answers to those questions and test the del.icio.us in parallel courses (same content, different groups).

In this lesson students had to publish larger document in Google Docs – to copy three different parts together to same document. This is important exercise before creation of final integrated project plan.