Questions about questions: another visit to iFontys

First of all, it’s been awhile since my last post. But as you can imagine, with the holidays and getting up and started again in the new year, blogs sometimes are the first thing to go.

So what has happened in the meantime? I made some big decisions for my graduation:

• A focus on asking questions and giving answers, to capitalize on the fact that those two are the biggest drive for collaboration.
• The tool will be designed with the facilitation of a Community of Practice in mind.
• I will focus my design specifically on the Fontys PABO Eindhoven students.

I will expand on the last two in other posts, but for now, I want to write about my last trip to Fontys students. But, it’s quite a read, so I’ll summarize what I learned for my design first.

• A lot of questions, the most important ones even, are about experiences. The questions and answers still stand, but this deserves some special attention later in my design.
• Content is still a very valuable resource to have in the design, especially when looking at the reading material students have. Being able to link this material to questions and answers might create some good discussion about it.
• The PABO is currently employing Learning Communities, which is very much related to the Communities of Practice that I want to encourage. Since the PABO LC appears to be largely built around meeting, I can fit my design around an online extension of this.