Week 5 Margrove Park

These sessions are drawing to a close and I can't make it next week so Carrie (researcher) is going to conduct some interviews. I'll add one extra session after that and this effectively ends the run of sessions.

I said at the outset that the sessions would react to whatever the participants want to do but I have been surprised at the range of things they have wanted to do.

This week with sessions drawing to an end I decided we needed to get back to the "program". I figured the participants may resist this and figured on some slack to pursue the other things they may wish to do. I also decided that we needed to deal with once and for all the problem of forgotten usernames and passwords and a method was put in place (can't really post details on this public blog) The groups website is driven by an open source CMC/Blog system with an "intranet" of google apps. This requires logging on more that once so we needed uniformity of usernames/passwords.

Surprisingly, the group did not balk at the idea of a slightly more "driven" session and said they enjoyed it.

We looked at personalising their own pages within the Intranet and they had quite an adventurous time exploring the google widgets. We then moved on to google docs and they seemed quite naturally to slip into using docs. Marian was able to share her doc with everyone and they collaborated on a Limeric. The spent a surprisingly long time on this - editing and re-editing.

There was a young man from Newcastle
Who thought carrying the coals was a hassle
He left everyone cold when he dropped his load
Said to to "hell" with the coal and Newcastle