New MoD learning project 2008

From last year's MoD 07/photo B.Jevnaker
Conversation in shared space seems to be an important ingredient

MoD 2008
This is a joint learning project for both business and design students organized by a small team at BI Norwegian school and the Design faculty of KHiO. The project started for the very first time in early January 2007, although building on various previous initiatives (from Scandinavia, Island as well as the US, Europe and probably also seeds from elsewhere).

A 2nd MoD project, MoD 2008, between BI + KHiO hast just started, from 7 January and runs in 3 intensive weeks, with some introductory lecturing offered earlier (a couple of days before Xmas). It was also run in three weeks January last year. The basic structure and organized flow is principally the same (although you can never step down into the "same" river twice, as Heraclit proposed).
This time we have the advantage of building on last year's good experiences incl. reflections on what are potential important learning ingredients
- (e.g., preparation in a team with dedicated faculty and offering and following a rich program with high quality lectures incl practice-based guest lecturing, briefings on the task and overall learning process, time for group processes, clear milestones for presentations, room for dialogue, Q&A/supervision, flexibility as to kinds of ideas/settings for students' concept proposals, etc. May come back to this later on).

We're now at the end of the first week with intensified lecturing and team work; we offer students a daily program incl. time for group work (that's essential). Impressions so far are as interesting as last year! See http://modoslo.blogspot.com/
A new ingredient this year is thus the modoslo blog as a digital site to communicate our MoD activity, the blog was initiated and created on Blogger Sunday 06/01.08 by me, just-in-time before the start-up. The faculty team have found this useful (such a blog is of course not excellently organized but a fresh experiment (and we've experienced e.g. triggering group presentations but also limitations such as difficult to post or link lecture presentations not posted elsewhere).
For people who know Dori (dean of Design faculty at KHiO), they will perhaps know that he also has his own blog - where he post photos and reflections also from this collaborative project with BI, see http://www.dorigislason.com

One of the advantages of blogs is that they can be open and we've invited in all student groups and also guest lecturers as contributing authors to the MoD blog.
An experience last year was that we did not have such a shared digital communication space to provide messages and project related postings.
As KHiO, BI also has an extra net solution for its students, BI has a Blackboard facility (only for students enrolled in BI courses, thus not open for KHiO students. The same goes for KHiO's system, you need to sign in. ...That's one of the reasons why I got the idea of a MoD blog as a communicative space in addition to the partly "closed" extranets). It shall be interesting to see how it can become useful and what are the potentials and limitations of this extra effort.
Birgit