MashUP event

We gave a presentation on our work so far to the MashUP event being help in The Space, the dedicated gallery area at the univesity. The project seemed to be well recieved, generating some interest and possible future collaborations. The presentation was filmed so I’ll hopefully be able to get a copy of it to post up here. In the mean time here are the presentation slides…

The slide animations haven’t come up so if you want to see it properly I’d recommend a download. Please feel free to comment

Game meeting 11/12/2008

We started out meeting by chatting about the ARG conference I’ve already talked about and both Simon and I thought that the day had been a really beneficial event, excellent speakers, fantastic facilities and a great opportunity to talk to others about what they were doing.

We then turned to business and more specifically our consultancy which now has a name! We will be calling the company Phoenix UK Ltd, after brainstorming on the way to London for the conference and stewing on the names we came up with. As the company specialises in turning companies around we wanted a name that helped to reflect this.

We’ve also decided on a failing business.  The business will be a old-fashioned men’s clothing store, one of those tweed jacket, corduroy trouser type places that has been around for years but has fallen on hard times.

On exposing the students to the game we’ve decided to make the game and competition elements more overt (thanks to Dan Hon and Alex Moseley for the inspiration) with the students taking part in a competitive internship with the best few people being “hired” by the company and receiving prizes.

This allows us to be far more open with the assessment aspect of the course and to incorporate a leader board to help motivate students and provide formative feedback throughout the course. We were looking at having some sort of continual peer feedback based on perceived contribution (something I saw in a talk by Randy Pausch) and this would tie into the new leader board as well as performance in conference calls and presentations held throughout the course.

Where the competition element is now going to be overt we have the ability to set the students specific tasks without having to overly mask them. Things like sending groups off to do things can be handled in a direct way instead of having to come up with a convoluted reason for it. This is going to include sending them to do field research into retail best practice, taking pictures and video of things they think reflect this which they will then present to their peers to be assessed.

 

There will also be a final presentation to the store and consultancy board. For the board we’re hoping to get a few people in from local industry and have the groups present in an almost “Dragon’s Den” style way.

 

The finance aspect looks to be the primary focus of the unit upon which we will then hang the marketing and personnel issues on that, with some of them cropping up as curveballs during the duration of the game.

 

In order to ensure the students can deal with these arising challenges there will be a number of frontloaded “seminars” to supply them with the foundations of the relevant knowledge for them to then take away and build upon.

 

All in all it’s coming together slowly. Now I just have to write this stuff into the design

Meeting 27/11/08

Ok, another meeting, another set of notes.

We’d already established that the students weren’t going to take specific roles within the groups for the unit, but to ellaborate we are now looking towards having them all go off and investigate, then come back together and collaborate as a “collective intelligence”.

I mentioned a concept to I had seen in a talk by Randy Pausch (an amazing man who I wish I had the opportunity to meet before he sadly passed away) whereby the students rate each other based on how well they feel they performed in the tasks they undertook during the week. This feedback would then be graphed and illustrate how well a student has performed in the eyes of their peers, acting as a motivational tool to get the students to pull their weight.

We decided it might be better to get rid of the “stop the rot” paper as this would essentially only be tacked onto to produce the final report. Instead of the paper, there will be a non-assessed briefing to the consulancy director(s) possibly via conference call whereby the students can present what they have learned so far and gain feedback and direction.

We talked about the need for some sort of primary data from the customers and how to include this. We’re thinking of supplying students with some rather dated, limited market research. This would then possibly be supported by a forum on which there is negative feedback about the company and it’s products or perhaps some other form of feedback the students can access, this is yet to be nailed down.

We identified that the students need to follow the process of “get info – identify the question – ask the question – get the answer – make recommendations” with each of the issues we present them with and we need to identify methods of guiding them through this without holding their hands.

The SWOT analysis is coming along, with the Threats and Weaknesses aspects identified as these can pretty much apply to any industry. The Skills aspect really needs to be informed by the business and the Opportunites are the area we can really tailor ourselves.

We thought about the way in which we will monitor the progress of the different groups and keep them moving without necessarily having to have them meet with Simon or one of his colleagues. We’re thinking of using a short, weekly progress report which will outline the progress made over the last week, problems that cropped up and what they aim to achieve over the coming week.

In support of the idea of “collective intelligence” it was thought that we could have some sort of forum within the consultancy site, for the module as a whole. The problem with this being that as all groups are working on the same business, I think it would break the suspension of disbelief.