Our students have a choice of using one of the 200 netbook devices or one of the 120 fixed desktop PCs - which ones are they drawn to and under what circumstances? They have relatively free reign in a large learning space (incorporating library, cafes and student services) the size of a football pitch across three floors - which means they have a choice as to where to work, learn and play with these netbooks - and again, which zones are they drawn to and under what circumstances?

Which leads us to another set of interesting questions:

• What kind of affordances do these devices bring?
• Are they indeed "value added" or something else?
• Does the combination of group work and mobile devices differ from that of group work and fixed devices?
• Does an "underworld" of virtualised peer support exist in these groupings?

I have a lot to think about and mull over before I finally hand in my project proposal in April 2010 - the trick here is to keep the research question(s) tightly focused.

If you are interesting in delving deeper into the OLPC project, Nicholas Negroponte, author of "Being Digital", founder of MIT Media Labs and founder of the OLPC initiative provides a nice summary of what the initiative is and the some of the issues of getting the project off the ground. James O'Hagan's blog "1 Laptop : 1 Student" offers some "stories" and case studies taken from practitioners of the initiatives.

References

Dunleavy, M., Dexter, S. & Heinecke, W.F. (2007). "What added value does a 1:1 student to laptop ratio bring to technology-supported teaching and learning?". Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 23, pp. 440-452.

"This programme represents a £13.08m investment aimed at supporting existing institutional strategies by providing solutions to institution-wide problems, based upon proven practices, technologies, standards and services. The solutions will act as exemplars to other institutions by demonstrating innovation and good practice, and building knowledge and experience, which can be shared across institutions."

One of those projects is the Academic Social Networking project which is being developed by the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) at the University of Cambridge. The project itself "aims to bring some of the affordances of consumer social networks to teaching and learning".

What is interesting to me, and possibly to other students on the research methods module is that CARET collaborated with Flow Interactive, an external company, to investigate whether commercial user-centric design (UCD) techniques could be transferable and be used within a Higher Education context.

As the research team suggest, user-centric design is different because:

"...it explicitly, constructively and actively includes users in the design process from a very early stage."

One of the key features of their particular methodology is the notion of "design personas" and how it enabled them to:

"...identified trends or patterns in user behaviours, expectations and motivations, through conducting a combination of diary studies and interviews, and how this formed the basis of our personas. Having these personas enabled us to focus the design effort on supporting user goals. Also, where traditionally a designer might have lists and lists of requirements, personas allow one to prioritize these requirements to the degree these personas would find them important, offering more clarity."

Moreover, the research team at CARET have published their UCD methodology into a rather useful and compelling handbook for us lucky reseachers to peruse and may even offer a new approach to conducting research with our key stakeholders.

There was some suggestion that we should have some learning outcomes, which I, personally, was not keen because a) we didn't have an idea for a game; and b) is there such a thing as attributing learning outcomes to a game? attributing rules to a game, yes! but learning outcomes??

A quick Google search trawl came up with the following resources that might provide us with some inspiration for a game, included:

• Google Earth blog
• Google Earth Outreach
• Google for Educators
• Top 10 Games with Google Earth
• Google Earth Community

Marie Leadbetter suggested that we should meet up "virtually" using Skype to discuss the project and Bill Babouris gave the team the idea for a game based up the recently conceived New Seven Wonders of the World - the game idea was tentatively centred around the notion of a "knowledge quest".

On Wednesday evening of Week 4, the team met via Skype to thrash out the aims and objectives of the game and to decide who was going to contribute to what. It should be said that this was the most amazing brain-storming, project management session ever conducted virtually. We went from an idea to a fully-realised project plan in 1.5 hours.

One of the ideas we liked was a quiz that was created by My Wonder World on Asia. The quiz was created using Keyhole Markup Language (KML) which is an "is an XML-based language schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization on existing or future Web-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers" which I had been playing with a couple of weeks prior to the team project. Unfortunately, we were not able to see how the KML file was constructed as it had been compressed into a KMZ file. Bill Babouris came up trumps again for finding a KMZ-KML converter that us to uncompress the file to see how it was constructed.

It became very clear to me that the quiz would be very doable and that I probably should be the person to code it as I had already been using it as well as having a long and varied computer programming background. All that remained was to identify the tasks and action points to be done and to assign each one to a team member. By Sunday, all questions, introductory text, images, coding, testing was completed.

An interesting topic that came out of the discussions was the notion of feedback and how it should be presented to the user. We felt that terms like "right" and "wrong" seem too hard and final and that we should endeavour to use more softer, and less negative, language in the feedback boxes. This team exercise turned out to be a very fulfilling and fun ride from "Oh, what are we going to do?" to "Ta-da, it's finished".