Your mission

Activity to prepare for my bit of the course

This is an activity to help get a stronger sense of what I mean by a soft technology, what one looks like and how it works. It is also quite good fun and might actually lead to some useful ideas and new (soft) technologies.

Your mission is to design at least one educational technology that uses no other information & communication technologies than an unenhanced standard email client.   It should use nothing more than that email client and its usual supporting infrastructure (such as computer, network connection, operating system etc). Your technology should involve no other distinct applications like web browsers, word processors, nor any other kind of server-based system such as a web server, shared storage, listservs, online schedulers or groupware. No attachments, no sneaky introduction of other technologies by relying on features found in only a few email clients like scheduling of document management. Plain email, such as Thunderbird or Outlook Express, nothing more.

Try to go beyond the obvious. With some effort by all concerned, every single feature of a learning management system can be replicated using nothing but email. You could even manually institute complex things like authentication, access control and encryption, if participants were willing to spend the time doing it. You could actually replicate Facebook, with enough ingenuity and a huge amount of effort and adherence to your rules (the orchestration) on the part of the people using your system.

The point is to use the softness of the mail system: to fill the holes as manually as possible and to avoid complexifying the assembly more than necessary. 

I'd recommend as a starting point that you identify the use of the technology first of all, then identify the phenomena of the email client (and anything else relevant) then talk about the tricky bit, which is the orchestration.

Share your ideas and designs: provide this in a form that may be aggregated with grsshopper and shared with others on the MOOC. 

The intention here is to focus on what phenomena are being orchestrated to what purpose in each case and (most importantly) how that orchestration occurs. The more complex, bizarre, interesting and ingenious the ways of using these better. There are a couple of simple and rather uninspired examples of the kind of thing I mean in the subpages of this one.

Moving on - more stuff for the keen or attention-deficient learner

What happens when you are able to use more technologies? Does it make it harder or easier? Try it!

How would you harden your system? Which parts of your system are hard, which parts are soft?