Designing soft technologies

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 

Your mission is to design at least one educational technology that uses no information & communication technologies other 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. A plain and unadorned email client, such as Thunderbird or Outlook Express, nothing more.

You will get more from the exercise if you actively make things really hard for yourself by, for example, limiting yourself to an old-fashioned text-based email client, though that might be overkill.

Do not worry if your solution is extremely slow or extremely laborious for all concerned, even if it takes this to ludicrous lengths - that's kind of the point, and it's why we harden technologies in the first place. Do not worry if it involves more people than would usually be needed (e.g. an intermediary to edit or reformat or process things): again, efficiency is a good reason to harden a technology.

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, so that kind of system is not a bad place to start looking for ideas. You could even manually institute complex things like authentication, access control and encryption, if participants were willing to spend the time doing it. In principle, it should be possible to hold a very slow webinar this way (even if only using text - ASCII art is a wonderful thing), or an adaptive system, or a full-scale collaborative filter. You could actually replicate Facebook or something Google-like, with enough ingenuity, enough helpers, and a huge amount of effort and adherence to your rules (the orchestration) on the part of the people using your system.

I'd recommend as a starting point that you identify the intended use of your learning 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 very simple and rather uninspired examples of the kind of thing I mean in the subpage of this one.

More things to think about for the keen or attention-deficient learner

What happens when you are able to use and assemble 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?

What personal skills would be needed for the users of your technology? What would be difficult when compared with a harder technology where the orchestration is done for you?

Are there any benefits that your technology offers that a hardened version might not?

Would using a wiki instead of email make your technology better or worse? What would you need to change in order to make that happen? 

What other supporting technologies apart from email would work as well or better?