Ethnography and web design

Fred Oliveira, founder of the Web 2.0 Workgroup, recently wrote a nice piece on ethnography and designing for the web. He has followed up that article with a posting yesterday regarding how several high profile companies implement these ideas in their own organisations.

These principles can be applied to the design of web based apps or implementations for teaching & learning. Teachers and students can collaborate on the design. Observe how the students achieve their goals and figure out how they make a difference. What is the nature of the transformative process. Take note of what the students are actually doing. How do they make that journey from point 'a' to point 'b' in terms of the transformative process. It is not always easy to distill that process and impossible to bottle yet if the essential ingredients can be identified perhaps a web based translation of these moments could be chartered and developed to act as a scaffold for those students who experience difficulties in successfully completing that journey from point 'a' to point 'b'.