Week 8 Commentary, Ben Lotan

This week we met three times, with various members in attendance.
We had a meeting on tuesday and two meetings on thursday.
these were primarily focused on consolidation of the cultural and sequence models, and the completion of the affinity diagram.
Then today (sunday) we had a long meeting with most of our members there for the core session in which we took the first explicit steps to form a vision.
First there were four of us. We flushed out two sequence models and made a consolidated sequence of group study we thought would be good to have. Then as more people arrived we got to visioning.
We "walked the data" and used the affinity diagram to guide us.
something i found interesting:
When we made the affinity diagram we had some difficulty, there were many disagreements and stepping backwards... it took us a while, and every little detail seemed crucial. Eventually we just had to finish it. I thought that it wouldnt be so helpful somehow as an artifact, that it would be helpful in the process of creating it, but no more. When we got to visioning however, i realized how good it was to have, and also how much the smaller details didnt matter. and all our organization issues could have been brushed aside much faster....
The visioning felt very productive and now we are all comfortable with our project.
So much of studying is organizing, and compiling and navigating through media... these necessary issues which are not ACTUALLY studying... we want a system which will allow students to Study when they "study" forgoing the slew of activities necessary as class structure works now...... we want people to be more effective, and make better use of time... or we at least want to allow them to do this. Also not just in a way that prepares them for the test. but which allows them to LEARN better....
so as we compile our data, we see many ways we could do this... but its a hefty problem... the system could easily get mixed up and confusing...
we are starting to see how necessary this whole process is. and thus we are happy.
so right now in the project we are ready to make our visions concrete and begin to storyboard.
good.
sorry this was scattered and a bit childish. I hope you saw the important stuff buried within all of this.
Good