Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Brainstorming with Web 2.0

There are MANY ways to brainstorm. But how do you brainstorm with a team of people that are geographically dispersed? How do you brainstorm with a group of people when you are alone at your desk? It’s impossible right?

Wrong!

Welcome Wallwisher. It’s basically a free online page (aka. wall) that anyone can post a note to. When you look back on Bruce Tuckman's 1965 model for team development of Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing, then I think Wallwisher is a great Web 2.0 tool for the 'Storming' phase. This phase is the time for members of the team to share ideas, to propose a method of working together, to divide and assign tasks to individual team members. Wallwisher works well for this because it will easily and quickly allow team members to post multiple short notes (max of 160 characters) to a common wall as well as post links to other web-hosted pages or files. Team members can move these notes around on the wall and organize them in whatever way they wish. For example, similar notes could be grouped together, notes outlining a process could be placed in a hierarchy to better illustrate the start and the end of the process, some notes that are proposed for deletion could be segregated to a specific area of the wall until all team members agree that they can be removed. Combined with a wiki, which could best serve the team in the 'Performing' phase, Wallwisher is definitely a useful tool for teams working together at a distance.

It’s catching on to. Last week I attended a series of CUE presentations and Wallwisher came up. Also, eCollegeFinder has recently written about Wallwisher as well.

Try it out! Let us know if you have any creative and innovative use for it!

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