eBooks for Evaluation and Reflection

Aside from my work at Proboscis I’m currently busy organising the Inspiring Digital Engagement Festival taking place in Sheffield on 15 September 2010. As part of this event we plan to use eBooks to gather feedback from participants about the day and their feelings and experiences of it. So I have been browsing the diffusion library to see how other people have approached using eBooks for this task and have come across a number of examples.

eBooks from Articulating Futures by Niharika Hariharan; eNotebooks from school workshops; StoryCubes at bTween

In the Articulating Futures workshop run by Niharika Hariharan eBooks were designed to take the students through the different workshop activities. The eBooks acted as personal journals and tools for them to bring their ideas together and were used  to reflect over the proceedings of each day. Proboscis have made a number of eNotebooks to use as learning diaries for school workshops such as Experiencing Democracy and Sound Scavenging, as field notebooks to collect ideas in projects such as St Marks and as evaluation tools at conferences such as Enter. At bTween in Manchester 2008 Story Cubes were used to collect people’s answers to questions around new technologies. A similar premise could easily have asked for feedback from participants on the event itself.

A blank probe pack

Finally, a chat with my co-organiser this afternoon reminded me of the eBooks that Orlagh, Niharika and I made for the probe packs we put together as part of Being in Common. These were sent out to twenty people with very different lifestyles and understanding of space living all over the world. The packs were designed to collect participants thoughts, feelings and experiences of common space. Participants returned the packs to Proboscis once they had completed it. You can read more about the probe packs and the *amazing* things people did with them here. It is this kind of reflective eNotebook that I would like to create for the Inspiring Digital Engagement Festival. Of course, you’ll be the first to know how I get on..

Download Articulating Futures eBooks from diffusion.org.uk.
Read about StoryCubes at bTween here.
Find out more about eNotebooks here.