Tuesday 17 February 2015

Dialogical Method #1 - Challenges in Communication


My project here has as subject an learning enviroment call Leds (Laboratory of Extension in Software Development). I'll speak later more about Leds. In Leds we try to stimulate the continuos interaction between whole involved, i.e.  students, teachers and community customer. We believe that the communication can be a excellent learning tool.

We use as methodologies in the projects the Scrum (agile project management), XP (Extreme Programming) and Canvas Models (Business Model Canvas and Project Model Canvas). In this methodologies, the team need to communicates more than in the tradicional methodologies. On the other hand, in the tradicional ones, there are a lot of formalisms and documents that sometimes prejudice the communication. The students in Leds work always together. The task of programming occurs always in pairs. Daily the students and the teachers made short meetings of the Scrum. In this meeting everyone says what is doing, the difficulties and the next tasks. Fortnightly, the students and the customer of project (of community) have a meet the delivery partial results. So, the communication in Leds is so intense. But it can be better.

The communication never is a easy task. There are a lot of the problems in our case that affects the well done interaction between everyone. Sometimes, the communication don't happen, or it isn't spontaneous. The students sometimes are afraid to talk what really think to the another students or mainly to the teachers. Listen the another is always a challenge too. Occasionally, we don't pay careful attention to listening to the others perspectives. We speak without thinking in what the another people told seconds ago. 

The communication between students and teachers need to improve a lot. We have sometimes different expectations and concerns about the tasks. Generally is very hard the another point of view. The communication with the clientes is not so easy too. We speak different dialects. Here and there, our dialect is more technical and the customer dialect is very domain specific. 

To sum up, communication is a big challenge!

How improve the communication on the Leds?
How stimulate a better communication?
How get over these difficulties?
How improve the learning through communication?

Can the Dialogic Method be useful in this case?

Answers in the next chapter...  :)

(To be continued....)

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