Diagramming Affinities (Wednesday)

All week long, I have been meeting with my students as they have done (semi) in-depth interviews (IDIs) of between 30 and 60 minutes to accompany the short (10 minute) interviews they did when I was away.  We met with people and spent time with them as they showed us how they use the web, especially to find information about education.

Today, we analyzed what we found from these interviews plus a comparative web site analysis that they also did.  Those of you in my profession will recognize an Affinity Diagram, but for those of you who are not, here's what we did:

• We wrote each observation on a different post-it note
• Then we went into the hallway and started with a "seed" - one of my notes.
• We compared a second note to this one and put it either close or far away depending on how similar or dissimilar it seemed to be
• We contented the process until we had posted all of our notes 
• Then we looked at each group or clump and further organized that into sub-clumps if it seemed that there were such sub-groupings
• We labeled each and then we "walked the wall" to move things as necessary

This is what it looked like when we were done:

Close up of one clump:
The needs of high school ("secondaria") students

We generated quite a lot of interest as we worked.  People came by, asking what we were doing, talking about how they could see doing something similar themselves and generally showing interest. 

It was only partly because we were using colored post-its (though everyone has been coveting these!)  

It represents a very different way of thinking about organizing information, a much more flexible and visual (not to mention physical) way to play around with different groupings and to try on different ways of organizing content.

(And just wait!  We have an even better - and certainly more colorful - Affinity Diagram coming - stay tuned)