Lessons from thoughtswap-ing
Margaret Dickey-Kurdziolek, Matthew Schaefer, Deborah G. Tatar, Ian Parker Renga · 2010
A successful collaborative tool designed to aid discussion must be flexible, maintain the user's coordinative agency, and be appropriable in many contexts. We have developed a tool, called ThoughtSwap, to help widen and deepen the scope of participation in facilitated discussions while supporting, not supplanting, discussants' coordination. By driving the design of ThoughtSwap toward a simpler mechanism, we were able to create a more versatile, high-impact tool. We design for an educational setting, but see wider possible use.