What is MVT, and why have I adopted the MVT approach?

Just two weeks to go before my ‘blogging taster course’, which is designed to give people a flavour of what blogging is and what it entails, should they be thinking of starting a blog themselves.

Needless to say, the course will be conducted online. I’ve considered all sorts of wonderful approaches involving Zoom, Google docs, Google forms and several other apps. In the end, I decided to use what I call the MVT: minimal viable technology.

What this means to me is asking the question: what do I need to do in order to achieve the aims of this course, and to give the participants a good experience? That raises the question, how to define “good”? My answer is an experience which, as well as delivering the goods in terms of course objectives, also has the following characteristics:

• is enjoyable

• does not involve inordinate delays because of technology problems

• does not involve inordinate delays because of human operator problems

The way I see it, the more technology you use at the same time, the greater the potential for something going wrong. For example, it’s possible (and easy) to give each small group a personalised Google doc to discuss in a breakout room. There’s great scope there for me to accidentally give two groups the same document, forget to set the document to Edit mode, not allocate it to the correct group. And what would be gained by doing that for a course consisting of two sessions of 2.5 hours each? Much easer to make the same document available to everyone and invite them to collaborate on that, or in a padlet (see below).

Thus the technology I’ll be using comprises:

• Zoom, for both whole group discussions and small group discussions in breakout rooms.

• Google Classroom, which I’m using as a repository for my handouts and videos, plus a couple of assignments to be completed for homework.

• Padlet, which is a sort of virtual board of post-it notes which can be saved as a pdf to be sent to everyone later.

Don’t get me wrong: I love technology. But I m also acutely aware that technology goes wrong occasionally. Indeed, my mantra is: it’s not if the technology goes wrong, it’s when. No need to tempt fate by using even more of it than necessary!