User Experience Fishbowl

Four UDG Agora professors from the 2015 cohort are in today's "fishbowl"
Four UDG Agora professors from the 2015 cohort are in today’s “fishbowl”

At today’s opening session for the 2016 Cohort of UDG Agora, four participants from 2015 were invited back to provide insight into their experience via one of the Liberating Structures formats known as the User Experience Fishbowl.

Moises in the fishbowl
Moises in the fishbowl

Today we welcomed back Adán, Araceli, Moises and Francisco, who were placed in the center of the room, the “fishbowl”. Their role was to have a discussion among themselves, with the rest of the audience observing. At key points, the observers then gathered in their small groups to share with each other what they heard as key learnings.

Araceli in the fishbowl
Araceli in the fishbowl
Adán in the fishbowl
Adán in the fishbowl

The description of this Liberating Structure is:

What is made possible? A subset of people with direct field experience can quickly foster understanding, spark creativity, and facilitate adoption of new practices among members of a larger community. Fishbowl sessions have a small inside circle of people surrounded by a larger outside circle of participants. The inside group is formed with people who made concrete progress on a challenge of interest to those in the outside circle. The fishbowl design makes it easy for people in the inside circle to illuminate what they have done by sharing experiences while in conversation with each other. The informality breaks down the barriers with direct communication between the two groups of people and facilitates questions and answers flowing back and forth. This creates the best conditions for people to learn from each other by discovering answers to their concerns themselves within the context of their working groups. You can stop imposing someone else’s practices!

Ask those in the fishbowl to describe their experience—the good, the bad, and the ugly—informally, concretely, and openly. Invite them to do it in conversation with each other as if the audience wasn’t there and they were sharing stories around a watering hole or stuck in a van on the way to the airport. Firmly, ask them to avoid presenting to the audience.

Invite the people outside the fishbowl to listen, observe nonverbal exchanges, and formulate questions within their small groups.

Francisco in the fishbowl
Francisco in the fishbowl

We have an audio recording of the discussion (we apologize for the uneven quality of the recording, a small failure bow)

5 thoughts on “User Experience Fishbowl

  1. Qué interesante fue con los compañeros que tomaron el Diplomado de Movil y que compartieron sus experiencias. Es bueno ya que nos retro alimentamos.

  2. Retomar de forma crítica las experiencias de colegas, sin duda, contribuyen a fortalecer nuestros aprendizajes pero también a plantearnos nuevas preguntas.

  3. Conocer la experiencia de los colegas me motiva a romper el status quo, a aplicar herramientas novedosas que traerán más dinamismo al aula y seguramente aprendizaje significativo.

  4. Este curso me ha dado mucho a mi formación Académica y profesional, la cuál estoy aplicando con mis alumnos en este curso de verano. Sobre todo la aplicación de la Técnica de Trabajo Colaborativo. Gracias por brindar estos espacios a nuestra Alma-Mater UdG , por conducto de la Coordinación de Innovación Educativa y Pregrado.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *