RESEARCHABLE QUESTION
How do we unify digital learning resources into a single cohesive environment that can serve complex content but is simple to use? (February 20)
How can we utilize interactive design to make digital learning environments more cohesive and user-centric?(February 14)
How can we rethink classroom experiences by optimizing technology to engage students and augment the learning process?(December 7)
I’d like to start with something I found a week ago that I had forgot to mention in class or here on my worklog. STEPS was a 2012 IXDA Interaction Award-winning project created at the Art Center College for Design in Pasedena with the guidance of Microsoft Research:
It is essentially a service design project that manages classroom activity for teachers and lets students learn and work, both using tablet devices in a one-to-one digital learning environment. This is solid work. At the same time it: 1. makes me nervous that this is work that has been done many times. It is hard and I’m intimidated by efforts such as STEPS, wich is backed by hardcore research and user testing and is presented with polished deliverables; and 2. reaffirms my position on the matter. This work is high caliber stuff and they are thinking along the same lines I am. If I am to stand on the shoulders of giants (as all smart people do), then my only choice is to see what they did right—improve upon it, see what they did wrong—fix it, and then frame the whole damn thing in a way that makes sense to my audience (high school and community colleges, rather than the K-12 crowd that STEPS serves).
Jan very helpfully stopped me when I said the above in class last week. He told me that yes, this is indeed what I ought to be doing. I keep talking about the “learning environment,” “learning management systems,” “learning software,” lectures, and text books. I have been getting caught up in defining exactly what my role is in this system. This idea of “unifying digital resouces” seems to be a great mantra for the overall goal of what I want to be doing.
Somewhat disappointingly, I remained mostly in research mode this week. However, the good news is that I read some awesome stuff. More Bret Victor, for the most part, but this stuff was pure gold and related well to the goals of my project. The conclusion I came away with this week is that my platform must serve as a layer of abstraction between the disparate and complex digital learning resources that are available for students and teachers. And Bret Victor has urged me in his paper entitled “Magic Ink” that the primary way to do this is through… GRAPHIC DESIGN (dun dun dun!). With all of the hype around interaction, user experience, andengagement, it is almost funny to hear such a sharp and tech-minded thinker championing “good ‘ole” graphic design as the primary design practice, even in interactive and dynamic media. But I think the guy has a great point. The paper talks almost exclusively about what he calls “information software.” In “information software,” Victor argues that interaction is bad—it is the enemy of learning, unless said interaction is explicitly for the sake of educating the user. He walks through the process of creating a BART train schedule widget for the San Francisco transit authority where he created an interface that relied foremost on graphic design rather than interaction (see below).
