Doings
- Narrowed down from 8 directions to 2
- Talked to over 18 people
- Read a bunch of papers on learning
- Created documentation platform
- Drafted statements and outlines for 2 directions
Learnings
- How to use github pages
- How to use the jekyll platform
- Peeked into scss / less / sass
- Talking to people about your ideas is very valuable.
- Talking also helps formulate your ideas better. Talking about your ideas also defines who you are, is good for networking.
- Am I designing to teach design? or designing to teach?
- All design should help people learn in some way (e.g. a new perspective, how to use an object, how to live better lives). The question is, do I help people learn my craft (design thinking & creativity & communications) because I want to empower them with the tools that I use? Or do I want to help people interact with their own craft in new ways, thereby empowering them with better knowledge about themselves? I don’t know is the lazy answer.
- IxD and HCI
- When I talked to people, I realized I had to sort answers by their approaches to the problem. Interaction design approaches problems from a people-centered view, at least the way we’ve been taught it, whereas HCI approaches problems from a technology-centered view.
- Was LOGO successful?
- According to some people, LOGO was more succesful in teaching programming when the learning was guided.
- How to get novices excited about exploration?
- I believe guidance is a valuable part to teaching novices, but I think a guided method also fails to pass on the urge to experiment, fail, and innovate upon learnings. How do we guide people into exploring without guidance?
- Constructivism vs. Direct Instruction are not mutually exclusive (imo)
- Direct, guided instruction can lead people to construct their own meaning out of the teaching, if the instruction applies a learning-by-doing method.
- Guided inquiry is beneficial for in-depth learning. Exploration is beneficial for breadth/longitudinal and innovative learning. (imo)
- The ideas that KSC propose seem to be ways for people to become experts in existing knowledge, but do not address how to bring people to innovate and create new knowledge.
Sage advice
- Structure your time by what you want to learn.
- This is your last chance to have complete freedom to do whatever you want. (not imo)
- Provoke new thinking.
- Time makes decisions, decisions don’t make time. (you’ll get a project done in 4 weeks, or 8 weeks, it will fit into whatever time frame you set.)
- Anders ruler.
- Make many - 10 - small experiments. They don’t have to be about the idea. They can be analogous. Make experiments that allow you to be inspired.
- Do both user and desk experiments. Find out where the gaps are, what’s exciting to you. How do users feel about them?
- In the end, it’s about creating a story.
- Make it real asap.
- Test ideas! Testestest. Quickly.
- Don’t allow your prototyping skills to dictate what the end product should be.