Class notes
April 5, 2007
- Tools can be useful without supporting learning. e.g. A whiteboard marker is certainly useful. In the context of learning, what sorts of tasks are well-supported by the marker? Making thinking visible, communicating visual concepts, making information persistent.
- The sociocultural approach says: Learning is inter-personal and distributed. Individual and context are mutually-constituting. Learning is "participation in cultural activities, which in turn contribute to changes in their cultural communities across generation." (Rogoff, 2003)
April 10, 2007
- Larry Leifer speaking on Design Learning
- Different channels for communication in design collaboration:
- Text activity is most effective for Storing Knowledge
- Drawing activity is most effective for Expressing Ideas
- Gesture is most effective for Mediating Interaction
- People have a 6.4 second attention span to information fragments, reflected by the 7-second rule in film & video
- Noun-phrases in formal design documents correlates awards and success
- Questions per hour correlates with success -- combination of analytic and generative questioning
- corresponds to divergent/convergent cycles of thinking
- inhalation: divergent generation
- exhalation: convergent reasoning
- Information Technology limits/distracts design learning and interaction
- IT impedes human creative behavior and collaboration
- Its value is only in formal knowledge representations & storage
- The more time I spend interacting with a dumb screen and keyboard is less time I'm interacting with a brilliant human being in front of me. The machine requires moving a cursor to a 3mm square and type one key at a time. You can gesture, speak and draw for a human being.
- Videoconference has a tiny, low-res camera with a fixed view => boring.
- New behaviors: no table, sit on exercise ball, move around
- Why? Must it be so? -> Great research project.
- equation for success: innovation = minds in communication ^ 2