Category Archives: design

A Status Update

Thursday, 24 April, 2008 – 9:19 am

Again, I have taken dramatic pause on this blog. This semester I hoped to start blogging about my Multimedia Projects class, but here we are at the near end of the semester, and not a peep! This is thanks to two issues: one lack of time, and two, lack of bloggable content.

I have been doing fascinating work that I am receiving credit for in my Multimedia Project course, but it’s not been something easy to explain. Like I’ve explained very briefly before, I’ve been lucky enough to become involved in a nascent project with Howard Rheingold, something we’re calling the Social Media Classroom. Along with Sam Rose and Max Senges, we’ve been trying to form the basis of the software product that will be delivered as a part the the project that has been funded by the MacArthur Foundation. You’ll notice that I have not linked to an official site about the project, because one does not yet exist. It’s so early in the project that I have nothing to “show” in a blog post. Yet.

Howard has been teaching a course at UC Berkeley about Social Media. This software is being built, at first, to power that endeavor.

The good news is that an alpha is coming soon. Late this spring we expect to have something to demonstrate the basis of our project. The software is being developed on the open-source Drupal CMS platform. This means that our project will be fully-open source, freely downloadable and modifiable. We’ll announce the applicable license when we have something to actually distribute. The short-term goal is to have a product that is reasonably easy for a teacher with a little bit of savvy to download, install, and administer without help from an IT department.

The product will incorporate the major range of social media tools, including blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarks, chat and video sharing into something to use in the classroom. To use all these pieces today requires a tremendous amount of effort to aggregate these discrete tools from around the world. And even when you do that, there is no continuity. We’re hoping to address that in one, customizable package in which the tools have a synergy, but also, the overall product will import information from the web, and also, share it back with the global community.

In the coming weeks I’ll have more to report, as our plans are fully solidified, we launch a home webpage for the project, and have something to show for our efforts. Things have not been finalized yet, but I may be a speaker at a an upcoming conference at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. If that pans out, I’ll detail my talk here. Stay tuned.

By Brian Christiansen | Also posted in classroom, education, technology | Comments

Making Better Web Software for Education

Friday, 14 March, 2008 – 2:42 pm

Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful, but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.

Above is a quote attributed to the Shaker furniture makers. My good friend Josh Porter shared it with me along with his feelings about craftsmanship. Last night Josh made a great presentation to Boston’s Markup & Style Society about craftsmanship as it applies to web design. It’s something we in such a fast-changing industry and market may overlook from time to time.

I think it’s time we took a little more pride in our creations. To design them with care and thoughtful details, as if they were going to be around longer than we tend to think about web sites existing.

The reason I felt compelled to start my graduate degree in Instructional Design is because I felt there wasn’t a lot of good web software for education. What was there showed very little dedication to quality design. Tools have been made and sold, but I don’t see a lot of passion poured into most of these projects.

For my first contribution, I will be contributing to the Social Media Classroom project with Howard Rheingold and Sam Rose. I’ll be working on some of the interaction design, information architecture and visual design. It’s still early in the project, but I’ll keep you updated when we have things to show off.

By Brian Christiansen | Also posted in projects | Comments

Andragogue as linker

Monday, 10 September, 2007 – 6:25 pm

In my first reading assignment on “The Adult as Learner,” I’m discovering andragogy. Andragogy is a term that compliments pedagogy. If pedagogy is “the art and science of teaching children,” then andragogy is “the art and science of teaching adults.”

It seems though, that the two terms represent more than simply what their Greek roots translate to. Pedagogy has been a term attached to a style of teaching which is more top-down, where the teacher is the focal point of classroom activities, dispensing the majority of information and guidance, as well as the gatekeeper of grades. If you went to public school in the United States during your formative years (or in most of the modern world, I would guess) you probably experienced this as your norm.

Andragogy is a different method where the teacher is not the focus. Malcom Knowles (no obvious relation to Beyoncé) gives us this definition of the andragogical method:

In contrast, the basic format of the andragogical model is a process design. The andragogical model assigns a dual role to the facilitator of learning (a title preferable over “teacher”): first and primarily, the role of designer and manager of processes or procedures that will facilitate the acquisition of content by the learners; and only secondarily, the role of content resource. The andragogical model assumes that there are many resources other than the teacher, including peers, individuals with specialized knowledge and skill in the community, a wide variety of material and media resources, and field experiences. One of the principal responsibilities of the andragogue is to know about all of these resources and to link learners with them.

That’s a lot to chew on in one paragraph. I experienced a shift from peda- to andra- in college to some degree and I think that may be a large factor in my greater enjoyment of college. But let’s take a look at a few things. See my added emphasis in the same paragraph below.

In contrast, the basic format of the andragogical model is a process design. The andragogical model assigns a dual role to the facilitator of learning (a title preferable over “teacher”): first and primarily, the role of designer and manager of processes or procedures that will facilitate the acquisition of content by the learners; and only secondarily, the role of content resource. The andragogical model assumes that there are many resources other than the teacher, including peers, individuals with specialized knowledge and skill in the community, a wide variety of material and media resources, and field experiences. One of the principal responsibilities of the andragogue is to know about all of these resources and to link learners with them.

Step back and ask yourself, especially with those items emphasized, what does that sound like? To me, that screams “the Internet.” But specifically, it says “social media” and blogs and bloggers specifically meet a heck of a lot of those criteria. Many bloggers who focus on a topic may not be the world’s preeminent voice in their interest, but they can tell you who the authorities are, link to them and compare and contrast the information that can be gleaned from these sources. I learn so much from blogs, it’s almost embarrassing. I find Wikipedia also functions in the same way. Linking makes the web go ’round.

However, there’s one nugget to squabble over here: authority. Anyone can have a blog or edit Wikipedia. You need to verify your resources before trusting them. Most books and peer-reivewed journals are just that: peer-reviewed. Luckily, through the wisdom of crowds if you can see that many in the interest community you’re exploring respect your resource, it is probably a safe bet. It’s easy to tell: who is your source linking to, and who links to your source? Of course, this wouldn’t apply to new or yet undiscovered resources, so these would need to be treated with some sort of intellectual probation.

I think this underscores the sheer power of the web as a learning tool (if this was ever in any doubt) and has certainly helped reassure me that I am personally on the right track pursuing this masters in instructional design.

[Quote source: Andragogy in Action by Malcolm Knowles, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.]

By Brian Christiansen | Also posted in instructional design, theory | Comments