Taeho Ko with the Night Beacon poster

The other, related source I’ve observed is when one person spans two fields that typically don’t go together. Business history is marked by famous names of people who mastered two disparate domains, like Andrew Carnegie. Today, I like read bloggers multiple sets of expertise. One calls himself Charbax. I first noticed him reporting on The Origami project in 2006. Looking at his video here reveals seeds of Origami’s problems. For instance, all the connectors are in precisely the natural location for your hands. The screen layout is far from finger friendly and the short battery life ensures that we’ll constantly wrestle with the cables. How can Charbax highlight the problems that will turn out to be insurmountable? It strikes me that he understands a lot about user experience as well as a lot about the technological elements that can make or break it. Fast forward to 2010 and his blog posts about Eric Schmidt’s keynote at IFA and about Google TV at IFA and his view of mobile technology in the age of Android and IOS remains compelling.

A related source for mobile technology can be found in this Economist article about the emerging mobile technology market, focusing on phones in India. Efforts to solve problems in emerging countries are often undertaken by people with a single type of expertise. A combination may be needed for pioneering efforts. They can pave the way for specialists to follow and hone. The article (among other things) profiles an Uttar Pradesh farmer whose income has increased twenty-five percent from the use of a phone. Yet he can not read and he reports trouble dialing. What project ideas does this suggest?

Many educators have been discussing the New York Times story on study habits and it is well worth reviewing that article during this semester, in part because some of the readings, especially Pink (2005), discuss so-called right-brain thinking. The four habits are worth repeating: (1) vary the choice of study environments, (2) mix content in each study session, (3) favor shorter more frequent sessions over longer less frequent sessions, and (4) use self-tests.

It’s also worth recounting the two popular notions with no supporting evidence, in part because I hear these repeated so often that I was surprised to find that extensive studies have failed to support them. Unfounded Notion: students have innate learning styles such as visual or auditory. Unfounded notion: some students are innately left-brained or right-brained. Unfounded Notion: some teaching styles have been shown to be consistently better than others. I know educators who parrot these “facts” and have been criticized for not using them in developing my own classes.

I encountered a couple of books online with messages connected to the idea of knowledge construction. One is The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning, Richard E. Mayer, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005. It’s available via Google Books . A table on page 11 offers three metaphors of multimedia learning. The preferred metaphor, Knowledge construction, is contrasted with two alternatives, response strengthening and information acquisition. The knowledge construction metaphor positions the learner as the active one doing the knowledge construction. The other two metaphors posit the learner as a passive receiver of lectures containing information or as a passive receiver of rewards and punishments for doing exercises badly or well.

I don’t endorse the above view completely because I believe that the response strengthening metaphor should actually posit the learner as actively choosing to do exercises, not just as the passive receiver of rewards and punishments. But I am impressed by the notion of the learner’s role as choosing which knowledge connections to strengthen, as exemplified by the knowledge construction approach. That is what I believe you need to do in 682.

The other book is Teachers and machines: the classroom use of technology since 1920, Larry Cuban, Teachers College Press, 1986. It’s also available via Google Books. I ran across this while looking for Edison’s 1913 proclamation that motion pictures would replace textbooks within ten years. Cuban also finds a similar 1922 quote by Edison, albeit with “several” replacing “ten.” It’s humbling to browse through Cuban’s book and realize how many people have learned, relearned, and unlearned the same lessons about learning technology over and over again, decade after decade. For instance, he mentions that it took thirty years after their introduction in 1900 for mobile desks to widely replace the bolt-down variety. I note that in 2010 my school has just moved to a new building where we return to the bolt-down variety arranged in semicircles around a stage for the sage.

Cuban introduces the book with a photograph of a traditional classroom from 1927 … in an airplane! The photograph shows the children flying over Los Angeles to learn about geography by sitting in rows and columns and facing a blackboard at the front of the cabin. Googling brings us the 2009 version which “will be kitted out with whiteboards, [30] desks, and laptops.”

Motion pictures were going to replace books, then radio was going to replace books, then television was going to replace books, then the personal computer was going to replace books. If Cuban updated his history today, he could add that the iPad is going to replace books and no one would dispute him. At least not for a while.

Cuban reviews research that shows that each of these technologies made a strong initial showing, then faded in classroom importance after a few years. He attributes this to the unwillingness of teachers to integrate the technologies into the classroom experience and to the unwillingness of innovators to fully consider the needs and environments of teachers. While this all makes sense in a teacher-centered classroom, the knowledge construction approach can remove the teacher as bottleneck. Students undertaking this approach may adopt technology that would hamper a response strengthening or information acquisition classroom. Which reminds me, check out our tools video on Deep Blue.

We’re looking forward to it with a mixture of excitement and other feelings!

A new semester means another iteration of my Interface and Interaction Design class, SI 682!

And a new SI 682 syllabus! (Update: 2010-10-26, linked to latest syllabus version)

And a new SI 682 course guide, version f! The appendices are probably the most interesting from the perspective of a student shopping around.  They explain the details of the exercises, projects, and design notebooks, the three components of your grade. (Update: 2010-10-26, linked to latest course guide version)