Boxes and Arrows recently ran a great article on Foundations of Interaction Design. The article takes various artistic concepts and analyzes interaction design against them.
My favorite part, mainly because I’d never actually thought about teaching itself as having such a thing, is the section on negative space.
Negative space
All good design disciplines have a form of negative space. In Architecture and Industrial Design it is the hollowness or the space between solids. In Graphic Design it is “white space” what is left without color, line or form, literally the white part of the paper to be printed on. Sound design looks at silence, and lighting design looks at darkness.So what is the negative of interaction?
There are many places where you can “lack” something, or more accurately there are many layers. Are we only talking about the product action? What about our action? What about the space in between either entity’s action?
Pause – So clearly a pause in time where no action is taking place by anything that is part of the interaction experience. Often in interaction design we try to fill these gaps, but maybe these gaps are useful.
Cessation of thought – What if doing nothing created a reaction from the system? Well, one student thought this up with BrainBall (http://w3.tii.se/en/index.asp?page=more&id=4) at Sweden’s Interaction Institute (http://w3.tii.se/en/). As you think less the ball moves more.
Inactivity – Doing nothing, or the product doing nothing in reaction to an action may be a negative occurrence. This differs from pause, but in this case inactivity is the reaction to activity as opposed to just a cessation of activity.
Well whatever the negative space of interaction design is, it isn’t.
If you think about it, in our teaching the negative space is wait time. I know that doesn’t really agree with the article, but it’s that point where we stop talking, and the student has the chance to process, to think, on their own. It’s our negative space because the teaching art isn’t being practiced in that space, and it’s necessary to aid in the student learning.
I don’t thionk there could be a total absence of thinking or work in the teaching negative space, but it’s certainly something to think about.
Posted by Rebecca as Teaching methods at 7:30 AM EDT
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Konrad Glogowski often shares what he does in class with his students, and shares how he approaches various issues. The other day I read his format for creating learning experiences, and I really like it. It’s another tool for accessing those higher levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy.
He has set the cycle Discover-Define-Immerse-Build-Contribute to help his students explore topics more than they might during normal research projects. It’s great because each step is designed to encourage the student to become the literal expert and to create from the expertise.
I think this not only shows a way to make research projects more authentic and impacting, but it encourages that love of learning that we try to inspire in our students.
Posted by Rebecca as Components of Learning, Teaching methods at 7:34 AM EDT
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I’ve spent a bit of the last year writing process documents and training guides for work, and I seem to be headed that direction again this month. Part of the problem is that there are so many components to one of my jobs that trying to capture it all in a guide designed to help someone do my job when I’m not there is something like trying to catch a raindrop on your tongue.
I’m trying to keep everything well-organized and simple, but I suspect it’s going to take a round or three of editing to get everything laid out well.
In order to be truly useful, instructions must be thorough and should try to cover unusual situations. More importantly, they must be clear, or the person reading them will never be able to understand them. Let’s face it: the point of instructions is to help someone else how to understand how to do something.
I rather like this ironically long-winded post from Lifehack because it does a god job of covering the most important sections to address in creating instructions.
Just remember to keep instructions complete and simple.
Posted by Rebecca as Training at 8:04 AM EDT
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I sometimes think I harp on this too much, but honestly, one of the best skills we can arm students (and everyone else) with these days is the gift of being able to research. The ability to recognize a good source and a bad source. The ability to cite where information was found so it can be verified by others. The ability to verify or disprove hypotheses and theories. Information literacy is a very necessary life skill.
Sadly, research is like math. So many students believe that they don’t need to learn it, and yet they use research skills every single day as they use Wikipedia to settle arguments with friends or use a search engine to figure out how to make their MySpace profile blink. They do research without ever realizing that’s what they’re doing (not unlike how they use math).
For the most part, I really like like this list of research tips. It covers the basics of getting off to a good start in conducting research. My only complaint is that Wikipedia is suggested as a valid starting point for conducting research. Longtime readers know that I’m against Wikipedia as a primary research tool, but it can help give you a direction when you’ve exhausted other avenues of research, as long as you remember you’ll have to do extra research to confirm or deny what you’ve found in the article.
Learn to conduct good, solid, defendable research!
Posted by Rebecca as Knowledge Management, Information Architecture at 7:31 AM EDT
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