[GraphDesProject]

Graham,

Some good points that I didn’t think of – ie another voice! Learners seem to feel reassured when they hear a “real professional” say the stuff that their tutor is saying every day! Also, the point about videos and going to the cinema made me laugh when I remembered back to then!! I’m not so sure they still feel that as they are a bit blase about YouTube. However, only yesteday I had a f2f Televison class and the motivation highlight of the sesion was when we informally showed a new film trailer….

Sancha

[GraphDesProject]

Graham, Yes I agree very much. And the same applies to print resources too. For example, there’s a generally good book on design thinking that has some errors in it, which puts me off the whole, so I tend not to use it at all.

And I know this is a course about TEL but is there going to be anything about the combination of technical to non-technical resources, I wonder?

Sancha

[GraphDesProject]

Hi Elizabeth,

Sadly I’ve been unable to see the webinars live since the first one as I’m at work at that time.

I don’t think there is a problem per se with accessing resources – but I have more sympathy, I guess, for learners after this activity if they have to research in ways alien to them (and quickly).

Sancha

[GraphDesProject]

Peter,

Yes rather over-dramatic! I think I did find quite a lot of things and if I was just browsing I’d investigate them more fully – but these were things for me not items to fit the purpose (resources for learners). Funnily enough later that day I by chance picked up a Twitter stream of #design #thinking and found quite a few leads!! It’s just knowing where to look and, I think now, researching in a different way from usual, hence the frustration.

Sancha

[GraphDesProject]

I was telling my sons about this and I feel that tasks like yours ought to be started in school. My younger is 11 and he comments on You Tube accounts and I’m always worreid that he’ll end up saying somnething that he has no clue about and it’ll come back to bite him when he’s job hunting.

Sancha

[GraphDesProject]

Hi Tim, You seem to have been more succesful than I was. I wonder if I was too narrow in my search – I was looking for something to help learners understand (and use) design thinking, that did not some direct from a tutor but rather from professionals who are “out there”. I found TED and YouTube by far the best for this, but was kind of sorry that I couldn’t find something revalatory and worthy!!! Your Where Good Ideas Come From sounds like it’d fit the bill for me better than some of the things I did find (tho I foud a good TED talk by Marion Bantjes).

[GraphDesProject]

Jim, I think this is a really good activity and like some of the others I intend to steal it! One of my jobs is to help learners set up blogs for both learning and professional practice (ie digital portfolios) and the new learner’s urge to call themselves and their blog Goth Girl,  Pink Fluffy Bunny and Super Stud etc etc is almost overwhelming! So the pretext for this activity, I feel, is very sound.

Sancha (@GraphDesProject)

[GraphDesProject]

Hello James and Sandra, I find htis really interesting and I certainly recognise much of what I do as Cognitive Apprenticeship. With my f2f learners at uni we run many workshop/tutorial style classes where they are learning both the technical skills and the reflective and theoretical know-how of graphic design/visual communication. However, I’d say that we overlay CA very overtly with the notion of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger). I say we do this overtly (“In industry you’ll be doing such and such…”) but there is also an unspoken level of this too – this is the motivation of why learners choose specific courses to help them enter a community of practice and what drives them to achieve the “apprenticeship”. I’ve done quite a bit of research too on design students using blogs and I think one of the underlying reasons why they took to it so easily (more so than other learners???) is because blogging is now seen as a thing that designers do in the community of practice and my learners wanted to keep up. I aslo explored Assessment recently and found resources to suggest that learners develop best when they get feedback while “doing” the job of the community of practice. I’m not sure you can seperate out CA and CoP in what used to be called a “vocational” programme. So I guess we use CA, Comms of Practice and a bit of research on top to check our pedagogical best practice.

Sancha (@GraphDesProject)

[GraphDesProject]

Thanks for the link. Interesting and nicely designed too. I think the phrase Design Thinking is bandied about in all sorts of directions and I’m never quite clear which path any given resource/course/company will be upon. So to have it exposed to scrutiny will be great and I’ll keep an eye out for the results.

Procrastination??? Dunno what you mean!

Sancha

[GraphDesProject]

Thank you!

[GraphDesProject]

Hi Elizabeth, I really like this activity and may also steal it!! But I just wondered if the time scale allowed would be long enough. I ask because I have struggled to fit an activity into the time suggested by ocTEL and in the end made my “activity” just part of a string of activities. I tried things out myself and they always took much longer than anticipated. I deliberately tried things I was not familair with. I think I have been guilty on many occasions of expecting my learners to go at too fast a pace. Just wondered if your time would allow them the chance to find things and then evaluate them. I think if I was setting this task I’d allow them to do it overnight, perhaps. Maybe my learners are slower!! PS: Wonder where ocTEL got the idea of 20 mins.

Sancha (@GraphDesProject)

[GraphDesProject]

The weekends, I agree are easier to manage the workload. However, I found some of the links on this activity to what I expected to be readings or videos a little odd – some linked to course outlines etc. So, I didn’t engage with it very well. I had read the JISC “In our own words” before. Cherry-picking!!

Sancha

[GraphDesProject]

PS: Excuse the lack of paragraphs above, which were in the orignal – I have tried to edit/update this but it remains the same!

[GraphDesProject]

Quite by chance I came across the Open Uni (free) 4 hour course for complete beginners at online learning – http://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/computing-and-ict/information-and-communication-technologies/living-the-internet-learning-online/content-section-0

Sancha (@GraphDesProject)

[GraphDesProject]

Hi Elizabeth, I’m picking up on your point about expectations in f2f courses. In the uni course I teach we do make a huge issue of expectations when we induct the f2f learners and indeed as we go on. I really believe that what you set out at the start will “take”. I teach graphics and we always had a problem with learners wanting to do fancy, glamorous image-making rather than learn the basic fundamentals. So we pushed the expectations thing across all issues/areas, stressing that the learners should now be critical young professionals (many of them are directly from school). However, I felt with these surveys that if you got a quite blase or get-by learner they might not take on board the survey feedback and just wave it away. I still think f2f inductions get messages across more strongly and that the start of online courses is more wobbly. Too much “enforcement” goes against the ethos, but it is so easy to miss some of this stuff however well-intentioned both learner and provider are. Perhaps a hang-out or webinar or light-hearted-but-serious video at the start might do the trick better than written materials. Any thoughts??

Sancha (@GraphDesProject)

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