- Aug 2016
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99percentinvisible.org 99percentinvisible.org
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there is always an aspect of coercion to design
The word "coercion" has historically been a negative word to me - to be coerced is to go against one's will. Many negative examples are presented here - what are positive examples of coercion in design? I lived in Portland, OR for many years and volunteered with the City Repair project whose mission is to "place make". Here are examples of PDX intersections "repairs": http://www.cityrepair.org/intersection-repair-examples/
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Today, we have since become so habituated to public lighting that our primary association with street lights is that they deter criminal activity and make us feel safe.
Is that really a false assumption? I'm totally on board with the overall argument here--big Mike Davis fan!--but feel this goes a step too far.
Austin's moon towers were supposedly a response to a late-nineteenth century serial killer), but have not prevented youth from gathering, indeed they have occasioned such gatherings:
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Designs that are unpleasant to some are put into place to make things more pleasant for others, and that latter category might just include you.
I'm really excited to see how we turn the argument of this essay toward the design of learning technologies and courses, specifically in how we might locate tacit power relations in seemingly innocuous (sometimes "unpleasant") interfaces...
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it’s this pattern of a work reacting to itself and its environment that gives it the spark of life.
I look forward to this new frame to my design work allowing one to capture this precious moment when a design pattern reacts to itself... or perhaps it is too elusive to in fact "capture"?
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If you find them as powerful as I do the context will eventually present itself.
I appreciate the invitation to read for emergence & discovery
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the way a sentence arises from grammatical templates/rules
Or the way a poem/argument emerges from the form of a sonnet.
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work on architecture,
Seems like architecture will be a valuable metaphor for our conversation about instructional design.
Interestingly, Alan Levine opens a recent blog on Domain of One's Own with a nice architectural metaphor for that great project:
Like a small stubborn, unique, old fashioned house surrounded by modern monolithic mega modern glass and steel structures, the Domain of Ones Own project started at the University of Mary Washington stands out as one hope amongst Educational Technology’s adoration of mega scale, management, analytics, automation, and tall tall towers of data, data, data.
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onlineteachingmanifesto.wordpress.com onlineteachingmanifesto.wordpress.com
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Automation need not impoverish education: we welcome our new robot colleagues.
Audrey Watters had something different to say about this idea of automation at last year's DPL Institute.
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Face-time is over-valued.
I'm not sure we need to say this to defend the value of digital pedagogy. I'd rather view it all as more of a continuum than a differently valenced dichotomy depending on your POV.
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hybridpedagogy.org hybridpedagogy.org
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Designing for discovery is tricky business
Indeed, it's almost an oxymoron.
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Having just finished a year working at an educational technology company, I’ve also seen from that side how learners become quantities on a spreadsheet, numbers on an infographic. I worry that researching learners and learning is not the same as knowing learners and learning
Especially coming out of the (shared) biographical context here, I'm interested in further discussing this idea...
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redpincushion.us redpincushion.us
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we talked about the importance of adopting practices that keep complexity in our educational processes,
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, from Patricia Williams's The Alchemy of Race and Rights:
That life is complicated is a fact of great analytic importance.
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That’s hard to do.
And a positively (and positive) anti-corporate logic. Witness the rhetoric of "solutions" so pervasive in at least Silicon Valley tech and edtech.
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we should make space for things that don’t fit into our tidy conceptions about education.
Here's perhaps an interesting take on this issue form someone working on the tech side of edtech, trying to build tech for teachers and students, and help them leverage that tech for teaching and learning:
As I say above, it's obviously hard to market this kind of "untidiness." When people are "shopping" for technology for the classroom, most don't want things that half work or might work or try it and let us know what works/doesn't. That only goes so far.
Don't get me wrong, the early adopters of both products I've worked on were just the kind of people who wanted to be part of that kind of experiment and by collaborating closely with them, I believe I've been able to direct product development in both projects towards a more authentic pedagogical value. But that process doesn't, at least I don't think it can, "scale"--a term I realize has it's own problematic ideology.
But I also get frustrated with this lack of tidiness because I want to offer a good product/service/experience to my educational users. I don't want to disrupt the teaching and learning process that should be the focus of everyone's energy in a classroom by my own tool's buginess. I don't want to suggest that a tool can be invisible, but I also don't want a tool to be the focus.
Despite my hesitancy about "untidiness"--no doubt further entrenched by my own anal retentiveness--I'm really interested in how edtech, or perhaps indie edtech, might actually incorporate this kind of philosophy. As long as centers for teaching and learning, and teachers and learners themselves, are on board, I don't see why it can't work.
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but you can’t actually “increase dancing”
I'd argue that YouTube has increased dancing, but I'm mostly just using that as an excuse to share this video:
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