LxD: Designing Experiences for Learning
Week 1
What excites you about diving into designing experiences for learning and why?
I’m excited to look at learning as a learner, designer, and teacher. I come from a family of lifelong learners. I grew up seeing my parents — medical professionals — continuously learning throughout their adulthood. The endless need for knowledge can be in noble pursuit, but I’m also interested in how learning can turn to practice. I feel design for learning (LxD) could be that persuasive missing-link to help turn information into action and influence positive behaviors.
learning → knowing → doing
Over the years, there have been a handful of teachers who have brought joy, creativity, and curiosity to the process of learning — they have been art/art history teachers, design professors, programming instructors who have expanded my imagination, understanding, and worldview. As an accidental design pedagogue myself (1.5 years of university teaching experience), I still have a long way to go to reach that level of craft in teaching a creative discipline. Perhaps, if I reframed teaching design as a design project in itself?
Another valuable aspect of designing for learning is the recognition of diversity in the types of learners and learning opportunities. I’m hoping this class would increase my empathy for different audience groups and gain a better understanding of how to design for inclusivity.
The project questions that I’m interested in understanding more about:
• What is the difference between gaining information and deeply learning something?
• How can a learning approach be designed for many to experience while also being tailored to the needs and desires of individuals?
• How can the actions of individuals lead to positive impact at various levels of scale?
What topic are you drawn to and why? Why do you believe the topic is important? What challenges are you interested in exploring to create/improve the design of learning experiences?
I’m interested in the intersection between technology and citizenship, but more importantly the topic of participation, particularly in the context of direct democracy. If democracy is our biggest experiment in organizing ourselves, we need to know not only how it functions, but also how we see ourselves in it. I’m interested in how we can create learning experiences that instigate self-awareness and self-reflection that can prompt proactive participation. There are many challenges in this inquiry, some of them are the many levels of abstraction created through political jargon, information fatigue in the digital media era, lack of understanding of the role of a citizen.
The topics from class that stood out to me are in bold:
- CITIZENSHIP
media literacy
cultural literacy
civic awareness (ex. voting, establishment of laws)
individual and community safety - TECHNOLOGY
ethical/responsible augmentation of human capacities
supporting smart cities and sustainable infrastructure
awareness of privacy and cybersecurity
cultivating and maintaining human identity - INTERACTION WITH OTHERS
conflict management
empathy for others
building and maintaining personal relationships
supporting equality and inclusivity
mindfulness and accountability of actions
sharing resources - LIFELONG LEARNING
a growth mindset
supporting inclusivity and equity among resources
using technology appropriately and effectively
Week 2: 21 — 27 Jan 2020
Expand on the questions/hypotheses raised in class — Who, what, when, where, why how? — as it relates to your topic(s) of interest.
Focusing on the topic of citizenship, my group of Matt, Amanda and myself explored the questions and hypotheses raised around Citizenship — which we redefined as Civic Engagement. This distinction felt necessary for the current climate of democracies around the world where xenophobia is becoming more prevalent (eg: Citizenship Amendment Act in India, Trump wanting to add a citizenship question in the census, etc). This topic is not only for citizens it is also for everyone who lives in a democratic country. We were also interested in the topic of Technology, especially where it intersected with Civic Engagement. Tech is playing an ever-increasing role in helping with access to information and process(eg: online Census in 2020), but at the same time enabling the spread of false information and fake news.
Some of the questions we touched on are:
- Who participates in civic processes? Who facilitates the participation of others?
- When does learning about civic participation happen in a person’s life? Is it a lifelong process of learning?
- What role does technology play in awareness and motivation?
- Where are the places where learning happens? Are there formal and informal places?
- Why is civic education important? Why is it important to examines technology’s role in our democratic process?
- How is information disseminated? How does learning occur? How does technology aid or dissuade learning and participation?
Our inquiry was low on hypothesis exploration.
23 Jan 2020: Decoding Learning Experience
For this exercise, I looked at a website by the Design & Democracy project from New Zealand called On the Fence. The website is targetted at non-voters and young people to build their confidence in participating in the democratic process. My personal experience with this website to help me understand where my views lie on the political spectrum was a learning experience. It brought broader self-awareness to my assumptions, tendencies to group-think and also the complexity of the jobs of decision-makers. I felt it was a successful civic tech exploration and could address the declining voter participation.
The novel approach of a “gameful questionnaire” / personality test alongside the intentionally approachable graphic visual style and branding made it a good case to decode from a design perspective.
Who are your learners/instructors/stakeholders? What are their hopes/aspirations; fears/concerns; needs?
Civic Engagement—the stakeholders:
Learners: Citizens, immigrants, marginalized communities, young voters, non-active voters
- Hopes/aspirations: a better (chance at) life, equity and justice, harmony, representation, self-determination, access, better services and cities
- Fears/Concerns: exclusion, apathy, overwhelm, ignorance, fake news
- Needs: ease of access, relatedness
(noticing: I found it difficult to start identifying these for learners. I might need to read more literature about the hopes and needs of citizens)
Instructors: Educators, government employee?, librarians, activists, community organizers, news media
- Hopes/aspirations: more informed citizens, resources for the community
- Fears/Concerns: misinformation, lack of participation
- Needs: ??
Indirect stakeholders: cities, companies
READING: Dirksen — Who are your learners? Chp. 2
- High motivated or unmotivated learners — determine motivations and attitude
- Types of learners: “Just tell me what I need to know” “ Hey this is cool” “ This is required” “I need to solve a problem” “I fear change” “ Ooh-Shiny” “What can I get from this”
- Intrinsic > extrinsic motivations
- For extrinsically motivated — find potentially intrinsic motivators, find pain points, using hypothetical problems
- “Make people feel smart”
- Leverage what they know, give early success, safe spaces to fail
- Scaffolding learning: reduce complexity, use walkthroughs (* I’m not sure this is effective in UX of digital apps) step-by-step, provide support
- Consider the context
- Organizing learning materials: High-level structure, visuals, story, application of information, metaphor and analogy
- Identify push and pull. Pull > push
- Learning styles: auditory, visual, tactile, kinesthetic, conceptual, social • spatial, linguistic, logical, musical, interpersonal, naturalistic, existential • converger, diverger, assimilator, accommodator
- Talk to your learners — follow your learners — try stuff out
Week 3: 28 — 31 Jan 2020
What have you discovered about your learners/stakeholders? What have you gained from class activities and exercises this week?
Matt, Amanda, Michelle and I had lengthy discussions about the stakeholders for the topic. For our mapping, we narrowed the stakeholders down to:
- Politically Engaged Citizens
- The In-betweeners
- Governing bodies
The three stakeholder groups have different hopes/interests and concerns indicated in blue and pink post-its respectively. We then mapped relationships that were in alignment and those in conflict with green and red tape respectively to see where the clustering is happening.
What I learned from this exercise is that there are a multiplicity of complex relationships that exists between the groups and some of these could be leveraged to have win-win outcomes for all/most stakeholders.
Round 2
Since our first take on the stakeholder map still felt pretty broad, we met as a group again to identify where our interests lie. Through our discussion, we surfaced other areas which could be an interesting avenue to explore in a learning design context, such as:
- data and ethics in civic tech
- digital rights
- navigating the justice system
The stakeholders for these topic areas could be identified as at-risk or vulnerable communities, marginalized peoples.
Tomorrow we will try and find more alignment with our group to understand which way we want to head.
Week 4: 3–7 Feb 2020
Thoughts on the learners:
- More specific is a good starting point — in order to hypothesize what would need to stay the same. Think about it as a multi-year learning experience.
- What are the existing learning experiences that could be leveraged or improved? How do you push them further?
- What are some informal entry points? Eg: Youtube, Project-based leisure, …
READING: Dirksen — What’s the goal? Chp. 3
Defining the problems: Work on a problem (what is the learning goal), in order to anchor the problem.
Pacing — what benefits from being taught slowly vs quickly? For example, a mindset shift takes longer.
Setting the destination, rather than just understanding. What are the attributes of learning you are striving for?
The sophistication of knowledge and skill — to what degree do our learners need to learn something?
Referencing your learning gaps diagram, what are the challenges you plan to tackle? What types of challenges are they? What ideas do you have for approaching them?
Stakeholder map
Gaps
4Mat system
Reading — Dirksen — Design for Skills
- Most learning experiences introduce skills rather than teach a skill
- Components to developing a skill — practice and feedback
- Goal of practice is to gain proficiency and unconscious competence
- Create learning experiences that look like FLOW — by creating a balance between challenge and satisfaction
- Straight-uphill model makes learners lose interest. Creating moments of “coasting” makes new content/knowledge/skill stand out. Managing fatigue in learning?
- Spacing content over time combined with hands-on experience (trying out the knowledge) allows better retention of knowledge
- Match the timing to how often they would need to do the skill
- Reflection: How might we leverage a longer arc of time to help our learners grasp the topic?
- Learners need to know how they are doing (aka feedback)
- Characteristics of good feedback: Show don’t tell, consequence-based feedback
- Things to consider: frequency of feedback, variety of feedback (visual cues, sounds etc)
- Context, Challenge, Activity, Feedback model
- Games create and support cycles of expertise
- Games allow for multiple levels of goals — immediate goal > short-term goal > medium-term goal > long-term goal
- This allows for progress-oriented learning and increasing proficiency
