The Common Loon
This weblog about facilitating lifelong learning in a digital age is maintained by Shanta Rohse. I created it to support a graduate independent study course I am taking at Athabasca University's Centre for Distance Education in Winter 2005. You can find out more about me from my personal web site.
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Tag It!
~ an application of the Tag It! pattern: recently tagged websites via del.icio.us ~
Extract It!
~ an application of the Extract It! pattern: a
real time boolean search via PubSub ~
Why the loon?
It's from an old reading blanket that's incubated many a lifelong learning project.
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Be a designer
This pattern is based Fischer’s (2002) call to learners to be and act as designers.
The technology that you are using doesn’t work the way you want it to.
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Rapid changes in technology make it almost impossible to keep up to date with new techniques and applications.
Future uses and problems of technology cannot be completely anticipated at by designers at the time when it is developed (Nardi, 1993 cited in Fischer, 2005).
You are not interested in the technology per se, but in doing your work.
Your work plans break down if the technology is mismatched to the task.
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Therefore, contribute your own visions and objectives to the technology design.
Breakdowns serve as potential sources of new insights, new knowledge, and new understanding…and better technology.
You can modify technologies as the need arises.
Control and ownership of the problem shifts from the designer to you - a significant and demanding shift that requires you to adopt “a new mindset” (Fischer, 1999) towards learning and teaching.
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Informed participation (Brown & Duguid, 2000) is a form of collaborative design in which participants of all backgrounds (not just skilled computer professionals) go beyond the information given, slowly acquire ownership in problems and contribute to the design.
posted by: Shanta at 16:50 |
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design, lifelong, learning, patterns
