Celebrating...and a question

By now you should have all received the email about course evaluations. Please take the 5 minutes to do these - I value your input and take it into account.

Also - respond to this particular post if you would like to move our "final" (which is essentially sharing an overview of our various final projects) to an evening event at my house with food and drinks (and big dog). I realize some of you have family and this may not work for you - but if we can get a sense of this by Wednesday we can make the right decision for all of us

Week 16 - Trajectories and Personas

Ok - the last chunk of reading - and hopefully an enjoyable set. Everyone should read the Crismond article and the Dorst/Lawson chapter on expertise that are already up on Blackboard. Crismond is speaking more to K-12 students, and the other chapter is speaking more to undergraduate and beyond. Read them from the perspective of trying to fill in some of the blanks from last week - about what changes as novices become experts. We had some hypotheses - how do these play out?

As for the last thing to read - you are to choose one of 2 chapters in Dorst/Lawson. One is speaking more to the "novice" (being a novice) end of the continuum, and one to the "professional end" (becoming a professional). Remember to tell each other which one you plan to read - and make sure that there are at least a couple people on each chapter. These are all easy reads :)

For our last class we're going to jump right into the idea of creating personas (there is an overview on Blackboard if you are interested). Personas are summaries of "typical" people - for us, typical design learners or designers. We'll work in pairs creating at least one persona of a typical learner or designer with a goal of using the persona as a way to synthesize what we understand about features of design knowing and learning - and then use the personas to imagine "if this person was in my classroom or workplace, what might I anticipate they would struggle with - and how might I help them learn or be a better designer?"

I should have the scanned pdf's of the last 2 chapters up on Blackboard soon - I have been having a problem with scanning them and should get it working soon.