iterativelearning

As everyone knows, green has become pretty dominant in the public consciousness of late. Like many organizations, hospitals are also looking at different green-friendly approaches. The radio program, Living On Earth, presents an engaging angle on Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and its creative efforts in this area. Elaborating on the details, they describe an approach informed by Evidence-Based Design. Part of this design involves patients’ rooms with sloped, floor-to-ceiling windows, and perhaps, not surprisingly, the underlying theory is that the more natural light there is, the greater the chance there is for quicker healing.

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Living on Earth, Green, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

I had some time to check out some of the highlights from the latest Educause Conference and specifically looked at a talk by Christine Borgman – Fostering Learning in the Networked World; The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge.

Realizing that we have a long way to go in terms of designing collaborative learning environments that genuinely engage students, she urged collaboration to happen as early as possible (e.g., the primary grades). While, of course, pedagogy needs to assume primary importance, the explosion of social media tools (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) in tandem with the near-ubiquity of cellphones certainly seems to enhance the potential for making collaboration easier.

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Educause, Christine Borgman

Rob Safuto over at Awakened Voice has brief thoughts on the pros and cons of Google Chrome after using it as his default browser since its release. I agree with him that the Intelligent Address Bar is a solid feature. I was surprised by one of the cons: the lack of integration with Google Bookmarks. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before that gap is filled.

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Chrome, Awakened Voice

Attended a workshop on wikis today designed to orient those new to wikis. During the Q&A, one person asked if there were any tools similar to MS-Word where faculty could insert comment bubbles.

I’ve heard this concern echoed elsewhere and I think it’s certainly a valid one, especially for those coming from English Departments where there are many situations where you don’t necessarily want to enter corrections, but you do want to pose questions to the student in order to clarify or consider another line of thought.

While many wikis offer a Comments tool, I haven’t seen one that offers it inline; usually the Comments section is placed at the bottom of the page or in the sidebar; moreover, writing faculty often prefer making inline comments and questions because they make it easy for both them and the student(s) to see the immediate context that needs more clarification or follow-up. Comments in their current wiki iteration, on the other hand, seem to be more oriented towards globally-oriented or macro-level commentary.

So this raises some potentially interesting questions: Do faculty need to bring a different mindset to wikis and find other means for accomplishing the same objective? If so, would designers be ignoring that fundamental usability mantra: know thy user? Should designers look to revise the wiki interface that allows for inline interrogation?

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Interface, wiki

Tamara Adlin over at UX Pioneers has an interview with John Carroll. New details to me were his interest in English literature and work with Noam Chomsky.

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John Carroll, Adlin

More on Diigo … I’ve written about this bookmark tool before. Even though I also use Delicious, I think Diigo offers richer potential for educators, especially for those who teach online (e.g., groups, annotations, avatars). Recently, they’ve enhanced their group sharing feature so you can send links shared in a group to your own blog. So in a learning situation, if one student shares a link with the group that another one finds interesting enough to blog on, this tool allows them to do so seamlessly. In this kind of dynamic, students could not only share information, but build on it via their blog posts, which then other students in the course could read and/or comment on.

Addendum: For OpenID fans, they’ve also added that as a login option.

A recent MIT LabCast features what they call Urban Pixels where public space lighting can be programmed in all kinds of ways. For example, instead of having the typical urban skyline illuminated by a static set of office building lights, the lighting display could be programmed so that it could be dynamic and active. William Mitchell sees it as liberating pixels from their traditionally confining frames.

Besides doing fun things with aesthetics, these urban pixels also have the potential to be environmentally friendly: charge during the day and then use that charge to power the evening light show.
Fun stuff. Definitely worth watching.

Jared Spool has a good interview with the Cooper GM, Kim Goodwin, on Excelling at Interaction Design. More specifically, they talk about what traits distinguish good designers from great ones. Catching my attention was one that can be so easily overlooked: active listening.

She urges designers to listen for the needs behind what’s being articulated by the client. For example, there can be this easy tendency to solve every problem by just saying, hey, let’s make it web-based.

Client: This ____ [solution] has to be web-based.

Designer: Why? What actually is the problem that you’re aiming to solve?.

A good designer uses active listening to encourage the client to think more openly and creatively about their problem and probes them with questions as to why they think specifically that a web-based solution would be the best response to their problem. Are there options outside of the web that would better address the unique characteristics of the design problem? Maybe a hybrid between the web and something else? This almost involuntary, uncritical inclination to see all solutions as web-based reminds me somewhat of the early days of instructional technology where overenthusiastic techie-teachers might inadvertently allow the technology to overrun the pedagogy.