iterativelearning

Especially in the context of EdTech and online learning, there’s lots of talk about ramping up innovation and creativity. But what exactly do these terms mean in practice? When we, as instructors, ask our students to do this, how do we define this for them? Mary Sheridan and Jennifer Roswell have a nice take on the term,

… innovative thinking has less to do with original creations and more to do with creatively combining existing resources (p. 23)

via: (2010) Design Literacies, Learning and Innovation in the Digital Age

When you read through any primer on web design, there’ll be a fair bit of discussion on making it as easy as possible for the user to get around the site. One common way to do this is, of course, is through breadcrumbs. Just yesterday, I was reminded of the real value behind this design principle, but interestingly enough, it didn’t happen with a website, but with an ordinary cable tv menu. More specifically, we’ve got Comcast’s OnDemand menu and after we would try and guess which category our desired program was under and then drill down several levels to find it, we would inevitably take the wrong path and would then have to slog our way back up through the same levels that we just went through. All too often, we’d run through this back-and-forth cycle several times before finally finding what we were looking for. It would be nice if Comcast would add a simple breadcrumbs trail that that could be activated through the remote control.