Design Thinking
The topic for the West Houston Institute Innovation Fellowship this week was Design Thinking. I love this principle and I learned a lot about the process.
Design Thinking by Tim Brown
One thing that caught my eye in this article relates to the nursing shift changes wherein patients felt a hole in their care. I think students (and even faculty) can feel that way in the shift between semesters. It's hard to say a proper goodbye to students (which is one of the reasons I no longer give final exams - I want the final exam day to be a celebration of their learning). They don't always have consistent advisors and we might see them for only one term. As we innovate systems in higher education, perhaps we need more consistent "care" for students throughout their educational journey in the form of a dedicated advisor and other support.
“Is Design Thinking the New Liberal Arts?” by Irving Wladawsky-Berger | Wall Street Journal
It's interesting that Wladawsky-Berger demonstrates how engineering has embraced the creativity generally associated with liberal arts. My dad is a retired electrical engineer and the design process was his favorite bit. Liberal arts like history actually fall under Social Sciences. MIT describes social science as a discipline that can "blend empirical research with theoretical work, undertake comparisons across time and space, or contribute to the development of quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis." When I was in undergrad in the late 90's, my department at Sam Houston State was pushing a focus on the scientific part of liberal arts as it was perceived to be more marketable and useful. My undergrad degree is actually a Social Sciences Composite with an emphasis in history. I think liberal arts has come back around to embracing more out of the box ways of doing history, but the scientific ethos is still present.
“John Maeda says there are three kinds of design—but one is most important” on Quartz
I am not a UX designer, but I do consider the user experience when I design my courses. Again, I'm not a software technician, but I can implement that. I'm wondering if there's a new space in computational design for people like us who exist largely in an online world. Distance learning is here to stay, after all.
Case in point: Edsurge advocates a partnership between edtech companies and schools.
But for edtech companies that aim to transform teaching and learning, it's not enough to solicit feedback from teachers. It doesn’t work to develop technology at arm’s length from the educators developing new teaching practices, especially when trying to enable teachers to focus more on students’ individual learning needs. At the leading edge of educational innovation, the best instructional models are still in flux, and attempts to create technology independent of new teaching practices restrict innovators’ ability to experiment and determine what will actually work.
I’ll take that idea a step further and say that teachers, designers AND students should work together to implement design of ed tech. We can’t fully be empathetic without student input!
