Learner Experience Design

This is a record of my reflections from Professor Stacie Rohrbach’s Learner Experience Design course taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Spring 2018.

Below is the course description:

Designing experiences that engage people in educational activities that
enhance their learning through meaningful, memorable, and enjoyable
interactions with information is vital to the well-being and advancement of
our society. In striving to aid this effort, we will investigate the intersection
of design thinking, UI/UX design, cognitive studies, social sciences,
instructional design, and educational pedagogy as a way of developing
knowledge and skills in designing experiences for learners. Through
readings, projects, and class exercises, we will explore how people
perceive and process information, what motivates them to learn, and
what constitutes an experience. We will investigate topics that are often
difficult to grasp and collaboratively build a taxonomy that generalizes
and links learning challenges and design approaches. We will also study
traditional and emergent learning tools and methods as a means of
defining affordances and limitations of various learning approaches and
mediums. Our investigation will provide us the opportunity to apply our
discoveries in the design, testing, and assessment of learning experiences
that we create.

01/16/18 | Post-Class Reflection

First class

This first class was unlike any I have experienced at a university level. Stacie didn’t stand at the front of the room explaining the structure of the course and reading the syllabus to us with the obligatory pause for everyone to go around and introduce themselves like most classes. She succinctly explained the course, asked us questions about learners, led us through an introduction bingo game, helped us analyze the bingo game, created a design trivia game which we played, and asked us to think about how the game functioned. She probably talked for less than a third of the whole class period compared to most professors who talk for more than two thirds of the first class. This class questioned the paradigm for first classes in university.

Takeaways

• Challenge the status quo. Just because every class you took was run a certain way, doesn’t mean that it is the best way. By questioning every aspect of a learning experience, new ways of approaching problems present themselves.
• Gamify education. Through the two games in class, the introduction game and the design trivia game, students were engaged with and excited for the class.
• Practice what you preach. Stacie didn’t just explain the most current educational findings that are applicable in a design context, she incorporated them into her class so students get a first-hand experience of the theory. At a meta level, the class itself is a product of Learner Experience Design (LxD).
• Talk less, show more. Stacie didn’t rely on lecturing at her students for them to learn, but instead engaged them in the learning experience.

Class Structure

The structure of the class is also notable. There is one applied project with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History that students work on in groups throughout the semester. This means that students learn skills in class and will then be able to apply them to the project they are working on. In addition, collaborating with other students on the project will simulate what working as a designer will be like outside of the university setting and will provide students with the opportunity to hone in on their style of working in teams. After every class, reading, and step in the design process students are required to document their reflections on Medium. This gives students a chance to reflect on what they learned, which is known to help consolidate and deepen knowledge. Lastly, Stacie clearly articulates her expectations for the class in the syllabus and concisely explains the logic behind the schedule through its design. Students can easily refer back to these documents at any time when they have questions or are confused.

Takeaways

• Combining theory and practice. Applying what is learned in class to a project aids students in understanding the intersection of theory and practice, aka praxis.
• Team-based projects. These provide opportunities to collaborate and understand how to work with other people to achieve your goals.
• Consistent reflection. The Medium posts act as a consistent way to reflect on the material and document important findings, so it aids learning in the present and the future.

Games

I will now analyze the two games that were played in class.

1. The first was a bingo game to break the ice. 25 descriptive statements were written in a 5x5 grid. The object of the game was to find people who answered yes to each of the statements, but you could only ask one person one question at a time. If s/he said no, then you had to find another person to ask the question to. An award would be given to the winner. Once the game started, everyone immediately stood up and started asking people questions. This game got everyone to interact with the other students in the class, but it incentivized short yes-no questions. This got me thinking about the purpose of the game: was it to get to know the other students in the class at a superficial level or a deeper level? After the game was over, Stacie asked the class to break down the game and what happened.
2. The second game was a design trivia game run through Kahoot! Students paired themselves up. The pairs were asked questions about design and had to choose from four possible answers. The screen at the front of the class showed the teams with the most points. Teams were incentivized to win by the promise of a reward for first place. This led some groups to lose their motivation because they thought they had no chance of winning.

Takeaways

• Incentives are powerful, but how are they used? The award in the bingo game pushed people to keep their conversations short and superficial. In the trivia game it made some teams lose motivation.
• How can collaboration replace competition in games? What would a collaborative game look like that incentivized getting to know the other members in the class?
• The importance of reflection. After each of the games, Stacie asked her students to reflect on the experience to have students generate their own knowledge. She then wrote on the board and responded to what people said.

Overall Takeaways

• Challenge the status quo.
• Reflecting is important to learning.
• How can collaboration replace competition in games?
• Kahoot! is an awesome application that I had never heard about.

To Do

• Look up names of people I didn’t know from the trivia game: Muriel Cooper, Christoph Meinel, and Rolf Faste.
• Go through the “interesting links” in the class’ Google Drive

01/18/2018 | Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Today we met at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History to discuss the project and tour the museum. The meeting started with Laurie Giarratani, the director of education, giving our class an explanation of the museum and its outreach programs. One need that may be important in the future for this project is to think of a way to connect with adults and children when spreading information about our intervention. To get us to start thinking about nature, she asked us to draw out a memory of a time when we felt connected to nature. We then partnered up and shared our memories with them. Afterwards a few people shared their stories with the class. This technique for eliciting responses from a group is called Think-Pair-Share.

Marijke Hecht, a PhD student in Learning Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, led everyone through a card sorting activity. Each student was given 35 cards that could describe a 21st Century Naturalist and he/she had to sort them into an agree, don’t know, and disagree pile. Then students had to choose the two cards that they thought most represented what they thought a 21st Century Naturalist should be and four cards representing other important aspects (the right side of the picture). The same was done for what wasn’t important for a 21st Century Naturalist (the left side of the picture).

21st Century Naturalist Card sorting activity (left: not necessary for a 21st Century Naturalist, right: necessary for a 21st Century Naturalist)

Marijke handed out a survey that required us to reflect about our decisions to help her with her research.

The survey

The activity helped us think more deeply about what we individually thought was important for a 21st Century Naturalist. We also learned that our peers think similarly and differently. Understanding that there is a plurality of definitions will be helpful as we progress in the project. Which skills will we focus on? I hope that Marijke will have results from her survey that she can share with us so we can base our decision on what her research finds.

Laurie took us on a tour of the We Are Nature exhibition. She explained the importance of the structure of the exhibition:

1. opening explanation of what anthropocene means (it’s more than a geological time period; it is the broad effects humans are having on the earth’s systems)
2. asks visitors what they think nature is
3. gives evidence of the impact humans are having on the environment (the categories are pollution, extinction, PostNatural, climate change, and habitat alteration)
4. allows space for processing
5. gives a brief account of future options for reducing our negative impact on the environment

The target audience for the exhibition is millennials and their young children and the casual language used aims to connect with them.

We Are Nature exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History

At the processing stage of the exhibition visitors wrote down their thoughts on a Post-It Note and put it on the emotion they were feeling. As time passed the notes fell into the boxes. I was intrigued by the idea and read some of the other visitors’ responses. They ranged the gamut from very hopeful that humans will solve our current environmental problems to nihilistic. The exhibition until that point had mainly shown the negative effects of humans and provided only a few examples of when humans saved animals that were on the brink of extinction, so I was left with the impression of a bleak future for the human race.

Processing activity at We Are Nature

At the very end of the exhibition there was a small area that discussed actions we could take now to be more sustainable and connected people to organizations that are doing work in the areas of their interest (ex. food, water, transportation, energy). Although this was a nice gesture, it didn’t give me much hope for the future. At the end of the exhibition, I was left with the question: How did they want visitors to feel by the end? The exhibition does a great job of getting people to understand the negative effects humans are having on the earth through multimedia displays and allowing space to reflect on what that means for us as individuals and the human race, but it lacks a clear message of a way forward.

Overall Takeaways

• One need that may be important in the future for this project is to think of a way to connect with adults AND children when spreading information about our intervention
• There is no single agreed upon definition of a 21st Century Naturalist. In our project we will have to be intentional with our definition.
• Reflection is important in all forms of learning, not only in the classroom. The processing area of the exhibition gave space and activities for visitors to reflect on what they had learned and their own reactions.

To Do

• Check in with Marijke Hecht about the results from her survey

Medium Feedback Notes

Stacie gave the class general feedback on our Medium posts:

Make macro/micro observations: It was nice to see some of you write about the details of what happened in class while also describing how they connect to larger learning goals. Remember, it’s often beneficial to explain WHAT you do AND WHY you do it.

Provide context: I appreciated that some of you provided a strong sense of context throughout your posts, describing what we did in class, why we did it, what we’re investigating in the project, why this is important, etc. Not only does this approach help the reader understand the purpose of your writing, it also aids your crafting of a clear, concise, and interesting story about your work and thinking.

Consider including personal anecdotes: I believe that your personal stories help audience connect with your posts and stay engaged in the reading of them. Your stories also do a good job of explaining how you see activities relating to your life.

Remember identifiers: When using images, make sure to cite them and be sure to include dates for your posts.

Use hierarchy: Don’t be afraid to utilize some form of hierarchy (headings, bolding, bullets) in your posts. It helps distinguish different types of content and also is a great way for you to practice some communication design : )

One area that I think I can improve on is including personal anecdotes. I normally don’t think in terms of stories, so I think I may find this difficult at first. My goal for the next post is to include at least one story.

01/19/2018 | CMNH Materials

The Future of Learning in the Pittsburgh Region

This is a document created by KnowledgeWorks and Remake Learning that outlines the need for education to change to align with new economic realities. The report highlights key areas (responsive learning environments, authentic mastery, artisanal education, educating for impact, educator swarms, and label-free learning) and gives examples of organizations that are doing work in each area. Below are the main points:

• The increasing importance of digital technology and coding in the future
• The purpose of education is changing. It needs to “align with new economic realities”
• Future education needs to be equitable, but this isn’t a given
• Learners and families will have to be more intentional and take responsibility for learning
• Portfolios are one way to show evidence of learning

Takeaways

• How can digital technology and coding be incorporated into the 21st Century Naturalist’s toolkit?
• Making sure that our intervention is equitable
• How can our intervention help learners and their families be more intentional with their education?
• Creating a portfolio is something that could be incorporated into the intervention as a way to show what learners have done as part of our intervention.

Shaping the Future of Learning

This document describes the five foundational issues KnowledgeWorks finds to be facing education and strategies for responding to them. The five issues are:

• Educate the whole person (lifelong learning through academic and social-emotional growth)
• Personalize learning in community (directly connect learning experiences to the location and culture of the learner)
• Flexible approaches to learning and coordination (that respond to learners’ needs)
• Systems change in equity (support underserved learners)
• Renegotiate definitions of success (students define their own)

Takeaways

• Reference the strategies for informal and community-based learning that it describes when we begin the project
• Equity is extremely important (this has been brought up in every document and conversation so far)
• Redefining success and creating positive learning experiences will be important. How will the learner be able to demonstrate what they have learned? Where will they show what they have learned? Is there an artifact that is a physical manifestation of their learning?

The 21st Century Naturalist

Below are the main notes:

Aware of the Anthropocene. Youths should be aware of humans as part of a broader natural system and our effect on that system.

See connections between nature and urban settings. Changing the common belief that man is separate from nature and that nature is an other (which is particularly true in urban environments). This requires an understanding of systems.

Engage, learn, and take action. Youth should not only be learning and documenting the world around them, we should support them taking action within their communities.

Value and seek diversity

How can youth develop as 21st Century Naturalists? Possible contributing groups are museums, schools, families, parks, and community groups.

Takeaways

• We need find a way to develop systems thinking in youth
• How can we create experiences that allow youth to make connections between themselves, nature, and the larger system?
• How can we create activities or systems that allow students to take action and collaborate with other people?

01/20/2018 | Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas

By Dr. James L. Adams

Chapter 2: Perceptual Blocks

Dr. James L. Adams, a former Stanford Mechanical Engineering Professor, clearly explains the different causes of perceptual blocks through words, excellent examples, and activities. It was an enjoyable read and it got me thinking about how I solve problems in my daily life. The examples made each of his points easily understandable. My favorite example is shown below:

https://mathequalslove.blogspot.com/2017/08/nine-dots-puzzle.html

Dr. Adams categorized perceptual blocks into 6 groups (stereotyping, difficulty in isolating the problem, tendency to delimit the problem area poorly, inability to see the problem from various viewpoints, saturation, and failure to utilize all sensory inputs).

Stereotyping

• Preconceptions cloud new information and limit options
• Creativity is combining disparate parts into a functioning and useful whole, so if you stereotype from the beginning you are limiting yourself
• We automatically stereotype because we can’t process all the information that comes in through our bodily senses
• We stereotype others and ourselves
• Context is important for knowledge acquisition, but there is a chance that residual information from the original context may mislead us (ex. if you first listen to organ music at a funeral, then whenever you hear organ music it may bring up associations with death).

Difficulty in isolating the problem

• Often people don’t see the problem clearly, so part of problem solving is problem definition
• We generally spend very little time defining a problem, so we can focus on solving it.
• Most people focus on getting rid of symptoms instead of focusing on the underlying problem

Tendency to delimit the problem area poorly

• We place limits around our own functioning (the 9 dot activity above is an example of this because most people don’t venture outside of the box at first)
• Once we realize the existence of these limits we will be eager to escape them
• It is better to broadly state a problem than overly define it (ex. design a better door vs. design a better way to get through a wall). But don’t make the problem definition too broad or else the solutions become general

Inability to see the problem from various viewpoints

• Use lateral thinking to define the problem, then vertical thinking to get deep into it
• Think through the perspective of other people and things
• If you don’t know where to start, start somewhere and then adjust. “It is far better to dig the wrong hole to an impressive depth than to sit around wondering where to start.” Edward De Bono

Saturation

• We can’t pay attention to everything around us, so we may unintentionally overlook important data
• We ignore a lot of information in order to conduct our daily lives

Failure to utilize all sensory inputs

• Senses are linked (taste and smell)
• To solve problems well, we need to combine theoretical knowledge with our senses
• Visualization is important in problem solving
• Try using your senses when problem solving (taste, smell, feel, etc.)

Takeaways

• Examples are important for aiding comprehension
• Realizing our stereotypes for a given situation and breaking through them can help us rethink the possibilities
• Contextualize information so that learners can understand how it fits together with the larger picture
• Spend time defining the problem first, then try to solve the problem
• Identify the limits we place on ourselves, then figure out how to break them (9 dot activity)
• Broadly state a problem as opposed to overly defining it (ex. design a better door vs. design a better way to get through a wall), but not too broadly.

01/23/2018 | Conceptual Blockbusting Class

The structure of today’s class was:

• a class discussion of our visit to the museum
• an individual drawing activity with discussion afterwards
• a group activity working on medication for the elderly with a discussion
• a group activity with each group having an item to describe and then not using those descriptors in their solution
• a group design activity to create and promote a design lecture series on campus.

Discussion

In our discussion about the exhibition, We Are Nature, many people contributed and made different points. Most people agreed that the exhibition did not do much to address actions that we could take to improve our current environmental situation, which left many feeling hopeless after leaving the exhibition. We thought of some ways to make the future section more interactive and realized that one problem was that everything was self-guided in the future section of the exhibition.

The way that the exhibit included data from the users was something that struck me as innovative and meaningful. The first example of this was the cork voting system.

Interactive cork voting system at CMNH

The other example was the Post-It Notes of people’s feelings after going through the exhibition, which created an infographic of everyone’s mood.

Interactive Post-It Note mood infographic

These both created a structure for visitors to participate in and the participation generated data for other visitors to interact with. We are therefore no longer designing information, but the structure for the information to exist in.

Each activity in class was a demonstration of one of the points in the first chapter of Conceptual Blockbusting.

1. Stereotyping

My definition of stereotyping is detecting what we know/expect, thereby limiting the full scope of information that we are getting. Stacie had us draw a tree, scallion, TV, microwave, and refrigerator on Post-It Notes. For each of the she pointed out aspects of the thing that we missed. For example, most people didn’t draw roots at the base of the trees. We drew what we see on a regular basis, which means we forget to include unseen information.

Stereotype: a drawing activity

2. Difficulty Isolating the Problem

Usually we don’t change the level of scale of the problem we are working on. Most problems are overly constrained and need to be seen from a larger perspective, but sometimes we have a problem that is so vague that the scope needs to be narrowed. The activity to demonstrate this point was coming up with a solution for people to regularly take their medication. Our team was midway through conceptualizing the problem and deciding the parameters when Stacie told us that the problem had been constrained to elderly living alone. Once we narrowed in on the problem, our group was able to come up with solutions. Stacie clarified that usually difficulty isolating the problem works in the opposite way: people overly define the problem and therefore miss out on solutions that could have a larger impact.

Difficulty Isolating the Problem: medication delivery

3. Tendency to limit the problem space

For this demonstrative activity, each group was given an object and was asked to use three words that were characteristic of the object. My group was given a knife. Our three words were blade, handle, and precision. We were then told we couldn’t use those three things when we designed a new knife. As you can see in the picture below, we listed off different ways of not using that one aspect to make a knife. Our final product was drawn at the last moment, but the ideas were very well thought out. If we had been asked to redesign a knife, we would have stayed within the typology of a common knife, but this activity got us to rethink the typology.

Tendency to limit the problem space: redesign a knife

4. Inability to see problems from various viewpoints

The last activity of the day was coming up with ideas for a design lecture series at Carnegie Mellon University. At first we were given time to work on finding the parameters of the solution and ideating. Stacie then gave us one stakeholder whose perspective we needed to take into consideration for our solution. My group’s stakeholder was the community, which we hadn’t initially identified as one of our stakeholders. With the community in mind, our solutions looked very different than they otherwise would have. We focused on making the presentations relatable for non-designers.

Inability to see the problem from multiple viewpoints: CMU design lecture series

Takeaways

• Don’t just regurgitate information. Make it yours. I still need to get better at this. My undergraduate education was about learning information well and then being able to talk about it in an objective manner using the proper terminology. I now need to unlearn some of that so I can learn the information in a way that is useful for me, not just useful for the test.
• Design the structure that user-generated data will exist in. Just like the Post-It Note interactive infographic at the We Are Nature exhibition, creating a space for users to interact that leaves behind their marks and data is one way to create a dynamic and informative piece.
• We forget to include unseen information (stereotyping)
• People often don’t think about the problem definition and overly define the problem, therefore miss out on solutions that could have a larger impact (Difficulty isolating the problem)
• If we had been asked to redesign a knife, we would have stayed within the typology of a common knife, but this activity got us to rethink the typology (Tendency to limit the problem space)
• With the community in mind, our solutions looked very different than they otherwise would have (Inability to see the problem from various viewpoints)

01/25/2018 | Conceptual Blockbusting Continued

The structure of today’s class was:

• Discussion of We Are Nature exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Natural History
• Saturation activity: remembering your student ID
• Discussion about saturation
• Difficulty using all sense activity: advertising the benefits of organic eating
• Discussion
• Starting to work on addressing the CMNH prompt

From the discussion at the beginning of the class I learned that my posts are probably way too long. So from now on I will try to hit only the salient points.

5. Saturation

With a partner, everyone wrote out what was on our student ID cards and then drew out the location of the information. Everyone in the class was missing some piece of information, and many had multiple mistakes/omissions. Since we see our ID every day and don’t need to know the detailed information, we don’t remember it. This is saturation. In class, one student made the helpful distinction between saturation and stereotyping. Saturation is prolonged exposure to the same thing so that you become accustomed to it. Stereotyping is a heuristic applied to new information that a person is processing. With this knowledge of saturation, we have to ask ourselves when we want information to blend in (use saturation) and when we want it to stand out (make whatever it is novel).

6. Difficulty using all senses

For our last activity demonstrating the principles in Chapter 2 of Conceptual Blockbusting, we were given the prompt of advertising the benefits of organic food. Each group worked on their ideas and presented them to the class. After everyone had presented, Stacie gave each group a sense to use for their next phase of ideation. My group was given touch. Our first idea and our solution after thinking through the problem from the perspective of the sense of touch were completely different. The first solution was solely visual and didn’t incorporate any of the other senses.

At the end, we changed groups and started to think about the CMNH prompt using the techniques we had learned through the activities.

01/30/2018 | McCarthy’s Learning Style Assessment

The classes structure was:

• Discussion of homework and reading
• Explanation of McCarthy’s Learning Styles theory
• We each filled out the Learning Style Assessment
• In groups we worked on making a learning experience based on McCarthy’s learning styles

Before this class I had never heard of learning styles and I found the concept useful because it starts a conversation. The assessment helps each person understand where they are relative to other people in the class and gives everyone a moment to reflect on what type of learner they are. Even if the resulting graph doesn’t truly represent your learning style, it still gets you thinking about how you learn. This self-reflection will result in a better understanding of how each of us learn. As a class we marked our locations on the matrix.

I was the only one who was very abstract in the class (1, 10). It startled me that no one else was near me, but I then reflected on my experiences in the program and realized that I usually ask different questions than my peers. I always want to get to the heart of the issue and gain a deep understanding of what is happening, as well as make things that solve problems and work elegantly.

The learning style matrix with the class’s information (that’s me at the bottom)

For the small group exercise, I decided to work with two people in the class who I hadn’t gotten the chance to partner with and who had different self-assessed learning styles. In our groups we were supposed to use McCarthy’s Learning Styles concept to guide our creation of a solution for teaching high schoolers (our selected target audience) the benefits of exercise.

I found this activity to be difficult for me because I didn’t feel like I had a strong foundational knowledge of the material, so I wasn’t sure if I was using it correctly. We were all very hesitant when thinking of solutions. If I were to do this activity again, I would take the general ideas of the framework, but not worry about the specifics. Since we were slow in our ideation, we didn’t finish a complete idea in the time allotted.

I think the framework can be useful because it provides a structure to think through engaging learners in the material. It reminds me of the We Are Nature exhibit because each of the parts (purpose, conceptualizing, problem solving, and transforming) exist in the overall structure of the exhibition (what the visitors think nature is, evidence of humankind’s negative effects on the environment, processing the information, and thinking about the future). The exhibition blurs the problem solving and transforming a little, so it isn’t an exact match, but the structure is similar.

Takeaways

• We often aren’t going to be there after finishing the learning experience design, so how do you create a standalone solution?
• The McCarthy Learning Styles can be adapted for use in a Learner Experience Design context by moving from providing meaning to conceptualizing to operationalizing to renewing (where you refine what you have learned and transform it).
• I think abstractly and can get stuck in the details and the facts without seeing the larger picture.

02/01/2018 | Finding our groups and starting the group project

Today we formed our teams! We separated into three groups based on the prompts we were interested in (1, 2, and not sure). I was in the unsure group. After talking with both groups, Roger and I decided to go with prompt one, which is a little more bounded. We both felt our past experiences as educators would help us create something in this context. It took a while to break into groups, but I think the time was a good investment because most people seemed excited to work with each other.

Today we focused on scoping the problem. We worked on a map that defined the problems and mapped the stakeholder relations. We focused on the possible objectives, problems, stakeholders, and the various perspectives.

Defining the Problems and Mapping Stakeholder Relations

Takeaways

• Spending time deciding a team early on is important
• Externalizing thinking is helpful, but still doesn’t come naturally for me
• Having a clear goal keeps the group focused and producing information

02/05/2018 | Dirksen Chapter 3 “What’s the Goal?”

Before reading chapter 3 of Julie Dirksen’s Usable Learning, I skimmed through chapter 2, which was about understanding the different types of learners there are. What impressed me about her writing is her ability to combine drawings, metaphors, and a conversational writing style to make the content accessible. There is a lot to learn from this book in terms of content, but I think there is also a lot I can learn from the form of the content. It isn’t overly designed, but conveys the information in an easily understandable format.

Now it’s time to talk about chapter 3, entitled “What’s the Goal?” Below is the structure of the chapter:

• Identify a problem
• Set a destination
• Determine gaps between the starting point and the destination
• Decide how far you are going to be able to go

This chapter will be a great resource as we begin the problem definition of our group project. There are questions that she list for identifying the problem and breaking it down into manageable parts. Dirksen’s desire for a clear goal reminds me of the SMART goal-setting technique. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time bound. Learning goals that don’t meet these criteria need to be broken up into smaller, achievable parts. She has a few stories about projects that she has worked on where she is given an ambiguous goal and she must ask why multiple times to truly understand the basis.

Another part that stood out to me was the emphasis and seeing if learners can DO something and if that doing is something they would do in the real world and if it is possible to measure the success of it. I reflected on my own education and the lack of doing. Almost everything I did was based on knowledge and synthesizing information, but rarely doing anything with it that was connected to the real world. Even when people are producing something, the effects of it should be measurable. This is an area that I have always struggled with in my own life. My goals are usually not broken down into measurable parts because I have gotten away so far by following other people’s plans and by quickly learning new information. I haven’t needed to develop a system to achieve my goals. If I can incorporate this into my own life, I think it could help me at this moment while I feel a little unmoored and down.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a theory that I learned about while teaching English in Japan. The clear breakdown of different levels of learning helped me craft lessons that focused on a few of the levels. While learning it, the facilitator focused on moving through the order from remember to create. Dirksen expands the possibilities by suggesting that we sometimes flip the order on its head and start with creating and ending with remembering. Looking back over my most successful classes, I realized that what I did was create a learning environment that encouraged creating, then having the students analyze what they created and deriving the foundational principles. If there is enough time, I have found this to be a truly beneficial approach to teaching.

Stacie often uses the flipped Bloom’s Taxonomy model while teaching. We start with an activity where we create something, analyze it, comprehend what happened, and hopefully remember the lessons that we extracted from the activity.

Takeaways

• Reference the questions to ask for identifying the problem when my group works on problem definition.
• How are we going to measure the success of our learner experience design?
• Use Bloom’s Taxonomy and Gloria Gery’s proficiency scale (familiarization to unconscious competence) to create a matrix
• Some learning is fast and other is slow. Fast is knowledge-based learning and slow is learning that tries to change our very foundation. Make sure to respect the speed of the learning.
• Dirksen Chapter 3 has a lot of good materials to reference when identifying a goal

02/06/2018 | Bridge Gaps

Today’s class structure was:

• Talked
• 10 minutes to get ready, write, and do things that you need to get done
• We played around in Mural for a second
• Looked at the problems we wrote down and asked why that is a problem (digging deeper)
• Defining Stakeholder states and bridging gaps

Today we focused on defining the problem and trying to dig deeper into the the root causes.

Bridge gaps

Changing scale

Current states

Core cause of problems

• Knowledge
• Skills
• Motivation
• Environment
• Communication

These help to define the project focus

02/08/2018 | Preferred State and Bridging Gaps

During class today Xenia, Roger, and I went through the notes we had written before for the current state and the preferred state. We added some more content and then focused on clarifying what we had written so it would be easier to bridge the current state to the preferred state via the gaps.

One of the most productive parts of the working time was when we talked as a team about our different styles of working. Roger and I are process oriented, while Xenia is less so. We are now trying to strike a balance between our different ways of working.

From writing this I realized that I need to take better notes about what we did as a group.

02/13/2018 | Ambrose Chapter 3 “Motivation”

This reading directly relates to my current experience as a student. I have always been a motivated student because I had a supportive learning environment, believed that I could overcome any academic challenge I was confronted with (expectancies), and intrinsically valued learning. At some point last semester I experienced extreme self-doubt and my expectancy dropped to an unprecedented low. This triggered a drop in my subjective value of my current education because I didn’t trust myself and I didn’t know where I wanted to go. The below diagram helped me chart my own journey as a Masters student here, which gave me a firmer grasp of the situation.

How Learning Works page 80

I started the semester off firmly in the motivated square. After having an existential crisis and then not feeling confident with my design work, I quickly moved into the fragile square. I’ve found the terminology of fragile to be helpful in processing what it is I feel and why I am so hesitant. This reading also explained how I can move back into a motivated state: I need small wins that will help me regain my confidence.

Now onto the reading.

This chapter on motivation in Learning How to Learn reminded me a lot of a lecture I attended while teaching in Japan. The English as a Second Language professor found that there were two predictors of language acquisition: innate ability and motivation. Since innate ability isn’t very malleable, I saw it as my duty to motivate my students so that they would be excited to learn in and out of class. Through experimenting, talking with my students, discussing lesson plans and class ideas with teachers, and making an effort to talk with students outside of class, I came up with ideas that resemble some within this chapter, especially the strategies for increasing value.

The overarching framework of this chapter was that subjective value and expectancies (expectations for success) influenced motivation, which affects goal-directed behavior that supports learning and performance outcomes.

How Learning Works p. 70

The beginning of this chapter defined terms and explained how they worked and the end of the chapter gave examples of strategies for employing this new information in learning. So my post will replicate this structure:

Terms and their definitions

Motivation is influenced by subjective value and expectancies

Subjective Values

• Attainment value: the accomplishment of a goal, e.g. leveling up in a video game.
• Intrinsic value: the satisfaction from the process of doing the task rather than from the outcome, e.g. playing music because of the feeling while playing, not because of an award that you hope to win.
• Instrumental value: what you are doing helps you accomplish a goal, e.g. getting good grades in high school so you can attend a prestigious college.

Expectancy

• Positive outcome expectancies: if I do the classwork, I can understand the content.
• Negative outcome expectancies: No matter how hard I try, I will never be good at this, e.g. some students in middle school run into some problems in math that they can’t easily solve and give up.
• Efficacy expectancies: I am capable of doing the work, e.g. the student has had practice writing fiction in their free time and is now taking a beginning fiction class.

Goals

• Learning goals: The interests that learners have in the subject and what they hope to get out of the learning experience, e.g. a student takes a web development class because he/she has a deep interest in creating websites.
• Social goals: The social outcomes that students hope to get from a learning experience, e.g. wanting to make new friends with similar interests.
• Affective goals: The feelings that learners hope to have, e.g. excited by the stimulating material.
• Performance-approach goals: The learner wants to meet a certain extrinsic goal, e.g. getting an A in a class.
• Performance-avoidance goals: The learner wants to make a minimum cut so they aren’t incompetent, so a B or C depending upon their goals, e.g. trying hard enough to get passing grades but not putting in any extra effort.
• Work-avoidance goals: finish the task with the least amount of effort, e.g. coming up with one idea for a solution and create the design without considering other options as opposed to ideating, testing various ideas, and then going with one option.

Checklists based on the strategies outlined in the book

Motivation (all three of these are needed to have learners be motivated)

• Subjective value
• Efficacy expectations
• Supportive environment

Value (we used a lot of these in our mapping, but we just didn’t know the formal names)

• Connect to students’ interests
• Provide authentic, real-world tasks which gives context to the learning and may create connections that lead to internships and/or jobs
• Show relevance to students’ current academic lives
• Demonstrate the relevance of higher-level skills to students’ future professional lives (meta-skills and how they could be used in another context)
• Identify and reward what the teacher/learner experience designer values
• Show your own passion and enthusiasm for the discipline/material

Positive expectancies

• Ensure alignment of objectives, assessments, and instructional strategies (goals, feedback and practice, and show level of understanding)
• Identify an appropriate level of challenge to keep learners in a state of flow (pre-assessments are one way to know what learners already know)
• Provide early success opportunities (smaller assignments with feedback)
• Articulate your expectations
• Provide rubrics (what would this look like for a camp?)
• Provide targeted feedback, timely and constructive
• Describe effective study strategies (discuss techniques campers use for various tasks)

Strategies for value and expectancies

• Provide flexibility and control (choose among options and make choices that align with their goals)
• Give students an opportunity to reflect (specific questions to help with the reflection. Change questions depending upon what the intended outcome is for the learning experience).

For the camp

• Use the checklists when assessing possible designs (motivation, value, positive expectancies, strategies for value and expectancies).
• Think through what their goals are. Verify our hypotheses. Try to align student goals and our objectives.
• Develop learning goals for the students and help them find the meaing in the activities.
• Students with multiple types of goals are more successful than those with a single goal. Pre-camp activity can be identifying goals and how they relate to the camp content.
• A pre-assessment of prior knowledge, goals, and students’ interests could help the camp tailor their content for students.
• Students who have learning goals develop deeper understanding of the material, ask for help, persist in the face of adversity, and seek out challenges compared to students with performance goals. How can our intervention help learners naturally develop learning goals?

Takeaways

• Personal: I need to have some small victories to be able to return to a motivated state from the fragile state that I’m currently in.
• Need to consider subjective value, efficacy expectations, and the supportiveness of the environment when designing learning experiences. Missing one can negatively affect the motivation of the learner.
• Create checklists with the empirical information so that I can easily assess different ideas and find gaps.

02/13/2018 | Musical Chair Class

We started off class by playing musical chairs. After reflecting on the game, I realized how much I like games and am motivated to try my best and hopefully win. In my family, I’m the one that increases the intensity of the game. Our favorite family game is dancing using an Xbox Kinect. When I’m not home and my family plays they don’t sweat as much as me. I’ve always known I like to play games, but now I’m questioning why I am so intense when I play. I also need to remember that not everyone thinks like me, so competitive games may not be best for everyone.

A major takeaway is the importance of following the norms for rules because there will be resistance from the players/learners if the game doesn’t follow the rules the way they think it should. If we deviate from norms too far, then we run the risk of people being confused. This is similar to interface design principles. It’s great to make new things, but if they don’t map to what people already know, then most people won’t like it very much.

Through the game and learning about the Magic Circle the idea of creating closed and open systems for the rules of play. When creating games, finding the balance between structure and adaptability is important. The rules need to be rigid enough to make sure everyone is playing the same game, but allow the players to add to it. An extreme version of this is Minecraft, where there are no rules to the gameplay, so the players explore the space and create their own worlds.

Another thought that came up after playing musical chairs is how to get the player to return and play the game again. We agreed as a class that we wouldn’t want to play musical chairs over and over again, but many games get people to play for hours on end. So what’s the difference? Musical chairs is a static game with very simple gameplay. The games that people spend hours or lifetimes playing are more dynamic that allow people to develop their skills and progressively get harder for the players.

While researching Rules of Play, I came across the Institute of Play, which is an amazing resource for this project and a way of educating that resonates with me. I thought the systems thinking game manual was relevant to my interests in education, design, and systems-level change. Their systems-thinking manual contains a lot of relevant information for us as we think about what we want to do for our project.

For the rest of the class, Xenia, Roger, and I worked on thinking about different ways to get students motivated to learn. We took a while to decide what direction we wanted to go in. In the end we decided to focus on taxonomies as a way to develop systems thinking. We then diagrammed some different taxonomies on the board to get a better understanding of what we would want learners to do. Next time we need to focus a little more and see from our learners’ perspective how an activity based around taxonomy could be interesting.

Takeaways

• Institute of Play is an awesome company that is developing material in line with my current interests
• Follow the norms of gameplay so that people don’t get confused. Think of examples of similar games to use as a model
• Create games that change over time as the player returns to them
• Try to think through the perspective of your learners while developing content.

02/15/2018 | Dirksen Chapter 5 Attention

“How do you get their attention?”

In this chapter Dirksen does another great job of using examples, simple graphics, and metaphors to help her readers understand the complex topics she is talking about. Whenever I read her writing I feel like I grasp the content easily and I am left with images that are connected to the concepts. She reveals some of the tricks she uses to make the content so accessible and fun to read.

The images from this chapter are:

• The elephant

The elephant represents our unconscious, automatic, and visceral brain.

• The rider

The rider is our conscious, verbal, and thinking brain. Although the rider thinks he is in control, the elephant is much stronger.

This means that we need to understand how to persuade the elephant to move in the direction we want it to when designing learning environments.

Dirksen recommends these strategies to engage the elephant in learning activities:

• Tell it stories using the content. Even not so interesting stories grab the attention of the learner because humans inherently seek patterns and want to know how the story will end. (I need to start adding stories to my posts. I wrote that before, but thinking in stories has been hard for me and it would take more time.)
• Surprise it. Keep the learner guessing about what will happen next. Feedback is a good example. Don’t always give the same feedback in learning environments, but sometimes mix it up and surprise learners. One example that stuck with me was telling a group of learners that they will go over all 37 points, but then the instructor tells them that they will only focus on the three most important ones in class. The learners will be more interested in those three points than if they had been told the three without the preface. The surprise and context makes the content more interesting.
• Creating moments of learning through cognitive dissonance.
• Show learners what they will be like after they complete the learning. Give them a before and after. Then explain how they can get there.
• Give learners real achievements, not a set list of skills. Dirksen’s example of a photoshop class was excellent. Instead of learning each skill separately, give projects that require those skills and teach them as needed. Know the skills you want to teach, and then use them to do something that will interest the learner population you are tailoring it for.
• Create a first-person puzzle to solve. This gives context to the skills that the learners will develop and an application of them. It also makes the information more meaningful. Have a goal and time pressure to create a sense of urgency.
• Create contexts for learners to be curious and explore.
• Collaboration will keep people’s attention longer than competition.

Takeaways

• Use stories in my Medium posts. The posts can be shorter, but they should have a story. It’s going to be my new approach.
• Think through our ideas through the lens of achievements and how that could be connected with the idea of a portfolio.
• A first-person puzzle to solve. Which skills can we create puzzles around? Have a clear goal and a time pressure. Reference page 136
• Incite curiosity! Leave things out and ask interesting questions that the students will need to follow. Page 144 gives a comprehensive list.

02/15/2018 | Attention

Class structure:

• Magic circle review
• Dirksen Chapter 5 Attention reading review
• Analysis of a learning media (Xenia, Roger, and I had the TED Ed animation called “How to practice effectively… for just about anything.”
• Presentation about our analyses as a class

Magic circle diagram

The interior of the circle is the synthetic world of the game, so the rules of the game apply. Outside of the circle is the real world. The Magic Circle diagram focuses on the edge between the synthetic and the real world. Some activities are open, so there isn’t a clear distinction between the real world and the synthetic world of the game, and others are closed, so the rules are inflexible and don’t reference the real world. There are three different types of systems.

• Game
• Play
• Culture

Games are closed. They don’t reference the real world and are a synthetic world all to their own. Players enter the game and lose themselves in it. Some examples are chutes and ladders and LEGOs when you follow the instructions.

Play is both open and closed. The rules of play are flexible enough to interact with the world around the game. Some examples are dolls and LEGOs when there is no specific set of instructions that they are following. So creating a LEGO castle for the make believe treasure that the learner has.

Culture is open. This is when the play is directly connected to the real world. It is a larger cultural experience. An example of this is the kneeling during the national anthem in the NFL. The game becomes a forum for talking about larger cultural issues.

Story time! In the takeaways from the Dirksen reading I said I would try to write a story. Knowing myself, I won’t actually do it unless I start now, so here we go:

In Stacie’s class today we reviewed the Dirksen reading about attention, see the previous post. The topic connected with me because I am having trouble focusing in all areas of my life, including classes. The reading emphasized that attention needs to be grabbed and then maintained. One way of grabbing it is what I am attempting to do now: tell a story. Story telling engages the learning and creates a logical framework for understanding new information. Let’s make educational material embedded in stories and connected to stories that students already know.

As a reflection on my own story, I’m going to have to give it another shot next time. It didn’t come out quite as a story.

Dirksen tells a compelling story in her texts through visuals and metaphors that help build shelves to organize the new information. I just read a blog post about how a journalist learned how to write for a newspaper, and it involved finding similar articles, understanding their structure, and then writing her own article based on what she learned. Next time, I will try to take Dirksen’s reading as an example and create my own story.

At the end of class we used these criteria to then analyze a piece of media that Stacie gave to us. My group looked through a TED Ed presentation. From the group presentations we learned that it is easy to grab attention, but difficult to maintain it. Many of the examples also lacked a call to arms. The other sources were slveryfootpring.org, Spent (a game looking at the difficulty of decision making when in poverty), and Good Attacks’ a traffic infographic video.

Ways to grab and maintain attention:

• Surprise me
• Story telling
• Shiny things
• Urgency
• Social pressure
• Leveraging experience

Takeaways

• Story telling is important, but it is something that doesn’t come naturally to me.
• Use Dirksen as an example and write in her style. Practice story telling!! Choose only one thing I want to remember and make a story out of it.
• Easy to grab attention, but difficult to maintain it.

02/17/2018 | My notes from the CMNH Question Feedback

• Get survey data from the camps (they referenced data and said that we could contact them for it).
• The demographics we have access to are limited, but we can get information on the zip codes and scholarship application.
• There is no formal assessment of camper learning
• Lesson plans and camp materials can be shared during the meetings we have (Breann said this)
• Marketing focuses on bringing people to the website. Are schools included in the current outreach?!?!
• They hope that learners will leave the exhibit with a sense of purpose and with steps that can be taken to reduce their impact on the environment.
• Climate change kits exist and it would be nice to see what they are like.

02/19/2018 | Ambrose Chapter 2 Organizing Knowledge

“How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and what they know.” (How Learning Works, p. 44)

The structure that we provide for learning is as important or more important than the information that is taught. This is in line with some of the research I have been doing about mental models. If we can learn the deeper structures, then we can use those in any context. The deeper structures are the trunks of our trees of knowledge. Once those develop, it is easier to add branches of specific information. These reading discussed some of the w

Isolated knowledge vs. interconnected knowledge. The more connections that new information has to other information or previous experiences, the easier it will be to remember it.

Novice vs. expert organization. Novices tend to have sparse, superficial knowledge structures, while experts have rich meaningful knowledge structures. Sparsely (N) vs. richly connected (E) and superficial (N) vs. meaningful (E).

Different forms of pattern associations:

• temporal contiguity (press a button and an action happens)
• ideas that share meaning (fairness and equity)
• objects that have perceptual similarities (triangle and a pyramid)

Knowledge organization develops in the context of use, so we need to create opportunities for students to be in contextually relevant situations to be able to use their knowledge (making, the environment, etc.). The knowledge organization should align with the task demands (which should also align with transferable skills outside of the camp setting).

As learning environment creators, we need to think about the tasks that students will be using this knowledge for outside of the learning environment and then building learning experiences that support the organization of knowledge to help with the future activities.

If we create highly organized knowledge structures, then we can retain a lot more information and that information will be more meaningful.

Students can more quickly create knowledge structures when they are given an advance organizer (e.g. category information about isolated facts)

Having multiple organization strategies (time, theories, historical figures) creates deeper connections between the different parts of the content.

It’s easier for learners to retain multiple facts with a causal dimension (STORIES!).

Analyzing contrasting cases and explaining an already solved problem helps learners identify successful examples.

How do you check how students are organizing their knowledge?

Strategies:

• Have experts create a concept map
• Analyze tasks to identify the most appropriate knowledge organization (give a skeletal outline or template for learners to understand the organizational principles necessary for the task)
• Explain the organizational structure of the course (relate each class to that larger structure)
• Explain the structure of each class so learners can grasp the framework (be specific and don’t use intro and conclusion)
• Use contrasting and boundary cases to highlight organizing features (by comparing examples, learners develop richer connections than just learning each fact in isolation, and by showing boundary cases learners understand the limits of that category and the rules of the categorization)
• Explicitly highlight deep features (examples that share deep features even though they superficially look different and examples were superficially they are similar but they don’t share deep features)
• Make connections between concepts explicit (similarities, differences). Have students think about these connections, don’t always explain them.
• Encourage students to work with multiple organizing structures (artistic movement, time period, color)
• Ask students to draw a concept map to expose their knowledge organization to learn how much students know and how they are connecting their information
• Use a sorting task to expose students’ knowledge organizations (some things should have superficial similarities but deep differences so you can tell if students understand the deeper connections between information
• Monitor students’ work for problems in their knowledge organization (compiling common mistakes)

It is not just what you know but how you organize what you know that is important for long-term learning.

Takeaways

• Information should be interconnected and relevant to the task at hand, so as learner experience designers we need to facilitate learners creating those connections
• Have students play with multiple ways of organizing the information (organizational categories, sorting, concept maps)
• Present information in context (connected to other information in a logical way, contrasting other information, within a larger organizational structure)
• Externalize thinking (the expert’s and learners’ thinking) to help understand the deeper structures and connections
• Max-Neef’s theory of needs (which needs can this camp/intervention satisfy?) which I just learned about in Transition Design

02/20/2018 | Organizing knowledge for our objective

The weather was fantastic so we had class outside! We focused on one specific thing that we wanted to teach in our pre-/post-camp intervention in class today. Xenia, Roger, and I went with observing/noticing/describing nature in urban contexts, which became helping nature flourish in urban settings.

Mastery cycle (notes from Stacie’s lecture)

In our group we thought of ways to cultivate students understanding and action of helping nature flourish in urban settings. The mastery framework which is shown on the right helped us understand the different steps necessary to get someone to a level of mastery.

At first, our learners will be novices, so they won’t know what they don’t know (which is connected to the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people are overly confident because they don’t know how much they don’t know). To get them to some level of competency, we broke down the components of our goal into:

• understand nature (characteristics and organizing)
• understand urban (context)
• Observe nature in urban settings
• Understand the growth of nature (we specifically chose plants)
• Have students act to help nature flourish through a project/action

Based on the Dirksen reading about sustaining attention, we thought of giving contexts in which students would need to help nature flourish, specifically food producing plants, and they would choose different plants based on the setting. So the context might be a low water supply or a zombie apocalypse where the zombies like sweet tasting plants. The students would be given a different plants to study and specific information about the context. There would also be other choices, like different places to place the plants. We thought this form of gamification would excite students and give them a reason to understand the information they were learning.

Through this exercise we thought about the power of storytelling, engaging students through gamification, making the information relevant by providing context, leveraging past experiences and pop culture, putting the student at the center of the learning, and asking questions as opposed to giving answers.

I still haven’t got this whole story thing down… I did come across a website that reminded me of Dirksen’s simple, but powerful illustrations called Wait But Why. This plus a transition design class reminded me that I need to think about how I communicate the information I’m learning. These notes aren’t just for me, but for anyone who happens to come across them.

Takeaways

• Help learners move through different stages of mastery by exposing them to information, giving them time to practice, and working on the different skills until they no longer think about them.
• Creating contexts where the information that learners are given is immediately relevant (ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!). Giving learners information and asking them a question about it (similar to an Escape Room).

02/26/2018 | The Six Facets of Understanding (Wiggins and McTighe)

In Chapter 4 of Understanding by Design, Wiggins and McTighe explain the six facets of understanding (which are useful for teaching and assessing for subject-mater mastery, but are artificial distinctions):

1. Explain. Knowledge of how and why; relations to other things. Assignments requiring an explanation of what the student knows and good reasons in support of it and adding new information and seeing how the learner deals with it.
2. Interpret. Organizing information in a narrative. Assignments ask learners to interpret, translate, make sense of, show the significance of, decode and make a story meaningful. These ideas can connect to learners’ everyday life. What does it all mean? Why is it important to me/us? We need to teach learners to build stories and interpretations (ex. an oral history out of different interviews).
3. Apply. Using the right knowledge in new contexts, so context-dependent knowledge. Assessments should then be performance based and give students new problems that they can apply the concepts and knowledge they have to work on. Think of ways for students to reinvent the knowledge and tools they have developed. These performance-based tasks should be authentic, but still have conventional tests to get students ready for the novel situations.
4. Perspective. Taking an “objective” stance and analyzing the underlying assumptions and the point of view of the author/context, which means they realize every answer is just one points of view. Making tacit assumptions and implications explicit. What are other ways of thinking about this problem, especially opposing points of view? Novices have trouble understanding facts from multiple perspectives. Create opportunities to be presented with alternative theories regarding the same issue and letting the learner think through each possibility.
5. Empathize. Understanding from the viewpoint of another. Creating situations where learners directly or indirectly experience the ideas they are studying, with the added bonus of seeing them from another point of view. Learners should ask themselves about how something they find absurd could make sense to someone else. Experiential learning is necessary to get students to understand the ideas from another’s viewpoint.
6. Self-knowledge. We must understand ourselves (self-assess, self-regulate, and metacognition) to understand our world, others, and what we don’t know. Regular self-questioning is necessary to grow in this area. Create self-assessments for students’ performance and then have the instructor add their assessment, and these should be more in depth than a simple numerical score for different areas on a simplistic rubric (which I have done a few of in my day and found little meaning in them).

Sea Pie by Diary of a Mad Hausfrau

My acronym for the six facets of understanding is SEA PIE. The best way to know if you understand something is to make yourself a SEA PIE:

• Self-knowledge
• Empathize with other people and their opinions/confusions
• Apply the information to new contexts
• Perspective of the whole picture and can rethink an issue from multiple angles
• Interpret the information and incorporate personal, referential, or historical angles
• Explain the information in a comprehensible way to others.

Two ways to think about planning learning experiences:

• Thinking like an assessor (meeting learning objectives and how to verify that)
• Thinking like an activity designer (creating fun and engaging content)

Personal thoughts

• I gravitate towards theory and understanding the facts, without really needing to understand how it could be applied. In Poincaré’s math example, I only need to know the syllogisms are true and am less interested in their application (which I still care about or else I would be studying pure math or theoretical science). Stories are less interesting for me, although I still appreciate them. Now the question is if I follow my natural tendencies or develop the ability to work with narratives.
• Perspective is something that I may try to do too much… I’m always thinking of the context in which ideas are born and who says them and what that says about their perspective on the situation. In my research for Jonathan Chapman about time, I am most interested in the work that rethinks the prevailing paradigm and proposes a new perspective, which is also why I like the work of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, conceptualist art, and Jorge Luis Borges.
• My own thinking is most amenable to explain, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge. Which means I lack some ability to interpret and apply, or at least am less interested in them.
• I really enjoy reading and grappling with educational theory especially when it pertains to teaching and developing students. How can I do something with this? Also, reading a reference about a PhD made me think that it is something I would enjoy and be good at, although it would entail a lot of suffering.

Takeaways

• Use the rubric at the end for each of the 6 facets
• Reference the specific examples in the text under instructional implications if we want to follow this framework
• Make these posts shorter. Choose one interesting thing and talk about that. Don’t try to explain (understand) everything. These are tools that I can use, and so I should find the shiny things I’m interested in and leave the rest.
• Use different perspectives when writing these posts, so take the viewpoint of a family member, friend, or peer in the class.
• Experiential learning is one way to increase empathy and apply information, while possibly gaining perspective.
• Self-assessments with the teacher’s comments added
• Ideation session ideas. Need to choose a few of these theories and ideas to apply to our work. We can then mix it up to see if any new ideas come to mind.

02/27/2018 | Meeting with Breann and Brandon from CMNH

Breann is the Camps and Classes Coordinator and Brandon is a Museum Educator and the creator of content for the new camps.

Our goals for the interview were to understand the demographics, the curriculum, and other background information about the camps. We also wanted to identify a camp or two so we could focus our designs on a few concrete examples. A full list of our questions can be found here.

Key takeaways

Demographics

• There are many repeat students, especially in the older camps (they could take mentoring roles)
• Campers have often visited the museum before and sometimes know it better than the staff
• Rare that campers come with friends. They have camp friends and will see them during the summer, but usually not during the school year.
• The camp sometimes doesn’t know the number of participants until the Thursday or Friday before (if the camp doesn’t reach the 24 camper maximum).
• They shared with us the demographic data and Xenia made these data visualizations using Tableau:

Curriculum

• There are four camps that meet our criteria of 11–13 year old range and the content relates to 21st century naturalist skills: Wetlands and Waterways, Future Thinking Labs, Go Pittsburgh, and Outdoor Adventure. There is one camp for younger kids called Conservation Nation that is directly about 21st century naturalist skills.
• At the end of the week each group presents a project.

General

• Pre-camp activities will be hard to do because sometimes people register at the last minute.
• 11–13 year olds aren’t coming every week and are more intentional in their camp choices.
• There isn’t any post-camp follow up right now.
• They are currently testing some of their activities with their homeschooling class. There may be an opportunity for us to also test our ideas with their homeschooling class.
• There is a difference between how camps are run and how classes are run. Camps are more informal and experience-based learning.

The camps we are most interested in are the Wetlands and Waterways and Conservation Nation. We will follow up about these camps to get more details and understand how we can add to what they already have done.

02/28/2019 | How do you understand understanding?

Based on what I learned last week, this post should:

• have a story
• be from the perspective of Tyler Starr (a good friend from undergrad who likes to do wacky things)
• focus on one main idea

I’m assigning myself these goals to mix up how I’m writing on Medium.

Elizabeth, the scientist, was studying cells in a petri dish and was fascinated by the connections she found between them. Each cell had similar features and related to each other. She could apply what she learned from one cell to another and the results would be similar. The connections continued and she felt like she understood the cells she was working on. While at home after work her dog looked like he was sick. While she took care of him, she started to realize that the single cells she was studying related to each other, not only in structure, but also in a complex way to create larger organisms. Why had she been always so intent on understanding the individual cells. This was a moment of self-knowledge and reflection.

Just like Elizabeth in this story, I realized that I’ve been focused on the minutiae at the expense of understanding the whole. I’ve felt very comfortable regurgitating information, explaining it, thinking about where the information has come from (perspective), and reflecting on my own tendencies, but I haven’t done much interpreting (this is an attempt), applying (which we will do in this class for our project), and empathizing. So to be able to implement and think through these ways of understanding, I think I need to be able to do them myself. Therefore, I will use these Medium posts as experiments to try new ways of working.

Takeaways

• Focus on interpreting, applying, and empathizing in my Medium posts

02/28/2018 | Examples of the six facets of understanding from Wiggins and McTighe and applying them to our CMNH project

Explain

CMNH

• After going out on a walk through the city and a park with a discussion about nature having students share their experiences through visuals, a presentation, words, a collage, and/or a concept map.
• Going for a tour outside and taking pictures, which are then printed and used to explain what they think of as nature and clustering other photos around examples of when humans impact the environment

Interpret

CMNH

• Show and tell your relationship to nature. Have students create a story using storyboarding. The story illustrates their understanding of the concept that was explored previously through hands-on experiences. This could also take the form of a play or physical acting of the concept. How do you physically represent composting?

Apply

Ex. Learning about graphs and statistics and then using that information to understand a few stocks that you choose and monitor for a month.

Trends

• Hands on
• Can apply immediately
• Tangible outcome
• Fun outcome (food, money, explosions, etc.)
• Practical outcome (can open jars that are stuck by running hot water on them and expanding the metal)
• Make sure the activity and its goal are clear to the learner

CMNH

• After learning about decomposition and how it works, students then use their knowledge to create composting boxes. They also could be given a lot of different material and need to decide which materials go in the compost and which don’t.

Perspective

Ex. The website Pop Your Bubble, which adds new perspectives to your Facebook newsfeed, so you are exposed to opinions that differ from your own.

Trends

• Strong facilitation from outside (teacher, game, technology)
• Can be forced, so how can this be done in a way that is natural?
• Immersion may be one way to overcome the inability to relate

CMNH

• Before going on an excursion, expose campers to different ways of looking at nature, e.g. scientist, animal, plant. During a walking tour of an area, in pairs give campers different perspectives to view the world through and take notes. When they return to camp they each present their findings.
• After seeing two videos about the same issue from different sides, campers are randomly selected to argue for one of the sides in a debating activity similar to this one from Noisy Classroom.

Empathize

Ex. Caring for a robotic baby that randomly cries for a day or longer in high school.

Trends

• Props
• Immersive
• The experience has a narrative
• Multi-sensory experiences
• These experiences take some time to be effective
• Need to make sure the experience is meaningful and meeting the learning goals, while being enjoyable

CMNH

• To gain a deeper understanding of the effects of leaving trash in a park, campers are broken up into groups to create a short skit depicting what animals might do with the trash that is left over (this could be connected to going to the We Are Nature exhibition and seeing all the plastic in the bird’s stomach).

Self-Knowledge

Ex. Habit forming app

Trends

• Feedback
• Comparison (to other people or averaged data or other ways of doing things)
• Gets you to slow down and reflect
• The user must trust the source
• Calling out behavior (to bring attention to it)
• Traveling and experiencing other cultures are ways to gain self-knowledge without a prompt. This could possibly be extended to other experiences if we give comparisons…
• Self-discovery (saying the scripts that students had written for an animation out loud, which gave them a chance to think through what they had written by engaging other senses)

CMNH

• As a class, campers could document data about their lives (ex. length of showers, electricity usage, how far they drive) and then bring all that data together in a visual representation so campers can see where they are relative to other people and be able to track themselves on a regular basis.
• Thinking of multiple aspects of their everyday life (brushing their teeth, eating, opening and closing doors, turning on and off the lights, opening and closing the refrigerator) in an ideation exercise. Then having each camper choose one and keep a journal about their behavior during the week. Before the end of camp, campers choose a way to to reduce the negative impact or do a different activity to offset the negative impact (ex. bathing: camper reduces his/her time in the shower OR switches to cold showers OR reduces meat intake)

03/01/2018 | Building Skills and Understanding

Goals for this article:

• Choose one or two concepts to focus on
• Apply the concept to another area (ideally connected to my life)

Procedural processes that are connected to McCarthy’s 4MAT

Cyclical nature of learning which is similar to the idea of flow

In this class we learned about procedural processes for building skills/understanding—putting the information on learners’ radars (content), practicing the skill/knowledge (integrate), and applying the skill/knowledge to a new context (apply)—and the cyclical nature of learning—letting students become confident in their abilities, then increasing the challenge and letting them get comfortable again, and then increasing the challenge (this is also closely connected to the concept of flow where the difficulty of the activity needs to be a little above the current level of the learner, but not too difficult or else the learner feels frustrated).

The way I see it is that the linear parts are zoomed in sections of the cyclical nature of learning. Too often we try to reduce things to linear processes, which strips the real world of its complexity and the interrelations between parts. This model of shifting between zoomed in sections that are more or less linear and then zooming out to see the how those parts relate to each other to form a dynamic whole will keep our learning experiences so that they are effective in both the short-term and long-term.

This is similar to a Wait But Why article I was reading, which talked about differences in scale. We live our lives day to day and can only do things on that scale. But each day is a pixel that creates the image that is our life. If we get stuck thinking about the image and how it is going to turn out, then the scale of the image is overwhelming. So we need to focus on the pixel and every now and then take a moment to see what type of image is being made and make adjustments accordingly. Our learning experience ideally should also follow this pattern of focusing on the everyday and occasionally making time to reflect on where the campers are going.

03/067/2018 | Meeting with Mandi Lyon from CMNH

The goal for our meeting was to learn about the partners in the community to be able to extend the learning in the camp and create a network that campers can join.

Mandi Lyon is the Program Development Coordinator at CMNH, which she says is like their R+D department. She is in charge of getting grants, figuring out what to do with the money they have, and making connections to outside partners.

Some things we learned:

• The Anthropocene focus was started by the director of CMNH
• There is opportunity to connect interested campers to services/groups in the community (currently this isn’t done and isn’t measured).
• The climate change kits via Climate and Urban Systems Partnership (CUSP) Pittsburgh were developed to be used at tabling events for informal learning about climate issues and a survey suggests that the 20-minute games had a longer term impact. The kits are something we can look into to see if we can incorporate them and/or learn from them.
• Some groups that Mandi thought we could connect with are the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, Urban EcoStewards (also part of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy), Pittsburgh Zoo, Tree Pittsburgh, Allegheny Land Trust, and the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association. Will these groups have opportunities for 11–13 year olds interested in volunteering?
• There isn’t any structure to follow up after a camp. The only evidence of an effect is through anecdotes from parents.
• The 21st Century Naturalist checklist is a benchmarking system for the different educational initiatives of the museum. They hope that students naturally progress through the different phases. So the definition doesn’t need to be perfect, but is continually being refined.
• Currently there is no direct connection with schools, but there is an educator collection for teachers and the climate change kits through CUSP can be used.
• Kevin Crowley at UPCLOSE at the University of Pittsburgh does research on natural history museums and learning. The main relevant concept from his research is learning ecosystems. Here are some links to papers that might be relevant from his work: City-Wide Collaborations for Urban Climate Education, Informal learning organizations as part of an educational ecology: Lessons from collaboration across the formal-informal divide, Learning to Make in the Museum: The Role of Maker Educators 1, A Learning Research Agenda for Natural History Institutions, Challenging Beliefs, Practices, and Content: How Museum Educators Change, The Natural History Museum: Taking on a Learning Agenda
• How can we track students to see their growth and if the camps have an impact on their future lives?
• Digital badging system in Chicago for tracking informal learning. Remake Learning tried to do this in Pittsburgh, but it wasn’t successful.

Takeaways

• Our design as a network that connects the campers with opportunities in their communities and in the city to extend their interest and learning.
• Tracking progress as a way for students to be able to reflect on their learning and for the museum to see what they have done and where they are going.
• Kevin Crowley does research about learning ecosystems, which is relevant to our project and could add depth to our thinking.

03/06/2018 | Who, What, Why, When, Where and group brainstorming

We started class by reflecting on what we are interested in and the who, what, why, when, and where of our prospective design. Below is what I wrote:

My interests

• Systems thinking in an informal educational environment
• Applying ideas from Transition Design to this project to continue the learning of campers, so it’s not a one-off event but an ecosystem of learning
• Using digital technology to connect campers to their physical world
• How our design can connect students with their interests from the camp to further learning

Our audience

• 11 — 13 year olds who enroll in the camp
• The counselors (we need more information about who will lead these camps)
• Community partners
• CMNH

What we want them to learn

• Systems thinking
• More about their relationship to nature
• Communicating what they’ve learned to others
• Skills to be able to do the work that will be necessary for 21st Century Naturalists
• How their actions have an impact on the environment and then applying that knowledge to make changes to their everyday life

These learning goals are valuable because… (need more of a camper perspective)

• Connecting campers with nature can give them agency over what is happening in the environment
• Helping students find areas they are interested in and giving them resources to pursue those interests
• Creating a foundation of skills that can be used in the future, which involves developing slow skills
• Campers will have tangible results of their actions and will know more about behavior change

When

• Post-camp and continuing their interests (11 — 13 year olds usually only go to a few camps that they like) or build into camp and extend it beyond the camp
• Extending camp into another opportunity (partners, camps, other learning resources, etc)

Where (need a more focused area)

• Pittsburgh community

Learning theories that could be useful

• 4MAT and CCAF model (way to analyze information and the way the camp is set up plus where we can intervene)
• Developing mastery
• Learning flow and practice with feedback

Minor learning theories and other things to apply

• Mapping learner relations
• Defining learner states and bridging gaps
• Aiding motivation
• Max-Neef’s theory of needs (from Transition Design)
• Mapping the problem to find intervention points

Other thoughts that could be useful when thinking about our work

• Growth mindset and grit
• Nudging (our goal and should campers be aware of it or not?)

This post:

• Diagram made on my tablet to illustrate my points
• Use the images to empathize with a different way of thinking