A Typology of User Experience Pleasures

Great teachers would probably understand immediately how each of these examples of cognitive seduction help people learn things. Kathy Sierra is talking about designing experiences for users of software, but wouldn't it be great if school was set up with these goals in mind? When's the last time you took a course that stimulated or contained even a handful of these feelings or elements? Her checklist could be used for designing learning experiences:

"1. Discovery
User experience as exploration of new territory
2. Challenge
User experience as obstacles to overcome, goals lying just beyond current skill and knowledge levels
3. Narrative
User experience as story arc (user on hero's journey) and character identification
4. Self-expression
User experience as self-discovery and creativity
5. Social framework
User experience as an opportunity for interaction/fellowship with others
6. Cognitive Arousal
User experience as brain teaser
7. Thrill
User experience as risk-taking with a safety net
8. Sensation
User experience as sensory stimulation
9. Triumph
User experience as opportunity to kick ass
10. Flow
User experience as opportunity for complete concentration, extreme focus, lack of self-awareness
11. Accomplishment
User experience as opportunity for productivity and success
12. Fantasy
User experience as alternate reality
13. Learning
User experience as opportunity for growth and improvement"

More on Personal Learning Environments

Although I haven't been posting much lately, I've still been following the ongoing discussion on personal learning environments. Of particular interest were Graham Attwell's in-depth coverage and this PLE wiki page initiated and maintained by Mark van Harmelen.

Let's Face(book) It

Good post on the growing desire for schools to integrate (co-opt?) technologies students are already using on their own: Let's Face(book) It. As I've said before, I think this strategy is doomed. Institutions creating their own social software spaces (blogging apps, e-portfolios, social-networking systems) to try to harness student interest will soon see tumbleweeds rolling through and not much else. Even educators who figure out how to use the tools for meeting curriculum goals will only ever get students to jump through hoops with these apps -- the needs of the institution and the real goals of students are too different. Stephen's comment is spot-on, and he also links to some further discussion.

Interest Level More Important Than Marks

Not really surprising, but still interesting -- high-school students' level of interest in the sciences is a better predictor of their success in the field later in life than their marks in science courses -- Early education key to scientific career choice:

"The findings suggest that mandatory testing policies, such as the No Child Left Behind Law promoted by the Bush administration as a solution to low-performing US schools, might worsen the nation's output of scientists by distracting teachers from field trips and other activities that stimulate student interest in sciences, Tai said."

New Skills For A New Century

Practical and powerful article from Edutopia on project-based learning: New Skills For A New Century. They've also got a whole content section devoted to the topic.

On a related note, Stephen linked to Christopher Sessum's excellent account of visiting a school doing project-based learning. My current interest in this topic stems from my thesis work, which is partly dealing with how people choose interesting projects (through learning goals). What if curriculum wasn't pre-defined and people could choose what (and how) to learn?

Change Happens

A little e-learning industry news: Xap Corporation To Acquire Bridges Transitions (pdf). This is significant for me because Bridges has been my employer here in the Okanagan since 1999, and Xap is a company from California. Should be interesting to see what happens.

Communicating Design Concepts

Just a virtual bookmark for this wise article on communicating design concepts -- these are issues I deal with every week in designing features and sites with prototypes, wireframes, mockups and design documentation...and don't always get it right.

Literature Review in Informal Learning

I still need to dig further into Futurelab's literature review in informal learning with technology outside school:

"This review focuses specifically on children's informal learning with technologies outside school. It brings together the existing research in the field to create a map of this digital ecology of education, discussing what we know about which children have access to these technologies, what they are using them for and the implications of this use for learning. Most significantly, however, it summarises the extent to which the research in this area is beginning to raise fundamental questions about how children learn and, consequently, whether we need to re-examine the design of our formal education system."

Flat Classrooms and New Schools

All kinds of big-thinking goodness about self-directed learning models in education:

• Holistic and Integral Education: Flat Classrooms, bouncing off Warlick's Flat Classrooms
  
• What if everything we think about school is wrong? This one was triggered by the fantastic Fairhaven School video, which seems to have popped up all over the place (more info here).
  
• Karen Remeis responded with: A different approach to school, somewhat skeptical about how many students will be motivated to learn in any kind of self-directed way.
  
• Albert Ip's follow-up post goes deeper.

Mostly via Stephen.

Seb's Open Research

I seem to have missed the return of Seb's Open Research a couple of weeks ago, but I'm glad to see it back. In the first volley of excellent posts, I thought his coverage of a conference session by Intuit's Scott Cook was top-notch, digging into innovation, user-focused design, and smart software development.

Social Software and the Co-Creation of Knowledge

Social Software and the Co-Creation of Knowledge is a quick post with a fairly simple question: "If social software supports the notion of individual choice, how does it best serve formal educational environments?" I know there have been examples of creative teachers finding ways to integrate these tools effectively, but I think they're really having to swim upstream, often having to ignore or stretch their curriculum constraints. And I'm glad they are -- in radical moments, I'd just as soon see most teachers chuck the curriculum in favour of guiding students toward the topics and projects that fascinate them most, regardless of the subject area. For that process, social software could become the primary way to learn. Anyway...great discussion in the comments to Christopher Sessum's post, and his follow-up post is excellent as well.

Designing Interfaces

Designing Interfaces is a book, but the accompanying site is a valuable resource as well. It lists interaction patterns for web sites and applications, describing each one and explaining when, how and why it is used. A nice toolkit if you're looking at designing something new for the web.

Close Down the Schools

Pat Kane's big idea for 2006 channels some Ivan Illich. He visited a group of pre-teens to talk to (and ask them about) digital tools in their lives, and found a total disconnect between the richness of their online worlds and what they're "learning" in class:

"All of them were actively involved in digital creativity in one form or another, from making fan websites with up to 60,000 hits, through coding Flash animations for their friends, to arranging music downloads for underground Glaswegian rap artists. But none of them saw any connection between this intrinsically motivated, rawly enterprising lifestyle -- where trade, hacking, self-skilling and peer-to-peer co-operation was the norm -- and any part of the curriculum they were receiving at school. And this was a computer studies class."

OLDaily

I miss OLDaily. Not in a crying-in-my-beer sort of way, just feeling the absence.

Electronic Portfolios for Whom?

Javier I. Ayala is looking at the literature on e-portfolios and seeing that the current research focuses almost entirely on assessment and meeting curricular outcomes instead of student-centered learning: Electronic Portfolios for Whom?

"To date, administrators and other change agents have capably articulated the importance of electronic portfolios; hence you might infer that the talk is matched with a walk in line with student needs and concerns. I argue that this is far from the case. In fact, much of what passes under the rubric of student needs and concerns in relation to electronic portfolios is nothing more than an attempt to solve curricular issues that have plagued higher education for decades, the least of them being student learning."

Thanks to the FutureMeter at XplanaZine. I keep rediscovering it, thinking how awesome it is, and then forgetting to subscribe -- a reminder from think:lab finally sealed the deal today.

Emergent Learning and Connecting with the Field

My friend Chris Corrigan shares some of his family's experience with unschooling in emergent learning and connecting with the field. The unschooling label scares many people, even more so than the homeschooling label. But what the Corrigans are doing isn't scary at all -- it's a rich, varied, caring approach to learning that really rings true for me.

"So this is what my kids continue to teach me. Create a caring and supportive environment, live by the principle that whenever it starts is the right time, and watch as learning happens."

A Space on the Web That We Control

Elgg is getting some much-deserved positive attention these days -- this mainstream article from the Guardian gives a nice overview of the basic uses: A Space on the Web That We Control.

Individualized Education Plans

I Speak of Dreams links the concepts of the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) with Individual Education Plans (IEP) and Personalized Learning Plan (PLP) in her post about Differentiating Education. IEPs have traditionally been used for special-needs students, but she points to a charter school now offering/requiring a version of them for every student -- and really, why shouldn't every learner have an individualized plan for what they're going to be learning and how they might do that best?

Classrooms as Studios -- Personal Doing Environments

Great thoughts from Remote Access (bouncing off an excellent post from David Warlick) on the idea of classrooms as studios:

"It is an intense, team-oriented, creative space where people are driven to create high-quality products. Studios are focused areas, and unfortunately in the case of the classroom, they may be too much so. In our splintered systems where kids need to 'cover' hundreds of outcomes in a single school year, the studio may provide too much depth and not enough breadth to make legislators happy. Make no mistake about it, kids can focus and be creative for long periods of time if they are working on issues they are concerned with and about."

So here you've got a motivated, innovative teacher who wants to let kids focus on the stuff that matters to them...but is finding it at odds with the goals of the system. I love the studio metaphor, and you could add others as well: lab, workshop or any other place where you learn the things you need to know in order to actually do something of value, to accomplish a goal you care about.

Perhaps this is the real model for the personal learning environment -- an organizing concept for an individual's physical and digital spaces containing the physical and virtual tools they will need to accomplish their goals. In an educational mindset, we might think the learning itself is the important thing, but really we're talking about doing, with learning as something that happens in the process of pursuing meaningful goals. Sometimes learning for its own sake could be the goal, but I suspect that most people aren't motivated in that way. Working on projects, creating new things, solving difficult problems -- these all require learning, but if I could accomplish those things without learning anything, I'd still do them, as long as the projects and problems were worth spending time and energy on.

This wouldn't interest me quite so much if I wasn't immersed in the idea of learning goals. I'm studying explicit learning goals in 43 Things, goals like "I want to learn to surf" and "I want to learn to speak Spanish". But when I think about my own experience, I realize that learning can be painful and disruptive and embarrassing enough to make me not want to try something in the first place. My actual goal is probably more like: "I want to surf" and "I want to speak Spanish". The learning might be what will get me there, but it's not the goal itself.

Thanks to George for the pointer.

Update: Clarence is reflecting more this topic...great stuff.

Seblogging PLEs

Sebastian Fiedler captures much of the recent PLE buzz and offers his own excellent take on the topic:

"I treat personal learning environments more as a psychological perspective. What forms my 'personal learning environment' at a given point in time, and for a particular purpose or goal (that drives a learning project), is largely determined by the range of resources that I am able to perceive, locate, link to, access, manage, and so forth."