All entries for Monday 29 June 2009

June 29, 2009

Using the Teaching Grid for 'hub–and–spoke' style teaching

This is an entry that I wrote in October 2008, reviewing a session that I had taught in the Teaching Grid. I'm porting it over to my new research blog for future reference.

In the first week of term I used the Teaching Grid experimental teaching space to teach the first session of a design and communications skills module. Having found a traditional IT training room to be inappropriate for such a session, I was keen to explore alternatives.

The International Design and Communication Management MA is a relatively new course, based in the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies and convened by Dr. Jonathan Vickery. It is professionally oriented, but with a strong emphasis upon the application of academic skills and theory. In the Autumn term, I teach a 'multimedia communication' skills module, consisting of eight two hour sessions. The core task of the module is for each students to design, create and use a personal e-portfolio. These web pages should then be maintained by each student, so as to represent their own academic and professional experience and capabilities. The e-portfolio will contribute to assessment of the student's work, as well as performing a vital role in the process of arranging and undertaking the professional placement in the summer term. They may also be used after the course has been completed, as part of the student's career development.

In the past, all of these sessions have been taught in conventional IT training rooms (rows of PCs facing a screen with a data projector). However, there is a significant 'theoretical' element to the task: a set of analytical, investigative, conceptual tools and behaviours that must be mastered in order to create an effective design within the given constraints: the students must learn to think and act as design and communication professionals, with the addition of a reflective academic perspective. The traditional IT room is unsuited to these more challenging aims. To effectively acquire and practice these skills, the students should be able to:

  • frequently present their designs to each other for feedback, engage in creative processes, such as drawing on whiteboards, conducting interviews, acting out scenarios;
  • seek mutual confirmation of understanding, especially when undertaking complex tasks and using abstract concepts;
  • exhibit the products of the design process for peer (simulated client) review (in the last session).

The environment in which this happens must enable the students to behave as:

  • design and communication professionals;
  • investigative, reflective academics.

The high proportion of students with English as a foreign language also makes such collaborative working valuable. However, with many of the students coming from the tradition of didactic content transmission, establishing the required practices and attitudes is problematic. I actively resist being drawn back into a traditional lecture mode, and am therefore keen to use an environment that strongly supports active, investigative, collaborative learning. However, given the steep multi-dimensional learning curve that is required, I must also be sensitive to the need to continually provide clear models of the many new and challenging behaviours that I demand from the students. There is therefore a tension between encouraging student beahviour of the kind described above, and the need to continually provide clear exemplars. To address this conflict, I use online tools and a 'hub-and-spoke' classroom working arrangement.

The online tools are constructed from a combination of resources that can be used independently at any time, and a session plan (on a single web page) putting some of these resources into context and setting challenges to the students, the solutions to which may use the resources. The session plan web page was used throughout the session, both by me at the central 'hub' location, and by the students in small groups as they dispersed into the 'spokes'. In the first session, the resources included a 7 minute video of a discussion between myself and Jonathan Vickery (explaining the purpose of the sessions), as well as an extensive glossary of key design and communication terms, relevant to the many issues that the students must consider.

The 'hub and spoke' physical organisation aims to provide a central location at which new ideas and practices can be introduced and modelled (hub), and a series of student team workareas (spokes) at which small groups of students can work indepedently to experiment and apply what they have seen. For this to work effectively, it should be easy to bring the focus of the session back from the spokes to the hub. It should also be possible to invite students to bring their work from the spokes to the hub and demonstrate it back to the rest of the class. A further possibility is for students from one spoke to visit students in another spoke.

In searching for a more appropriate learning space in which this could take place, I based the first session in the Teaching Grid experimental teaching space. The final session, in which the students will exhibit their e-portfolios, will return to the Teaching Grid, with the intervening sessions taking place in a traditional IT training room. It would have been preferable to hold the first two sessions in the Teaching Grid, allowing the more challenging activities to be undertaken in a longer time, however, the room was not available.

The space available to us in the Teaching Grid does not completely support the 'hub-and-spoke' learning design when used with 25 students. Using glass and curtain partitions, it can be divided into four small spaces each capable of accomodating six students with a laptop and large screen (two spaces with LCD smart boards, two with data projectors). It also proved possible to merge two of these spaces at one end into one, so as to accomodate all 25 students. However, there is no separate 'hub' location that can be viewed by all four groups in situ. To reconvene all 25 students in one place required their work to be disrupted and two of the spaces to be reconfigured. I attempted to compensate for this by putting some of the hub activities into the session plan web page as text, to be used independently by the students in the spoke locations. This is obviously a much less effective, less personal, less flexible, less controlled approach than demonstrating from the hub position: seriously detrimental to the effectiveness of the session.

The session was divided into three segments, intended to last around 40 minutes each. In the first segment, with the students gathered into a double work space and facing a large screen, I introduced the module web site, the glossary, and the session plan page. I then played the introductory video. This worked well, being a relatively conventional activity. We then spent a short time diviiding into groups using a voluntary method. It would have been better to have had the groups pre-assigned, and better still to have had the students already seated in their groups at the spoke locations all viewing the central hub.

The second segment was much more challenging, with each group being given the task of working through sequences of glossary terms, and then applying those terms to their own e-portfolio design process. The new Sitebuilder glossary system worked wonderfully, allowing me to quickly build a resource to which we we return constantly during the module. Modelling from the central hub would have made a significant difference to this series of difficult tasks. I was able to easily walk between groups to offer additional support, but found myself to be repeating explanations for each group.

Finally, each group was tasked with designing an e-portfolio for a client (me). They were able to get paper and pens, and had access to the computers for researching the client. Some students tried to use the electronic whiteboard but struggled. Other students used to video cameras that I provided (Sanyo Xacti HD) to interview the client. The final presentations were caried out in one of the spaces, with students able to watch from the space outside. This was entirely paper based. Given more time, it would have been better for the students to create a digital presentation combining video, audio, text and images. Stretching the activiites over two weeks would have enabled this.


Robert O'Toole : 29 Jun 2009 21:10 |  Tags:    |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Design Thinking – Tim Brown

In this entry I discuss the argument that good design (and problem solving) depends upon the maintainance of three seperate types of activity. I go on to consider how this might apply to teaching, and how learning spaces might be designed and used to support this approach.

Introducing "design thinking"

I've just read the article Design Thinking1 by Tim Brown of the design company IDEO (available as a PDF), in which the author argues for the adoption of a design attitude and methodology in addressing all kinds of difficult problems (from service design to political and social). From a page on the IDEO web site in which they talk about their methods:

An inherently shared approach, design thinking brings together people from different disciplines to effectively explore new ideas—ideas that are more human-centered, that are better able to be executed, and that generate valuable new outcomes.2

The article promotes good design practices, such as prototyping, iteration, storytelling and empathic design, bundled together into the process of design seen as a collective non-linear collaboration of simultaneous acts of experiencing (using, feeling, participating), responding systematically (conceptualizing, creating narratives, prototyping), and manufacturing. It is almost as if these three activities are distinct but interdependent design faculties (and yes I mean that in a quasi Kantian sense). The article contains a nice diagram, with a large impressionistic circle divided unevenly into three blobs connected by bi-directional flows:

  • Inspiration
  • Ideation
  • Implementation (drawn as smaller than the other two)

It gets even more interesting when Brown states that:

The design process is best described metaphorically as a system of spaces rather than a pre-defined series of orderly steps. The spaces demarcate different sorts of related activities that together form the continuum of innovation.3

A continuum of faculties/spaces, not a process

Consider the three spaces to be three inter-dependent faculties. Inspiration is the essential perceptual apparatus that seeks to experience the world as real people do (rather than as stick people on use case diagrams). But the important message is that the designer must not ever switch their faculty of inspiration off, or allow it to be filled with prejudices coming from ideation and implementation - you may think you have a perfect design, but don't get carried away. And that's why it's important to think of the spaces as being constantly and simultaneously active: not a sequence but a continuum:

...the process makes sense and achieves results, even though its architecture differs from the linear, milestone-based processes typical of other kinds of business activities.3

Implications for teaching

The IDEO approach addresses one of the most common errors encountered in both design projects and independent student led investigative learning: becoming locked into a seemingly adequate solution before the problem domain and the array of possible responses has been thoroughly explored. The message for designers and for students is thus: keep yourself open to new and potentially disruptive experiences (facts, feelings etc), keep coming up with new narratives and prototypes (concepts, arguments, stories, structures), before becoming too locked into producing the final result - and even then be prepared to be agile.

Implications for learning space design

For both designers and for students it is important to sustain all three of these design faculties, even when concentrating upon one more than the others. Brown's argument suggests that separate physical spaces need to be maintained, so that the designer (student) can move from one faculty to another (even though earlier he described the model as "metaphorical"). In his diagram he suggest:

Have a project room where you can share insights, tell stories.4

A kind of reflective space for reporting back from the outside world, from the source of all inspiration (a blog could be the online equivalent). If one were to create three such offline or online spaces, one would aim to make them distinct and tailored to each type of activity, not simply for functional reasons, but also to encourage a change of behaviour as students move between the spaces.

Perhaps it would be wise to encourage each student to spend time in each of the spaces? So that, for example, they avoid becoming too deeply embedded in implementation issues, and lose their connection with inspirational experiences.

This now suggests a way to redesign activities that I will be teaching as part of the MA in International Design and Communications Management.

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has taught in this way, or experienced such design spaces.

________________

1 Brown, T. Design Thinking, Harvard Business Review, June 2008.

2 Approach - Thinking - IDEO, http://www.ideo.com/thinking/approach/ [Accessed 29/06/09]

3 Brown, T.  p.88

4 Brown, T. p.89

________________

An article on design thinking in education, by Alice Daniel, can be found at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3797/is_200702/ai_n18706046/



Robert O'Toole : 29 Jun 2009 20:56 |  Tags:      |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem