Seriously Mobile Summit
I'm crossing my fingers that I can get the time to make it to the Serious Mobile Summit this Friday...I'm especially excited about the virtual discussion panel!
April 18, 2007
April 17, 2007
Bodystorming
© 1994-2007 Proboscis.
A term used to describe a variety of different approaches, but I like the one offered by Proboscis.
"Bodystorming is similar to brainstorming except it involves physical interaction and engagement with the system through a playful acting out of the issues, techniques, interface and interaction possibilities".
Giles explains that "our particular use of it as a technique is as an 'experience' for working with people in communities - giving abstract ideas a physical presence and sense of interaction that are often remote and difficult to grasp"
It is exactly the idea I was searching for in my last post but I would never have come up with such a clear and beautiful explanation. Funnily enough I already knew of Bodystorming, but I'd never have made the connection between this experience and my clumsy ideas about location-based learning and idea generation without google.
April 08, 2007
Thinking on the web.....
I've been thinking a lot recently about the ways in which the web has changed the way I learn. One of the most striking changes is the way it helps me to precipitate ideas. You know - the ones on the tip of my brain....
In the olden days, ideas like these might take days, weeks, months to reveal themselves, and sometimes they'd just slip away. Thinking about how I work on the web, I've come to realise I have developed methods that speed up the process, and give me a much better success rate! I start with a whiff of a thought...maybe I've got a few sketchey terms in my head, a faint outline. I pop them into google. "ideas, meme, precipitation, "new ways of learning"' If I'm lucky, someone out there has already put in the effort to develop a more concrete meme..in this case no...OK, then I'll read the articles, papers and blogs that include similar words or strings. Maybe one of them touches on a theme that rings bells, usually there'll be a sentence or two that seems to move closer to what I was thinking. I borrow the sentence and do another search. I repeat this circling process over and over again until I either find content that expresses my idea or is coming close enough that I can fill in the blanks.
If I get stuck, I'll do some word searches in wikipedia, and thesaurus.com. I've also started searching google images, professional image libraries like Corbis and even video:YouTube - as a visual learner, being able to tap into such a huge source of visual stimuli is a dream come true.
Once I have the idea, I'll usually email it to myself so it's in wriitng and I can look at it with fresh eyes. If I think it's worth it, I blog it. Writing here seems to be the best way to fully bake an idea because at that point, I find myself viewing the idea from the perspective of a reader - and that's when I'm most critical!
These approaches work so well for me that nowadays I'll boldly follow some entirely tenous thought that pops into my head, Blink-style, just to see where it leads!
Does anyone else work this way? Or some other way specific to the web?
OK, I admit: I have no idea yet how this relates to location-based learning, but deep deep down I have a feeling it does...and I'm confident I'm only a few searches away from the answer.....
February 05, 2007
What rural farmers in Montana can teach us about location-based learning.
thanks to http://depts.washington.edu/dmachine/mschung/thesis/presentation/04-object.html
Reading Corporeal Experience: A Haptic Way of Knowing, felt like hitting the jackpot. Maire Eithne O'Neill pulls together all the threads of Learning Theory, Dance, Georgraphy, Ethnography, Urban planning, Human Cognition, Environmental Psychology and in particular; case studies of ranchers in rural Montana, to explore the importance of embodied experience to our understanding of space and place.
She is primarily trying to establish new pedagogic methods for design, and especially in architecture, however I'd argue the discussion can be extended to any discipline involving spatial or platial cognition.
Her argument is so clear it sounds more like common sense.
Physical work, movement, and intimate contact with the built and natural landscape give people the opportunity to formulate knowledge about places that cannot be gained by singularly visual means.
(...)
Design education in general has failed to establish pedagogic methods for appropriately exploring a range of topistic (place) experiences as tools for design. In formal design learning, we rarely address or explore culturally and individually developed topistic experiences because we do not understand these modes of learning very well, and perhaps because this kind of autonomous knowledge undermines authority.
She introduces (and even invents when there's a gap) a surprising number of terms to describe how we learn and create meaning during location-based experiences.
I'm reminded again that I haven't even scratched the surface when it comes to understanding the value of location-based learning and more specifically, it's place in education.
>Haptic
>Somatic
>Topistic
>Spatial
>Placial
>Corporeal knowledge
>Body-ballet
>Place-ballet
>Kinesthetic
>Pathic
and that's without even mentioning the old faithfuls:
>Experiential
>Action-based
>Embodied
>Situated