Learner Experience Design-’20

The Teaching Tightrope

January 14

What excites you about diving into designing experiences for learning and why?

If you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime. You will see him learn as you teach and will feel good about having taught him. You will want to teach more to get more of that feeling. Everyone will see what a good teacher you are. More men will congregate at your dock to be taught by the fisherman who taught a man to eat for a lifetime. A line will form. A line will draw a crowd…

There are few things I loved more than teaching rock climbing. Flu season was an exciting time in the workplace for me. Inevitably, an instructor would fall ill, and oh gosh, oh no, there’d be no one else to teach ropes except for me, oh darn better close the laptop.

Fill ins included, I might be nearing 1,000 pupils. That’s 1,000 people I’ve warned that their first instinct when they panic is going to be to close their fist and retract it towards their body. Maybe 600 that I’ve warned to take a test fall before climbing too high so that their fear of heights could be curbed by their newfound trust in the system.

These lessons and learnings were vital, but also it became apparent to me that the need for these lessons could, at least partially, be attributed to a failure in Design. Had the Engineer behind the GriGri device considered panic reactions, we might not have needed that class at all.

Yet, the interactions that happened as part of the class were meaningful. They forged a bond between the instructor and the student. They validated the student’s feelings that they had achieved something and perhaps convinced them that “they were a climber.”

I think as designers we want to make everything more intuitive, but I also think learning experiences almost need a type of friction to make them satisfying and to give a sense of accomplishment. I’m not entirely sure how to sort out these needs and dynamics at this point, but I am excited to dive deeper into the careful balancing act in facilitating engaging, intuitive and durable learning.

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Lifelong Learning

January 21st, 2020

What topic(s) are you drawn to and why? Why do you believe the topic(s) is important? What challenges are you interested in exploring to create/improve the design of learning experiences?

If you pay attention, there are little pieces of poetry scattered throughout your life.

I graduated from college the same year my mom retired. Quite literally, I received a piece of paper listing that I had completed my studies in the sciences and for her one thanking her for her decades of service to the company.

Generations apart, she and I were at once faced with reorienting our life to a new phase and deciding how much of the previous phase we were carrying over.

As much as I was troubled by the new openness of my life, if I was in the “right career” or to what extent I might need to reset the pace and perspective of my way of living for next decade, I at least had some structure from starting a new job. While the structured personal learning of my schooling years was coming to an end (so I thought), I at least had the direction of knowing what I needed to focus my mind on next.

What we are trying to learn defines who we are.

In small but honest ways, my mother was faced with the question: Who am I now?

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I think what drew me to lifelong learning as a topic was the ways in which our perspective on learning has so much to do with our feeling of identity, how unstructured the problem space currently is, and the potential for decades of impact on a learner.

There were several suggestions thrown on our whiteboard that aimed to address some pretty heavy questions.

• What opportunities are there for setting growth minded learning perspectives as people transition out of their formal education, be it at the college level, high school or otherwise?
• What is the changing role of the library as a secondary learning center to the school?
• What to do about occupational retraining when a person’s job becomes obsolete? Who leads it? What is realistic?

For all of these problems, there is a unique challenge. For better or for worse, formal schooling begins at a standardized time in a person’s life, and occurs on regulated timelines. These questions of lifelong learning can happen at a wide range of times.

How do we account for these differences given generational cultural gaps/differences in learning paradigms, biological differences in the ways people learn, and the very real cultural stigmas in the workplace and more generally about older people learning?

While these are difficult challenges, and may overlap with other topics. Designing experiences for lifelong learning (if done effectively) has the opportunity to change the way a person views themselves and the way they engage with the world for decades to come.

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6 Small Questions about One Big Concept

January 21st

Switching gears here.

In today’s class, each of us posted 5 questions about our topic that ask some form of “Who, What, Where, When, Why, or How?”

I originally wrote for “Adult Learning Experiences,” but as we moved around the room, I found myself drawn to “Interacting with Others.”

Hot off Finding Fred, a podcast about how Fred Rogers became Pittsburgh’s beloved “Mr. Rogers” the problem of finding ways to shape the way we treat others (and ourselves) seemed all the more pressing, and so much more complicated.

Our group found clusters of questions around Motivation, Perception, Difference and the Tools & Tech of the trade.

We also thought throw a basic model of how a person discovers the challenges of maintaining good interactions with others, how they become motivated to investigate the hidden variables of communication and shaping relationships, and how once they are bought in, they can begin to use tools to evaluate and reflect on their interactions.

The basic model goes like this:

1.Generally, most people start their lives assuming that everyone is more or less like them, or at the very least that they are similar enough that other people understand what you’re saying and the way in which you say it.

2. At some point we become aware of difference, not just in terms of identity, but also in terms of communication and interpretation.

3.We become aware that each time we communicate, we are choosing one method among thousands of possible choices.

4. Once we understand our ability to choose, we can start to evaluate our choices and begin to use tools and technology to aid in shaping our communication.

While the concept may be worth investigating, our model falls short in its definition of WHO exactly we are speaking about, or want to focus on, and the WHERE of where to begin investigating first.

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Decoding a Learning Experience

January 23rd

Lessons or tools?

I’m thinking back to some reading we did as part of a Design Thinking course last semester. Lucy Kimbell’s Rethinking Design Thinking was one of the last readings we did for the course, but I’m fairly certain it was the best of the bunch. In particular, she talked about embodied knowledge in the systems of agents, tools and interactions we call “Design.” He argument was that a discipline is neither its people, its tools, or even its ideas, but a set of practices, cultures and mindsets in how we interact with our tools.

I’m doing the point a great injustice here, but as we went through our learning experiences, this question kept gnawing at me. These are all great tools. Shockingly so. How do we know how to use them? How do we know what to learn from our experience or where to look? To what extent to we even need to be conscious that we’re learning?

We had a few games dissected, and some tools that seemed right on the edge of being flipped into a game. For the game “Loneliness” that I brought in, and Matt’s “Facticious” trivia, there was for me a sense that yes, I am playing a game, but also to pay attention.

Without disrupting my enjoyment, there was a kind of signaling that the game wanted me to analyze it deeper. That there was some hidden learning if I invested the extra time and energy to reflect on the experience that I was having, and to hold it up to the light.

I’m wondering about how our experiences signal this moment of reflection, how soon in the interaction, and how to consider this signaling culturally.

Field Guide to Learning What You Already Know

January 30

I’m interested in re-learning.

Fun fact, I had a bike accident when I was young and stayed off of bicycles for almost a decade afterwards, so I feel confident in saying this.

Not even riding a bike is like riding a bike.

Mastery has a shelf life, and I think the dominant learning paradigm is that you learn cumulatively and in sequence. Re-learning has a feeling of shame to it—re-treading, remedial.

For many of us, learning happens sequentially in school, but things are messier in life. Our priorities shift, or (as in my case with biking) things happen to us that may keep us away from something that may ultimately be important.

Part of being a designer has been adopting a particular mindset about learning. The idea of forcing yourself to be a perpetual beginner, and moreso to be okay with feeling that way. For a lot of people though, “beginner shame” is a barrier to learning, especially when we are presenting to the world as adults.

My learners want to grow desperately, but are turned away by the feelings of wasted time that come up as we review past learnings. They need to learn with enough privacy that they won’t be turned away as they are failing at things that “they should know” or “they swear they could have done a year ago.” My learners sometimes aren’t even interested in what they are re-learning, but know that they need it to move forward. My learners are mostly adults. Some of my learners have suffered trauma of some form, or are learning to live with a new range of physical abilities. My learners have a broad range of topics they need to relearn, but are most concerned with how the information is paced, and how it can build of the pieces they do remember. I think my learners long to feel proud about what they’re doing, and to feel the rush of being curious again.