AERA: Friday 1

Industrial Designers and 10 year olds making furniture
University of Alberta in Edmonton (30,000 undergrads +6-7000 grads)
Brenda Gustofson, Dougal A G MacDonald,

Design Technology is based on identifying a need and potential solutions to that need.
- design technology is value laden
"Can studying children as they work with adult, novice designers provide insight into how to facilitate children's interaction with scinece and technology?"
- based on Vygotsky
- talk is a verbal tool
- drawing is a visual tool (recording and mediating)
- talking and drawing are vehicles for design decisino making
(university student translates the young students' ideas and drawings into the computer program -- started off with different ideas and different areas of understanding, but came to a negotiated common understanding
- how did the kids react to the negotiations that turned their designs into plausible and realistic ones?
- kids got to name the design, which was very important to them
- drawing is a developmental process (representing and developing) that leads to a finished (and changed) product.
- continuous representation of design ideas.
takeaway for ARGH
- have kids start with initial idea
- play game
- generate game change

Designining for Culture
Patricia Young, Baltimore
takeaway for ARGH: not much

Wei-Chen Hung
Development Research (learning system to control and manage behavior of ADHD students in Chicago.)
Intervention strategies for various behaviors -- find this grid/gestalt-based design matrix
under controlled, mixed, and over controlled.
takeaway for ARGH: not much, but the behaviorist-modeled grid was interesting and perhaps useful for campers.

Student introspection in Blended Learning
Hyu-Jeong I
blended learning is the third generation of distance learning-- combination of online and face-to-face learning.
what are critical factors in blended learning?
55 graduate students in regular distance ed, learners complained that there was not enough face to face, so the course was redesigned for 2004 as a blended course.
ATLAS was the data analysis program for qualitative analysis (free for a limited number of calculations)
Four Factors
1. face to face interaction affects their level of social presence.
2. course structure - individual and group assignments, synchronous and asynch communication
3. technology - liked the CDROM of course.
4. Instructor -
takeaway for ARGH: not much, the idea of "Blended learning" is sort of cool -- is any info source that originates outside the classroom considered "blended" or does it have to be info that comes from the teacher?