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The Magic of Students Giving Themselves Advice
Every student faces challenges that feel insurmountable—whether it’s a difficult project, a personal struggle, or a moment of self-doubt. But what if the key to solving these problems wasn’t about looking inward, but outward? What if by asking students to offer advice to ‘someone else,’ we could help them uncover the solutions they were seeking…
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Using technology to break the learning styles myth
I was always skeptical about media-based “learning styles” from the moment I learned about them. It seemed strange to me that we’re all happily enabling people to limit how they learn to only one style, when our brains are learning machines that can learn in a plethora of contexts. Dividing learning into Visual, Auditory, Read/Write,…
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From students seeking cheat codes to embracing dice rolls
Teaching students industry processes isn’t about guaranteeing success, it’s about improving odds. Instructors need to pay attention to both how they teach any given process, and the desperation students typically have to use processes as shortcuts to success. In the past few years of teaching many different problem-solving and UX design processes, students always find…
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How AI highlights the flaws in grading
AI is going to make teachers work much harder. Not because ChatGPT is killing student’s thinking, but because the grading system killed thinking already. However, a quirk in how grades are assigned is the reason things are going to get worse if we don’t change. For subjects with a high degree of nuance like writing,…
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I have been thinking about education for 15 years
The other day I was digging through some notebooks in my drawer, and I realized how many of them had notes about education. Each page I flipped through warped my sense of time passing. Though some of them were 10 years old, the notes felt like they were written yesterday. Not because the ideas themselves…
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Positive negatives
We need a word for experiences that are positive, but their undertones are negative. The situation that happened to me feels a little like this: I discovered a new song on Spotify that resonated super deeply with me through my Discover Weekly. Looking at the two collaborating artists, I thought to myself “Who are these…
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Sharing on social media sucks because we do it too much
I had a chilling thought yesterday about the effects of excessive exposure to everyone’s thoughts online: It’s easy to mock the excited posts of people celebrating new jobs and enjoying a small moment of victory in an otherwise difficult life. I used to dedicate my entire LinkedIn to laughing at these seemingly vapid posts. But…
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Improving marketplace UX by getting more users
Improving marketplace UX means getting more users You can improve marketplace UX with better search and helping users make offers. But the real secret? Having more people 📈. In our latest YouTube video, we did a UX comparison of Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji (a Canadian marketplace like Craigslist or eBay). Below we’ve summarized our learnings.…
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The challenge with ranting as comedy
For a moment it seemed like ranting could have been a comedic avenue for me. Friends found it funny and I got a high from going down a quality rant about the most irrelevant things. Alternatively, ranting for an audience is a difficult task. Audiences can perceive the performer as shallow or unnecessarily harsh. For…
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How digital design canvases will evolve to better suit modern workflows
Modern design canvases, like Figma, take inspiration from sticky notes we put on a wall. As you add and move sticky notes, their purpose gets lost and additional information not on the note is lost. Similarly, the design canvas gets messy with frames filled with UI at different states of completion. These end up strewn…
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The smiling moon
Barcelona was hot and humid beyond what we could tolerate, but walking around the beautiful city, visiting friends and eating delicious food made it worth it. At least it did for the first week and a half. In addition to the recommendations curated by one of our generous friends, we relied heavily on Google Maps…
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My lost notebook
In 2016, at the happiest moment of my design education, I forgot my notebook on a train and the documentation of my growth that year disappeared with it. “At least you didn’t lose your laptop…” a friend said gingerly when the last car of the train rushed past. It was true that I had uniquely…