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AI tutors aren't a silver bullet, nor should they be
The debate around AI tutors wouldn’t be so aggressive if the claims and expectations were rooted in appropriate use-cases. Ideas from technologists trying to show how all of education will improve for everyone are often talking about content challenges. Their central argument is that more time getting personalized content focused on specific challenges in a subject will…
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UX Portfolio Lessons: Timeless & Thoughtful Storytelling
Another June, another session closed of the UX Certificate that I teach. One important aspect of the classroom is what I call a “shareback”. I take all the individualized feedback given to each student, summarize it, and share it with the class. It’s a type of group metacognition. By highlighting to the class what happened…
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From Teacher Grading to Manager Feedback
In higher education, there’s a lot of enthusiasm around project-based learning (PBL). The idea is to give students real-world problems to have them acquire their skills and knowledge through them. As an instructor, I naturally gravitated to this idea and felt like I’ve always tried to recreate realistic scenarios for the students to experience. However,…
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Holding my breath
Sometimes when I’m working, I realize that I’ve been holding my breath. If you’ve never noticed yourself doing that, then I beg you to pay attention to it just for today. Why? A man wearing a hoodie runs in with a cardboard sign that reads ‘Mindfulness is good for productivity. I punch that man hard…
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Suboptimal creative release
Last night I sat with a friend and we wrote a rap song. Neither of us can play any music or sing. But it was some of the most immersed I’ve felt doing anything in a long time. Around 2013 I started reading business books, looking for secrets to work more productively. This obsession shifted…
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Time circa 2019
I looked up at the wall from my computer screen and my calendar smiled back with 2021.
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The forgotten art of fun at work
For all the times we ecourage a lack of sugar-coating, we forget to encourage teams to say things kinds things. For all the times we encourage efficiency, we forget to encourage teams to enjoy the process. For all the times we encourage risk-taking, we forget to encourage teams to receive failures with a smile. For…
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Google's new father-son ad will make you cringe
Take 1: Lover On Nov 19, 2009, Google posted an ad to Youtube titled ‘Parisian Love’. It encapsulated all the emotional highs and lows of living with Google Search. It is one of tech’s best ads ever made. The beauty of this ad was that it was not presumptuous. It painted a picture of a…
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She works on a park bench
A scene in 2019 A woman sits on a park bench, writing in her notebook. Another types on her phone. Our perception is that the former is noble, and the latter a drone. Is this because we romanticize the old? Is there something unsettling about the multitude of activities possible on an obscure device? Afterall,…
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Working around Google's reign on education
The question of whether Google impacts the way people learn is as old as Google itself. Opinions about its pros and cons are in constant flux. Fantasizing about retreating into our luddite shells of looking up information in the library is not productive. To live in today’s reality of information retrieval is to be a…
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The Value of After-Class Journals
I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of assigning weekly journals in my class before. Despite preaching to my students every year that they should journal to bolster their learning capacity, I’d never formalized it as a learning tool within the course. This year, in an attempt to show them the value more formally, I…
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Learning how to structure a virtual class
My online lecture on Creativity, Innovation, and Critical Thinking has more than 90 students enrolled this semester. Even before COVID-19, I was constantly searching for new ways to keep the class experiential for such a large group of students. When the university announced last year that the course would be online, I had to revise…