A weekly newsletter where I share ideas from about nurturing learning and curiosity with technology.
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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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Can this tool make design class discussions richer?
I’ve been reflecting on how educational technology can help design students get better at seeing different opinions and expressing their own. Particularly in UX, it’s often difficult to know what aspect of a design might have the most impact on the users and business. This makes it important for future designers to understand how different…
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Maybe being in someone else's shoes should be required training
I never understood some of the ways my teachers behaved until I started teaching myself. Why did certain emails get ignored? Why did they grade so carelessly? What made them so angry about questions related to the exams? Teaching over the last seven years has exposed me to a lot of situations that made me…
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Embracing problem-creator thinking in design education
Because most generative AI tools today are solutions oriented, it’s more important than ever that design students be able to think critically and analyze broader contexts. This will both help them continue to have value in an AI-driven world and ensure we don’t lose out on innovative solutions that come from more exploratory problem-assessing approaches. …
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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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Generative, Personal, but not Artificial
Why is Apple so allergic to the term “AI”? Yesterday’s WWDC conference was split between new OS updates and the big Apple Intelligence announcement. Just like all these articles pointed out back at WWDC 2023, once again never said “artificial intelligence” or “AI” once. But this time, they did say “intelligence”… a lot! Besides Apple…
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Looking the other direction to learn more deeply
Have you ever noticed that in The Great Wave off Kanagawa print by Hokusai has more than 20 people in it? I certainly didn’t and the clip below from the excellent BBC series, The Art of Japanese Life, gave me a whole new appreciation for this picture. The impact of looking at something from left…
