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Design, Learning, and Collaboration Assignmnet 10 Jon Marbach Hey guys (Jing,Tomo) - I'll have something for you to work with by 10:30! Keep checking back. General Thoughts: I've mentioned some of this before but it's worth repeating here because it relates to the paper... While I was an undergrad in CS and about to graduate, I spent a lot of time thinking about why most students weren't able to program at all leaving only a few that could tackle difficult projects. In my senior year, I started working with a friend named Jeff who had picked up a book on OpenGL and said "Hey, I'm gonna learn this stuff!" He inspired me to do the same and we started writing apps (sometimes together, sometimes separately) that would use the technologies we wanted to learn. Now that I've been through the course, this put the information we were trying to learn in context and in general was a huge motivating factor. Jeff and I weren't working completely on our own though. We soon met a former student - Jaek - who still lived close to the school and worked as a programmer at a local company. Jaek had a ton of experience in the topics we were interested in and became interested in the apps we were trying to write. Ultimately, Jaek became what the paper would call our "guide on the side", giving suggestions, pointing us to resources, doing small demos, or explaining tricky concepts. Of course, we still did the work ourselves. Without realizing it at the time, we had set up a collaborative learning environment among the three of us, and I felt that I learned more working with them in half a year than I had learned in the previous three years of CS courses. I think the feeling though came from not having learned more but I had learned a new way to work - self-directed learning. When seeing one of our programs, the common undergraduate symptom was "Man, I never could've written that." My answer, though noone believed me was, "Neither could I, until I tried to." Without the resources that Jaek had pointed me too and the advice he'd given me, I wouldn't have been able to, but at that point, I felt like I could write anything. I no longer needed to feel like I knew everything about some technology before I used it. Although this environment was great, it couldn't have happened if I hadn't backgound knowledge from my other courses. I've read a phrase somewhere that was something like, "People who know more, know more because they know more." The argument is that one needs a critical mass of knowledge to be able to sythesize new knowledge from new information. I think that more traditional classroom techniques are effective at creating that critical mass, but then once it is obtained, a student should be moved to an environment more like what the paper describes.
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