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John DeRiggi Assignment 2 January 28, 2002 1.1 What was interesting I liked that this article discussed the relationship between design activity and learning. The article allows members to work together by collaborating, negotiationg, and working out problems through argumentative processes. These general characteristics of design activity should be used to improve upon existing teaching methods. Traditional teaching is based around a very structured, scientific approach. It was argued that real problems are more fluid and not set up in a predictable structure, and therefore should not be attacked in a such a way. Also, through the use of technology such as the L3D lab, these groups can interact directly with the problem, and efficiently negotiate a resolution. 1.2 What was not interesting I thought that all aspects of the article were interesting, however, some sections might be to optimistic when considering how large schools are in the present day. I believe that many people would agree with the article on the benefits of collaboration and a design activity and would be more than happy to implement them immediately if they had the necessary funding and widespread support for the technology and everything else required to restructure. 2. What is the main message of the article The article argues that lifelong learning and collaborative and active design activity are essential to improving education on a wide scale. Problems with our current education are evidenced by the difficult transition that many experience when leaving the classroom and entering the workplace. In the academic realm, students are exposed to regimented and structured learning processes, rarely dealing with the dynamic and irregular problems we are more likely to face in the real world. Because people are not used to the unstructured problems, this transistion is challenging. However, if academic institutions confronted students with problems requiring group collaboration and argumentative processes to find a good resolution, then this jump into the workplace would not be so hard. Lifelong learning would be more of a continuous stream of knowledge collection than the dichotomy it is today. 3.1 The blue words. While clicking on the words is a nice way to get a quick definition, in many ways this is just an economically improved way to pass out a definition list. Maybe it would have been better to have an online intelligent agent that could answer my questions about any vocabulary that I did not fully understand. Or maybe we could have an online chat or forum where we could all talk to eachother about the article, clarify things that might have been confusing and then return to our assignmnents. 3.2 Have i seen them before. I have seen this functionality before on websites referncing other products, help portions of certain software, and other instructional media. 4.2Ivan Illich Illich had radical views about traditional school systems and believed that they robbed children from exposure to natural life and civilization. Classrooms exposed children to a primitive and ficticious environmnent unlike the outside world. Ivan believed firmly in the belief that an effort needs to be made on how technology can be used to help people pursue creative and autonomus interaction in the learning process.
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