Category Archives: learning and teaching

amidoinitrite, edtech, education, elearning, field report, learning and teaching, learning design, resource development, startup

EduGrowth pre-accelerator pitch night

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And the winner is…

amidoinitrite, education, hackathon, learning and teaching

Is everything hackable?

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Is everything hackable? Yeah, I think so. Does hacking known problematic student administration-style services and ‘wicked problems’ potentially lead to better teaching and learning outcomes and experience for students, staff and the university? Could it be done in 36 hours? That’s the answer I wanted to find out when I attended Monash University’s HackMon.

First up, introductions. This is where each team pitched their initial project idea with the hope of attracting new team members to help them solve their wicked problem.

Academic director of MU-OLT, Kris Ryan provides a teaching and learning context during his introduction on the morning of the first day.

Detail from the imagination wall, a breakdown of hackathon activities over the next two days, with pre-hack events.

Hackathon breakdown, including pre-hack activities. Next steps/post-hack-style activities could also be worth mentioning…

And then it started, which was awesome.

There was a whole lot of activity, including much horse trading and team building.

Taking a break for lunch on the first day. Great view from the seventh floor of 271 Collins Street.

Themes by project teams – Digital assistants (“What now and how?”), Resource/facilities management and Scheduling (What can I use?), status dashboards (“What and when?”)
amidoinitrite, education, homework, learning and teaching, learning design, resource development

Service Design Boot Camp at GA

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On Saturday 20 August I attended the Service Design Boot Camp workshop at General Assembly in Melbourne, which was pretty cool. I’ve been interested in the discipline for some time, exploring aspects of design process, prototyping, testing and iterating with Coursera’s Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society open online course online course, but I’ve never had the chance to embrace it fully face-to-face, until now. Awesome.

On the promotional page for the workshop they said “This course is for anyone that has an interest in applying the design process to solve complex problems. It’s likely you’ll have many transferable skills or experiences that will be put to use through the course of the day.” Cool. That’s exactly what I want to be able to do.

What did we do?

In the workshop we worked through the components that make up the practise of service design:

  • Discovery: gaining empathy and understanding the needs and pain points of users.
  • Ideation: Developing a range of ideas on how to develop a solution to meet the needs of all users.
  • Prototyping: Testing and iterating, including the customer experience, “front of house” interactions, and back of house dependencies.
  • Communication: Articulating the many facets of your offering in a concise way.

Discovery

Define

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“How might we..” “for…” “so that…”

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Deliver – Service blueprinting and role play

Completed service blueprint for our solution.
Completed service blueprint for our solution.
communication
We use role play to articulate the customer journey and services we designed.

Leading practitioners

amidoinitrite, learning and teaching, repossessed to skate, skateboarding

Deliberate practise with feedback

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You have to have feedback as quickly as possible. 10,000 hours with a teacher, with constant feedback, is critical.


What better feedback than skateboarding? You skate, you make a mistake, you fall, you bleed. Repeat.

If you don’t get better, you break bones and have to stop. If you learn from your mistakes with the help of teachers, you stop bleeding.

Deliberate Practice with Feedback.
Deliberate Practice with Feedback.
amidoinitrite, education, learning and teaching, learning design, repossessed to skate, resource development

Redefine and reassess everything (around you)

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“What is the strange profound attraction that this rectangular piece of concrete holds for them? Do we now observe the rights of passage of a newly emerging civilisation?” – Dr Eugene D Mander (Public Domain, 1988)

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“I think skateboarding is a way for people to reassess and redefine everything around them.” – Ian Mackaye

Know the ledge


“Skateboarding is not a hobby. And it is not a sport. Skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you. For most people, when they saw a swimming pool, they thought, ‘Let’s take a swim.’ But I thought, ‘Let’s ride it.’ When they saw the curb or a street, they would think about driving on it. I would think about the texture. I slowly developed the ability to look at the world through totally different means.” – Ian MacKaye

amidoinitrite, concept, education, learning and teaching, learning design

Your ghost

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When you leave your place of work, what kind of legacy do you leave behind? What exactly makes up Your ghost*? Is it only made up of the files or digital data you created or pushed around while you were in that physical space or does Your ghost transcend the physical? Can Your ghost be something intangible like a mindset or an approach to production? Can these intangible things haunt those that you leave behind?


Your ghost, originally uploaded by Rowan Peter.

Strange. It may seem that this is a paranoid contemplation or reflection on my own ghost, but it’s actually my observations of how others have used or perhaps misused Your ghost. Now that you’ve gone, I’ve seen firsthand how they’ve just simply reused the physical artifacts that you created. Instead of being inspired by your intangible ghost to create their own physical artifacts and excel in their own way they simply reused yours. No imagination. Sad.

I understand that you can’t control what others do with what you leave behind, regardless of the physical or intangible nature of Your ghost. It just makes me sad to see that they’ve reduced you to that, that’s all.


*Although my use of Your ghost is most definitely inspired by the Kristin Hersh song of the same name, I feel that the intent is perhaps a little different. To me Hersh’s song encapsulates a feeling of loss or sense of longing for someone or something in the past. That’s ok, it’s her song. My use of Your ghost is about my desire for myself and others to be inspired by one persons intangible legacy and not just make use of the physical remains they leave behind.