Tag Archives: Design-Thinking

Feb 21 2019
4 Comments
332wednesday12, Uncategorized

Design thinking? MORE LIKE DESIGN STINKING!! AM I RIGHT!?!?

Oh, what a controversial post title… Welcome, fellow traveler of the #UWinDig seas. Please, grab a seat. Stick around. I did a twitter essay – two actually.

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Part 1 – in which I come to the conclusion that the technologist module is mostly fine, but also maybe useless.

Part 2 – in which I talk about design thinking being a sham and make 1 VERY good joke (CW: NAUGHTY WORDS)

 

Reflection… (a lot of reflection is in the twitter thread, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much here)

As stated in the first twitter thread, I did not find the module to be that useful.  Though I understand that it would definitely be helpful to a lot of teachers.  As I mention in the thread, their are a ton of great links to useful tools for the classroom.  It’s just that most of it seemed like common sense to me. I’m curious how many others found the module to be mostly common sense. Am I crazy? Am I too cynical?

Anyways, because of this I had a hard time figuring out what to do my reflection on at all. I ended up doing what I always do: complaining.  It was a lot of fun!  I had already been reading about education fads a lot over the last few months, as well as instances of education misrepresenting things from other disciplines (psych and neuropsych mostly).  So this topic kind of lines up all my current education related interests.  If I had more time I probably would have made a silly video, but I’ll have to save that for another day.

 

 

 

Here’s some good links I posted in the twitter thread that I’m going to post here as well, because I’m such a fun guy.

  1. This Vox video on doors that is very interesting

2. This video form a conference that is also very interesting and gives some history of design thinking and the perspective of a designer (Natasha Jen: Design Thinking is Bullshit)

 

3. This very appropriate (and not at all edgy) Medium post (Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis – It’s Contagious and Rots Your Brains) – *this guy is probably being a little harsh

Design Thinking will mess up your brains. Decline sets in. Enthusiasts embrace sexed up platitudes as profundities and believe smooching lipsticked pigs is innovation. If you manage an organization, you do not want individuals infected with these mental models in your meetings. Their ignorance and gullibility are not assets but liabilities. But for all these issues, there’s an even deeper way in which pushing the DTs in education is problematic.

 

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Feb 17 2019
2 Comments
322monday20

5 QUICK STEPS TO BECOMING A TECHNOLOGIST (NUMBER 4 MAY SURPRISE YOU!) ft. POWTOON

For this multimedia reflection I decided to try out Powtoon after hearing about it in several classes over the past two years. For those who don’t know Powtoon is a flashy power-point variant that gives you the option to present your work in the form of a video.

Take a look:

A Link to Daniel Cartier's Powtoon

Wow! Pretty cool right?! Makes you just wanna make one right this second yeah? Welllllll…

 

You see Powtoon is a freemium model which means you can pay for extra features with either a PRO or PRO+ membership, which allows you to unlock different backgrounds, music, clipart, and export features (such as download). This actually made the creation of the Powtoon harder because ideas I had would be squashed by what was available to me as a free user.

 

However, perhaps your wondering is Powtoon is worth buying into?

Powtoon's Pricing Structure. $16 at the cheapest?!

…Yeah no…

Because much of Powtoon is locked behind a paywall I think it may end up being a bit infuriating to use, as students are going to naturally want to use content that they cannot within the free version.

It should be stated however that if you want to do the legwork and find your own videos and images you are allowed to import them but videos cannot come from Youtube which means every video needs to be downloaded and re-uploaded…something that is just not feasible on classroom WiFi.

In my opinion Powtoon was little more exciting that creating a power-point and some of the free user woes really soured my opinion of it. Was the final product cool? Yes. Would my students want to possibly create one of their own? Sure. But as we look at Powtoon through the CONNECT phase of Design Learning the flaws mean that is really not feasible until the intermediate grades where even still the actual execution is not worth the end result.

Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk.

/rant

 

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