RSA Animate illustrated lectures

The combination of skilful drawing illustrating the short, thought-provoking lecture in this video is great:

I have watched several of them now (it's part of a series) and find them very compelling. Many people find it quite difficult just to listen to a lecture and need something to watch ... other than a 'talking head'. The sketching hits just the right humorous note for me; it emphasises what is being said, without distracting from the content. It also looks effortless which means it probably took ages and ages to create! 

Multimedia design

I have been running a blog to document my work for Kesurokai, an organisation that brings together traditional craftsmen from Japan and Europe. As a favour, I also agreed to update their web site however, as their organiser, Hannes Schnelle, and many of their craftsmen are from Germany, it is written in German! It has been a long time since I learned German at school so this presented an interesting challenge, but I managed it with some excellent help from green woodworkers Michail and Katy Schütte who translated the bulk of the text and my kind friend Michael Hohl who helped me finish it off.

KeyPiece

KeyPiece was a combined research seminar and public exhibition that brought together ten leading researchers in metalwork and jewellery; Cóilín Ó Dubhghaill who initiated the project, Christoph Zellweger who led the workshops, and participants Lionel Dean, Maria Hanson, Grace Horne, Antje Illner, Drummond Masterton, Sarah O’Hana, Tine de Ruysser and Lucian Taylor.

Gallery event
Starting from the ‘object’, the question of how a ‘keypiece’ can be identified and defined provided the basis for debate between the makers. The works displayed functioned as both a physical reference and a catalyst in the development of the dialogue about the nature of research in the field.

To enable engagement with the public whilst maintaining the seminar situation, the exhibits provided a divide of the gallery space; one half public space, the other workshop setting, with paper covering walls and floor for participants to write and draw. After the workshop finished the whole gallery became accessible to the public, providing greater insight into the exhibited objects.

Multimedia documentation
The event was observed and documented by myself using video and stills and writer/curator Monica Gaspar. I used this record to create an online interactive multimedia resource for distribution within and beyond the professional community. The aim was to provide an engaging, accessible and durable documentation of the event, which will be of interest to practitioners, educators, researchers within the creative practices and beyond.

Who needs a web site?

Blogging software is so easy and so customisable, I feel that personal web sites are going to become a thing of the past. Why pay someone when you can do it yourself? Why wrestle with Dreamweaver when you can set things out simply and clearly on a blog?

I have found that creating a website with a blog is a different experience, because you tend to build gradually, rather than assembling everything, then putting it up in one go. However, if you are fairly organised and categorise as you go then a blog creates a rich resource that the reader can brows in many different ways. 

I started blogging for Kesurokai, a European-Japanese cultural exchange project I am involved with. I needed to create a project web site and also document the project between its start-up at the beginning of the year and the main event in August. The documentation has become a web site and has generated widespread interest very quickly and easily.

I have also just set up a new blog for my partner, Robin Wood to use as a sales page. He has been blogging for a while and gets on well with it, but cannot easily update the products for sale on his web site because it is too technical, and of course I am not good at getting around to it! So, I created a new blog for this and tweaked his existing blog, so they feel as if they are on the same site and tie in with his web site. Blogger isn't as sophisticated as TypePad, which this blog is on, so it was not straight forward but I am quite proud of the result.

Craft interpretation

When I was researching for my PhD and experimenting with interpretation, I found that a well-annotated drawing was what the learners responded to best. Photographs helped, but somehow gave too much information or the view was never from quite the right angle.

At that stage I had a hang-up about drawing which I have found many people suffer from. They feel that if they can't easily produce and exact replication of something, they can't draw, and give up. However, it is a learned technique and, given a little help from a few fellow students, I found I could sketch what I needed.Nowadays I can quite quickly produce drawings like the one above using Adobe Illustrator, but always start by sketching by hand to get a feel for the perspective that will be needed and how it will work in with the text. 

These pictures show my partner Robin Wood's latest development; a device for holding a bowl whilst hand-carving which he has called the BowlMate. He developed it for learners to use whilst he is teaching and there has been so much interest from the wider woodworking community he wanted to publish plans, which I spent an enjoyable day yesterday doing. 

You can see the results of my work on his web site here and also download a PDF here.

A vision of students today

I am not sure this video tells me anything I didn't already know and it certainly offers no solutions, but I LOVE the way it has been made. I also shows interesting use of Google documents to gather student opinion and experiences. (My thanks for fellow Open University tutor Derek Jones for posting that on our course forum.)

Design thinking

Design thinking: creativity for the 21st century is an Open University level 1 course that went live in February 2010. I worked with the course team as a consultant; authoring content, providing feedback on the use of new software that was developed for the course, and overseeing consistency of content and use of images across the whole course.

Course content
Through a mix of academic, practical work and reflective activity students develop an understanding of design, acquire new designing skills and build a portfolio of design projects as a foundation for future study. The course looks at common principles of design and ways of thinking that lead to ideas and creative solutions.

Software
OpenDesignStudio is an image sharing site so the students, who work remotely, can upload images of their practical work and discuss it with their tutor and other students. Compendium is a mind mapping software that students use to record their activities as they are designing and as a reflective tool as part of their assessment.

Ongoing involvement
I now work as a tutor on the course and am also forum moderator, an essential part of college life for distance learners!

Students at a Day School

More understanding of "the crit"

A small 'aha' moment about what is happening during "the crit" I described earlier - two things:

• The teacher(s) assess the student's work, tell them what is good about it and where it can be improved. (That bit is obvious!)
• The student experiences this process for their own work and sees it happening to other students. In this way they learn about how to critique generally; the sorts of criteria their work is judged on, things which tend to be praised, things which tend to be frowned upon, different ways of solving different problems. (That was my 'aha' moment!)

In this way they both learn how to improve their current work and how to critically evaluate their future work. Individual feedback wouldn't be as effective, being part of a group is vital, but students don't seem to understand group work. There is a constant complaint from Lecturers that students do not turn up to organised teaching sessions, but are constantly clamoring for individual attention.

Again, during the H&S training session I observed, the small group of students who attended got to see a range of common problems and solutions to them which would have been much more limited if they had been alone. They clearly did not understand this and had a tendency to wander off or be looking elsewhere whilst the others had their go.

I wonder if simply making this explicit to the students would make a difference, or if something more sophisticated with group work and peer support needs to be done?

Dissecting a chicken

I have vivid memories of a first aid training video which I watched around 15 years ago. Why? Well, interspersed between the clips about how to check someone's pulse, put them in the recovery position, and so on were clips of a chef using a large meat cleaver to joint a chicken. Each time we returned to the kitchen he was using the tool calmly and skillfully, but this was a video about first aid and the suspense was dreadful ... and yes, eventually the inevitable happened!

This was brought back to me because I spent the day watching and thinking about basic Heath & Safety training. In my current research at Sheffield Hallam University I am looking at how basic skills are taught in the Design Studios and how web 2.0 technologies could be used to support independent learning. H&S training is so important, done properly it will help prevent students hurting themselves, damaging costly machinery, and ruining their creative work, but mention it and people glaze over.

The three students who did turn up this morning I think had a really engaging and useful session. The technicians showed them so many little handy hints over and above the statutory safety stuff and they gained really valuable experience using the equipment. However, it was not efficient use of staff time and the other students won't be allowed to use the workshops until they too have had their training.

This feels like a good area to tackle in my research (there's funding for it!) and I am now thinking about how I could make it appear more relevant and interesting. I'm very squeamish so I don't think I'll be shooting it as a horror movie, but it is food for thought!

Craft learning and "the crit"

"The crit" is central to traditional design education and I sat in on one this week as part of my current research at Sheffield Hallam University. It brought back memories of doing it myself, it is a fairly scary experience, and it made me think about the Japanese craftsmen's apprenticeship experiences described in Edo craftsmen : master artisans of old Tokyo.

Firstly let me describe "the crit" for the uninitiated; it's a little like X Factor or Britain's Got Talent, but the audience are also putting on the show, they are students each showing their latest work. One by one they go to the front of the room and show images of their work on PowerPoint and hand around things they have made. The 'judges' are a group of lecturers who sit around a table making notes, discussing, asking the students questions and offering advice.

It is only three weeks until the students hand in their final projects and they need help knowing what to do to get it finished satisfactorily. Quite a few haven't made good use of the Easter holidays and are going to have a busy few weeks. The atmosphere is a bit tense, the lecturers at times have to be quite blunt to the students about their work, but whilst they are tough, they are also very fair and very supportive. There feels to be a close bond between the lecturers and students. At the end of the session another student drops into the room to give a little box to one of the lecturers; it contains a cup-cake and pinned to the top is a handwritten thank-you note!

Whilst the students go through this many times during their three years at University, the old craftsmen in Toyko had often started at a very young age and continued under the critical eye of their master for many years. For some it was clearly a positive experience, but others spoke with perplexing pride of the fact that their masters never praised their work and they were reluctant to praise their own work themselves. I can't decide if it is false modesty or a genuine feeling that they ll never be as good as their masters. Either way, it doesn't strike me as healthy.

This somehow joins up with my other major project with Open University where I have been part of the team writing a new course in Design Thinking which is entirely delivered online and all the students study it remotely. I am tutoring one of the first batches of students through the course and also moderator on the student forum so party to a wide range of online interactions. In this situation it seems to be quite difficult to "crit" the students and even getting them to do critical analysis of their own work is not easy. This too is not healthy!

I feel that for online / distance learning to be successful there needs to be a way of getting the right sort of "crit" into the arena. It needs to fall into the 'tough but fair' category, which partly comes from the attitude of the teachers (those I observed clearly worked well together as a group), and partly from their relationship with the students. Fostering all this online is very different to dealing with face-to-face relationships and so much of it falls outside the scope of the sorts of learning resources I have been designing, however it is clearly vital to their success. Hmmmm ...

via my kesurokai blog