Originally Posted by
tooblue
For more than fifteen years I have taught at a vocational institution. Primarily, I educate design students, focused on Web and interactive technologies. I write a lot of curriculum, coming up with novel ways to teach principles of good user interface and user experience design. A lot has changed since I first began teaching, but nothing has changed more than the student’s expectations, incompressible apprehensions and the knowledge base they bring with them to the classroom. I not so affectionately refer to the current crop of students as the Lego Kit generation. Unless you provide them with a kit that includes highly detailed illustrations, explicit step-by-step instructions, and spend a good deal of time mentoring (holding their hand) and regularly affirming their efforts, they fall apart when faced with a challenge.
Over the past three years, I have assigned a particular project that highlights the peculiarities of the current dynamic. The project involves the development of an app, based on a customizable app building template (aka, a Lego Kit). The project on the whole is complex in the way it forces students to apply basic programming principles, grapple with interface and user design issues and the need to manage interactive narratives. In addition to all of the above, the students are expected to develop the illustrative, photographic and video content for the app themselves. This is a joint project between two courses—my design course and an applied scripting and technology course. It’s a comprehensive effort and can be considered a capstone project in their final semester.
Owing to the limited time-frames of semester based teaching and learning, and despite the fact we are supplying them the Kit, it’s too much to also ask the students to come up with a compelling subject matter to build content for (five or so years ago, that wasn’t the case). So, while another faculty member, who teaches the applied class has built and provided them with the customizable app template to work with, I do the research and provide them a subject matter to work with. It’s important the subject matter be interesting, socially relevant and not encourage the students to run afoul of copyright. Because the app, in potential commercial form, could be used to power an information kiosk in a museum or science center, I focus on content that is historical and geared towards youth or children.
In particular, I love Aesop’s fables. They are short, easy to grasp, interpret and adapt to these types of applications. What’s more, you can easily build upon the moral of the story to inform an audience about a contemporary issue such as, say, climate change or bio diversity. Which is made easier by the fact the fables mostly involve interactions between animals: foxes, hares and tortoises etc. In very basic terms, they are simply creating an interactive story book, that is installed on a large touchscreen computer. The fable, with cute animals and a simple moral lesson is just a hook … to get the user to watch loosely related infographic videos and visualized data about the shrinking polar ice caps and mass species extinction.
Having been online since they popped out of the womb, the students mostly get it—what they are supposed to do. The project makes sense. However, I’ve observed and made note of a phenomenon, while assigning and discussing the project outline with my students, that is troubling. Beyond the fact we are supplying the students with a template/kit, accompanied by a good deal of hand-holding, which is a frustrating issue all on its own. The students struggle mightily to discern the moral of the assigned fable they are expected to adapt.
For example, I often use “The Fox and The Crow” as the story they are expected to illustrate, animate and make interactive. Over the past three years, when I ask the class if they have heard of Aesop, I have not had one student answer in the affirmative. Next, I ask them if they know what a Fable is, or if they know a Fable can be defined as a moral tale? Again, not a single student in three years has answered yes, or can tell me what I mean when I say, “a Fable can be defined as a moral tale.” In follow up, I ask the students to define morality for me. Not a single student has been able to, so I eventually allow them to google it. We then read the definition aloud and discuss how morality can be conveyed in a story, thus rendering that story a ‘moral tale’ aka a ‘Fable.’ Lastly, we then read the “The Fox and The Crow.” After reading it a second time to themselves, I let the students stew on it before asking them what the moral of the The Fox and The Crow is.
Over the past three years, the overwhelmingly unanimous answer has been (and I’m paraphrasing): “If I’m crafty, like a fox, I can trick people into giving me something valuable that they didn’t want to give up.” In a sense, that’s not a wrong, or perhaps even a bad answer, depending upon your perspective (and whether or not you're a lawyer). It’s telling though, and quite sad when you really think about it. First, it demonstrates to me they have little or no historical frame of reference for what can be considered moral teaching and learning, except what they glean from popular culture and the media. Moreover, not only can they not discern the moral of the Fable, but they can’t define morality, except in their own, arguable skewed, terms. That's in part what renders' this generation vulnerable and disappointed.
Of course, this is just a foolishly long anecdote for a message board. I started writing it while watching the soccer match. Allez les bleus! And go Cougars.
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