Can Techies be Creative?
I was going to log on and write something about Facebook, and I found this thing that I wrote last year while preparing for a conference in Canada. The title is Observations and Suggestions for College-Level Digital Arts Courses. I have discussed some of the ideas such as co-teaching, peer-to-peer learning, and hyper-disciplinary creative course in our retreat, but I figure some of you might be interested in reading the paper so I uploaded the PDF file for you to download at: http://www.badongo.com/file/8861173
Any comments or feedback will be much appreciated, thank you very much!
Teaching Web Design in First Life
So much of our recent conversations and discussions are about the possibilities in Second Life. While all those discussions are wonderful and exciting, I still find myself wondering about what could/should be done to make teaching in our “First Life” here at FIT easier and more effective.
Ironically, as a teacher who teaches young students who will be designing our virtual environment of the future, I believe effective learning of computer technology begins from a well designed physical space. Not all computer classrooms/labs are created equal, and building a successful computer lab classroom takes much more than just filling a space with expensive and cutting-edge equipments. After all, those are human beings in there teaching and learning.
The connection between the physical and social setting of the computer lab classroom and their effect on student learning has been documented by several researches and books. I also found that many schools have published guidelines for the design of their computer labs. I am not sure whether such a document exists for FIT or not. If there is, I would love to learn about it.
I have begun my own research on this subject, and I will share my findings with you on this blog in the future. Meanwhile, please feel free to send me any thoughts, comments, or suggestions that you may have regarding this matter. If you are interested in this subject as well, here are a couple of places to start:
