Gunnar -
Thanks for your note. My responses are embedded below:
On 8/23/13 7:54 AM, Gunnar Swanson wrote:
> I'm slowly getting to what I meant to be the topic of this post: Teena's " Perhaps this is a phd topic for someone (else!)?" I second that motion. Punya's education ties make me hope he'll recruit someone to deal with some of this (particularly, I hope, the whole thinking through making thing and its implications for education.)
> Punya wrote "I pilfer ideas from the design literature and bring it to bear on my research and scholarship on educational psychology and technology. And that has led to a reasonably productive and successful academic career. I often joke that my career is based mainly on the fact that most of my colleagues in education do NOT read outside the education literature—which makes my bringing in of ideas from other fields (usually design) appear far more creative than it really is." I hope he keeps it up (and I hope he points us toward ed lit that might enlighten our thinking about design.)
>
> If anyone is working on this in education, please connect them with me.
There is a strong line of work in education (particularly in educational
technology) by the name of "constructionism." As defined by Seymour Papert
"The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of
science education underlying this project. From constructivist theories
of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than
as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative
materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an
activity the learner experiences as constructing is a meaningful product.".
-- from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theory)
A similar line of work goes under the label of "Learning by design"
which is where I have located most of my work, particularly in teacher
education and teacher professional development. Connect with me off the
list and I can send you some of my writings (all on my website but
sometimes hard to dig out).
Personally I have always been intrigued by a broader idea of how what we
learn influences our world view beyond just the discipline being
learned. Consider for instance Dawkins' quote that "understanding
evolution led me to atheism." The point being not that his viewpoint is
right or wrong but rather how we make these leaps from our disciplinary
knowledge to a broader worldview. I see the idea of design as providing
me with a similar worldview. So my courses and projects on typography or
visually manipulating a cube that I did in my master's program influence
me (even today) on how I think about teaching, learning, research and
parenting.
> I disagree with the notion that such transfer is uncreative. The essence of creativity is picking something up in one place an putting it down in another. The discussion of why we see it as creative in one case and why we see it as parasitic in another is more than I have time for right now but I would argue that much of what gets seen as not creative (or even an affront to creativity) is unfairly condemned as such.
I agree that such transfer is a creative act - and have a piece in the
journal TechTrends coming out soon on exactly this idea. That it is
"parasitic" or "pilfering" is neither here nor there. Moreover, I have
always cited my sources from the design literature - so it is all above
board (so to speak).
thanks
~ punya
--
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Punya Mishra
Web: http://punyamishra.com
Blog: http://punya.educ.msu.edu/blog/
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