Dear Johann,
Thanks for your lengthy response. I don't think (proverbially) describing "modern students" as "a species" is in any way productive, nor is your coarse generalisation of their behaviour very respectful. I don't believe "modern students" are all that different from those of yesteryear, there are still the eager, the lazy and every graduation in between.
Food for thought: 'I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.' – Hesiod, 8th century BC
All best,
Melle
melle zijlstra (phd researcher | university of bath | department of computer science)
bath (uk)
dublin (ireland)
(uk) +447495905169
(m.zijlstra@) bath.ac.uk<http://bath.ac.uk>
mellezijlstra.com<http://mellezijlstra.com>
maatschappijtotnutvanmijalleen.nl<http://maatschappijtotnutvanmijalleen.nl>
linkedin<http://nl.linkedin.com/in/mellezijlstra>
On 05/07/2018 09:51, Johann van der Merwe wrote:
Warning: Long Post
Melle, you wrote:
"Johann, I'm not sure what defines a 'modern student' and if I'm one, but I
can perfectly find and weigh information, with or without library shelves.
Most libraries have good search engines these days and there are many other
ways to get access to information. I'm curious to hear how in your opinion
students have changed (at least that's what I assume you suggest has
happened) and over what period of time? By the way, finding, analysing and
critically weighing information are skills designers also learn in their
education. Their sources and purposes may be different, but the principles
are not all that different I believe."
We found that students were not at all capable (or willing) to find and
weigh information ... they did not use the library to its full potantial
... etc., etc.
Those comments were not meant to be universal - that is what I found both
in my own teaching field, as well as from other lecturers at SA conferences
(including some Australian & UK examples).
"Modern students" as a species rely on the internet, rely on the vast
industry that has sprung up via ex-lecturers offering their services in
writing & selling essays & reports, on any subject, BUT, they are much more
than that.
Melle, I do not have an easy answer to your questiuon, but my
investigations into what exactly the "Millenium student" might be led me to
:
[1] The new Millenium students will find their own life teachers for
themselves, as Lindsea stated, and they are finding that in their own
lives, the internet world and the „real world‟ are becoming conceptually
indistinguishable – with their interactions at e.g. home and at university
merging with those they are experiencing online to such an extent that the
real and the virtual are becoming indistinguishable. The positive view of
these circumstances comes from the structuration of design itself, for if
we believe that design is a social act, and that design can actively renew
itself through forms of social structuration (that should read,
socio-technical structuration), then Dunin-Woyseth and Nielsen (2001:27-28)
suggest an epistemological premise for design: they have adopted the term
making knowledge to highlight the essence of design as a making profession.
[2] The students who enter the first year of design education are, thanks
to the (South African) school feeding programme, totally unprepared for a
constructivist approach to education, despite our national school
curriculum stating that school leavers should be able to learn how to
learn. The first year students were thus given the chance to immerse
themselves in the possibilities offered by this new approach, and the fact
that they not only taught and learned from each other, thereby relying less
and less on the authoritative voice of the educator, but the fact that they
were allowed to „perform‟ their newly acquired skills to an audience helped
them gain the confidence to construct totally new social and cognitive
maps, since the (personal) map we follow through life and learning is
constructed by our co-ontogenic relationships with our environment. To the
new Millenium student (cf. Chapter2:75) playing at (performing) is not
simply an adolescent game but an everyday social interaction that Goffman
calls a dramaturgical account, “the subject matter [of which] is the
creation, maintenance, and destruction of common understandings of reality
by people working individually and collectively to present a shared and
unified image of that reality” (Kivisto and Pittman, 2005:272).
[3] Design as a discipline is looking for an identity, and the new
Millennium student is likewise looking for a personal identity (a natural
and ongoing process); the discipline and the student of that discipline are
comparable to what Flores (1998:352) calls corporate and personal
identities. In an article that reflects on the Winograd and Flores book,
Understanding Computers and Cognition (1988), he confirms that “the
construction of and participation in sites on the Web is already enhancing
both of these identity-forming practices, and is, for that reason, about
identity-building …”. Flores also mentions a third possibility, which I
will only be able to deal with, in depth, in Chapter 4 (in the discussion
on ontological phenomenology), which is that both accounts of identity
formation can be grounded through the work of Heidegger, an outlook I fully
endorse since I do not believe in the possibility of a „split personality‟
for designers: your professional identity (being the way you think, and the
way you are) is the same as your personal identity. Once embarking on a
process of structuration … and, again, I have to interrupt myself, because
the process of structuration includes a measure of paradox, in the sense
that it is a narrative structure that is being constructed, an image, if
you will. As such – and I have no doubt that there are enough people who do
so deliberately – the „story‟ (that is your identity for others to „read‟)
can be manipulated-constructed to the extent that there are different
stories for different people; one for the office and one for family and
friends. Having said that, once you embark on a process of structuration,
normally, and under the influence of social constructivism (which in my
design thinking class includes a good dose of cybernetics
self-observation), the developing design (of your identity) does not depend
on too many subjective inputs and single-decision interpretations, but on
the evolution of a co-ontogenic drift (cf. autopoiesis, Chapter 4), with
drift referring to a very natural and mutual process of development, a
co-designing process that designs and produces an identity with and inside
a social structure. Now imagine that social structure to be an internet
community.
We turned students around from the very appealing brink of "instant
success" via the internet to the very real pleasures of achieving something
on one's own merit, because that is what they deserved.
Johann
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
