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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 -- -------------------------------------- Punya Mishra Web: http://punyamishra.com Blog: http://punya.educ.msu.edu/blog/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------