[Air-l] laptops and Internet access in class

[jerichob at juno.com]

This is a bit of a tangent, but it pertains to how technology is used 
in a particular workplace, and what foundations may be necessary to 
underly its use, and how best to teach those foundations.  

Matt's comments (below) remind me of a conversation I had recently 
with my brother, who is an art director at Electronic Arts (i.e. he 
designs video games).  He was talking about training new designers, 
and how they are good with the technology in some ways, but they do 
not understand the basics of design.  He will show them how he does 
the lighting for a particular scene and how it works with the elements 
in the scene, and they will take his lighting set-up and just cut and 
paste it into everything, without understanding the basic concepts 
needed to actually design the lighting to fit the particular scene 
they are working with. My brother is known within the company as a 
very good teacher, but he said by the time young designers start 
working, some of their practices seem to be so rigidly established 
that it's very difficult to train them to do otherwise, and they seem 
to think that they can just cut and paste elements from elsewhere 
rather than designing a scene.  He attributes it partly to a lack of 
imagination that is produced during formal education.  His theory is 
that it's because the young artists are not taught how to design, but 
how to use computers to design (and even that not terribly well). He 
himself is a self-taught artist who learned with paper and pencil, and 
actually resisted computers for most of the 1980s. Now he works both 
ways - directly on the computer and with paper and pencil - but he 
thinks it is better to learn how to draw and paint on paper before 
moving to the computer, because then at least you develop an 
understanding of how to put a scene together. In his experience, the 
best designers work on paper as well as on the computer and are fluent 
in multiple media.

Of course, it's possible that he is on the tail end of a particular 
way of working that will disappear as designers trained solely on 
computers take over, and that his methods of design are becoming 
obsolete.  I don't know enough about the field to say.  However, he 
feels that the "cut-and-paste" approach of the younger designers leads 
to an unimaginative and derivative look, and he is worried about it. 
It reminds me of the difference between students who can write papers 
that present an original argument drawing from the work of others and 
students who cut and paste sentences without really understanding how 
to put an argument together.  They use the technology to pull together 
a lot of information, but they don't know how to present it in a way 
that gets their point across to other people.  They haven't learned 
the basics of design.

Jericho

Jericho Burg
Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego
http://www.communication.ucsd.edu/people/g_burg.html

-- "Matthew Bernius" <mbernius at gmail.com> wrote:

Blind faith in technology has become a crutch for student to avoid 
learning
fundamentals. While they assume that an answer is "out there," they 
more
often than not, lack both the desire to seek it out or the skills (or 
even
suspicion) to interrogate the information once they find it.

I've found that these so called "digital natives" haven't even begun to
interrogate the systems (language, practices, heuristics) that they 
operate
in. If anything, they are far worse at switching digital authoring 
tools
than we "immigrants" who were forced to internalize the language and
metaphor of the tools we used. This is a common thread that I've heard 
from
numerous employers -- that recent grad have a real hard time switching
between tools (sometimes even between different versions of the same
software).