[Air-l] laptops and Internet access in class

Tue May 22 12:17:03 PDT 2007

Jericho:

I interviewed a Madison Avenue designer on Saturday who made the same
comments and he is also a paper/pen and computer designer who is
self-taught. He blamed the conformity imposed by formal education and
its emphasis on rigid standards. I have also seen this problem first
hand as a communications professional and a motion picture
producer/director. As a scholar and researcher, I believe that theory
and history are important, but I also believe that one needs to often
start teachings students concretely in the field on real projects with
professionals, so that the abstract theories can truly take hold and
this is what I have done for the past decade with my student interns who
have gone on to do great things professionally. As a person who lives in
both worlds, I see the problem that academics have with professionals
and vice versa and I see the student as often the victim. Why? The
student needs good grades to stay in school, qualify for grad school,
satisfy parents and to keep or gain scholarship dollars. Hence, the
professors word is law. Conversely, it is fair to say that many, if not
most professors, are not as grounded full-time in the real world and the
professional usually is a better expert on how to work in the every day
work environment. There needs to be a meeting of the minds that requires
both students and the professors to take the classroom to the work
environment. This was suggested to me by a Madison Avenue Advertising
executive. Neither side fully appreciates the gifts that each brings to
the equation. The professor can help teach a student to critically
analyze, evaluate and be creative. The professional can bring out the
full talent that resides within the student once they have the basics
mastered and have tested it in the field with fellow professionals.
Perhaps each student should have internships every semester that
involves satisfying qualifications for several classes simultaneously so
that students become accustomed to putting together multiple facets of a
project and using their imagination.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
[mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of jerichob at juno.com
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 12:34 PM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-l] laptops and Internet access in class

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).

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