[Air-l] laptops and Internet access in class

[elw at stderr.org]

pleaseuseparagraphbreakswhenyouwrite;itisjustashardtoreadtextwithnoparagraphbreaksasitistoreadasentencewithnospaces.particularlyifyouwritequitealongblockoftextthatpeopletrytoread.

</vitanza>

thanks.

--e



On Tue, 22 May 2007, Heidelberg, Chris wrote:

> Date: Tue, 22 May 2007 15:17:03 -0400
> From: "Heidelberg, Chris" <Chris.Heidelberg at ssa.gov>
> Reply-To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: Re: [Air-l] laptops and Internet access in class
> 
> 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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