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New way of learning

During this course i'm experiencing absolutely new way of learning. In schools and at the universities in my home country everything is different – in my opinion much worse. Lectures are taking place in big classrooms with something about 150 students inside and a lecturer comes, speaks to the crowd drawing something on a board without any personal interaction with students and after one or one and a half of an hour he leaves and the students have to go to another big classroom for another lecture, which looks exactly the same. And usually nobody cares if you are there or not. You just have to be prepared for your exams. Fellow students are borrowing and copying notes from each other and that's all about their contact in learning matters. Sometimes they are studying together for exams, but there are no group activities in their study program.

Here it's completely opposite – we have a lot of group activities and we have to talk a lot about what we have to do together, share our ideas and solutions. Through that we are learning to be open for different points of view and criticism, to listen to each other with understanding and explain our ideas, so they could be understood by others. The classrooms are usually not so big, so everyone can be seen and heard and that encourages to interaction on both lines lecturer-student and student-student. I feel that i'm treated personaly not as one of the crowd and that's great. The lecturers are closer to the students than i imagined. They care about us to understand what they are talking about and to be at the classes, they are also very helpful in a lot of matters unconnected with the course. They are really nice, friendly, smart people, who are sharing their knowledge and experience with us in many interesting, creative ways, but who also wants to involve, understand and get to know us. I think that they are learning a little from us too. Great and new for me is also that we can stay in touch with them online. That's really helpful. Just like meetings with Nancy, which surprised me even more. It's not yet popular in Poland to use any online tools in education.

In my country learning is old-fashion and boring. It's impossible for people to imagine that studying can be fun, so i wasn't expecting that they will be here, but they really are. I'm happy that i choose this course, because even if i won't decide to be a designer in my future i'll develop my creativity and learn here a lot of things, which can be useful in my personal and profesional life doesn't matter what i will be doing. And the best thing is that i'll learn them having a good time.

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How much does your personal preference drive your tool choices? What if everyone else in your group had different preferences? How would you proceed as you steward the technology? Does looking at others’ preferences and perspectives change your view as a tech steward? Challenge you?

My personal preferences of choosing tools to work online are based mostly on what i am familiar with. If i can work with something i know it's much easier and faster. Otherwise i have to learn how the tool works itself before i can use it to do what i have to.

But in both cases, the thing, which is really important for me are language options of the tool. If i can change the language to Polish it's much easier for me to work, because my brain automaticly understands and notices everything after one quick glance. In English i have to focus a bit more (read not just look at the words) and in any other language (except Spanish, which i understand more or less although i can't speak or write in it) i have to translate almost everything to understand for example what should i click on to do what i want.

If everyone else in my group had different preferences, the best solution in my opinion would be to choose one tool which most of us is familiar with to save time, that otherwise we would have to spend on learning how to use it. For sure it should be in English.

But it could happen that we all had different preferences, because everyone is really experienced in use of only one tool and have no idea what the others are. Then we would have no other option than to learn one of them. We should show each other our propositions and briefly explain how they work, then decide collectively, which one we want to learn and afterwards – use. Good thing is that there will always be at least one person who knows how it works and can help the others.

If we had a lot of time (and technological knowledge) we could also create a completely new tool for our group's use only.

There is a lot of possibilities. In every case the most suitable solution depends on kinds, types of character and skills of people, who are members of a group and the time they have to finish their work.

Looking at preferences and perspectives of others extends my view, inspires me to try something new. That's always a challenge, but sometimes also great fun and finally it brings a lot of satisfaction.

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Team-work and me

I haven't work much in a group before i started to study IDE, so it's something new for me. In high school if i had some project to do it was usually my own responsibility to have it done step by step from research through conclusions to final presentation.

When it happens – somebody shows me new, fresh way of thinking and i enjoy it – it gives me a lot of energy, ideas and will to work.

The other thing that challenges me is working online. As i wrote in the last post i don't have too much experience in working, discussing or just staying in touch through the Internet. And fact that the connection in my room is really bad doesn't help. But it will change soon i hope.

The thing that i'm really happy about is that we started to work in groups at the begining of the year, because it's helping to get to know each other better and faster than usually.

What can i do to improve my experience and group's work in the coming weeks? I think that it would be really helpful if i spent more time online and i could also read a bit more to get to know all aspects of our research problems better.

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Personal reaserch experiment

But the problem from those times, which phones and online societies solved is that if people didn't make an appointment before and they wanted to see someone the only thing they could do was to go to visit him without any guarantee that he will be at home (terrible if someone had friends in other cities), so they aren't so bad after all.

When i'm thinking about an experiment, which i can do to explore new area or type of use of the Internet first thing, which comes to my mind is to start to use some online apps and tools, because i have never done that and lately i thought that i might really enjoy it, so maybe even start to like other things, which the Internet offers.

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Oops...

I missed the part with asking people. But i don't think that anybody from my network could give me a valuable answer (or one that i can not figure out myself), maybe my father, but anyway right now i don't have enough time to do this, so i hope that my personal reflection will be also ok.

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What do we need to learn as we explore the application of online communities and networks to open innovation design?

Nowadays the Internet plays very important role in our life. It is a source of knowledge, 'place' where you can find and read everyday's news, modern way of entertainment and virtual environment with a lot of different communities and networks creating a possibility to meet new people and talk with them or just stay in touch with others, who you already know.

People used to laugh that something or someone, who you can not find in the Internet doesn't exist at all.

We as future designers need to know how to promote our products, designes successfuly, so how to get to as many potential customers as we only can. Most of them certainly uses the Internet every day, what means that it could be very useful marketing tool. We have a great opportunity to meet and attract people to our works online. What do we need and want to learn is how to do that?

We have to explore needs, requierments and esthetic preferences of our target users. We will find out then what draws their attention the most, so we'll have a clue how to make successful online ads. But it will not really help us if we don't know how to choose right websites or networks for promotion of concrete products. So that's the second thing, which we need to learn.

In short words - we have to learn what's the most effective way of online advertising.

But before we will be ready to put a product on a market we of course have to create it. During this process we will need a lot of things.

First of all – money. It is a problem connected with almost everything in our life. As a designers we need it for both – creating and marketing of our product. The Internet can help us in this matter too.

We can find funds online, if we will learn how to look for them properly. We have to get to know where to find the right people - future sponsors - and how to talk with them to gain their trust and will to support us.

If we don't want to work alone, we can also use the Internet to find a good team. We need to learn in which online communities, networks we can meet people who we could work with, so ones, who have similar attitude and vision.

After we find a team or decide to work on our own, we can also wish to work using lots of online applications and tools, so we have to learn what are our options and how to use them.

We can also use the Internet just to check if it is worth to spend time and money working on our project – ask people what do they think about our idea to find out if we should correct, improve or completely change it. It could help us avoid failure.

I'm sure that there is a lot of other aspects in which the Internet can be really helpful for designers, but for now that's all what comes to my mind.