Below is all of my content that has been tagged with the term education. Browsing it should be very exciting for you. Enjoy.
I'm M. Jackson Wilkinson, a technologist, designer, speaker, educator, and writer in San Francisco. I recently moved from Washington, DC to work as a Senior Product Designer at LinkedIn, and am happy to take your feedback. I'm from Philadelphia, went to Bowdoin College in Maine, root for the Phillies, and love to sing.
Worth reading from A-Z.
From Mind Hacks:
Not Exactly Rocket Science covers an intriguing study on how people try less hard in a competition as the number of competitors increases.
The researchers started off with a simple observation that US students tended to get better marks when they took their exams in smaller exam rooms.
This brings up one of the reasons why you might not want to grow your team or business too much. When you have 50 designers, will they all work as hard and be as creative as when you had five? Will you still be the team you used to be?
The broader the web gets, the more specialized its practitioners are becoming. The role of the generalist is incredibly important, and we can’t keep neglecting it.
Jay Heinrichs on the difference between fighting and arguing, and why he’s spent years teaching his kids to argue effectively:
I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side. A dispute over territory in the backseat of a car qualifies as an argument, for example, in the unlikely event that one child attempts to persuade his audience rather than slug it.
I share his disappointment in our culture’s fear of a good, constructive argument. It’s reason and good argumentation that can help produce the best work, yet it’s all too common that we shy away and do only things that will be least likely to rub people the wrong way for fear of argument.
Exciting concept: the United Nations is funding and sponsoring the newly-launched University of the People, an online university that is nearly free. Students from over fifty countries have already enrolled into programs in business administration and computer science.
The only charge to students is a $15 to $50 admission fee, depending on their country of origin, and a processing fee for every test ranging from $10 to $100. For the University to sustain its operation, it needs 15,000 students and $6 million, of which Mr. Reshef [the university’s founder] has donated $1 million of his own money.
There are good and bad things about this concept in my opinion — the second-class status of the liberal arts falling on the bad side — but I’m eager to see a program like this succeed.
Dana Boyd from Microsoft Research was exploring teen practices, and collected questions for the questionnaire via Twitter. This certainly isn’t peer-reviewed, but there are lots of tasty morsels worth considering. Two:
@harraton: Do they care about their privacy? VERY much so. But what constitutes privacy for them is often quite different than what constitutes privacy for adults. Privacy is not dead.
and:
@dougthomas: Teens; what are their thoughts about downloading songs? films? software? without paying for it. They want access. Their parents won’t pay for it. They don’t have credit cards. They get what they are looking for by any means necessary. And those who get access to it traffic in that content among their peers who may be less technologically savvy/economically privileged.
Other good bits on lack of media literacy, lack of interest in Twitter, and a complete lack of association between the sites they love and the fields of computer science or design.
Society should have learned from experience that trying to make academia do what industry wants it to do seldom works in the long-term. By concentrating our resources on providing and embracing a career path that doesn’t require moving mountains, we create a stronger work force and a stronger, more multi-talented industry.
Babies’ minds aren’t just voids, waiting to gain capabilities. Instead, recent research is showing more and more that they are in fact well-designed to do what they need to do best: learn and discover.
“Adults can follow directions and focus, and that’s great,” says John Colombo, a psychologist at the University of Kansas. “But children, it turns out, are much better at picking up on all the extraneous stuff that’s going on… . And this makes sense: If you don’t know how the world works, then how do you know what to focus on? You should try to take everything in.”
A somewhat poorly-reposted article by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen turns the spotlight on gifted young adults, just making their way into the workplace:
In the workplace, being bright can quickly backfire if one is placed on the proverbial misfit list and exceptional talents can be locked down in organizational politics.
and:
They yearn to live out the promise of high potential. However, the transition from full-time learner to full-time worker can engender deep disappointment instead of the anticipated coming-of-age exhilaration.
Lots of other worthy bits here, scattered about. Worth wading through if you are, or work with, gifted folks.
Learning curves, advanced features, and powerful interfaces are things we on the web should be embracing, not fearing. Design for both the beginner and the expert.