Hello Sharon
I am enjoying your presentation - particularly designers teaching the way they were taught - am interested in this from a Community of Practice point of view and the drawback of the community of practice perpetuating teaching and learning, and, perhaps perpetuating inequalities, in particular in relation to non-English speaking students. For example, always promoting the 'western' view of design.

Hi Sharon,
I could not comment synchronously. I also liked your talk.

Regarding lifelong learning in distance education: we recognized a growing need of distance learners to keep the materials they study and contents they produce much longer than just over the period of the course is presented. In fact they want to keep what they produce in the context where they produced it and with whom they produced it. This goes beyond e-portfolios, but involves emerging communities of learners - lifelong learners.

To add on to. Learning is connected. We seem not to learn something once, but we build on what we learned over a longer period. In distance education often learning experiences are disconnected from another. When one online course ends, it is difficult to refer to the contents created in this course again. I think it is important, same as in collocated learning environments to evolve communities of distance learning through connected courses with continuing content evolution and connected students.

Hi Sharon,

I am 1/2 excited and 1/2 anxious after hearing your presentation and your reply to the questions raised by the participants.

I am excited because of the opportunity arises and challenges ahead; I am anxious because to challenge the notion of design studios cannot be online, it takes time and efforts to encourage more design educators to come on board.

One of the questions on instant communication vs. delayed communication was a spot on why many design educators find e-learning practical. Perhaps they have been so used to the (studio) culture they were originally trained / come from - sometimes it is really hard to break the cycle!

Having instance communication certain has its advantages including immediate feedback, and it certainly easier to get the message across with verbal and facial cues.

Having said that, I personally think that there are advantages for delayed communication too - (a) allows students to craft their thoughts and hopefully they would be mindful enough to think through and reflect accordingly, (b) trains them to think critically and logically vs. intuitively, and (c) forces students to be more conscientious in terms of what they are writing, to name a few.

A while back I was reminded that designers should be more open-minded and receptive to 'new' things, but what I am experiencing so far doesn't seem to be the case. Perhaps it takes time? Perhaps they need more time? Perhaps they don't have time!

I would like to further discuss the advantages and disadvantages that I have personally experienced from both sides of the desk if you will.

One thing I have noticed as both a teacher and a student is that the online environment, at least with the current state of technology is not for all types of learners. If you are an audio learner, you may have great difficulty having to read so much content. If you are a visual or tactile learner, you may struggle with what often times feels like rather flat presentations. In my opinion program which I am enrolled is doing an excellent job utilizing the current technology. The interface of the online classes which has been custom designed by the schools is very intuitive and easy to follow. They provide students with supplemental videos on instructions, movies, readings, hands-on demonstrations, etc. The weekly class sessions which are referred to as 'modules' are incredibly thorough, and probably much more so than a lecture would be. So from a content point of view it's an excellent experience.

The current difficulty as I see it from the student side are the ONLINE teaching and communication skills of the individual instructor. I've had absolutely amazing experiences and horrible one's. And I can tell that it has much more to do with the individual instructors comfort level in this virtual environment.

The difficulty I see as an instructor is being reliant on students ability to communicate what they are understanding or not understanding. It might be easy to say this will be demonstrated in the work, test scores etc., but I haven't always found that to be the case. As Peter pointed out, in face to face communication we have visual cues that we heavily rely on, and I think their must be new cues that we have to learn to pick up on in an online environment.

Hmm... In one of the graduate seminars (when Sharon was still in HKPolyU), I presented a topic on Herrmann Brain Dominance and we discussed knowing students' preferred mode of learning (e.g., left vs right brain; or in another classification - auditory, visual, tactile, kinesthetic etc.) do we purposely match their style or do we directly / indirectly train they to adjust and adapt a different style of learning?

While it is commonly known that designers are mostly right-brained dominant (intuitive, creative, synthesis etc.) and they may not necessary be used to a more logical, critical and analytical thinking (left-brain dominant) - some BA students I have observed are very creative and expressive or to some extent try to be unique or distinct from others, but when asked about rationale or justification, they don't seem to be able to articulate it - I believe many experienced and good design educators would say both thinking modes are important. Can technology help to strike a balance between these two modes of thinking?

To move someone out of their comfort zone and put them into an uncomfortable zone requires time and tries out different strategies.

The landscape of education is changing as a result of the knowledge-based economy and advances in technology. This poses challenging dimensions for design educators to reconsider their teaching practices. New teaching pedagogies are expected to deal with the influx of learners who are more technologically savvy and with different expectations when acquiring and practicing design in the media-rich and technology-mediated e-learning environment. Design education is seen to be falling behind. While I am not saying e-learning is the best solution, the reality is that e-learning is here to stay, so what are we (as design educators) going to do about it? For sure, as technology advances, e-learning has certain advantages that design educators could explore and consider to 'produce' future designers that are not only capable of designing in isolation but also handle cross boundaries and cross cultures collaborative design.

If enculturation the ‘way of being’ a (mindful) reflective practitioner is what the design education really intends to achieve, then we need more than just a skillful or experienced design educator – one must not only know what to teach (body of knowledge) with the appropriate framework of studio thinking (including studio structure and studio habits of mind) but also how to teach using appropriate pedagogy that is backed by a philosophy of teaching. Unlike design practitioners, future design educators need to be mindful themselves (FIRST) in order to produce mindful designers (SECOND).