Teaching is an ill structured and complex domain. Being able to shift from the stable and transparent traditional pedagogical technologies to protean, unstable and opaque technologies will help prepare students for applying their designed knowledge to the real world. By being able to deal with ambiguity, frustration and change in the classroom, teachers will help model for their students how to navigate in the real world. I am interested in exploring how to help students be successful in ambiguous more real-world environments. They are too comfortable in static black and white environments. I have been trying to assign more design your own labs for my students in college prep Physics classes. Assigning such labs really challenge my student to organize their investigations and understand the essential concepts.
As a teacher that is continuously working at improving a new Engineering Design course last semester, I love the perspective of "knowledge as design" and "wicked problems". How do I help students accept and work with these paradigms? How do teachers help students be comfortable creating satisificing solutions to wicked problems? And are satisificing solutions acceptable when building a bridge? Is there levels or graduations of satisficing solutions to be used in different contexts?
Creative repurposing is critical to teaching in a low income district and for overcoming the "Functional Fixedness" discussed in Chapter 1. A colleague's students used wikispaces to create quizzes in an English class. The students were wonderfully creative in this exercise.Their quizzes were full of personality. The personality in the quizzes made the formative assessment engaging to peers. There is a whole community of creative repurposing emerging and supported by web 2.0 technologies for personal projects at www.instructables.com. I would like to have student's post their design projects to this kind of forum to receive feedback and document their work.
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