Linking Assignment #6
- How has your colleague’s experience differed from yours? And how do you know? What were the theoretical underpinnings of their work?
For this linking assignment, I thought I would look at Navid’s user interface analysis, as having done a few projects with Navid, I have always appreciated his keen eye on site and assignment design. In this assignment, I wanted to compare my reflection on the user interface with what Navid sees in his educator experience in high school with mine in the adult learning sphere. He brings a breadth of knowledge about what user interfaces account for younger generations while comparing it to what user interfaces account with adult learners. This makes our analysis an interesting process side by side as Navid’s observations speak to things that keep teenagers into webpages for for longer while I see that as a benefit when trying to engage older learners.
The theoretical underpinnings of the works are from the same research from Harris (2017), where the manipulation I find is high to keep people on webpages and I do see the dangers of those in younger minds where there’s a lot of consideration with a still growing and developing brain. We see not only what Harris described but also, Navid was implying what he found from a Piaget perspective of development in the user interface. As I mostly deal with adult learners, my post was focused on the adult learning perspective of wanting to be honoured and appreciated as part of ways to engage adults and I find that in well done user interfaces, medals and accomplishment trackers are ways to keep those adults engaged in the site (Brignull, 2011).
- What web authoring tool have they chosen to manifest their work? How does their tool differ from yours in the ways in which it allows content-authoring and end-user interface?
We both completed the Inyerface module in a similar amount of time, and Navid was looking at it from a consumer perspective where I had looked at it from a web developer perspective. Navid, did an excellent job of reflecting his feelings on the user interface and noted different frustrations and indicated where he would’ve stopped surfing the website had this not been an assignment. As a previous web developer, I was noting mostly ways to try to trick or even try to accelerate the process and I found the game to be great at not allowing me to use loopholes and to actually have me ride out the features.
This consumer vs developer look at the web authoring tool put the affective perspective to my data analysis component. It gave me questions about measuring that sense of frustration almost in a meter.
The other perspective where we differ is where Navid talks about still using GUI that’s outdated when it comes to supporting youth in educational technology journeys. The stuff they use at home vs what is being done at school can be frustrating and for me, adult learning in a clinical setting uses a multi-modality perspective as clinical education at the current time of this analysis still can’t match real world clinical practice and so, we’re in the opposite end where we encourage our newer and younger learners to take a page from their more experienced mentors as real world clinical education still is the gold standard in my setting.
- How do the constraints of the course design manifest in your architectural choices? How have you responded to the pedagogical underpinnings of this course design in your own web space?
One of the things that this section covered was how easy it was for the user interface to drive the experience of the learner and user. It was to the point that Navid and I had the same reflection where content can almost be second to how the user interface is done. Our reflection is that you can almost support information and learners when the user interface is done well.
References
Brignull, H. (2011). Dark patterns: Deception vs. honesty in UI design. A List Apart, 338.
Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day [Video]. TED.