education building

This morning on the CBC’s early edition, Rick interviewed Qixing Zheng, “Microsoft Canada’s first User Experience Advisor“. I was surprised they were doing such an interview in the first place, but more so that she is M. Canada’s FIRST user experience professional. I guess this responsibility has, until now been directed from the mothership or something. Regardless, it gave me some hope that my own role (as ‘experience designer‘ for several years now) here in the LIDC may become a little more recognized and understood. Of course it also begs the question, is such a position even needed at a university? A question I will attempt to tackle in future posts here.

The announcement was made back in March on the “User Experience Connection“, and I was interested to learn that Qixing is a masters graduate from UBC in Human Computer Interaction. I thought the interview went fairly well and I appreciated her explanation of what the role of the user experience professional is all about (even Ricki seemed to get it).  Her website states that her passion in this area is

…deeply rooted in helping people to improve their user experiences with the technology they rely on everyday. To me, a good user experience is simple, consistent, pleasing, and reliable.

I have been trying to update my profile page on the wiki we use in the LIDC (here, but soon maybe here), with a small blurb about my approach to creating better user experiences on SFU websites, and the projects I have worked on.  So far I’d say its still in an early draft form, but I look forward to articulating what I try to do here, especially in light of the recent news.

A great video on joho blog today, will kick off a new category for education.building on, organization. While discussing his new book Everything Is Miscellaneous, the guru of the topic goes off a bit on his public school system. Fortunately, I had the time to watch the whole thing and pulled out a great quote. He describes the way he sees his own kids using the web to do homework, and the incongruence with the testing methods they are evaluated on.

“..and they are doing their homework together of course they are, but they’re getting graded individually, and they’re getting tested more and more and more. They separate the tables, they all face forward and they get their little books they write down what they know as individuals.

This is a radically different view of knowledge. What they are being told is, to ‘know is to be equal’. I mean this is an old rant right but it’s getting worse. They are being told that ‘to know’ is have content shoved into your head and be able to write down answers, whereas they’re doing the right thing online outside of the view of teachers, who think they are doing their homework by themselves, they’re not. They’re learning socially.” timecode 22:28 - 23:05

If you keep listening from that point, he responds a bit to the issue of testing and suggests ways that social software may be able to create new ways of teaching and learning.
This software will be a new focus here, particularly in the area of organization. For digital resources to be useful for academics, some new proficiencies in managing these assets are needed such as tagging, and the capability to navigate between the many formats information can be displayed in and converted to.