Yes, I have to disagree with the argument about remote design education being worthless. I've been involved in online collaborative design teaching for ten years via the Omnium project (and platform) at the College of Fine Arts in Australia - http://www.omnium.net.au. Australia has a long history and expertise in distance education because of the size of the place in relation to the population size.
I used to teach face-to-face at COFA when I was head of the school of Media Arts and the Digital Media program there. I also taught online for students who were either not in Sydney or Australia or on another campus. Now I'm back in Germany I still teach online from here. Teaching online requires a lot of preparation, which is a good thing pedagogically speaking. It's far too easy to walk into a room and wing it if you know your subject. Sometimes that is a good thing too, but it doesn't structure the learning experience very well usually. The 'low bandwidth' of communication also forces you to think about what it is you are trying to teach and break it down and explain it very carefully. Books are low bandwidth too - usually just text and pictures - but deep content. As Angel mentioned, I have learned an enormous amount from reading books, and that's without any direct interaction with the authors (usually). Online learning and teaching allows that interaction and discussion. It also slows discussion down, which is an excellent way to get students to consider different views and processes (it's not just the loud ones that hog the floor) and allows for broader peer feedback and collaboration in ways the often don't happen in real life (because friends sit and work with friends, etc.). On top of that you get an archive of the whole thing to refer back to. COFA Online offers a Masters in Cross Disciplinary Art and Design that also includes a sculpture course. Of course, it is different from studio work, that's for sure, but not better or worse. A large part of teaching sculpture students about form, light and shade, volume, etc. is done through examples which are photographs anyway. You can't drag all your students over to Europe to quickly look at a Henry Moore, you show them a photograph and talk about it. For interaction design, the online learning experience makes even more sense because, at least for the digital versions, so many examples are online to use, 'handle', critique, etc. So you're at an advantage over some other traditional disciplines. Most of the time I work remotely too for clients in the UK, often with other people working on the projects in the USA. That's not uncommon, so it's not a bad idea to teach students how to work this way because it will play a large part in their futures. The only thing I haven't really found a good online substitute for is brainstorming. There are ways to come close, but it's not quite the same process. We've written and presented quite a bit about this - http://omnium.net.au/research/papers/ %u2013 and I have some more recent papers/examples if anyone is interested. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=37349
________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
