Hubwise

Category: Learning

  • Teaching & Learning in a Connected Age

    This year I finally completed my PhD in Curriculum Theory and Implementation. As my memory of walking across the stage to take my place within the academy fades I have begun thinking about the future. I began this blog the year I entered my doctoral studies and I posted only a few passing thoughts in the […]

  • Competency Based Degree Programs

    Assess learning, not time. Anya Kamenetz, of the NY Post, reports on an emerging trend in higher education regarding how learning is assessed, and degrees are accredited. She writes, In 1893, Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, introduced to the National Education Association a novel concept: the credit hour. Roughly equivalent to one hour of lecture time […]

  • Life on iPad

    What of the liberal arts’ future at Apple? One possible clue to this question lies about an hour into this week’s keynote, where Tim Cook put up a “Life on iPad” video to show the myriad of things people have been doing with their iPads. Jobs credited Apple’s success to working at the intersection of […]

  • Learnable Programming

    An insightful essay by Bret Victor. Considers programming as systems designed to “designed to encourage particular ways of thinking.” Building on Seymour Papert’s “Mindstorms” Victor thoughtfully considers how programming systems might be “carefully and beautifully designed around the way people think and learn.” In short, he argues that for programming systems to be learnable, “we […]

  • A Reimagining of Textbooks

    Inkling is an innovative interactive textbook for the iPad.

  • What does it mean to learn?

    The English word “learn” is a verb that denotes to “acquire knowledge of (a subject) or skill in (an art, etc.) as a result of study, experience, or teaching” (OED). This word comes to us by way of the Old English (c.450-c.1100) word leornian, which meant “to get knowledge” or to “be cultivated”. Further etymological […]

  • The Intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts

    At the close of Apple’s iPad product launch on January 27, 2010 Steve Job stood in front his Keynote slide of two street signs, one reading “Liberal Arts,” the other “Technology.” At this juncture, Jobs tells his audience, “Now the reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we have […]

  • Design thinking in the academy

    Among emergent “design thinking” spaces Stanford University’s Institute for Design, or d.school, stands out as a notable example. Its research, development, and educational vision is to use design thinking to “drive multidisciplinary innovation,” believing that “great innovators and leaders need to be great design thinkers” (“Standford University Institute of Design,” 2007). It’s objective is to […]

  • A designer’s birth in emergent spaces

    As a design professional, I have worked primarily in the emerging world of digital design and have sought to give aesthetic, semantic and functional order to a medium that was more imagined, than real. Unique to beginning my digital (web) design career in the mid 1990s was that it afforded me the opportunity to participate […]

  • In the beginning

    This is a beginning. Not a beginning in the sense of creatio ex nihilo, but rather an emergence where the old still largely evidences itself in the new. It’s an ending that shifts into a beginning. In this way, it may be a transition of utility à la creatio ex materia; or perhaps, a more […]