Design and Digital Pedagogy, Part III: Good Design is Good Thinking

Assessing Design in Students' Digital Projects

“But this isn’t an English class,” my students protest, when they discover that I have given their poorly written paper a grade less than A. “I thought you were grading this on the ideas!” “Yes,” I agree. “And your ideas are scattered, nebulous, and contradictory. The clunky and incoherent sentences are only a symptom of the real problem.”

No, I don’t really say it quite that bluntly, but I do launch into my speech about how the process of crafting and revising your writing is part of the process of defining and developing your ideas, etc., etc. Good writing is good thinking.

So we take it for granted that we need to include various aspects of writing among our assessment criteria when we assign papers. But as we venture into assigning more new media projects, we may hesitate to evaluate the design component of those projects in courses not specifically focused on design. There are two reasons, I think, for this hesitation: 1) we fear that we are judging mere appearances rather than substance, and 2) we doubt our own competence to make informed judgments, beyond our subjective preferences.

If we are going to assign our students to work in new media, however, we need to give them feedback on their designs, for the same reasons that we need to give them feedback on their writing: because the purpose of any such assignment is (or ought to be) to require students not only to interact with course content, but to formulate coherent ideas about it, and to communicate those to others.

In order to evaluate design in a way that is not only clear and consistent, but also substantive and useful to the students, we need to be able to articulate criteria for good design. Fortunately, this is not as hard as you might think! Using the materials on this page, you can create a design rubric that will help your students use design effectively, and allow you to grade it fairly.

The fundamental questions that you need to ask, and that you need to get students in the habit of asking, are, What are the most important ideas you want to convey with your project? and, To whom do you want to convey them (who is your audience)?

Sound familiar? Right. It’s the same way you’ve been teaching and grading writing for years. So all you need to do is translate your criteria into visual terms. For example:

Tone. In a written assignment, you might evaluate this based on vocabulary, length and complexity of sentences, and use of first person. In design, you are looking at color scheme, typography, and graphics, but you are still asking the same basic question: does the work show awareness of its audience and a contextually appropriate attitude toward the material?

Organization. You know how to assess whether a writer’s sentences and paragraphs flow logically from one to the next while working to construct an argument. Ask yourself the same kinds of questions about the layout of a new media project: are the parts that relate to each other actually near each other? 

You can undoubtedly sense all this intuitively when looking at a visual project, but pinning it down to specific components will be much more useful than telling a student it just doesn’t “feel” right.

“No,” you explain patiently, “this isn’t a design class.” And you communicate to your students, through classroom activities, grading rubrics, and feedback on their papers, that design is crucial to how they express ideas in visual media. It’s not just the frosting.

Design and Digital Pedagogy, Part II: Design and Participation in Class Blogs

A simple google search turns up numerous sites offering advice on the pedagogical uses of blogging, sample assignments, assessment strategies, etc. (Not to mention the heated debates over Blogs vs. Term Papers - but let’s not go there.) Much harder to find, however, are discussions of the design of class blogs, and how design considerations may affect student participation, and even the quality of student work.

It seems obvious enough that an attractively designed page will be more inviting to students, will encourage them to spend more time there and to put more effort into their posts. But there’s more to it than luring them in with eye candy. The visual look of your page can communicate to students whether you are inviting them to a “hang,” where they can show up in their mental pajamas, relax on digital beanbag chairs, and chat over popcorn and root beer, or to a dinner party, where they will need to tuck in their shirts and use the correct fork. If you opt for the more formal tone, how will you balance academic standards with giving students a sense of ownership of this digital space? The more students can identify positively with the class blog, the harder they will work to make their posts meet the standards that the visual presentation subconsciously conveys. If your blog is open to the public, what kinds of readers would you like to attract? Professionals in the field who will respond substantively to the posts? Your students’ peers? Younger students, so that your class can act as the “experts”? Your design will convey to users who is invited in, and how they are expected to behave.

All that still seems pretty obvious, and more or less superficial. But consider a particular pedagogical problem. A colleague of mine recently attempted to use a blog as the medium for discussion of a particular book among his students in a particular course. The results, he said, were so disastrous that he will never attempt it again. Now, this colleague is no technophobe, has no fears that the blog spells the end of liberal education as we know it. So what was the problem? One student, he said, had posted so frequently and so diligently, with long diatribes that attacked the book under discussion and the opinions of other students so vigorously, that the other students felt he had completely hijacked the space, and either stopped putting effort into their own posts, or stopped posting altogether.

There are low-tech approaches to this problem, of course: just as he would have done with a student who was dominating discussion in the classroom, my colleague spoke to the student in person, urging him to tone down his rhetoric, etc., all to no avail. But could design have prevented this from seeming like such a problem in the first place? What if the class page was set up so that, from the home page, the user saw only the first few lines of each post? That would have the effect of equalizing all of the voices in the conversation, at least in the initial view. Neither the students nor other readers would have to scroll down past one classmate’s endless rant in order to get to the thoughtful comments of others farther down.

Furthermore, this format would encourage students to craft their first sentences more carefully, in order to spark a reader’s interest, and to convey the main idea. The structure itself builds in an intrinsic reason for what otherwise seems to students like just one more pointless requirement: “Wait - we have to have a main idea?”

So, should you rush right to your class blog and adorn it with cutesy pictures, flashy fonts, and eye-catching colors? Maybe. But first, you will need to think carefully about what you want your blog to accomplish. Then you will want to study the other posts on this page for design principles that will help you achieve your goals.

More and more metadata

Findability and searchability.  Those were our goals for this blog--so, metadata to the rescue!

To tackle the matter of making the blog findable by a search engine, we've put metadata in the head of the blog's html template.  Looks like this:

Notice how we're also using the Dublin Core standard to describe our blog?  I didn't see other blogs doing this, but since there's an existing metadata standard to describe web documents, we're using it.  Now if anyone uses a tool that harvests DC metadata from web documents, DHSIdesign is covered.

To make the content of our blog more searchable, we're using a controlled vocabulary to tag, or label, our posts.  This way, related posts will be collocated within the blog.

Here's the CV we came up with:

Ironically, "metadata" isn't included in here. :)  So we're officially adding "metadata" to this list, starting . . . now.

Blogger is already telling us who created posts and when they were posted, so we didn't need to include that information.

Now, hopefully, people will be able to 1) find our blog and see what it's about and 2) navigate the content within.  Yay!

Blog design

Blogger is great for the flexibility it gives users in customizing themes and layout. After you set the default colors and fonts of your blog, you may still find that there are other properties you'd like to customize. In the interests of allowing other would-be bloggers to learn from our work, I will document the CSS properties I added to the template using the HTML editor function on Blogger.

Here are the styles I added to the template in order to set the background image and anchor it to the top:

body {
background-image:url('http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1303/4689693936_a31a9da55d_o.jpg');
background-repeat:x-repeat;
background-attachment:fixed;
}

#outer-wrapper {
background:$bgcolor;
}

These CSS styles I added to the Flickr badge:

#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper {
text-align:center;
width:175px;
}

#flickr_badge_wrapper {
padding:10px 0 10px 0;
}

.flickr_badge_image {
margin:0 5px 0 5px;
}

.flickr_badge_image img {
border: 1px solid black !important;
margin: 5px 4px 0px 0;
display:inline;
float:left;
}

#flickr_badge_source {
text-align:left;
margin:5px 10px 0 10px;
}

#flickr_badge_icon {
float:left;
margin:5px 5px 0 0;
}