The Learner Centered Project 2003-2007

In my first four years in Australia I worked as the Program Director of an undergraduate Industrial Design Program. This was not a job. This was a project. To update, upgrade and to make education align with the contemporary thinking in pedagogy, learning and education. The project probably never ended. It is still to be……

The Lemon Squeezer and the Kettle

Today I wrote to students in my graduating class. You have till June 2022 to do a bit of housekeeping. Aka Marie Kondo, get your house in order, just be clear whose shoulders you stand on. And other such. It is possible you know many of these already. If so now is the time to……

What is a website inside a university?

That every major city on the planet has to have a university. We are going back a few hundred years, for that statement to be true. Today every major city has many universities. It is almost a given that universities and cities go together.  There are as many types of universities as there are cities.……

Agency: Enabling Students and Teachers to realize their agency

For four years now I have been coordinating studio courses at the university level. Situated behind this enactment of the university course and classroom is an approach focussed upon enabling agency in students and teachers. So I asked two questions: How do I enable student agency? and also How do I enable teacher agency? After……

Doing superlatives: How good were the works presented today?

This text began life as an Announcement inside the Canvas LMS of a first year studio – Design for Sustainability. The course and past works can be seen in the My First 6 Months website here. It’s a winters June afternoon in Melbourne. I am in my room in building 515 serving as a panellist……

On Permission Seeking

Do you need permission? Imagine we are having this conversation 500 years ago. And we are discussing light.  How do we calculate the speed of light? Or how do we figure out the focal length of a lens? We would have to set up an experiment. But there would be no shops selling scientific instruments,……

So how do you teach drawing in design school?

Kevin O’Neil for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_League_of_Extraordinary_Gentlemen I am currently reading this book – The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – and making very little progress. The stones, the smoke, the wall, the stray cat and well all the ink details are proving too distracting. Its endless the details, the touches, the stylised touches. The point is? All……

The first three weeks of University

Key to the project “My First 6 Months” is the notion of agency in the student. Key to this project is the constant awareness of Freire’s critique of the Banking Model of Education. Key to the project is the notion of ‘collaborative learning’. Finally there is the zeitgeist, the notion of enterprise. Key Words: Agency,……