Also, I always find it strange when I read a paper from the HCI community that doesn’t build upon the hundreds of years of research in human psychology devoted to how people think; modern computers have only really been around for the past half-century, but people have been thinking about human intellect for centuries.  It doesn’t make sense to develop a framework without acknowledging what people from other fields know about our own capabilities.

An ultimate goal in learning is that the student is able to solve problems on her own; this doesn’t necessarily mean that the learner can solve problems without any external aid but that the learner knows which resources to use and what questions to ask in order to solve a problem. Education should be designed to help learners develop to a point in which they are no longer dependent on the educators themselves.

Metrics

Assessment is a tricky question in education because most people are skeptical of the relevance and accuracy of numerical assessments for measuring “what matters.” But I think this concern often masks a critical component to assessment, which is to provide feedback to the learner. Rather than utilizing assessment as a means to segment and classify, how can assessment be used to provide valuable feedback to the learner that helps them develop strategies to improve themselves and their skills?

User-Centered Design

This is not learning specific, but I was surprised by the ending of Master and Mimicry, which is more critical of user-centered design than I would expect (I studied design at Stanford before coming to the Media Lab). While I agree that many people don’t know what they want, an essential role of the designer is discovering implicit needs through observation and ethnography. Merely asking users what they want is quite a superficial way to go about designing a solution and is not what I believe user-centered design is about. Even as designers discover their own vision, their vision is often derived from their own observations of the world and what they perceive to be a necessary shift in how we think about this world; fundamentally, the designer is his own user.