I am taking a moment this morning to capture a few thoughts about integrating the OpenMind platform into my HCI course. I wrote a bit about the initial decision in my post about the course re-redesign. Yesterday, I read my students' second batch of submissions, and I can say that incorporating this platform may have been one of my better decisions from the summer.
In the first week, the students completed the first module, and I had them write about whether they could identify the use of motivated reasoning or confirmation bias in past project work. Most were able to come up with good examples, a few did not, and a few did something much more interesting. These students responded first by saying they didn't think they saw either one, then they explained lucid and clear examples of using these. That is, even in writing about it, they tried to deny this as if it were shameful, but then admitted to having done it. In my feedback, I tried to point out that the important thing was to recognize it, not to feel bad or shameful about it.
This past week was even more interesting. They completed the second OpenMind module, this one on moral foundations theory. At the same time, they read Norman's Design of Everyday Things presentation on constraints, which includes a taxonomy of logical, semantic, cultural, and physical constraints. I asked them to consider how moral foundations theory influenced cultural constraints of design. I have to admit a certain pride in that question, and the students' responses by and large showed that it was both challenging and thought-provoking. A few students were only able to give very broad, abstract answers, essentially answering the question by restating, or trying to answer the easier question of whether it does rather than how it does. Here, it was an opportunity for me to remind them that human experience is almost all about abstractions and assumptions, while design is all about specifics. Indeed, that is a major theme of Design of Everyday Things' discussion of human behavior. Some of the students were able to come up with excellent insights that related the theories of moral foundations and design. Most noteworthy, however, were the few students who made generalizations about all people based on their own moral foundations. That is, they made claims that all peoples preferred safety or liberty, and I was able to push back on the distinction between how one sees the world versus how the world is.
They will be completing the remaining modules over the next three weeks, and I am eager to see how this trend continues. At the end, I want to talk to them about the holistic experience of completing the OpenMind modules, and maybe at the end of the semester try to come back to it and see if they think it impacted their designs.
I had my students discussing what went wrong in the Tanya Rider case from 2005. The woman was trapped for 8 days in her car in a ravine before the police finally consulted her cell provider records to get an idea where her phone had last pinged the towers. They had difficulty classifying her as a missing person even though her husband wanted her found. For all the police knew, she had fled her husband or her husband had killed her. They had a hard time with the notion that sometimes when bad things happen there isn't someone to blame. They were constitutionally bound to protect her right to privacy from her own husband. When I asked them to be specific about what the police did wrong, they couldn't, so they shifted blame to "the system" and asserted it needed to be "fixed." The point I was hoping someone would get to is that we've constructed a system which finds a balance between government provided security and security from the government. In the process, there will *always* be some government overreach and some government failure to provide safety. Students are uncomfortable with the notion that life isn't simplistic. In the Tanya Rider case, her husband was an authorized user of her bank account and made a withdrawal while she was stuck in the ravine that the police interpreted as a sign that she was OK - the detail that he was an authorized user was neither requested nor communicated and the bank has no way of telling after the fact who carried out the transaction. The students didn't seem to grasp that both communication and recordkeeping might be less than perfectly detailed.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of college students, I wonder how much of the problem is that they aren't old enough to have the part of their brain developed to think critically, let alone self-critically. As opposed to the part of the problem where their moral framework is centered around "I am a good person" rather than "I am flawed and so is everyone else." Growing up a Calvinist, it was beaten into me pretty early that I was totally depraved and it wasn't until I grew up that I understood that didn't mean I started out as bad as possible (but it does explain why software has bugs and the existence of clergy who are pedophiles and sex traffickers). The hard part for me always seemed to be explaining how anything good ever happens when humans are involved.
Thanks for sharing that story! I don't remember that case, but I can see where astute students should ask serious questions about it, but those who aren't engaged might just shrug it off. I suppose that might be true about most of our stories :)
DeleteI wonder about cultural and natural explanations for some of the phenomena. Certainly, the physical maturity of the brain is something to take into account, but I suspect that cultural factors around schooling are more significant. Not long ago in historical terms, our students would have been considered adults for several years already!