I’ve started to loosely define my user as the college or graduate-level student who is going into a creative and/or strategic field. I have access to these people both at ITP and at work, so testing and validation would be possible.
For my research, I’m looking into ways to help place information in situ, so it’s not as siloed in specific knowledge banks or academic contexts. Being less familiar with education, I’m looking into common learning theories for adults. Here’s a start.
- Adult Learning Theory posits that adults must understand the applicability of information to their life to learn best. I’d like to lets users literally contextualize information in places that seem relevant to their own activities and goals for the future.
- Anchored Learning Theory suggests that putting a subject matter within a realistic situation will embed it with more meaning. I’d like to virtually anchors content to context, so that in a specific situation where information might be useful it will resurface.
- Constructivism is the idea that learning is an active construction and learners learn best when they make connections between experiences and ideas. I’d like to help users attain two paths to long-term memory retrieval by creating two modalities for learning.
Next, I plan to look more into persuasive design and HCI.
Have you read Donald Norman’s design of everyday things? He cites how memory can be in your head or in the world around you I how thoughtfully the environment is designed. If an interface matches your mental model of a process , it allows you to free up memory in your mind and allow you to lean on information that is in your environment. http://www.sharritt.com/CISHCIExam/norman.html#3
If I understand you correctly, I see building a system that brings into the world an iteration of a learners mental model.
I can describe an attempt in a gamification project that I lead that attempted to capture all three types of learning you stated in your post.
Thanks, Greg! I think that’s right—an externalized form of a learners’ mental model and information situated in one’s environment. That’s a great way to put it.
And yes please! I would love to hear about any informative successes and challenges from your gamification project.