This year’s project theme will be “Learning in the Wild”! You will be required to design support for people to learn from the world outside the classroom.
The Internet has opened up a wide world of information to people across the globe. One of the touted benefits of this information superhighway is the increase in opportunities for self-betterment through more accessible education. However, research has shown that many of these educational technologies intended to break barriers to learning, end up actually increasing the digital divide by reaching mainly those who have already obtained advanced formal education (Massive Open Online Courses are a particularly well illustrated example of this). Some of these problems in designing adequate technology and reaching a wider audience arise because designers and developers can be insufficiently aware of the beliefs, preferences, needs, and prior experiences of people who are different from themselves and how their learning experiences differ.
Over the course of the semester, you will work as a group on designing a technological interactive system to support informal learning experiences outside the classroom. You are encouraged to consider potential learners that differ from yourself (i.e. not college learning experiences).
I ask that students consider how people might learn outside of the classroom. Potential examples of informal learning experiences include, but are not limited to:
Projects are organized around four parts, each consisting of several milestones:
This is the third time this course has been offered at Williams College. Here are some examples from previous versions of this course:
If you'd like to see comparable projects from external HCI courses, here are a few examples:
Note that this course is not identical to any of the courses that spawned these projects, so our final outputs will be different! Also note these samples are intended to illustrate a variety of approaches, none of which is intended to be ideal or exemplary. Be sure to understand and carefully consider project requirements and feedback in the context of your own work.
There are 4 major components to the course project, and they each have their own page: