| | [ Emotion Design Probe : LT Experiences ]
 Mission : ways to improve learning experience in LTs.
Location : NUS
Target : NUS students from various faculties
Methodology : Laddering Process, Short Explanatory Interviews
Introduction
The first need was to establish the definition Learning Experience. Does it refer to conducive learning ? Level of Happiness ? Or amount of notes gathered at the end of every lecture ?
After a couple of hours of questioning and literally squeezing our brain juices out , our group realised the answer was out there all along. Postive Learning Experience = Enjoyment. With such, we then began to focus the crux of this project on the various elements that dictates the enjoyment of learning. After running through the mutiple frameworks that were available, our group finally decided to approach this case with respect to the " Technology as Experience" theory proposed by
McCarthy and Wright. As such, we treated the LT has a whole entity of system and technology that encompasses various dimensions that can [be it whether direct/indirect], affect our intellectual, emotional, compositional
and sensual experiences.
We also started brainstorming about the extensiveness of each of these 4 threads in affecting learning experience in LTs and came up with the hypothesis that compositional and sensual elements might just be the answer to the question.
In order to ensure fairness, we also had to assume several factors.
1) ALL lecture contents are equally interesting.
2) ALL lecturers are equally interesting.
Lugging Through
After getting a brief idea of what has to be done, we began the frenzied tasks of snapping up pictures of various LTs in the school and hogging potential individuals for the Laddering Process.
Even though there were friendly students who were willing to help us out, our results showed that laddering did not provide much information. Instead, respondents were going round and round the topic and even displayed tendencies of drifting away from the subject. Replies were mundane, repetitive and at times, it seems like we have pushed our interviewees to the point where they started to get desperate and tried to come up with answers like "looking stupid".
However, one imporant thing that we gathered from our laddering process was that a good portion of the students did not see technology as a factor. Instead, they linked learning experiences to good companionship during lectures.
WIth such, our team decided to embark on short explanatory interiews in an attempt to collate more extensive and valuable information. This turned out to be much more appropriate and less confusing for us too. 25 interviewees were given very specific brief questions that require them to state their most/least favourite LTs and provide a short explaination for their choice. From our results gathered, we managed to find some striking similarities in preferences.
Results, Results ... More Results
There was a general concensus on LT 11 being the most favourite LT and LT 26 being the most forsakened one.
All of us were pretty bewildered by such unanimous results and decided to check out the notorious LT 26 by ourselves. It was easy to see why.
The next step was to consolidate how our respondents categorised the different factors that they took into consideration and we tried to pack them into the 4 threads for further analysis. After going through the numerous comments concering various LTs, we then concluded that our hypothesis was essentially gearing towards the correct track as a majority of our respondents targetting compositional and emotional elements as crucial factors in evaluating the enjoyment of being in an LT. This paved the direction for us to look into for any possible improvements that could be introduced to enchance learning experience.
 As such, we came up with a few propositions that were specifically created to target the compostional and emotional aspects :
 Further Thoughts & Evaluation
If there is anything that I have learnt from this, it is the fact that this assignment has made me realise that what we as investigators presume to be the problem, might not be the case after all. What started as a pretty-simple exploration of LTs turned out to be an insightful experience as we were reintroduced to extremely minute and possibly redundent elements that we have probably never even noticed before.
In terms of methodology, I reckon there is still much more to be learnt. Perhaps one day, we could come up with some perfect mode of investigation that will allow us to immediately churn out both qualititative and quantitative results, instead of having to comb around.
Now that I am going through this whole thing and looking back, it seems that our group has chosen a very systemic method that has probably constrained ourselves from other fun and enlightening perspectives that we could have taken. This is especially so after the presentation that associated this whole thing with some mystical feng shui aura and power, though it did seem a little bit too far-fetched. heh.
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| | Posted 4/17/2007 12:15 PM - 15 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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