Overview:
Contrast. Repetition. Alignment. Proximity. CRAP for short. These are the fundamentals of effective design and the focus of this mobile lesson.
Work description:
Created responsive HTML/CSS webpage using Dreamweaver’s native responsive design grid system. Designed lesson including the development of learner tasks (and implementation of supporting technology infrastructure) and resource identification.
Learner target:
Educational technology professionals and introductory design students
Technology employed:
Dreamweaver, Fireworks, DropEvent (e-mail created photo galleries), Poll Everywhere (text-based lesson feedback), YouTube
Theoretical foundations:
In this lesson, students don’t just learn design principles, they apply those principles by identifying good and bad examples, analyzing their merits and shortcomings. Framed in terms of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, students move beyond KNOWLEDGE gathering and into APPLICATION and ANALYSIS, thus promoting deeper concept retention. This lesson also capitalizes on the unique affordances of a mobile device, specifically the ability to take and e-mail photos on the go. Students create class-specific “good” and “bad” galleries simply by taking and e-mailing photos (via DropEvent). While the final step of re-designing a bad example (to create the “once crap, now CRAP” gallery) involves a desktop or tablet, Bloom convinced me that this final act of SYNTHESIS was vital.
