Our visit to the Olympic Cauldron park at the Rice Eccles Stadium brought nostalgic memories of the SLC Olympic glory days. I was reminded of how fired up we all were. Every night I watched the events on TV because they were relevant to my environment. As far as design goes... I thought it was reasonably well designed and achieved its goal of bringing back the emotions of that era. For me, because there was that emotional tie, it could have been poor design and I would have still have enjoyed the experience and rated it high.In class, we talked about the usability factor in our formative assessment. This is a huge factor in user level of engagement. We like to use text to create our designs, yet most people do not like to read text. Think about our in-class discussions. There are a number of factors that draw us to respond to a particular post, but most of us will likely confess that we are more likely to respond to the shorter posts that have some substance to respond to. Short, interesting, and concise.
We wrapped up the class debate on Media vs. Method - Are you a Clark or a Kozma follower? I found it interesting... Given that the class consists of Instructional Design Ed. Technology majors, it only makes sense that most of us would lean toward the Kozma side of the debate - which is to say that yes, media does influence learning. Ultimately the class saw some logical truths from both sides of the argument and comments came up questioning if the two side could even be defined as a debate in the first place. But...in the initial stages of the debate, the Clark supporters didn't want to commit. The class was assigned who they would initially side with. Whether or not we actually stood on that side, we were to pretend as if we did and try to argue in favor. The Clark defenders waffled and wishy washed at first. They wrote as if they really didn't want anyone to think they actually believed Clark's purist opinion so they provided disclaimers - i.e. "since I have to take the Clark side, I have to say it this way ... but ..." As more people contributed to the article, greater ideas opened our minds to what each theorist was really saying. The written defenses started to get more fervent regardless of which side the defender was on. So who won the debate? I don't think we ever really decided, which is probably why it still remains the great debate.
