The Right Approach

Yours truly was browsing Wired and came across this wonderful article titled Let’s Stop Focusing on Shiny Gadgets and Start Using Tech to Empower People, a post about Red Burns, a teacher I really wish I met as her approach to tech is the right one without question.

From Red Burns’ Opening Remarks to New Students

What I want you to know:

That there is a difference between the mundane and the inspired.

That the biggest danger is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.

That any human organization must inevitably juggle internal contradictions — the imperatives of efficiency and the countervailing human trade-offs.

That the inherent preferences in organizations are efficiency, clarity, certainty, and perfection.

‘Create images that might take a writer ten pages to write.’

That human beings are ambiguous, uncertain, and imperfect.

I used the same approach at Pratt when I as an adjunct professor for 6 years teaching advanced computer graphics to kids getting their masters whereby the student chose their assignment according to the particular design discipline they were in (interior, graphic, packaging etc., etc.) with the only proviso being that said assignment had to be not only professionally done at the highest possible level but also the assignment had to be presented to the class as a whole as designers of all stripes have to do this when pitching a client. Needless to say, the results were astounding because the students used tech as a gateway to enable creativity to come forth on projects of their own choosing. Hopefully I channeled Red when doing this way back in the 80's as it was an experience I hold dear to the cockles of my heart. :)