Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Addresses what it means to know something, how people gain and use knowledge and complex skills, how to determine what an individual knows, how humans learn, how humans solve complex problems, how knowledge is created within a social and group context, and how to model human capabilities and performance. It selects and studies theoretical perspectives that inform the design of computer-based mediated environments, products and experiences.

COURSE DETAILS:

Cognition, Learning and Collaboration focuses on building an understanding of theories and research approaches from the cognitive sciences, social sciences, and human performance studies as they apply to the design of richly interactive technologies. Students will be encouraged to consider the contributions, limitations and integration of a variety of theoretical perspectives and research methodologies to the design of innovative and effective technology-based environments, tools, and applications. topic areas include:

• Perceptual cognition: vision, hearing, touch and multimodal perception 
• Augmented cognition: decision support, knowledge management, human information interaction 
• Enactive Cognition: motor control, GOMs, epistemic action, expertise 
• Social cognition: human communication collaboration and competition

This course will provide foundational cognitive engineering knowledge for students of the graduate program and prepare them for specialized elective courses in interaction science, design and media, and networked practice. 

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

The course goal is build an understanding of the science of human cognition, how it can be incorporated into the design and evaluation of interactive technologies (cognitive engineering), and ways to assess the cognitive outcomes of those technologies in the lab and in the situation of use. 

We will take a Reflective Practitioner approach (from Schön): an iterative cycle of evidence-based inquiry into practice. It begins by formulating questions from practice, inquiry into other sources of knowledge, mapping knowledge onto practice, and evaluation of the result. This is followed by subsequent cycles where new questions are based on the under- standing that has been gained in previous iterations.
The class begins with some example presentations by the instructor that apply cognitive science to interaction design. These are followed by presentations by student teams who:

• Select a topic that draws from those covered by chapters of the textbook. A good deal of leeway in choice of topic will be available to those who have specific interests.
• Find research publications in the scientific literature that have the potential to impact design or design research in the area chosen, and make these available to colleagues in the course.
• Lead an online discussion in the week previous to their scheduled presentation
• Give a 60 minute presentation in class, and lead discussion.

Presenters should strive to achieve enough of an understanding of the material that they are able to discuss at length concepts and methods, how it may apply to design or design research, and how its impact on the effectiveness of the subsequent design might be determined.

 

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

RECOMMENDED READING: