Just to clarify a couple points regarding my speculations about the closure
of design practice (which I realize is a provocation and quite contrary to
the explicit norms of the profession). My notion that they are more open
'at the beginning' did not mean that designers do not constantly seek input
about usability, etc. Rather it meant that the KIND of input they see as
useful and relevant becomes more and more restricted in scope as their own
design ideas develop.
Another exception to the lack of research on divergent appropriation of
educational materials in the classroom (and elsewhere), whether by teachers
or by students, is the interesting project of Don Leu at Syracuse
University in which he has managed over a period of years to put together a
working collaboration between educational software designers and teachers
and students in the user classrooms. He has produced some actual examples
of where classroom needs have been fed back into the design process
successfully. Of course I believe that the organizational relations of the
various participants is quite novel in his project, and I don't really know
how hard it was to get the designers to be receptive.
It's one thing to create a partnership in which, over time, an initially
more open and ethnographic form of user input get translated into an
evolving specialist-recognizable form of input, without resulting in
closure. It's quite another to achieve the same result between relatively
unconnected and already well established, large-scale, separate designer
and user communities of practice. I'm not denying it can happen; I just
think we really ought to know what we're up against, and be looking for
models of how to turn a 'server-client' model into a genuine partnership
model.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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