An email sent by Kristina Woolsey following the meeting on July 22, 1999

Date: Thu, 22 Jul 99 20:36:17 -0700
From: kwoolsey <kristina@ross.marin.k12.ca.us>
To: "bhill@metadesign.com" <bhill@metadesign.com>,
kaleeg@leland.Stanford.EDU, bhavin@leland.Stanford.EDU
Cc: decker@leland.Stanford.EDU
Subject: Great Meeting!

Thanks all for a very stimulating meeting. This opportunity for critique is very useful for me and I appreciate everyone's insights.

Today I especially enjoyed the chance to examine the expectations of the product, and the rather radical approach to education that it represents. Thank you for humoring me in my criticisms of everyday education. It didn't hit me until after the meeting that you are embedded in this system now; take this as a compliment!

I thought of two specific things based on this:

(1) We should rename the product "Thinking out of the Box" or some such.

Suggestions are welcome. I have a list of many bad ideas for titles ("Thinking out of the Box and around the Corner", Using Pictures to Break out of your Boxes", "Inventing with Images") which would be greatly improved with a few good ones.

Maybe also I should write a short book explicitly on the radical approach to education which is embedded in this product. Maybe that is the real message of the product and all the visualization is a red herring for beginning students ....

(2) We should have a student manual as well as a teacher manual with the product. In the student manual we might include

(a) a description of each activity ... with descriptions of intents ("Hidden Pictures is designed to ....; we have short brochures on each section (eg Seeing) which are included in a different packaging of the product which might serve this purpose ... we wrote them for users who did not purchase the book ... Bill, do you have copies of all these brochures??? Or open module products? ....

reactions to expected cynical comments ("yes this looks like it is for 3rd graders, but take a serious minute with it to bring yourself back to your core thinking patterns!")

and

assessment comments specific to each exercise ("try this a few times to see if you can do it more quickly ..." "many people improve xxx ..." "do this drawing twice and see what changes" .... "most people are spatially inept and struggle with this ... 100 kids at Stanford in the Education school scored only xxx on this test ... 100 kids at Stanford in Engineering scored only xxx" )

(b) we should be very explicit about how students might choose to approach the product ... showing them that what they get from it is a result of what they put into it ... my current levels for the product are

Fool Around/Have Fun

Understand from a Distance

Engage

Change your Life

I was taken with the notion today of how important the student community is at Stanford in the Visual Thinking class ... we need some way to bring this casual exchange/challenge into the electronic course ...

I also started thinking of what would happen if a student leafed through the problem sets of a physics class, or the handouts of a literature, the problem sets of a physics class, or the handouts of a literature seminar, or the studio exercises in an art class, or the assignments in Decker's class ...

Somehow in face to face interactions there is context for these things, and expectations of responsibilities ... We need to think of some ways to envelop our electronic students with some kind of parallel mileau ...

So. I had fun thinking about this after our meeting. Clearly the examples in my comments are a bit frivolous, but I am hoping you understand my general points.

See you in a few weeks.

khw