Design Reflection: Scaffolding Digital Literacy

Digital literacy browser extension mockup

In this project I designed a browser extension that would help users decide whether or not an online source was credible.  The target users were middle school students.  The final iteration of the project includes the design for a browser extension which leads novice users through the process of evaluating an online source, and provides a reference for the criteria for evaluation of a source to more adept users.  While it was designed largely as a scaffolding tool, it was born more from a combination of random ideas and triangulation between the content and the needs of the users.  Towards the end of the process I did review Mayer’s principles and found some already represented by my design decisions, some were irrelevant to the way I had decided to approach the content, and other could be applied with slight tweaks.  In the future I think I’d like to be more intentional with my use of the Principles of Multimedia Learning in my design, and reference them earlier in the process so I’m sure the relevant principles are baked into the design from the start.

The largest difference between this project and design work I’ve done independently was the “final representation” stage.  Most of my individual learning in design has been in web design, and when I design something for the web, I usually jump from a pen and paper sketch to more or less completed web page.  I think that this is more relevant for web design because the proliferation of responsive design and the lack of fixed screen sizes has made pixel-perfect design nearly impossible to attain on the web.  Moreover, this ensures that I can learn in a flexible manner as I have to build out my sketches.  Inevitably they change slightly as I create them, but the creation process doesn’t necessarily take very long, thanks to the huge number of frameworks and tools available.  However, this also affects my design as this habit of always trying to make the things I design meant that I specifically limited my design on this project to something I could develop.  Although I ran out of time to build the browser extension within the confines of the assignment, I did research to try to ascertain whether or not it was possible before I committed to the design.

The chance to compare projects and ideas was maybe the most interesting part of the entire experience for me.  This was magnified after working without much outside input for a few weeks, and then being able to see how others prioritized the users’ needs and approached the problem.  I went into the design fixated on the idea that students knew a little, but weren’t applying it or referencing the information, so I tried to create a quick reference and scaffolding tool.  Others, especially Amanda whose project I spent more time with, focused on making the topic more relatable and appealing to the students by using a familiar medium, “Let’s Play” style YouTube videos, to connect with the audience more closely.  Perhaps inevitably, I ended up finding this project much more interesting than my own.  This experience speaks to the effectiveness of collaboration in learning and design for coming up with better ideas.