Ryan Raffa | Parsons MFA DT Blog » Design and Education

21st Century Skills

Ryan — Mon, 10 May 2010 17:02:44 +0000

For Design and Education, we were asked to identify what we felt were important skills that should be encouraged and reinforced for students to succeed in the 21st Century. I put together a non-exclusive list of skills I feel need to be addressed by all areas of education (from children to adults) at the local, national, and international levels if we are all to succeed in the 21st Century, ensuring a prosperous and humane world for generations to come. These skills are collaboration, participation, synthesis, and reinvention.

Each of these skills go hand-in-hand, so I did my best not to segregate them into unique, cult-silos of personality but instead will illustrate how they are all intertwined.

Here is a copy of my final paper, and here are the slides of the presentation I gave in class.

Prototype Playtest – Participation Culture

Ryan — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:32:03 +0000

For Design and Education, we were asked to prepare a testable/playable prototype of an activity based on one of topics/weeks listed in our class syllabus. I chose week 4 from my course, Participation Culture, which was focused on the Situationist International, forms of investigation/research, and Psychogeography.

In brief, my prototype will have students interacting with their surrounding neighborhood in two different ways, one physically and one digitally. After being provided a brief description of the underlying concepts, students will be split into groups and sent into the streets outside the school. Each group will be asked to walk around an entire city block (the direction determined by the group of students), with students detailing the experiences on the materials supplied.

Students will return to the classroom, turn on their computers, and reenact the walk using the street-view of Google maps. Clicking through the street-view frame by frame, students will experience their previous walk in digital form. The exercise will culminate in a group discussion.

Here is a link to the full-writeup:

Social Networks in the Classroom

Ryan — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:13:05 +0000

For Design and Education, we were asked to write a paper which proposed a way for a social networking site to be used in the classroom setting. I am proposing to use Flickr as a way for students to investigate and propose alternative uses of space at the high school where the students attend. Flickr will be used as a resource for visual brainstorming, research, identity and community building, and a forum for asking questions, interacting with interested parties and fellow students.

Here is my recommendation:

Mind Map – Design and Education

Ryan — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:45:09 +0000

We were asked to create a mind map of two questions for the first Design and Education assignment. The questions were: What does education mean to you?, and What does design mean to you?

Here is my mind map: