Introduction & Background
My role as a specialist technician in wearable technology at the London College of Fashion, is to introduce and support students in the field of wearable technology (see my first blog post for context). This includes drumming up interest, developing a workable/usable knowledge base whilst lastly supporting students.
Evaluation
Over the past year, I’ve been placed in a fortunate position where I have been funded to be able to design an ideal lab environment and generate my own curriculum of workshops outside of academic scrutiny. Despite this prime position the largest issue I face is student engagement within the college – and further the consistent lack of experience alongside varying levels of expectations.
Although interest within the subject seems high at initial contact, the reality is without direct 1-to-1 support the learning curve is steep without any prior knowledge; this results in the labs underutilisation albeit a handful of highly dedicated students – mostly grouped from the MA Fashion Futures course.
My biggest concern and challenge is to balance the recruitment of students, with the over reliance on myself in supporting students work, striking a line between teaching instead of running a production-level support service for students.
The issues that need to be addressed are:
- The Large Barrier to Entry
- The Underutilisation of the Lab
- Students Expecting Too Much Out of The Technician, To the Point of Being Detrimental to The Students Learning Experience
Moving Forward
Within the rest of this case study I will attempt to take steps to address these issues going forward.
1. Large Barrier To Entry
To help students negotiate with the large learning curve I had initially developed a curriculum of different workshops to cover a range of different areas (see figure 1), however, on reflection I believe it could be beneficial to in addition create clear learning pathways for example if I wanted to create an ‘AI enhanced Jacket’ laying out a clear route through workshops 2, 3, 8 & 9 may make it more manageable (see figure 2) – which could further be supplemented through additional learning materials and guides for specific areas.
Additional learning materials is something I have already attempted to implement (see figure 3), however, on reflection a much larger collection of resources paired with a learning pathway could really show a clear direction (Oliver & Herrington, 2003).
2. Underutilisation of the Lab
Showcasing successful projects is something that feels like an obvious solution and is something that I have been doing already without thinking about it. However, I believe if I were to now fully lean into this, I could drum up a lot of interest in projects, but also use these projects as an opportunity to highlight the students experience, such as highlighting the project difficulties, timelines, skills learned – instead of just showing the final outcomes. This further feeds into my other difficulties regarding barriers to entry and student expectations.
3. Lowering Expectation of Technician Offerings
As stated in point one, additional learning guides paired with a pathway could also lower student expectation through showing a clear route of the work that goes into a particular project – an array of these different project pathways (see figure 2) or ‘templates’ could demonstrate and make clear the hidden complexities in certain projects (Atkinson et al., 2000) – further allowing myself as a technician to refer students back to these, allowing the technician to be free to support students by focusing on specific support/problem when complex problems arise – which in turn should significantly improve the student experience.
Bibliography:
Atkinson, R. K., Derry, S. J., Renkl, A. and Wortham, D. (2000) ‘Learning from Examples: Instructional Principles from the Worked Examples Research’, Review of Educational Research, 70(2), pp. 181–214. doi: 10.3102/00346543070002181.
Oliver, R. and Herrington, J. (2003) ‘Exploring Technology-Mediated Learning from a Pedagogical Perspective’, Interactive Learning Environments, 11(2), pp. 111–126.
doi: 10.1076/ilee.11.2.111.14136.
Image Index:
Figure 1. Wearable Tech Workshops (2024) Available at: wt.lcfdll.com
Figure 2. Conceptualised ‘Learning Pathway’ for an AI Garment (2024)
Figure 3. Wearable Tech, Additional Guides & Useful Information (2024)
Available at: wt.lcfdll.com