XCOR 3020 Design & Technology in Global Culture

The Design and Technology in Global Culture XCORE 3020 seminar course focuses on the social and cultural impacts of technology innovations taking place across the globe. In the course, students develop an understanding of current advancements and form perspectives on the cultural impacts resulting from the design. Subjects in which the course addresses: AI systems, Human-Computer interaction, UX concepts, interactive communication, cyber, and design research. Students focus on the use of innovation in various fields such as: education, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, transportation, health, and entertainment.

Reflection

In the spring of 2018, I proposed the XCOR 3020 Design and Technology in Global Culture seminar course. The course was approved by the core curriculum committee and introduced to the program in the 2018 fall semester. My goal in the course is to introduce students to new innovations as a way to prepare them as professionals in a cross-cultural, fast pace, creative and digital workforce. In the course, students are introduced to concepts in human/computer interaction (HCI) and discuss the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) vs human intelligence currently taking place throughout the globe. Through lecture, reading, documentary, and discussion, students are asked to consider ways in which the design and technology innovation benefits and challenges specific demographics. Students develop skills in collaboration, research, and writing, design processes/brainstorming, problem-solving, and strategizing. The goal of the course is to offer students an environment in which they may develop their own thoughts and perspectives on global innovation design to prepare students for a future working within a global professional landscape.

Beginning with one student in the fall of 2018, the course was scheduled similarly to an independent study. The student conducted research into the social, political use of social networking and its impact on culture, beginning with the 2010 Arab Spring and progressing into the 2016 United States election. In the spring semester of 2019, the course increased to eight students. The intimate group setting allowed for excellent conversations about new innovations. Students were introduced to projects in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Autonomous Vehicles, Dark Web, and CryptoCurrency. The course was interactive with a great deal of peer learning, where students were energetic to share discoveries and ideas. Students were assigned collaborative research projects and experienced no problem working as a team. By fall 2019, the number of students in the course grew to a capacity of twenty-five and has remained at twenty-five to thirty students since the fall of 2019.

In 2019 Tableau was added to the Design & Technology in Global Culture XCOR 3020 course. The Tableau project was introduced to students during the second half of the semester.

Students were asked to create an account in Tableau public before receiving the software demonstration during class, where they followed along on the studio computers or their own devices, familiarizing themselves with the software. The complexity of Tableau required additional class time and simplification for the research assignment. 

Working in teams, students were asked to collect data relative to one of the topics discussed in class; cyber systems, algorithms, data mining, and data visualization. They designed surveys to gather quantitative data that would be visualized in Tableau. Students were offered flexibility in choosing to design their surveys using Google forms or acquiring data sets from online resources including Kaggle.com and data.gov. Students were taught to clean their data sets before linking the content to Tableau, where they created their visualizations and infographic layouts.

During the project, I found that the technical challenges of learning Tableau, required a significant amount of time, and learning the software trumped the subject analysis. This observation encouraged me to rethink the integration of Tableau in the XCOR courses. Fall 2020, the software will be introduced at the beginning of the semester when the course lecture focuses on research, resources, and references. An additional day will be spent on demonstration and student practice. The goal of adding time for practicing Tableau will encourage students to feel comfortable with the software to utilize throughout the course of the semester.