TPACK involves understanding the capabilities of technology – understanding how we make meaning with it, how we can manipulate it to communicate, engage and teach. I include below an extraordinarily powerful use of media, created with the simplest of tools, one camera, a couple of people and some music. No 3-d aliens, no fancy digital effects – but (and this is important) the designers clearly have a deep understanding of the nuances of meaning that can be generated through subtle yet powerful use of the tools at hand. Zooms and pans, dissolves and wipes, memories and meanings.
Think about this video when people ask of what value are these new digital tools? Tell them we don’t know – but maybe a few years from now someone will surprise us by creating something this touching and breathtaking.
The video below has been getting a lot of attention on the blogs lately, and despite that it is pretty good. No kittens riding skateboards or mentos and Coke here. Just a beautifully constructed take down of TV News. A must see for all media literacy courses.
The math-po (and sci-po) stream keeps flowing. Math Mama Writes, who started the whole math-poetry movement has some more on her blog, and here is Erin Nash with some really beautiful biological poetry. And of course, here’s her husband Sean Nash having his students writing poetry too. Of course let’s not forget my daughter Shreya (who sort of started this whole thing) and her sci-po’s at her blog Uniquely Mine.
Below are some thoughts about math-poetry – but you can ignore all that and scroll right down to the poem: The infinity of primes!
Through all this I have been plugging away at my math poetry. I know the original challenge was to write something to motivate students to learn math (and I did write one along those lines). But more interesting to me has been this theme I have picked up, which is of writing proofs as poetry. I know many people have described mathematics in poetic terms but I am trying something slightly different here. I am trying to explain theorems (as in these couple of instances, see here, here, here and here) and speficially in the poem included below, I am actually trying to construct a mathematical proof in rhyming verse.
The Rethink Scholarship is an scholarship for aspiring art directors and designers to Langara College’s Communication and Ideation Design program. This video is to publicize the program.
I stumbled across this little machine that shuts itself off once it has been switched on! How cool is that. I don’t have an clue whom to credit it to and would appreciate a heads up on that. I was reminded of the myth of Sisyphus which led to a great piece of hand-drawn animation on YouTube. So here they are… somewhat apt images for a dull, dreary day in mid-Michigan.
I recently received an email from a teacher in Poland, seeking advice for a curriculum outline for their Design Technology Section. They said, and I quote:
Unfortunately, I have minimal experience with the subject as a teacher or as a student in my younger years, consequently, I have little background as to what a DT class should look like.
As you might guess I’m struggling trying to put together some sort of DT curriculum for our Middle School.
Our small school does not not have any kind of fabrication equipment so our DT class is currently heavy on IT design aspects….(web design, research on a topic and devise a solution, book creation,etc… )
The specific request was for”some useful and practical information that I can implement fairly easily.”
Sean had this wonderful post on his blog (Is this a sluggish strategy?) about this whole scientific and mathematical poetry that is going around. He links to some excellent sci-po’s written by his students (see Pushing Scientific Thought Into Art) and also provides a nice protocol for those who want to apply it in their own classrooms.
It is amazing to me just how this idea has spread. It has en-livened my life, I can say that much. Anyway, I wanted to say thanks to Sean (and his students) – and what better way to say it than in verse. So here is: For Sean & his students
Those who follow this blog know that I love visual wordplay. This is most commonly seen in my ambigram work but another area where I have spent some time is in writing palindromic poetry. I wrote a whole series of poems when I was in graduate school at Illinois and they have been online, moving from server to server, for over 15 years now. I had written about my interest in palindromic poetry a couple of time before (see this and this). Now these were pieces created for fun and I had no real intention or interest in doing anything with them. I wasn’t even sure if anybody ever read them. That is, till a couple of days ago…
Steve Wagenseller, a student in my 817 Learning Technology by Design seminar wrote something so cool in the class forum that I felt that it was worth recording on my blog…
A point outside a circle,
shoots out two lines
one heading for the center
the other more feline
smoothly kisses the curve
That delicate swerve
of the ball and then, abruptly
turns to the center,
making an angle
and meets the first
which went on straight
To thus form a triangle.
The angle formed by the tangent
And the other line, the radius
the mathematical mind sees
is exactly 90 degrees!
And funnily enough, it doesn’t matter
where the initial point is, the starter
Where ever it may be
(as long as it is outside the circumference)
The angle will always be 90!
Did that make sense?
A poem on the fact that a tangent to a circle is perpendicular to the radius drawn to the point of tangency. See image below
I guess ’tis the season of Math-Po’s! Sue VanHattum, whose challenge started all this, commented on my recent Math-Po (Math-Po (Mathematical Poetry): Goldbach’s Conjecture) by providing an example of her own writing, a poem titled Imaginary Numbers Do the Trick. That piece so inspired me that I spent the next hour (and a good part of a faculty meeting), writing one on the same idea. A close read of both these poems (hers and mine) will reveal that I was more than inspired… some phrases and words from Sue’s work insinuated themselves into my pre-frontal cortex and ended up in my poems. As they say, plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery. Read, The Mathematical i, after the cartoon…
My previous post (Poetry, Science & Math, OR why I love the web) mentioned a challenge by Sue VanHattum of “Math Mama Writes” to “write a little kids’ poem … and that tells of the beauty of math, or, that mentions math and challenge, both in a positive way.” Well, I got inspired and took a part of my lunch break today to write something up. I am not sure it technically fits Sue’s challenge but here it is none the less. [If you are interested in learning more about the history and mathematics behind Goldbach's Conjecture, one of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics, check Goldbach's Conjecture on Wikipedia.]
Goldbach’s Conjecture
Goldbach, a mathematician, serious and stern
Many years ago noticed a pattern
He wrote, to Euler, the math genius
Here is something, he said, to excite us!
I have seen, he scribbled, with my imagination
That every even digit
(except two, which doesn’t fit)
Can be broken into a partition
Of two primes which add
To the original even digit
(Now, Euler, don’t fidget!)
But isn’t that totally rad!
Now since that day this simple thesis
Remains just that, a hypothesis
Forcing number lovers to lose their slumber
As they try to prove, primes in pairs can add up to any even number.
(Two is the exception, as we said before
Which is, come to think of it, a bit of a bore).
You can see an original of the letter that Goldbach wrote to Euler at mathisgoodforyou.com.
A 5th grade science assignment, transformed. A rant about Mother Goose. A math poetry challenge! How did that come to be? And what does that have to do with loving the Interwebs? Read on…
I had written earlier about how my 10 year-old daughter had been writing poems on science (Scientific Poems or Sci-Po’s for short). It all started with an extra-credit assignment she needed to do for her science class, and a need, I perceived, to keep her blog (Uniquely Mine) up-to-date. She has quite a few written now. For instance here is one about a news item about scientists finding dinosaur eggs (and other dino-stuff) in India (Cluster of dinosaur eggs found in southern India), and here’s the poem:
I had written about the EduPunk movement earlier, in fact had even designed a logo for it.
A brief description of Edupunk can be found on Wikipedia (a google search will reveal many more). Wikipedia describes it as follows:
Edupunk is an approach to teaching and learning practices that result from a do it yourself (DIY) attitude.The New York Times defines it as “an approach to teaching that avoids mainstream tools like Powerpoint and Blackboard and instead aims to bring the rebellious attitude and D.I.Y. ethos of ’70s bands like The Clash to the classroom.”
Well, I am no expert on 70’s bands but the EduPunk title does appeal to me. It appeals to me because for the longest tie the main attraction of digital technology, to me, has been this DIY attitude, the fact that I can, over an evening or two, create a stop-motion movie with my kids (here or here), or mashup a commercial, or, in this case, create my own course website. The final product may not have the finish or sheen of a commercial product but it is in some key way “authentic.” It is mine. It embodies me, my sensibility, my approach, my vision in ways that other products can not.
For my entire tenure here at MSU I have constructed my own course-websites, cobbling them together with what I have often jokingly called “duct-tape and magic.” I have even written about this, long before the EduPunk moniker came along (see links at end of post). What I want to describe in this post are my current experiments (for my CEP817 Learning Technology by Design course) using using Wordpress as a learning management system, and boy am I impressed!! [My partner in crime in this is Kristen Kereluik, a graduate student in our program.]
I had written previously about a blog started by students in our Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Ph.D. program (ideaplay.org) and had designed a couple of ambigrammatic logos for them. You can see the original post here. Here is one of the original designs I had provided:
Sir, I was reading the article in Wikipedia on ‘Samarangana Sutradhara’ (King Bhoja’s treatise on Architecture). I was of the impression that there is no translation of the work in English. Though the article says that there is a translation by you of the work, the list of your works and publications on your webpage does not include any such work. Kindly let me know if you have indeed translated the treatise. If so kindly let me know how I can access a copy.
The fact that I had translated this ancient Sanskrit treatise came as a surprise to me.
I have had a lot of fun this year playing with video. Most of these experiments were done with my kids (nothing like combining work with pleasure). One of the things we had done last year was a stop motion new year’s card. So we just HAD to create one this year as well. Enjoy!
[FYI: Links to last year's creations can be found below]
Best Wishes for 2010!
from Shreya, Soham, Smita & Punya!
Here is a list of other explorations in video made in the past year or so with family. As you may notice some of these movies (particularly the series Explore, Create, Share) are ones that I use in my teaching – nothing like getting your kids to do your work for you
Our family’s stop-motion animation festival continues with our latest offering: Finding Nemo, the sea-quel!! This movie was conceptualized by Shreya and filmed by all of us over a couple of days. What was interesting about this movie was just how many technologies got utilized in creating it (a complete list comes at the end of the movie) – and just how seamlessly these different tools could be integrated together. As we have been making these movies I have seen a greater level of sophistication and thinking from both my kids about the possibilities of stop-motion animation in particular and the visual aspects of telling a story through film. I can pretty much step back and let them do it. That has been fun to watch.
Anyway, before the movie, I need to give a shout out to our family friend, Amol Pavangadkar, who made all this possible by helping us create a really cool animation stand. We were inspired by this design and here it is, in use, by Shreya’s friends, as they made their animation movie.
So using this set up we have already created three movies. You can see the first one here, the new year’s card here and the third one below. Enjoy, Finding Nemo, the sea-quel!
Students in my CEP 818 (Creativity in Teaching and Learning) have been using digital photography to explore a variety of topics related to trans-disciplinary creativity. I hope to showcase some of their work on this blog once the semester gets over. In the meanwhile, I received an email from Michael Hughes, a former alumnus of this course, and a teacher in Jakarta, Indonesia. In his email he provided some links to some really cool work his students have been doing.
Ambigram.com is a website about ambigrams and the people who make them. Lots of cool stuff for enthusiasts and novices alike. They often conduct competitions and other fun challenges for readers. One recent one was related to palindromes. In brief, they challenged people to create palindromic ambigrams. This is something I had tried a few time a long time ago – but their challenge pushed me to go back and come up with some solutions.
Well, I ended up with more than I had anticipated. I now have a technique, using which, anybody can create a palindromic ambigram of any length! How cool is that.
A new ambigram created in memory of Jere Brophy, world renowned scholar on psychology of motivation. The ambigram reads, “motivation” one direction and “Jere Brophy” when rotated by 180 degrees. Click on the image to see a larger version, hosted on Flickr.
Well, it is the top half of a lake-reflection ambigram. What this means is that if you reflect what you see along a horizontal line at the bottom of the image, the picture you will then get will spell a word. Can you figure out what it says?
While you think about that, let me tell you about this new group-blog set up by graduate students in our Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Program. The blog is called IdeaPlay and is available at ideaplay.org. So sitting here in India I had a few moments to sketch out some ambigrams for their blog. Here are two…
The first is a rotational ambigram that reads the word “Idea” if you go clockwise and the word “Play” if you go anti-clockwise.
And as for the lake reflection ambigram (half of which you saw up there)… well (no great surprise) it reads IdeaPlay as well, like so..
I hope you liked these new ambigrams, and I hope you will check out the the ideaplay.org blog.
Robin Revette Fowler sent me a message on Facebook regarding my recent posting(s) about moving from incompetence to mastery (see the two previous posts here and here). She took issue with my idea that mastery requires some kind of meta-level, self-awareness. She said
It seems like the issue is with either the meaning of “mastery” or perhaps with the types of skills you’re talking about.
Conscious/unconscious knowledge is especially interesting to me re: linguistics. Most native speakers have only unconscious competence of their language– I used to hear Writing Center tutors telling ESL students, “you need an ‘a’ here; I don’t know why” all the time. Many NNSs, on the other hand, have much stronger conscious competence– they often know “rules” about how to use determiners much better than Native English speakers, for example. At the same time, I’m not sure they would be said to have “mastery.”
And I don’t know that the conscious competence is the important thing here. Would you argue that only linguists who can describe their determiner choices have “mastery” of English grammar?
At first blush Robin seems to be making a good point. Do writers need to know how and why they do what they do they do as long as they get it right? There is a surface plausibility to the argument but I am not sure that it stands muster if we dig deeper. Read the rest of this entry »
Ken Friedman, whose article I had used as the basis of my previous posting, From incompetence to mastery, the stages dropped me an email in response to my critique. To provide some context, (you can read my full post here) I had suggested in my posting that it may be inappropriate to label the the highest level of mastery as being unconscious competence. My concern, of course, was with the “unconscious” part – since I felt that true mastery requires a level of reflection, something denied by the word “unconscious.”
Ken wrote that he actually sees examples of unconscious competence everywhere. He went on to say (quoted with permission) Read the rest of this entry »
In a couple of previous posts I had talked about the idea of postdiction (see the posts here and here). The argument being that good teaching (among a long list of other good things) is postdictable, i.e. it walks the line between predictability and chaos, and most importantly makes sense post hoc. To make my point I had posted a couple of videos that were good examples of being postdictable.
Closely connected to the idea of postdictable is the idea of creating anticipation and suspense. Once again other artists (particularly those working in temporal media such as film, and advertising) seem to have grasped the importance of this earlier than educators. Good film-makers can create suspense out of pretty much the flimsiest of materials. Think of the first scenes from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. The way the scene builds tension out of a disagreement over whether or not to tip is pitch perfect. There is more tension in that scene than in dozens of other “suspense” thrillers.
However making suspense work is difficult. Navigating this line between predictability and tension over the unknown is a fine art. (This is where, of course, the connection with postdictability becomes most clear.)
Check out the two videos below, which highlight just how fine the line is between succeeding at creating suspense and anticipation and failing to do so. Both of these videos are interesting and well made – both have pace and rhythm but one of them builds anticipation while the other just happens. One tells a story, the other doesn’t. Read the rest of this entry »
The Lansing temple recently organized a special Diwali program. My daughter Shreya participated in a dance and I, as always, took photographs of the event. Click here or the image below to see all 161 of the photographs I took.
Enjoy.
You can also read a poem written by Shreya on Diwali on her blog Uniquely Mine.
I had written earlier about the idea of “postdictable” which was defined as something that is “surprising initially, but then understandable with a bit of thought.” It lies at the spot between predictability and total chaos. The movie Sixth Sense is postdictable in the best sense of the world. Good teaching I believe needs to be postdictable. That is what keeps us engaged, keeps us waiting for more, the payoff as it were. And best of all, once all the pieces are in, we can’t wait to go back and review everything again, to see just how beautifully the whole thing holds together. There is a strong aesthetic component to this – a sense of wholeness, closure, elegance, and inevitability. Good poems have this quality, as do mathematical theorems. A well crafted lecture or a lesson plan has this quality as well. In my mind these ideas are closely tied to the Dewey’s idea of experience and to the idea of design. Hopefully I will have a chance to explore these connections in a later post but for now, here are a couple of commercials that I think were postdictable in a really cool kind of way. Read the rest of this entry »
As readers of this blog know I love examples of seeing things in new ways. That to me if often the crux of creativity. Anyway here are two examples. The first curtesey of Leigh Wolf is a new advertisement from some credit card company. The ad is actually pretty average but what is really cool are the visuals. Read the rest of this entry »
[My partner in crime in this is 
