Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

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.

Enjoy.

What do you think this is?

Take a guess…

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Shreya, my daughter has a blog, Uniquely Mine. An RSS feed from her blog can be found right here (just scroll down and see the right column). Anyway, over the past few weeks she has been doing something for extra credit for the science class. Her fifth-grade teacher has asked all students to find stories related to science in the newspaper, create a short writeup about it to share with the other children. I asked her to add another layer of challenge to that. Once she has her report all typed up, she needs to write a short poem about it and post it to her blog.

I asked her to do this partly because I was concerned that she would not be able to keep up her blog once school started. As most people she was very excited to have a blog and wrote a bunch of stuff for it in the beginning. Then life began to take over and her postings grew few and far in between. What was needed, I figured, was a way to keep her writing regularly. So this idea of piggybacking on something she was already doing. The poems she writes are often short and it didn’t seem like much of an imposition to ask her to write little poems based on the science articles she has been finding for her school report.

Well, so far so good. She has a quite a bit of writing (mostly poems) in a genre we have decided to call Sci-Po a.k.a. Scientific Poems! (It’s a obvious ripp-off on the term Sci-Fi). It has also been a lot of fun.

When we first set up the blog, I advised her to not allow commenting. I was not sure what kinds of comments she would generate and it just seemed as if we were asking for trouble (especially exposing a 10 year old to the kind of junk that is prevalent on the Internet). However, after much consideration we finally decided to open up her site and allow people to comment. So if you read this blog, click over to her site and drop her a note. Please, remember this is a 10 year old so be polite Of course all comments are moderated so I still hope to protect her from some of the nastier aspects of the world (not that I can do that forever but at least I can try).

Anyway, check out her writing. I think you will like it. Here is my favorite. It is a non-sense poem (not a Sci-Po but fun none-the-less) titled, Salt’n Pepa in Santa Fe. Here is is:

Salt’n Pepa in Santa Fe
by Shreya Mishra

Squigles-squagles, pinchley pooh
Slip’n sliding on my shoe
Dimpo-doby dorkly dake
Gently eat the slice of cake
Shickly-bumbly rabbity-red
Back at home, tucked in bed

My friend, Hartosh (I had written previously about his mathematical novel here) and his wife Pam, recently had a baby boy. This ambigram is of his name: Nihal

Enjoy.

Leigh Wolf, my partner in crime as far as the MAET program goes, recently presented at Ignite Lansing. She talked about her two passions, teaching and food (not sure which order to place these). Specifically she talked about food photography and the connections she sees between what she does there and her other life as an educator. It is a lovely presentation, and the video is now available on YouTube. Take a look.

I am always looking for examples of looking at the world differently – of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. This is of course connected with the veja du assignments I give my students.

I just came across a couple of very interesting video examples of this on the site LikeCOOL. This site has everything from after-office neckties, to inflatable boxing gloves… but in between these crazy things are some cool videos. Here are three (in increasing order of coolness):

Two robots made entirely using Lego Mindstorms NXT Retail-kit that can solve Sudoku problems and the Rubik’s Cube! How totally cool is that. LEGO Mindstorms is a line of Lego sets combining programmable bricks with electric motors, sensors, Lego bricks, and Lego Technic pieces (such as gears, axles, and beams). See Wikipedia article on Lego Mindstorms

See the videos below, and check out the website for the project: Tilted Twister

Sudoku Solver

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Rubik’s Cube Solver

This is truly amazing… What is also great is that the designer also include directions for making these robots. I gotta get myself one of these

H/T Geekpress

I had written earlier about the idea of Jugaad, the quintessential Indian idea of situational creativity. One of the masters at this is Arvind Gupta. Check out his website for tons of wonderful science toys and experiments that can be made from stuff we typically throw away. Very cool and a critical part of the kind of repurposing of artifacts we need for creative teaching.

Throwaway Technology, playful Pedagogy and powerful Content… who says TPACK needs hi-tech!

Via Major Fun (aka Bernie DeKoven) comes Arvind Gupta, winner of the Defender of the Playful Award.

One often hears the criticism that students today don’t know how to write… the part of the blame is placed on technology, on the limitations of texting and twittering! For instance, here are two quotes from a book review TXTNG: THE GR8 DB8 by Marcus Merkmann in the New York Post.

[Texters are] vandals doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbors 800 years ago – John Humphrys, British TV presenter.

Texting is bleak, bald, sad shorthand which masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness – John Sutherland, author

Of course all this is presented with no real data! A contrasting perspective is presented by research conducted by the Stanford Study of Writing project conducted by Andrea Lunsford. Describing this research, Clive Thompson writes in an article in Wired:

technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions…. young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

Well, maybe youth today are writing more, but is it any good? Turns out that college students today are not just producing a greater number of words, but these words are of better quality as well.

Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

There is actually one concern that this research has pointed out, however the accusing finger points not at the students but rather at us, the professors. For today’s students:

… writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

Now this is something to think about…

And finally, what about the pernicious influence of texting on student writing… sadly, no evidence of that could be found!

Glad to put that myth to rest!

Finally, just in case something thinks that this “adult” condemnation of what young people do is something recent… well, turns out there are historical antecedents for that as well. The quotes below are not directly related to the issue of technology and writing, but are revealing about our attitudes all the same.

We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self-control — Words inscribed on a 6,000-year-old Egyptian tomb.

What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them? — Plato, 4th Century BC

The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint … As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behaviour and dress — Peter the Hermit, 1274 AD

As they say, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…. The more things change the more they stay the same

Note: I am not sure the Stanford project looked at the different kinds of media use that students engage in today (photos, video, mashups etc.), because that is a huge part of how the very idea of literacy is being redefined today. I don’t necessarily want to get into that issue here in this post, but is clearly a huge part of the kinds of literacy activities students today are engaged in.

I just ran across this blog (Color Me Katie) that just blew me away. Katie Sokoler is a freelance photographer and street artist living in Brooklyn – and her blog just throbs with life, and energy and the sheer pleasure of living. That’s her down there blowing bubbles (wait till you see the stop-motion animation version of this).

I think she says it best:

It’s important for me to express myself creatively every day. I have all of these fun ideas in my head and if I don’t get them out I’m pretty sure my mind would explode. Realistically, I’d probably just get frustrated and fall asleep. But explosion or no explosion, doing something creative acts as a form of therapy for me. I feel better after taking photographs, making street art, painting, or making wall sized collages. The messier and more sweatier I get, the better I feel.

How cool is that!

A while ago I had written about how we use language to capture intangible ideas – and the risks associated with not paying attention to these intangibles. I had said (though you can read the complete post A different language):

For instance wine connoisseurs have developed a specialized language (which sadly is quite opaque to me) to explain to each other characteristics of wine. So the words “fruity” and “dry” have specific gustatory connections… What we need to do is develop a language that allow us to somewhat consistently express and represent the intangibles of teaching, somewhat like what Bird does in explaining his music (or wine connoisseurs do when describing wine). The lack of such a language essentially prevents us from recognizing that classrooms are far more than 4 walls, a teacher and a bunch of students… and that aesthetics play a great role in the act of teaching and learning.

Now here is “scientific” proof of what I was saying. In goofing around on the web I came across this article on PubMedCentral titled Six senses in the literature. The bleak sensory landscape of biomedical texts. The authors Raul Rodriguez-Esteban and Andrey Rzhetsky argue that

When we read prose—whether technical or literary—our mind parses sentences to recover their meaning. Yet, the flow of the words themselves can invoke surprising or unexpected sensory responses, even for the writer. Even a very rational and technical text can typically affect the reader on multiple cognitive levels, in addition to its basic task of transmitting the author-intended meaning.

This led them to wonder about the kinds of words used in scientific texts, specifically biomedical texts. Being good scientists, the decided to test this out:

In this study, we therefore analysed the frequencies of use of sensory words and time-related terms in a large collection of biomedical texts, and compared the results with similar analyses of a collection of news articles, a large encyclopaedia, and a body of literary prose and poetry.

And what did they find? No real surprises here:

We found that, unlike literary compositions and newswire articles, biomedical texts are extremely sensory poor, yet rich in overall vocabulary. It is likely that the sensory-deprived writing style that dominates the biomedical literature impedes text comprehension and numbs the reader’s senses and mind.

In conclusion they say:

In short, we believe that scientific prose should be enriched with sensory words, provided that they clarify the meaning rather than obscure it, in much the same way as a good statistical data visualization involves the mapping of abstract data into colours and three-dimensional shapes, to help the reader or viewer discover meaningful patterns.

I think the analogy to visual representation is right on… and I could not agree more with their conclusion.

My daughter, whose creative exploits have been featured here before (for instance see her design for a math-music game), now has a blog, titled Uniquely Mine. It features original writing (poems, stories) by her. Do check it out. You can find regular updates on this blog via the beauty of RSS feeds on the right column (just scroll down).

The one piece by Shreya I would like to draw attention to is a story titled Obtuse can be right. She wrote this as a part of a fourth grade assignment, and it is pretty cool, with interesting geometry-related wordplay. Enjoy.

My friend Gaurav Bhatnagar (whose doggerel on ambigrams is featured on my blog as well) gave it high praise in his Facebook update, saying, “This is a masterpiece. Highly recommender (sic!). As good as Asimov’s short shorts.” I haven’t had a chance to see Asimov’s short shorts but I guess they are cool!

Anybody who knows me (and/or reads this blog) will know of my love of issues related to representation (see all postings under that category). So I am always looking out for new and interesting representations. An lovely example sent to me by Patrick Dickson is website titled Information is beautiful. This site, and much of the work showcased there is the creation of David McCandless, a free-lance information designer. He describes his interests as being in “how designed information can help us understand the world, cut through BS and reveal hidden connections, patterns and stories underneath.”

For instance check out If Twitter was a community of 100 people

An example of how just visualizing and representing data can change one’s prior conception of a idea can be found at How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb (sort of).

The one that made the best connection to me personally was Caffeine & Calories.

Enjoy.

David Wong is a colleague of mine at the College of Education and an avid John Dewey scholar. He also loves to fish. You can learn more about his work by going to his web site here. (I had earlier blogged about his work around visually representing ideas here and here).

A few years ago, as a birthday present for David, I created the following image. It combined his two loves (John Dewey and fishing) in one sweet image. Ah… the wonders of photoshop. I had quite forgotten about it till I came across it again recently and decided to include it here (for the record).