Punya Mishra's Web

Here’s a new ambigram I designed at the kick-off for the MSU Creativity Initiative. I will have more information on that in a later post but for now… enjoy.

Creativity, any which way you look at it.

Slate Magazine is running a series on Creative Pairs, or why Two is the Magic Number! Written by Joshua Wolf Shenk the series seeks to understand:

What makes creative relationships work? How do two people—who may be perfectly capable and talented on their own—explode into innovation, discovery, and brilliance when working together? These may seem to be obvious questions. Collaboration yields so much of what is novel, useful, and beautiful that it’s natural to try to understand it.

The series is an excellent introduction to the research on creative collaboration has most interestingly has a series of case studies of creative pairs. The first pair studied were John Lennon & Paul McCartney and followed their careers over time and how the “push-pull” between these two creative personalities led to some of the greatest music of the 20th Century.

The next set of profiles focuses on Matthew Swanson & Robbi Behr, the couple behind Idiot’s Books. Joshua Shenk inflicts on them “a series of experiments, stunts, and adventures” with the goal of shedding “light on the nature of their collaboration—and on the broader questions of relationships, psychology, and creativity.” So far the couple has been given a battery of psychological tests, tolerated a tour of their home and studio, sat on a couch for a psychoanalytic session, and finally, created a verbal/visual map of their creative process. As Shenk says, “What they came up with turned out to both nicely illustrate how they work and to perfectly embody their Idiocy.” I completely and totally recommend anybody interested in creativity to take a look at this somewhat interactive feature: Idiot Books, Creative Process Diagram.

I have always been interested in what lies at the intersection of science and art. There are of course many different ways of looking at this. There is the idea of scientific creativity being both similar to and different from artistic creativity. And then there is the idea of artistically representing scientific ideas. I have written about this elsewhere in the context of poetry (both scientific poetry / sci-po or mathematical poetry / math-po). I have also argued that this process of “translation” from one medium to another is a very powerful way of both understanding the issues at hand but could also be an interesting teaching tool. For instance see these sci-po’s written by Sean Nash’s students. As I had said before, echoing Sean, in the context of writing a mathematical proof in verse (click here if you are interested), this act of writing a poem about mathematics forces you to truly and deeply understand the idea before you can start playing with it.

Such artistic representations of science can also be a powerful tool for outreach – to communicate often abstruse and complex ideas to a wider audience. One of the best approaches that has received some attention in the past years is Dance your Ph.D. As the Science Mag website says

The dreaded question. “So, what’s your Ph.D. research about?” You could bore them with an explanation. Or you could dance.

That’s the idea behind “Dance Your Ph.D.” Over the past 3 years, scientists from around the world have teamed up to create dance videos based on their graduate research. This year’s contest, launched in June by Science, received 45 brave submissions.

Today, judges—including scientists, choreographers, and past winners—announced the finalists in four categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences. Each receives $500.

Click here to see and vote for the finalists.

Greg Casperson is a graduate student in our Ed Psy & Ed Tech program. He has been engaged, over the past few months, in the most interesting experiment. He carefully selects and posts to his website one poem every day! Greg’s RSS feed has become one of the first things I check out every morning. He has impeccable taste, since, for one reason or another, he seems to select poems and poets that I love.

I had been wanting to blog about his “poem a day” website for a while now but then he did something that caused me to question his taste! He posted a poem written by me! I must admit I loved the attention but, truth be told, I am not sure I deserve being in such exalted company. What he posted this Friday was a poem I had written and posted on my blog, a few months ago. I wrote this poem in response to a poem by Grace Paley. I had come across Paley’s poem in a book I had picked up at a sale. Though I loved the original poem, something about it bothered me. I even read it to my kids and discussed my concern with them. Then, later that evening, I felt the urge to write a  response. And an hour or so later, there it was, Poem or Pie. Greg, for reasons known only to himself, decided to do a double-poem day and chose to link to my post.

Whether or not you like my poem, I strongly recommend adding Greg’s website to your RSS feed. Trust me, there is no better way to start the day than by reading a thoughtfully selected poem. And did I mention that Greg has impeccable taste (his occasional forays into pleasing his program faculty aside).

Anyway enjoy Greg’s “A poem a day” or surf over to my post that includes both the original poem my Paley, and my response. Do take a moment to read the first comment on my post. Turns out Grace Paley’s daughter read my poem and chose to drop by my website and write a comment! How cool is that. 

I am currently teaching a course on Creativity in Teaching & Learning and as a part of that I was searching for an interesting image to highlight a note I was posting to the class. I wanted an image that represented, in some cool manner, the multi-dimensionality of perception, how the “position” we take, defines what we see. Not satisfied with what I was coming up with (via Google or Flickr) I started doodling and pretty soon I had a new triplet ambigram.

Triplet ambigrams are 3-d shapes that cast different shadows depending on where you shine light on it. Now every shape (or most shapes) cast different shadows when light falls on them from different direction – the issue is to make these shadows interesting. In the case of triplet ambigrams, the challenge is constructing the simplest object that can make interesting and different shadows.

Here is what I came up with. This three-d shape casts three different shadows – each of which is a letter-form, in this case the letters A, B & C. How cool is that.

ABC Triplet Ambigram (See large size on Flickr)

I also took a picture of my doodles as I came up with this shape. Here is a small version of that sketch (a larger version is available on Flickr).

(see larger version on Flickr)

I have created a few more of these things before. Here is one for CFT (Cognitive Flexibility Theory). I had posted this triplet earlier in the context of the periodic table of elements here.

And another for Cognitive Technology Society. This logo was selected for use by the organization and then they changed their mind, or the organization vanished (one or the other).

I have often talked of repurposing as being key to creativity, particularly for teachers using new technologies. (See previous postings on this topic here and here, and here and here.) Imagine my surprise when this past Sunday’s comics-page had a comic on this very issue. The strip is called Jump Start below is the specific set of panels on repurposing.

The cartoon is given above.

France is being attacked by alien beings! This summer in France I noticed characters from 80′s video games in the strangest of places. For instance, see this one, that I found while walking somewhere near the Latin Quarter in Paris.

And though I took a picture of just one, I noticed these pixilated, bit-mapped graphics (from some Space Invaders type of game) all over the place. I was intrigued but not enough to research it in any way.

Just a couple of days ago I was reminded of this when I saw some stickers of similar characters on Kristen Kereluik’s laptop and told her about the sightings in France. Well, she did the requisite Google search and sent me a few links. As it turns out these are the artistic creations of an artist named (no surprise here), Invader. As Invader’s wikipedia says:

Invader (born 1969) is a French street artist who pastes up characters from and inspired by the Space Invaders game, made up of small coloured square tiles that form a mosaic. He does this in cities across the world, then documents this as an “Invasion”, with maps of where to find each invader.

Kristen also found a Flickr site devoted to documenting this artwork.

How fun!

A few weeks ago I posted a note about an assignment I gave my students in the on-campus version of the MAET program. They had completed an unit on motivation and had watched the RSA / Daniel Pink video and their task was was to create demotivational posters, (along the lines of those on despair.com) using ideas either from their readings/discussions or from the Pink video.

The posters were a huge success. In fact Daniel Pink tweeted them (Thanks Daniel) and lots of his followers ended up on my website to see the work done by the students, which is all very cool.

Well, I am now in Rouen, France, meeting with the students in the off-campus MAET program. I got a chance to work with each of the groups (representing year 1, 2 & 3) and had them create similar posters as well. So now we have a total of 17(!) posters. It is interesting to see just how different they are, even the ones that tackle the same concept do it differently.

I have included all of the posters below  — the one’s from East Lansing as well as the one’s created here at Rouen. Click on the words to see the posters (the names of the students who created them is provided below each of the posters).

Incentives Scot Acre Patrick Gillespie Marc Compton Shawn Telford	Individuality Kerry Guiliano Aaron Moran Mike Bammer Julie Howe Addy Hamilton	Motivation Barb Bedford Cheryl Schaefer Hope Andres Stacey Schuh	Rewards Grace Bammer Mary Wever Jessica Steffel Sarah Blazo	Curiosity Craig McMichael Chloe Tingley Lial Miller Katie Lorey
Teamwork Melanie Hosbach Fiona Scott Andrew Melmoth	Rewards 2 Sarah Pickles Katie Shefren Joost Guttinger Renee Codsi	Mastery Theresa Hamilton Larissa Lisayo Miguel Herrera	Dreams Cheytoria Hickey Bridget Reed	Grades Kristi Dix Patricia Liff Rugh Gadson Olivia Shillings
Autonomy Frances Snowden, Jessica Maisonnave, Andrea Ouimetto	Mastery2 Paul Blackwell, Brigette Jensen, Candace Marcotte	Collaboration Bill Marland, Christina Popowski, Jillian Johnson, Jamie Perry	Creativity John Hogan Michelle Cox Sean Sweeny Rehb Rajab Alfred McDonnel	Financial Incentives Dean Halverson Ashley Priem Shaza Ahmed Lauren Cortesi Camiella Hudson
	Material Incentives Rawad Bon Hamadan Jason Shulha Eliza Mantyh Patty Kolinski	Motivation 2 Bossel Deiry Susie Dina JP Bennett Kelly Cunningham Kristin Bergeron

I love finding interesting faces. I am not speaking of the ones on people (though I like interesting ones there as well) but rather the unexpected faces we find in things around us. I have been doing this for a while now and have a flickr set devoted to this. Here are some interesting examples from my set, you can of course see all the of them by going to my set titled Faces We See.

A face in an auto-rikshaw Bhubaneswar, India	A “scream” in wood, Kinawa Middle School, Okemos, MI
	.
A row of scared concrete faces Outside Salt Lake City airport, Utah	A nice smiley face in a vending machine Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris

I am not alone in this as this recent Huffington Post slide-show and this Mastercard commercial (that I wrote about here). My internet searches also pulled up this Audi Commercial.

The TPACK Radio/Video show that we had created for ISTE is now available on Vimeo. I think this version is easier to embed and view (as opposed to a 21MB download, as it was the previous time around).

TPACK Radio/Video Show ISTE 2010 from Punya Mishra on Vimeo.

A fake radio/video show created for ISTE2010 by Punya Mishra with Matt Koehler (and a bunch of other people who are thanked in the video). We were asked to create a video for ISTE, a conference that neither of us (Punya or Matt) could attend. Our goal was to create an engaging 15 minute video that would convey our ideas about technology integration in teaching, specifically the TPACK framework. The entire thing (including the two Mastercard & UPS commercials) was scripted, shot and edited over 4 days. More details (and credits here)

Here is the second of the two commercials created specially for our ISTE Radio/Video show. The first one (a take-off on the UPS/Whiteboard commercials can be seen here). Enjoy. As always, the director’s commentary is provided below.

The backstory: I have, for many years now, wanted to create a short video along the lines of the Mastercard “Priceless” commercials. I have had many different ideas, but never really got a chance to do so. So when I came up with the idea of the Radio/Video show for ISTE, I decided this was the time to go do it.

The activity shown here (with tennis balls, flip cams, markers and transparencies) is one that I have actually done multiple times, in venues around the world. This is a simple activity that exposes a fundamental misconception people have about how objects fall. The question I ask is where the tennis ball would fall if dropped by someone in three different conditions: standing still, walking or running. Most people say that the ball would fall at the feet in the first case (right answer), and behind the person in the other two cases (wrong answer). It turns out that the ball always falls at the feet of the person – assuming, of course, that the person keeps moving at the same speed after letting go of the ball. Why the ball does so has to do with Newton’s First Law, something many people can recite back to you, even while getting this question wrong.

After I get all the responses (and it is always amazing to me just how many people get it wrong), I ask people to go and create a video of the actual experiment. I typically give them 45 minutes to an hour to do the entire thing. There is something to be said for being able to see what “really” happens, to go frame-by-frame through it. It better than any physics lesson, this activity exposes people to just how wrong their intuitions were.

There are many layers to this assignment. In some cases I have had people tape a transparency sheet to their computer screens and then track the parabolic path of the ball. You can go ahead and measure the height of the person’s hand knowing the frame-rate of the video, actually calculate the value of g, acceleration due to gravity.

Anyway, that assignment became the core idea behind the video. The entire commercial was shot, narrated and edited one Sunday afternoon. I got a group of my daughter’s friends together and we shot the still frames of them dropping the ball and shooting the video. The script was narrated by my son. Despite multiple takes he could not correctly pronounce the word “pedagogy” so tweaked the script to drop that particular word (which of course meant that Technology and Content were out as well!). The tag line “There is some knowledge you are born with, for everything else there’s TPACK” emerged out a conversation with Matt Koehler.

See the Whiteboard/UPS commercial or the entire ISTE10, Radio/Video Show.

Our ISTE Radio/Video show needed a few commercials to break the monotony – so we created a couple. Here is the first one, a take on the UPS / Whiteboard commercials. Watch and enjoy (director’s commentary provided below).

The idea for this video came from my wife, Smita. I was talking with her about possible commercials to spoof, and that we needed something that people would recognize right away. She suggested the UPS-whiteboard commercials and bingo! I knew this was the one. A bit of doodling on paper and watching some of the original commercials on YouTube later, the strong resemblance between the UPS logo and the intersection of the three circles (that make up TPACK) struck me. And, as they say, the rest just fell into place. One of the things nice about the UPS commercials is the manner in which the “long-haired guy” changes the image with little moves here and there. I think our version does the same, at two different levels. The first is the manner in which the seeming UPS logo is shown to really be the crucial meeting point of the three circles, and then, at the very end, how the color of the marker changes from green to red! Tiny touches but they make all the difference, if you ask me.

The star of the commercial is Mete Akcaoglu, a doctoral student in our program, selected for his hair (we needed someone with longer hair to correspond with the star of the actual commercials), his “cool” Turkish accent, and his acting ability. Essentially what happened was that Mete just happened to walk by my office and got immediately “volunteered” to be the star. Not that he had much choice I do think he did a great job.

We checked out a variety of places with whiteboards (meeting rooms etc.) but all of them had some problem or the other (excessive glare, strange reflections, and inadequate lighting). Finally, Leigh Wolf was gracious enough to lend us her office (even though, I am sure, it was a huge distraction). The commercial was filmed with a Flip camera and edited with iMovie. Matt Koehler found us the right music – and 20 minutes later, we had a final version.

You can see the commercial in “context” by going directly to the ISTE10 TPACK radio/video show, but be prepared to spend 15 minutes on the entire program.

My daughter on her blog has a new poem / haiku called Sweat, a haiku with one glich. She is in India right now where the temperatures are easily in the 90′s – which I guess explains the genesis of the poem. What was more interesting, to me however, was the manner in which she, quite instinctively, breaks up a word in the poem. Interestingly, she regards that as a “glich!”

Here is the poem.

Sweat

Sticky, icky, ew!
I wipe it off, and it trick-
les, right back again!

“trick-”

“-les”

down the page. Reminds me of one of my favorite poets, e.e.cummings and how he plays with words. For instance here is a poem by him

l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness

It takes a bit of effort to read but it is worth it. With some thought you will see that in the parenthesis is the phrase “a leaf falls,” broken up so that it runs down the page, rather than across it. So instead of “a leaf falls” you read

(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)

Of course breaking it all up forces you (the reader) to read the lines in slow-motion, with pauses as it were. Also the shape of the letters comes through now as do the alliterative / symmetric “le” “ll” and “af” “fa” sounds. There is a visual and audio pattern here… a verbo-visual pun maybe. Sort of what Shreya did with the word “trickles.”

But there is more…

Outside the parenthesis is the word “loneliness” broken up so that you can see the words “one” sandwiched between two “L’s.” The “L” is written in lower-case, which again makes it look like the number “1″ or capital “I.”

l
one
l
iness

So the repetition of the idea of “one” or “I” (once as “one” and twice as the number or the “I”) emphasizes the solitary nature of this experience. It could be 1 leaf falling, or one person watching one leaf fall… And all the pieces come together to set up a sad mood of one lonely person watching one leaf fall

How clever of mr. cummings. And how cool that Shreya, discovered something similar in breaking up “trickles” into two parts, showing how the sweat actually

“trick -

- les”

down.

To me it is an indication of her increasing comfort with language. It is only when we are comfortable with the rules that we start to break them, and it is there that true creativity and one’s one “writerly” voice emerges. So I would argue, despite Shreya’s thinking that it is a glitch, that it is not. It actually her noticing a pattern, imposed on her by the syllable count required by the Haiku structure itself, and then using that constraint for a creative purpose.

As for the mis-spelling of “glich” – I hope she doesn’t correct it. Because the poem now does have one glitch, the mis-spelling of the word “glitch.” How self-referential!!

All in all, what a wonderful way to begin a Sunday, reflecting on creativity and writing, inspired by a poem written by 11 year old Shreya. How very cool!!

I just spent a day at MICDS in St. Louis talking with a small but select group of teachers about creativity in teaching, the role of big ideas, the meaning of TPACK, the importance of trans-disciplinary learning (among other things). What a wonderful way of spending the day! This visit was organized by Elizabeth Helfant at MICDS. Apart from the workshop, it was also wonderful to finally meet up with Mr. Nashworld, Sean Nash himself. Sean and I have been blogging buddies for a while now and it was great to finally meet up with him.

As a part of our activities today I had all the participants crate i-Images. I have written about i-Images on this blog before (see here and here).

i-Images are the brainchild of David Wong and you can find his page on i-Images here.

Anyway, here are some of the i-Images created today. I do think they are pretty cool and thought provoking, each in its own way. Click on the images below to see what the workshop participants created. Enjoy.

Kristine M Kamper	Lynn Mittler	Chris Rappleye	Stephanie Madlinger
Lisa Huxley	Sean Nash	Sean Nash	Sean Nash

I have been a big fan of Despair.com and its quirky, dark humor. I particularly love the demotivational posters, with their beautiful inspiring photographs coupled with some deeply cynical or depressing message.

Today students in my MAET summer program completed a unit on motivation. They read the standard Ed Psych motivational literature (Dweck etc.) and also watched the RSA / Daniel Pink video (that I had linked to here). And then, they created a series of demotivational posters. These posters were created in Google Presentation, with images from Flickr and most importantly they had to use their ideas from either the readings or from the Pink video. [Incidentally the video was not created by Daniel Pink, nor by RSA, but rather by Cognitive Media.]

Here is what they came up with, click on the words to see the posters. The names of the students who created them is provided below the titles.

Incentives Scot Acre Patrick Gillespie Marc Compton Shawn Telford	Individuality Kerry Guiliano Aaron Moran Mike Bammer Julie Howe Addy Hamilton	Motivation Barb Bedford Cheryl Schaefer Hope Andres Stacey Schuh	Rewards Grace Bammer Mary Wever Jessica Steffel Sarah Blazo	Curiosity Craig McMichael Chloe Tingley Lial Miller Katie Lorey

A great article titled the: The Subtle Technology of Indian Artisanship: From saris to hand-painted signs, design thinking is an unacknowledged force in Indian craft by Ken Botnick & Ira Raja. I have written about ideas such as these earlier, particularly in the context of Jugaad  (aka situational creativity). (Thanks Babitha George for the link). This is of course connected to the idea of Everyday Creativity (that Lawrence Bruce had shared in a comment on a previous post).

For instance see these posts:

• Thoughtless acts? Technology, creativity & teaching
• Thoughtless acts? Technology, creativity & teaching
• Jugaad, educational toys from Junk (TPACK at work)
• Jugaad, India-genous creativity

There are lots of cool examples in this article but the one that stood out was this one:

This underwear sign presents an example of innovative thinking about space. Finding a drain
opening in the path of his endeavors, the artist spontaneously incorporated a navel (and home for a mynah bird)

How wonderful is that!! Read the entire article for more…

Unoriginal

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.” – Jim Jarmusch

More Jim Jarmusch quotes here. Nice design of a layout for this quote here. Photo credit Emily Smith from flickr.

We have all heard the statement that “less is more” and in many instances that may actually be true. Good design, for instance, often is based on the KISS principle, which, come to think of it, maybe an example of Less is More. That said, there may be situations where more may be more. Wes Fryer has a great post on those of us who want to inspire creativity: Want to Inspire Creativity? Invite LOTS of Opportunities to CREATE.

It must say though that this idea of more from more will not necessarily work in most contexts. If it is busy-work we are talking about, more often just means more boredom. Think of the task the teacher had assigned in the quote that Wes provides, it was an open-ended creative task, one with fuzzy definitions about what “quality work” meant. It is here that just creating (and unconsciously learning from experience) allows students to learn, in a risk free way. Failure is not a problem, it is just a step along the way. Failure is an option.

How does it connect to Gladwell’s idea of 10,000 hours of effort to become an expert and the movement from incompetence to mastery? What does it mean for what you do in your classes, and the assignments you give your students? What does this mean for me as an instructor preparing to teach MAET courses this summer?

My friend and colleague Leigh Wolf forwarded me this article on Edward Tufte: The Many Faces (And Sculptures) Of Edward Tufte. I have been a fan of information design guru Edward Tufte’s work for years (decades?). I love his emphasis on clarity and simplicity in presenting information. I love the fact that he designs and publishes his own books (so that he can have full control over each and every aspect of the presentation). What I didn’t know of was his playful artistic side. It turns out that ET (as he is known) is also an artist, crafting giant metal sculptures in his “back yard” (if you can call the hundreds of acres that stretch behind his house a “back yard!”).

Over the past few years I have been thinking quite hard about the idea that creative people are not creative in just one area but rather tend to play within and across multiple disciplines or areas. Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein have in their book Sparks of Genius often talked about how the most creative scientists are polymaths, often having artistic and other interests that go beyond their immediate professional interests. In fact they argue, and I would tend to agree with them, that creativity cannot be forced into one box or domain. Creative individuals are curious about everything and often engage in creative activities in multiple areas, though they may specialize in just one area (usually the domain they are most known for).

This is true for the most creative people I know. For instance, consider Douglas Hofstadter (best known for his book Godel, Escher & Back and is work in Artificial Intelligence) dabbles in everything from mathematics to music, wordplay to art. Similarly Scott Kim (best know as a puzzle game designer) creates ambigrams and composes music, plays the drums and teaches mathematics using dance!

In my own way I have tried to do the same. Everything I do, from creating ambigrams to teaching, from photography to developing keynote presentations, from being a parent to advising students on their research, seems to me to be connected and inter-woven. I think my success as a researcher and scholar (to whatever extent I have been successful) derives from this “dabbling” across disciplines.

What is sad, however, is how much such “dabbling” is frowned upon. Through high-school and college, through graduate school and even as a faculty member, I have been advised, always by by well-meaning people, to focus, to find my niche, to become an expert on one thing. I have resisted it, mainly because knowing just one thing, seems, at least to me, such an impoverished way of being.

And I understand why I have received the advice I have. We live in a specialized world. A world where expertise is valued.  And an expert, after all, is someone who knows more and more about less and less. There is no space for dabbling in this world of.

But I wonder about that. I have a friend who is a successful professor of civil engineering. Turns out, that as he was growing up, what he really wanted to be, was a chef! I haven’t had a chance to talk to him about this but I wonder how his vision of being a chef influences what he does as a researcher and a teacher? Does it contribute (in some subconscious manner) to his work? Or has he suppressed it completely?

Either way I see it as a tragedy, in the first case because we haven’t developed a way of speaking of these influences, and in the second case because a possible, fruitful career was nipped in the bud.

The sad thing is that I am seeing school do the same thing to my kids, in fact to most kids I know. NCLB has not helped either. Don’t get me wrong. This is not an argument for some form of dilletantism (dabbling for the sake of dabbling). Not at all. What I am recommending (thanks to the Roob-Bernstein’s for this term) is polymathy. One of my students, Danah Henriksen, is currently working on a dissertation on looking for polymathy in teachers. As she says:

“Polymathy” may be thought of as an informed enthusiasm for more than one field of knowledge or expertise, or excellence in several realms that might seem distant from each other.  It has been suggested that what makes polymaths so successful and fluidly creative is an ability to cross-pollinate ideas and information.  People who open their minds to, and who learn from, multiple knowledge areas can apply new information and unique ways of thinking from one discipline into another.

This for me is the biggest reason for supporting such playing around in multiple areas. These experiences at the fringes (so to speak) of our professional lives, provide us with newer ways of being in the world. They allow us to see the world in new ways. They allow us to question things the field may have taken for granted. Just as Tufte says at the end of the piece, my goal, is to “make people see a little differently.” Turns out one of the best and easiest ways of doing so is by seeing through different disciplinary eyes.

We need to provide better opportunities for our students to do the same.

Back in 2007, I was second author on a paper titled Teacher as Filmmaker, in which we described an approach to teacher professional development that involved teachers creating short, evocative movies, which we called iVideos. You can read the paper and abstract (below).

Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Siebenthal, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. To appear in M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press.

In our Masters program in Educational Technology at Michigan State University, K-12 teachers create “iVideos” – short, two-minute, digital videos designed to evoke powerful experiences about educative ideas. For example, an iVideo might enable viewers to experience the vastness of space, the interconnection between people and their environment, the timeless themes in great literature, and other compelling subject-matter ideas. How might these teacher-made iVideos serve as catalysts for teacher technology education and professional development? We describe the conceptual foundation of iVideos by building on the metaphor of teacher as filmmaker – an idea that highlights how teachers and filmmakers both strive to create powerful experiences for their audiences. In doing so, we argue that teachers are enabled to transform ideas and practice by immersing themselves in deep pedagogical consideration of subject-matter, significance, audience, learning, epistemology, and aesthetics. We also discuss how this approach develops teachers’ competency and efficacy with technology.

A week or so ago I received an email from Dr. Matthew Kearney, from University of Technology, Sydney informing us that, inspired by our work (as laid out in the above paper) students in their “pre-service teacher education elective class chose to make some ‘idea videos’ on a range of current issues in K-12 education.” You can see these movies by going to

http://sites.google.com/site/teacherivideos/

It feels great to know that our work was useful (and even inspiring) to others. Dr. Kearney adds that:

I would like to invite any interested student teachers at MSU to view an ‘ivideo’ of interest from our gallery and leave their reactions as a ‘comment’ at the bottom of the relevant page. (Our student teacher ‘filmmakers’ will be monitoring these pages for any feedback / comments / questions on conceptual or technical aspects of their iVideos.)

PS Please feel free to forward this invitation to any other teacher education institutions / staff who may be interested in this exercise.

Please take a moment to check out these videos. They are quite well done and worth a moment of your time. Drop a comment if you can, it will mean a lot to the students.

I have always been interested in the manner in which people use (or re-use) everyday things for purposes they were never intended for. Be it a piece of red tape to mark a glass door so that people don’t slam into the glass (as I see at the MSU clinical center every time I go there) or use a chair to prop open a door—these are examples of everyday creativity. I have used different phrases or words to describe this phenomena (particularly in the context of educational technology), everything from situational creativity to repurposing to jugaad.

So imagine my pleasure at serendipitously chancing upon a book titled Thoughtless Acts?

This book by Jane Fulton Suri and IDEO

invites you to notice the subtle and amusing ways that people react to the world around them. These “thoughtless acts” reveal how people behave in a world not always perfectly tailored to their needs and demonstrate the kind of real-world observational approach that can inspire designers and anyone involved in creative endeavors.

Its a neat little book, filled with photographs of different “thoughtless acts” i.e. (to quote from the book):

… intuitive ways in which we adapt, exploit, and react to things in our environment; things we do without really thinking.

Some actions, such as grabbing onto something for balance, are universal and instinctive. Others, such as warming hands on a hot mug or stroking velvet, draw on experiences so deeply embodied that they are almost unconscious. Still more, such as hanging a jacket to claim a chair, have become spontaneous  through habit or social learning. Observing such everyday interactions reveals subtle details about how we relate to the designed and natural world. This is key information and inspiration for design, and a good starting point for any creative initiative.

What the book emphasizes, for me, is the the value of “learning to see” – a distinction between recognition (which is seeing the world through existing frameworks) and perception (seeing the world as it is!). (Related posts here.) I have argued that this distinction between recognition and perception is the crux of true creativity. To quote myself (see original post here):

Perception is about seeing things for what they are, while recognition is about seeing things for how they have been labeled or how we have seen them in the past.

In this way of looking at things (if you pardon the pun) a toilet seat can be an aesthetic object!

Anyway, the book, Thoughtless Acts? is a pleasure to browse and a quick Google search revealed (no surprise there) a website that goes with the book. What else but thoughtlessacts.com. The website allows you to preview the book as well as contribute observations of your own.

And if you wonder what this has to do with education technology, take a moment to follow these links. In brief, I have argued that there is no such thing as an educational technology. What we have are a range of technologies that we can repurpose, re-see, and re-envision as being educational technologies. Be it using a audio editing tool such as Audacity as a data analysis tool or a GPS device to teach mathematics, teachers are designers of experiences for their students. Experiences that allow them to engage with the world, with deep ideas of content! (TPACK anyone?). But these technologies don’t come as a given, with their pedagogical purpose stamped all over them. Educators have to work on “re-seeing” them for their own selfish (educational) purposes.

Martin Gardner, 1914 – 2010

Martin Gardner died five days ago. Gardner was an influential writer about mathematics and was one of the greatest influences on me (and my friends) as I was growing up. His recreational mathematics column was the main reason I subscribed to the Scientific American back in high school. A few years ago a couple of my high-school friends wrote a mathematical novel (see my posting about Suri & Bal’s A Mathematical Ambiguity) and the high point for them was the fact that Martin Gardner agreed to write a blurb for the back cover. (My point of pride was that I was thanked in the acknowledgments page, putting me cheek-by-jowl with Martin Gardner!).

More personally, it was through Gardner’s writings that I was introduced to authors like Douglas Hofstadter, Raymond Smullyan, Scott Kim and James Randi — people who in turn ended up becoming immense influences on my thinking and way of looking at the world.

Martin Gardner, through his writing, his sense of humor and playfulness, his emphasis on rationality as a tool for understanding the world, his love of mathematics and learning, will always be with me. I know that in some  powerful, deep and fundamental way, he made me who I am today.

I have written about the value of seeing humor in the futility of existence (see this and this) but humor can also be found in the existence of futility. Below is a motivational video that demonstrates this fact. Enjoy…

As the young man says, “You can do anything that you think that you can do.” Well, may be not!

How can anybody resist this flowchart / visual representation of Hey Jude! Check it out. Don’t you just hear the song as you move through the boxes and arrows.

Excusado by Edward Weston

I have written earlier about the idea of veja du (which ended up becoming an assignment in my creativity class). To recap:

… if déjà vu is the process by which something strange becomes, abruptly and surprisingly familiar, véjà du is the very opposite. It is the seeing of a familiar situation with “fresh eyes,” as if you have never seen it before. So if déjà vu is about making the strange look familiar, véjà du is all about making the familiar look strange!

I was, this morning, provided and excellent example of veja du by one of the participants in my CEP817, Learning Technology by Design seminar. Steve Wagenseller pointed us to the photograph above, Excusado by Edward Weston and also linked to an essay by Marco Bohr on this photograph. I would strongly recommend looking at some other photographs by Weston (the tight closeups of vegetables are fantastic) and reading this essay “Excusado by Edward Weston“. A couple of key quotes. In this first quote Bohr places Edward Weston’s work within the broader context of art (and art movements) particularly drawing attention to the similarities and differences between his picture of a toilet and another (more famous) toilet that featured in the history of 20th century art.

Just like Marcel Duchamp eight years earlier, although this stands in a completely different context, he gave character to a toilet with his own recognizable ‘handwriting’. Duchamp had said that the perception of his urinal instillation was transformed by putting it in a gallery and calling it art. Weston transformed the perception of a toilet by capturing its pure aesthetic value in his defined style…

The next quote (and this is how Bohr finishes his essay) captures, for me the essence of the veja du assignment and takes it one step further, to comment on all that we do.

‘Excusado’ means to look at your object from different perspectives. For me it also means to get closer to the center of interest. It means that the light shapes the form and the form shapes the light. ‘Excusado’ means that there is no excuse for not making a beautiful picture even if it is toilet.

Think about that last sentence for a moment:

Excusado” means that there is no excuse for not making a beautiful picture even if there is a toilet.

Wow! What does that mean for me as a teacher? As a parent? As colleague? There are no excuses …

I have been tracking the Hitler-Downfall parodies for over two years now and it seems that they keep getting better and better. But over the last few days comes the news that Constantin films, which owns the rights to the original movie asked YouTube to find and take down every video that included a clip from the film. So the parodies have been vanishing from YouTube, which is a tragedy for creative freedom and the the right to create and disseminate parodies. This was one of the funniest Internet memes, capable of delivering pitch-perfect commentary on everything from Hillary Clinton’s loss in the Democratic Primaries, to the fact that the iPad did not have a camera! Farhad Manjoo has a great article about this meme (and links to a couple of awesome parodies), titled: YouTube vs. Der Führer

One of the interesting points he makes about the Content ID technology that YouTube uses to identify copyright infringement. As he says:

At its heart, Content ID is like a souped-up version of the FBI’s fingerprinting database. The entertainment industry keeps sending YouTube new reference files for movies, TV shows, songs, video games, and other content. YouTube scans every new upload and the millions of videos in its database against each of these files. David King, a YouTube product manager, told me that the system can find extremely fuzzy matches. It can spot when a copyrighted video has been transformed in some way by an uploader—for instance, it can finger a basketball game even if you pause, rewind, and then replay a clip from it, and it can identify Eric Cartman if you record a clip of  South Park by holding your camera up to your TV.

How amazing is that! Also Manjoo points out that one of the smartest things that Constantin films could have done is take advantage of this free publicity to run advertisements for the original movie/DVD. As Manjoo says,

Constantin never bothered to exercise its rights to run ads on the Downfall clips… according to YouTube, the vast majority of content owners who take part in Content ID are now recouping revenue from videos rather than pulling them down. Constantin would have earned a lot of money—not to mention avoided a lot of bad publicity—had it done the same thing.

It appears that some of the clips have started coming back, as users complain about their videos being taken down. YouTube policy automatically posts videos back if a copyright infringement claim is contested.

Personally, this has been a video / remix that has already given me hours of entertainment. It is a simple idea but with great potential and a wonderful example of the creative possibilities of giving people the opportunity to appropriate, mix and publish media.

I recently read the following poem by Grace Paley and just had to write a response. Anyway, here’s the original poem:

The Poet’s Occasional Alternative
by Grace Paley

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead     it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft     a poem would have had some
distance to go     days and weeks and
much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor

everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it     many friends
will say     why in the world did you
make only one

this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable
sadness I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership     I do not
want to wait a week     a year     a
generation for the right
consumer to come along

And here’s my response (this has been edited after it was first posted)

Poem or Pie
by Punya Mishra

I just read this poem
about a poet who chose to
bake a pie,
than write a poem!

It was weird, since in my hands
was a poem, not a slice of pie!

Was this the poem
That was not written?

And where was the pie?
Its existence, of course, had to be inferred,
assumed, taken at face value…

which made me question
whether that pie ever really
existed

having caught one
possible contradiction
I doubted everything.

I read this poem to my daughter
Who was more forgiving
maybe, she said, they baked
a pie AND wrote a poem

I wasn’t buying that!
Because in my heart I knew
that poets will do anything
lie, steal, stab and kill
to get the right slant on an idea

To get the right hook
that will make the reader smile
and pull them in to

Wallow in the here-nowness
Of baking a pie, and poking fun
At airy-fairyness of poetry
(in a poem no less). Who could resist
that?

But the truth is
I know it, and you do too,
that some days, a poem beats a pie

Though it is cute, in a self-deprecating
humble kind of way,
to claim the reverse.

Teaching with technology, for me, is all about repurposing technology. Such repurposing requires creative play. Our presentation at SITE 2010 was around some creative micro- and macro-design tasks that can help foster such creative repurposing. I just came across this 1964 Jonathan Winters / Jack Paar video that makes the same point but in a far more interesting manner. Enjoy.

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As he said, “Here’s a stick…” he said, “Make me believe in something.”

[h/t Teachpaperless

In his article Is Google making us stupid? the author Nicholas Carr takes Sergi Brin to task for something he had said in a 2004  interview with Newsweek. Brin is quoted as saying “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

What is the relationship of information technology and cognition? What about human creativity? What role does technology play, if any, in getting us to be less or more creative? Read the rest of this entry »

That’s me, wimpified! (Well that’s the best I could do).
Can you do better? Go Wimp Yourself!!