The Dubberly Design Office has created a series of models of innovation, play and design. These are terrific resources and I just found out about them by chance. I see these as being quite significant in the classes I teach, including CEP817: Learning Technology by Design; CEP818: Creativity in Teaching and Learning; and CEP917: Knowledge Media Design.
I am including links to a couple of their models – but I do recommend visiting their site to see more…
I spent a two days a couple of weeks ago with the faculty and leadership of Bloomfield Hills School District. The first day was a workshop on teaching, technology and creativity with the faculty of Model High School and Bowers Academy. Leigh and I had been invited there by Bill Boyle, the principal (read his blog). We spent the day exploring ideas of TPACK and creativity and it was great fun (see poems and images below).
Two days later I was back again, this time invited by the district Superintendent, Rob Glass, working with the entire school leadership on issues related to social media and what it means for schools and school districts. The morning was led of by Social Media guru, Shel Holtz, who talked about how social media was transforming the world of work and learning. [You can download his presentation here, though I must say that it is a 175MB download.] Building on Shel’s presentation I facilitated a series of brainstorming activities with all the administrators about specific things they could do in their schools and classrooms to meet these challenges. At the end of the day we had a series of key action items (short term and long term) for a range of different contexts.
All in all it was an extremely productive and fun day.
I am including below some of the stuff that emerged out of that meeting. The first is a slideshow of photographs from these two days.
And of course whenever I do a workshop on creativity can bad poetry be far behind? So here are some of the poems (and a rap song!) that emerged from the first workshop on creativity.Enjoy.
1. There once was a professor whose goal
Was to teach that creativity is whole
Effective and new
We’re making a stew
Of technology, content, pedagogy and soul
2
Some teachers on PD
Learned about creativity
They found creative products are new
From our pasts came only a few
for their own students they hope this won’t be
Deanna Vetrnone, Geoffery Parkinson
3.
Whole, roll, jellyroll
Effect, Defect, and reflect
Novel Pavel Datsyuk
Peg Pasternak, Bruce Kezlarian, Cullen Murphy
4.
There once was a girl from Nantucket
Who was so bored she said *@%& it
She developed something N.E.W.
To away her blues
And forever vowed to think outside the bucket
Matt Autha, Rosalie Burnett, Bill Boyle
5. PD Rap
I can’t believe the of change
It makes my brain feel deranged
It has my whole body freakin’
But now I’ll start my creativity tweakin’
Rapping to you in rhyming couplets
Rain my words like drops in a bucket
Like the girl on Nantucket
Who looked around and just said f%$# it
Suffering from deep amnesia
Out of lots of inertia, a little fantasia
While waiting for lunch from La Marsa.
Thinking about the old days
With nostalgia.
When we had pencils and chalk
Things moved slow
Now we start to balk
But it’s go go go
But no we know technology’s just a tool
We’ll keep up, won’t be no fool
And our whole school will rule!
Camille Dempsey, a professional development consultant in instructional technology, education, arts and leadership as well as a doctoral candidate in in the Leadership and Instructional Technology Program at Duquesne University has been ” investigating TPACK in conjunction with IT & visual art” and shared a recent presentation she and her colleague made at the Pennsylvania Art Education Association Conference.
Dempsey, J. C. & Linaberger, M. (2010, October). Art in the digital garden: Cultivating best practices in technology integration and art. Pennsylvania Art Education Association Conference, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
I was recently invited to present a keynote address at the 21st Century Instructional Technology Conference (titled Elements of Technology) at the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Nevada. Clark County is the 5th largest school district in the country with over 300,000 students and it was a great privilege to be invited to present there. I was invited there by the Instructional Technology Department (led by Loretta Asay) and my contact person was Project Facilitator, Sherwood Jones. They are a great group of people and I truly had a wonderful time there.
Apart from the Keynote I also conducted a workshop on Creativity and Teaching with Technology. I had anticipated having around 25 people for the workshop but the room was overflowing (at least 15 more than I had anticipated). That did throw a few kinks into my routine but nothing that was unsurmountable. I am sharing below some of the things that people created during this two hour workshop.
I explained my idea of a creative idea or product as being Novel, Effective and Whole (the so called New NEW)! This led Terra Graves, Thomasina Rose and Kristina Ernest to create this acrostic poem.
New
Organic
Visual
Engaging
Longevity
Educational
Fun
Freedom
Everyone
Creativity
Teachers
Innovative
Variety
Enthusiasm
Winning
Holistic
Outside the Box
Learning
Exciting
Here are a few more from Lisa Widmer, Katie Jones, Brent Mesenburg and Robert Jackson
The first two are limericks that summarize some of the things we had talked about in the first half of the workshop.
Creativity is our goal
Make it Novel Effective and Whole
When in doubt
Turn it about
And satisfy your soul
A second, funnier, version is as follows:
Creativity is our goal
Make it Novel Effective and Whole
When in doubt
Don’t Freak out
It’s quite alright if you stole
The same team wrote another poem, synthesizing some of the ideas we played with in the second half of the workshop.
Being creative is like heaven
Mimic the great Magellan
And fear not missteps
Just use the five steps
And crank that knob to eleven
The “crank the knob to eleven” of course being a response to the (in)famous scene from This is Final Tap.
A couple of other pieces that emerged from this team (can you tell this was a prolific group) was the quote:
“Tweak it to Teach it”
Somewhat along the same lines was Patrick Whitehead who suggested the following two:
Thinking is tweaking your mind
Think better… TWEAK your mind!
Apart from this display of verbal dexterity, the participants also completed a “letter search” task where they looked for letter that spell out the word “Relax, Repose, Reteach.” I had done a similar activity with students in our MAET program a year ago in Plymouth. Essentially what I did was create a somewhat awkward problem scenario the solution to which were the words Relax, Repose, Reteach. So these were the letters students searched for… and this is what they came up with.
Now for the twist! As it turns out one of the themes of the keynote (and the workshop) were the three words “Explore, Create, Share.” Students watched each of the three videos that we had created (see them here) as well as the mashup that had inspired us to begin with (see the original and the mashup here).
What the students didn’t know was that the three words (Relax, Repose, Reteach) could be rearranged to read… (surprise, surprise) the words Create, Explore, Share!! Here is what that looks like…
I must give a shout-out to High School Freshman Bryan Jones who I “volunteered” to help me out. He had a tough job, collecting all the pictures since there were multiple cameras (from regular digital cameras to iPhones), missing cables, a mac that was running Windows (which mean iPhoto wouldn’t cooperate)… and he had to pull everything together in around 25 minutes while the workshop was still going on… And he managed it without fuss and stress. Thanks!
Finally, we all watched the new Steven Johnson video “Where good ideas come from” and created demotivational posters based on what they heard and saw. Below is the video (just in case you haven’t seen it already) and below that the posters the students created.
As you can imagine this was a hectic workshop for all of us. We covered a lot of ground and the participants also created some interesting artifacts that can have a life beyond the immediate workshop. What fun!
The triplet ambigrams keep flying in. This new one came in an email from Chunlei Zhang, a faculty member at East China Normal University, having received his Ph.D. in Curriculum & Teaching from Beijing Normal University. He was inspired after reading my previous blog post (here and here) to make his own design. And being a serious educator he focused on three words that all instructional designers need to keep in mind – Content, Students and Objectives. Which naturally meant that his triplet ambigram was devoted to C, S & O! Check it out below…
A few weeks ago I had shared a few triplet-ambigrams I had designed. For the uninitiated a triplet ambigram is a 3-d shape that cast different, and interesting, shadows depending on where you shine light on it. For instance here’s a triplet ambigram that casts three different shadows that read A, B & C!
Yesterday I received an email from Alex Ruthman, a self-proclaimed regular reader of this blog who had been inspired to create his own triplet ambigrams. Alex is a music educator and researcher at UMass Lowell with an interest in creativity, music technology, web 2.0 and learner agency (see his home page here). Now, Alex has taken the design of such triplets to their next logical level. He does not just prototype them on paper, he designs them in Google Sketchup and then 3D prints them in plastic! Here is a photo he sent to me…
As you can see this shape casts the shadows of L, P & C (depending on where light shines on it). What is more, Alex does not just do this for fun. He has actually found an use for it in his teaching. As he said in his email:
I use these with my music education methods and research courses illustrating multiple perspectives and three modes of engaging with music: listening, performing and creating.
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.
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.
Back in March of this year, Joel Colbert (friend and former chair of the AACTE Innovation and Technology Committee) spent a few hours working together on a document that AACTE was going to put out. Yesterday, at the meeting of the NTLS meeting in Washington DC, I found out that the report is out. You can find the report titled 21st Century Knowledge and Skills in Educator Preparation. This eschoolnews article will also tell you more: Groups urge updates to teacher preparation programs. As the article says:
The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) are calling on teacher education programs to update their curricula to better prepare future teachers to integrate 21st-century skills into their instruction.
The groups released a paper on Sept. 23 seeking to establish a shared vision for infusing digital-age knowledge and skills into teacher preparation programs and spark a meaningful discussion among higher-education leaders about how to implement this vision.
I have mixed feelings about this report – even though I am thanked at the end (along with other members of the Innovation & Technology Committee). I saw my task as being taking a document that already existed and ensure that some of the key work done by the committee (such as the work around TPACK and the handbook) would be addressed in the report. So it was a task circumscribed and limited in critical ways. As some of my other writing (here on the blog and at other venues) suggests, I have a somewhat different perspective on what we mean by 21st Century Skills (starting even with my dislike of that term) and what it would even mean… but that is neither here nor there. The report is here, take a look, and let me know what you think.
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.
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).
A véjà du experience is about looking at a familiar situation but with fresh eyes, as if you’ve never seen it before. It forms the basis of an assignment I give in my CEP818, Creativity in Teaching & Learning course. The assignment is described in greater detail here, but the core idea is to take multiple photographs of some everyday object in such a way that the viewer cannot easily determine what the object is! More here.
Today, I spent some time with my kids re-doing the assignment. My son suggested taking pictures of his X-Box 360 but we finally went with an object selected by my daughter. Here are the pictures. What do you think it is?
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.
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.
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.
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 Pinkvideo 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).
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).
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.
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!
See the neat little trick of breaking up the word “trickles” so that it actually
“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.
I have never been able to make to the ISTE (formerly NECC) conference since it falls bang in the middle of my summer teaching. This year was no exception. The only problem is that, this year, Matt and I had been invited to a special forum by SIGTE (titled “Considering the “C” in TPACK: Curriculum-based Technology Integration”) neither of us could be there. (Bummer!) So instead, we were asked to make video!
The idea of a 15 minute video of the two of us speaking into a camera was not very appealing… So we did something different. Doing something different was appropriate given our interest in creativity and the fact that our talk was about TPACK! So 4 days and untold hours of work later, here is the video that was presented at ISTE. [Halfway through this I realized that it may have taken less time to have just flown to Denver and made our presentation!]
I should also take moment to thank Sarah McPherson, New York Institute of Technology, for organizing the session and the rest of the panelists (Glen Bull, Judi Harris, Ann Thompson and Denise Schmidt) for their support. Ann Thompson and Denise Schmidt deserve a special thanks for stepping in at the last minute to cover for Matt and me.
Thanks also to Leigh Wolf for narrating and hosting the radio show, and providing her office to shoot the UPS commercial; Mete Akcaoglu for starring in the faux-UPS commercial; Soham Mishra for narrating the faux-Mastercard commercial and Shreya Mishra and her friends for starring in it.
Just a warning, the video is 15 minutes long and a 21 MB download.
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
An interesting challenge that remains has to do with how we reconcile projections of the earth with the actual shape of the earth. For instance the Mercator projection distorts what are straight lines into curves and vice versa. Of course complicating all this is the fact that what we think of as straight lines needs to be reconfigured somewhat to meet the demands of a spherical surface i.e. the whole idea of a great circle.
I recently came across a very cool web site which uses Googlemaps to map a straight walk on the surface of the earth. Check out map.talleye.com
The moment you try this out you realize just how complex a process it is to go from the Mercator projection to understanding the same path on a sphere. This also reminded me of the maps of the earth that show the demarcation of day and night on its surface. Check it out at daylightmap.com.
[More information on the Mercator projection can be found here and on great circles here.]
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…
This presentation of a talk by Daniel Pink has been making the rounds on the Interwebs. I am including it here just as a personal reminder for me to use in my teaching AND as an example of a wonderful presentation style. Check out
RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
The three key factors that Pink describes as being inherently motivating are Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Now think about school… How much of these three do we present our students? Too often school is about doing things someone else as prescribed, not for mastery but rather just to get it done, with little sense of the broader purpose for doing so. Is it surprising that school is demotivating?
This is not an issue of whether or not (or how) we should be using technology – but rather a more fundamental issue of why we have school in the first place.
What can we do to bring in these three into the classroom?
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.
I do think he did a great job.
