Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

I just discovered a blog by Charles Blow, visual Op-Ed columnist for the NYTimes. Titled By the Numbers it is a site for “discussion about all things statistical — from the environment to entertainment — and their visual expressions.” Pretty cool. Check it out.

I just completed my presentation Education Technology and Teacher Education, the TPACK framework. I think it went well, though you have to talk to ask the audience what they “really” think.
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A few years ago, as a part of our PT3 project Matt Koehler, Ken Dirkin and I video taped a series of teacher interviews around authentic problem solving in teaching using technology. The teachers were winners of the TAPS (Technology in Authentic Problem Solving) award, an award given by MACUL and MSU. Over the past few months Ken has been working on creating a website to make these videos more accessible.
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Geetha Narayanan, Director Mallya Aditi International School and Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, is someone I have wanted to meet for a long time. One of the pleasures of of this conference is getting an opportunity to hear her speak … and I was not disappointed.
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The next session State of ET in India Today and was led by fellow BITSian Manas Chakrabarti (now an independent consultant).
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During Dr. Jalaluddin’s keynote I took some time to search online for some reports, prompted by what he had been saying. (Yes I was listening not just browsing). Read the rest of this entry »

I leave for India tomorrow to participate in a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity being held in Bangalore from the 20th to the 22nd of August. The meeting is organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International Youth Foundation and “is designed to bring together education and education technology practitioners, scholars and experts, academicians and students for an exchange of ideas aimed towards creative approaches and solutions for technology use in teaching and learning.”

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I had posted about this really cool video I recently found (see Life is about editing). Behold my surprise when one of the comments on the blog was from none other than Allee Willis (see her wikipedia page here, and personal website here). Read the rest of this entry »

A recent story in the NYTimes about Peter Gabriel (An Old Rocker Gets Digital) brought back memories of Peter Gabriel’s album covers. It tells you a lot about me that I know album covers better than I know his music!
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A fun and thought provoking, recursive music video by Allee Willis titled “Editing is Cool.” The video attempts to capture the process of creating this very video, from the lyrics, to the music to the special effects and so on. Denise Caruso (at Salon) quotes Allee Willis as saying, “… you can see every single stage of the song and video coming together, along with work logs and lyrics and lots more.”
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An interesting (and growing) collection of “habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done. And in the specific anecdotes and the way people describe their own relationship to their own work.”
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I have been playing with an iTouch for the past few days and have have been quite impressed. What bothered me somewhat though was that my website (something I have spent hours designing) didn’t morph itself as gracefully as I would have liked into this new interface. But for every technological problem, there exists a technological solution (and vice versa)…
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Imagine you are standing in front of a bathroom mirror; how big do you think the image of your face is on the surface? And what would happen to the size of that image if you were to step steadily backward, away from the glass?

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Over the past few weeks I have noticed that some webpages I visit have banner ads that are targeted to me quite specifically - in particular to my Indian origin. Read the rest of this entry »

I had posted earlier about a “virtual speed bump” a visual illusion that make drivers think that they were approaching a speed bump when in actuality it was just a design cleverly painted on the ground. Now here’s another one: Directions in a car park… Read the rest of this entry »

Just found out about this rather nifty tool that looks at your browser history and estimates your gender. My personal results were as follows:
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How do we evaluate a search engine? Chris Wilson attempts to answer this question (with help from the crowd) in his article on Slate “How To Talk to a Search Engine: Three queries to help decide if Google or Cuil or Ask is right for you?” Read the rest of this entry »

I just came across a rather different kind of news aggregator, at least compared to Google. The brainchild of Guy Kawasaki (ex-Apple evangelist and tech guru) you have to check out AllTop. This may actually become a regular destination for me.

While researching my previous post about véjà du and Abraham Wald I came across “The Back of the Napkin Blog” (a.k.a. Digital Roam). This blog is devoted to visual thinking and representation. Very cool and very interesting… well worth a visit. Turns out that there is a posting here about Abraham Wald and his WWII insight. You can read it here: The hole story, What you don’t see will kill you. You can see the author’s page here.

I learned a new term today, véjà du. As we all know (didn’t I write a posting about this earlier?) déjà vu (or paramnesia) from the French meaning “already seen” describes the experience of feeling that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously. It has also been called “a glitch in the matrix!

In contrast to this, a véjà du experience is about looking at a familiar situation but with fresh eyes, as if you’ve 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! A wonderful phrase… one that makes perfect sense the moment you hear it.
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