Every Christmas-break our family creates a stop-motion video new year’s greeting card. We have been doing this for 4 years or so and it is an incredibly fun way to spend time together. It has become a “signature” thing we do as a family. Anyway this year was no exception – though it took us much longer than before to come up with a good idea – and then to execute it was another challenge. Anyway, here it is (on Vimeo).
A very wonderful holidays and a very happy new year to all of you,
from Shreya, Soham, Smita & Punya
Just a few comments on the making of these videos. First, all our new-year videos are stop-motion videos. That’s how we made the first one and it has stuck. Second, all these videos are somewhat typographical in nature – playing with words and their representation. Third, these videos rarely feature us either individually or as a family. A hand or a still-frame may show up once in a while but for the most part our videos are made with inanimate objects.
This year I tried to change all three of these, suggesting that we make a live action video, with us as actors – and have some kind of a puzzle that was not related to words. After spending days thinking about this, working with various ideas, this whole line of thought was vetoed down by both Soham and Shreya. It was interesting to me that over time we had not only become a family that makes videos but a family that makes stop motion videos! How cool an identity is that! Of course, this meant that we then had to start over from scratch to come up with something that fit what we had done in the past.
Speaking of videos made in the past, you can see them by following the links below:
Over the past few weeks I have been experimenting with using my iPad as a drawing/painting tool. The sketches below were created by tracing on an existing image – usually a photograph. So this is not “freehand” drawing per se – but given my limited talents that may not be such a bad idea.
What you need for this is a drawing/sketching App that allows you to draw in layers. You place your photo on one layer and draw on the layer above it. This way you don’t mess up the photograph and you can separate your sketch from the photo. Once you are done, all you do is delete the photograph-layer and there it is, a lovely (well that’s subjective) hand-drawn sketch.
As you can see I started with simple line-drawings, and over time have tried branching out a bit, through the use of shading and now, even color.
A typical sketch takes around 20 – 30 minutes (sometimes less) – and I have found it just a fantastic way to relax. Creative relaxation… what else can one wish for.
I am extremely proud of what we do as a part of our Master’s in Ed Tech (MAET) program. It is a unique program and over the years we have worked hard to make it a multi-faceted and unique experience for your students. Over the next few weeks I (with some help from doctoral student Laura Terry) will be posting examples of the excellent work our students do in this program. (See here for the first post about representing educational tensions with photography.)
The design of our program is very carefully thought through—driven both by powerful theoretical ideas grounded in the pragmatics of teaching and learning. Just this week I found out that a paper we had written about the kinds of activities we do in the MAET program just got published. If you are interested in teacher education and teacher professional development or specifically in the MAET program please check out:
Koehler, M.J., Mishra, P., Bouck, E. C., DeSchryver, M., Kereluik, K., Shin, T.S., Wolf, L.G. (2011). Deep-Play: Developing TPACK for 21st Century Teachers. International Journal of Learning Technology, Vol. 6, No. 2. 146-163.
Abstract: A key complication facing teachers who seek to integrate technology in their teaching is the fact that most technologies are not designed for educational purposes. Making a tool an educational technology requires creative input from the teacher to re-design, or maybe even subvert the original intentions of the designer. The learning technology by design (LT/D) framework has been proposed as being an effective instructional technique to develop deeper understanding of technological pedagogical content knowledge. In this paper we expand our description of the LT/D technique to develop what we call a deep-play model for teacher professional development. The deep-play model integrates: (a) pedagogy for key 21st century learning skills; (b) content that cuts across disciplines with trans-disciplinary cognitive tools; (c) technology by the creative repurposing of tools for pedagogical purposes.
Please let me know if you would like a copy of the paper.
Steve Jobs retired as CEO of Apple this past week. The Wall Street Journal marked this event by creatingSteve Job’s Best Quotes compendium. There are all worth reading – but a couple stood out for their connection to this course.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something… It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]
A large part of my creativity course, CEP818, (announcement here) has this idea of creativity as “connections” at its core. One of the goals of the course is to provide a set of trans-disciplinary tools that can help increase the possibility of making such connections.
And finally, here’s my personal favorite quote from Jobs that speaks to the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the work we do (be it design or teaching).
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through. [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]
Many years ago I got bitten by the Ambigram bug and before I knew it I had created hundreds! This was of course long before Dan Brown and Angels and Demons made ambigrams wildly popular. It has been fun to see what was once a fringe activity take on a wider popularity. There was a time that I could actually count the number of ambigram artists on the fingers of my hand, and, in fact, most of us knew each other, either formally or informally. Things are very different today as a Google search will easily reveal, but this also means that keeping track of all that is going on in the ambigram field is extremely difficult.
Over the past few months I have been talking with Mark Hunter a gentleman who is trying to make high quality ambigrams accessible to more people, and to raise awareness of ambigrams worldwide. He is doing this through two different web sites.
He is also the owner of Ambigram.com, which seeks to be an almost one stop site for all you need to know about ambigrams. He told me about how he spent a considerable sum to purchase the Ambigram.com domain name and has worked hard to grow its membership. He has been quite successful in this and in fact they they recently announced their new Ambigrammy Awards! (How cool is that.) He also maintains a list of artists practicing this craft (your’s truly being one of them).
A few weeks ago I had written about an email that I received from an eighth grader in Colorado. Jake, a budding poet, was interested in learning more about me in the context of some palindromic poetry I had written many years ago. I wrote back to Jake (you can see the correspondence here) and a couple of days ago I received another email from him, this time containing a palindromic poem written by him. With his permission, I am including his email and poem below:
Punya,
Here is the palindromic poem that I wrote recently, but I made it so that the words are reversed instead of just the lines. It adds another layer of difficulty to creating it, and I recommend trying it if you get the chance.
Falling Snow
snow falling gently
on stomping feet
cold stinging
the teasing and laughing children
sculpted beautifully – crystals form
flakes dancing gracefully
tumble and spin
spin and tumble
gracefully dancing flakes
form crystals – beautifully sculpted
children laughing and teasing the
stinging cold
feet stomping on
gently falling snow
How awesomely cool is that! I wrote back to him right away saying
Jake. This is awesome!!!! I just shared it with my family and we were unanimous in our appreciation and praise for your achievement. Not only is it a doubly palindromic poem, an achievement in and of itself, it is a wonderful poem in it’s own right….
Thank you so much for sharing this with me. It completely made my day.
Don’t you just love the open-architecture of the web (and why I resist the closed worlds of Facebook).
I have been a huge fan of Don Norman ever since I first ran into his book on the Psychology of Everyday Things (which he later renamed as The Design of Everyday Things, and the story behind that name change is worth reading as an excellent example of design). Don Norman also was the inspiration behind my collection of examples of good and bad design, something that ended up in the CEP817, Learning Technology by Design seminar.
Recently I got to read an essay by him titled “Why Design Education Must Change.” Essentially he argues that design education, as it is done today, does not prepare designers for the challenges of the present or the future. As he says:
Where once industrial designers focused primarily upon form and function, materials and manufacturing, today’s issues are far more complex and challenging. New skills are required, especially for such areas as interaction, experience, and service design. Classical industrial design is a form of applied art, requiring deep knowledge of forms and materials and skills in sketching, drawing, and rendering. The new areas are more like applied social and behavioral sciences and require understanding of human cognition and emotion, sensory and motor systems, and sufficient knowledge of the scientific method, statistics and experimental design so that designers can perform valid, legitimate tests of their ideas before deploying them.
Many of the things he wrote about resonated with me as an educator with an interest in technology. I have often argued for seeing education through the lens of design and in fact have written extensively about it (too lazy to list/link these publications here).
Over the past few years I have become somewhat disenchanted with the nature of educational technology research and its value to practitioners. The top journals seem to be biased towards specific kinds of research (quantitative, experimental, control group kinds of studies). The research and publication process just takes too long. It can take years from the start of a research study to its final publication (going through the stages of conceptualizing a study to collecting and analyzing data, to writing and submitting it for publication and responding to reviewers comments). This process was ok when the world we lived in was stable. But in a world where technology changes pretty much every day, a publication can be out of date even before it is published. The goals of this process were more to be “scientific” rather than to impact practice. Qualitative approaches have often been offered as a response but they have their own challenges of experimenter bias, generalizability and so on.
To cut a long story short, I have been struggling, in often an inchoate kind of way, with these issues. So it was with great pleasure that I read Don’s article – even though it did not deal directly with educational research. And somewhat towards the end a couple of paragraphs caught my eye – that seemed to offer, very broadly, a way forward. I have cut and pasted these paragraphs below, with one change – replacing the word “designer” with “educator.” Take a look…
Educators are practitioners, which means they are not trying to extend the knowledge base of science but instead, to apply the knowledge. The educator’s goal is to have large, important impact. Scientists are interested in truth, often in the distinction between the predictions of two differing theories. The differences they look for are quite small: often statistically significant but in terms of applied impact, quite unimportant. Experiments that carefully control for numerous possible biases and that use large numbers of experimental observers are inappropriate for educators.
The educator needs results immediately, in hours or at possibly a few days. Quite often tests of 5 to 10 people are quite sufficient. Yes, attention must be paid to the possible biases (such as experimenter biases and the impact of order of presentation of tests), but if one is looking for large effect, it should be possible to do tests that are simpler and faster than are used by the scientific community will suffice. Designs don’t have to be optimal or perfect: results that are not quite optimum or les than perfect are often completely satisfactory for everyday usage. No everyday product is perfect, nor need they be. We need experimental techniques that recognize these pragmatic, applied goals.
Education needs to develop its own experimental methods. They should be simple and quick, looking for large phenomena and conditions that are “good enough.” But they must still be sensitive to statistical variability and experimental biases. These methods do not exist: we need some sympathetic statisticians to work with educators to develop these new, appropriate methods.
What do you think? What would some of these new experimental methods look like? It seems to me that this is a design problem that should really be at the forefront of what we educational technology researchers do.
I had a wonderful day at the Grant Woods Area Education Agency at Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I was invited there by Andy Crozier and his team as a part of their 21st Century Learning Institute. I spent the day with 50+ teachers, library media specialists, and administrators talking about TPACK, creativity, technology integration and other fun stuff. This was a great group of people and I had a great time (and I hoped that they did too).
A wordle of some of the ideas that we touched upon can be found below (thanks Nick Sauers)
Matt Townsley’s Notes (Incidentally Matt and I have known each other for a while now but had never met. It was great to finally meet up with one of my online buddies. Matt blogs at MetaMusing)
The participants also created (as a part of the workshop) some poems. I am including them below:
Creativity Haiku by Karry, Michelle, Kathleen, Beth, Todd, Kathy technology is
creative innovation
tpack makes us think
Limerick by Deanne, Ruth, Jason Administrators, librarians and teachers
Came to learn about “teachnology” features
TPACK is the focus
Dr. Punya is the “mostest”
They came out of there much wiser creatures
Untitled by Joe, Kay, and Jessica While spoon feeding our students in class
We focus on the Total PACKage
As we use, integrate, and innovate
To help them Know-Act-Value
We find-Everything is NEW
Deja Who? by Amy, Christopher, & Mike There once was a man from MSU.
He Déjà Vu’ed and Veja du’ed.
TPACK was his shared view
of all that was NEW!
Poem by Melva, Cathy, Jan, Kim, Dianna Acronyms, acronyms, here’s what we found
TPACK is where teaching hits the ground.
Technology, Pedagogy, Content and Knowledge
Will take teaching beyond the cutting edge.
NEW stands for Novel, Effective and Whole
And if something is meant to roll, it should roll.
We’re learning how in our classrooms to apply
All of this information which is in great supply.
Team TPACK by Tony, Mary, Kelly, Jodi There once was a teacher from Marimac
Who wanted to teach with his Mac
His friend said now Jo
Just take it slow.
Remember to think about TPACK
Poem by Mary, Brad and Jan Teaching 3 knowledge bases
Providing framework for technology integration
And
Creativity
Keeping learning déjà vu and veja du
Creativity by Brian, Lisa, Seth, Julie, Stacy There was a smart man from MSU,
who defined creativity as N-E-W.
He effectively did present
technology, pedagogy and content
and it all started with veja du.
Thanks to Andy and his team for this wonderful opportunity.
Back in January I was invited to speak at the Drexel Learning Games Network (DGLN) seminar series. As I had written in my original post (TPACK & Games @ Drexel), DLGN is the brainchild of Aroutis Foster, former graduate student, now rising star academic and researcher. As the DLGN website says
The Drexel Learning Games Network is made up of faculty and staff at Drexel University interested in game-based learning initiatives. It was established in the School of Education in Goodwin College with the goal of supporting teaching, researching, and designing of games for learning from K- to infinity.
I had mentioned that though I am not primarily a games and learning researcher, I have done some work in the area, primarily through collaborations with colleagues and students around MSU. I had a lot of fun constructing this talk, attempting to make some connections between my TPACK work and the idea of learning from games.
I see digital games as being an important part of learning – but in a somewhat different way than merely learning by playing games. In fact I have been somewhat skeptical of how one can use games for developing disciplinary knowledge. My experience has been that there is a fundamental tension in designing educational games – where the demands of designing engaging gameplay often conflict with the broader pedagogical goal of respecting the core concepts of the discipline or content to be covered. For instance a recent dissertation on how participants were learning Chinese from playing a massively multiplayer online role playing game (Zon) showed that my concerns were justified. Most participants focused on the gameplay rather than on the tasks that were connected with learning the language. I don’t think that finding this balance between gameplay and learning content is impossible to achieve – but that it is maybe the most important challenge faced by educational game designers.
I tried, in my presentation, to make some connections to learning from games by repurposing games – i.e. seeing their pedagogical potential outside of just playing with them. I of course used the TPACK framework as guiding my talk – but also brought in issues related to trans-disciplinary learning and design.
The International Conference on Indian Education: The Positive Turmoil. is being held at the India Habitat Center in New Delhi. This Habitat center is a rather cool building and, apart from academic conferences (I saw two different conferences going on at the same time), it also hosts open-air sculpture and art galleries. One of the galleries right near where the IEPT conference was being held was a photography exhibit by Sanjay Nanda. Sanjay is a graphic designer by profession and a passionate photographer in his spare time. He also runs IndiPix Gallery, what he described as “a space for contemporary art photography.” I can’t find an easy way to embed any of his photos here, so you will have to visit their website to check out Sanjay’s work. Trust me, it is will be worth your time.
I just came across this sign on a wall in Bhubaneswar. Check it out, nothing less than “Tension free shiting!” All you have to do is dial a number!
Here is the sign cropped close
Here is the complete sign.
It is part of an advertisement for a packing and moving company. The painter droped the “f” in the word “shift!” I love the fact that this service is available through dialing a single phone number, from anywhere in the country and you can use any mode that you like to dial it in!
Leigh Wolf, is many things: techie, teacher, foodie, and friend. She is also a doctoral student in our program and coordinator of our Master’s in Educational Technology Program. Recently Leigh was nominated and short-listed for the Learning without Frontiers awards in the Further & Higher Education category. I really don’t know anybody more deserving of this honor and I know that many of you would agree with this assessment.
So I would request you to take a moment to go ahead and vote for her. It’s really easy. You can send an SMS or use Skype-SMS and send “WOLF” (without the quotes) to 07950 080 667 (if you are calling from within UK) or +44 7950 080 667 if from outside UK.
For the past couple of years now, our family has been creating new year’s greetings using stop-motion video. This year was no exception. Here it is (on Vimeo)
A very wonderful holidays and a very happy new year to all of you,
from Shreya, Soham, Smita & Punya
You can see other videos made by us… just follow the links below:
Kristen Kereluik, Matt Koehler and I just published an article in The California Reader: A publication of the California Reading Association. The complete citation and abstract is as follows:
This paper discusses new literacy practices that can be enabled through the creative repurposing of digital technologies. We frame the discussion within the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework. TPACK is a form of knowledge that teachers need to have in order to successfully integrate technology in their teaching. TPACK argues for the idea of teachers as designers of curriculum, who repurpose existing technical tools for pedagogical purposes. Finally we offer a set of implications of this approach for teacher preparation programs.
We start the paper with two examples that were first reported on this blog. The first is from Michael Hughes, a graduate of our MAET program, who had something he does with his 6th grade students and the second has to do with Sean Nash (of Nashworld fame) and an activity he gave students in his advanced biology class – reported here.
As I have been blogging over the years I am finding more and more examples of this kind of bi-directional influence, academic texts end up on my blog (edited or unedited) and my blogging informs the my academic writing! I had expected the former to happen, in fact the broader dissemination of my academic writing was part of the reason I started this blog in the first place. What I had not expected was to see my blogging contributing to my academic writing.
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…
Around 2 weeks ago I posted a note about a “pentagon” I saw in some boiling lentils in my kitchen. There have been some interesting responses to this… but before I get to that, here is the original image, if you missed the original posting:
Interestingly enough, a few readers questioned the very presence of the pentagon! They saw paws and hands and soccer balls … rather than a simple geometric shape. My first response was, “you must be kidding me, how can you NOT see a pentagon?” But as I thought about it a bit more, I began to “see” their point of view. I think, now, that I was too quick to latch onto the “pentagon” rather than consider other shapes. Whether this is a cultural matter (as some people suggested) or an individual quirk (as some others did), I am not sure.
That said, the fact that some kind of a 5-sided, pointed figure was visible was not in doubt. Whether a pentagon was the best way to label it maybe a fair question to ask. The “fiveness” of it, however, is not really under question here.
So… what caused this “five-based” shape? To cut a long story short, those of you who predicted this pattern had something to do with the heat source below were right, pretty much. I must add though that the lentils had NOT been stirred, and that this pattern emerged because they had not been stirred. Anyway, here is a photo of the heat source. I tried to take this picture from approximately the same location as the first one…
The first thing you notice are the five prongs that hold the pot up. And these five prongs align quite perfectly with the lines of bubbles that come inwards from the other edge of the vessel. The five prongs that hold the pot up prevent direct heat from hitting the base of the vessel and I suppose lead to less “boiling” activity in these areas, making them ideas spots for the bubbles to collect.
As to why we get the lines between these prongs (what I called the pentagon) is still not clear to me. My suspicion is that the convection currents that move through the water move the bubbles as they form to points where there is less “bubbling.” That explains the lines coming from the side towards the center – but does not fully, at least to my mind, explain the lines that join these prongs together – the pentagon that I first noticed.
Some more experimentation may be in order… I will keep you posted as and when opportunity arises for me to study this further
There are interesting patterns all around us. Here is one I found the other day. We were boiling lentils in a shallow bowl… and then, out of nowhere emerged an almost perfect pentagon!
The almost perfect pentagon that showed up on the surface
of the boiling lentils!
How cool is that. And does it mean something that five is a magical number (see this, this and this). As this page on numerology says
Five is the symbol of human microcosm. The number of the human being. Human forms—the pentagon when arms and legs are out stretched. The pentagon is endless —sharing the symbolism of perfection and power of the circle. Five is a circular number as it produces itself in its last digit when raised to its own power. The pentacle, like the circle symbolizes whole, the quincunx being the number of its center and the meeting point of heaven, earth, and the four cardinal points plus the center point.
Five is also representative of the Godhead – Central Creator of the four fours plus itself equalling five. Five is the marriage of the hieros gamos as combination of feminine and the masculine. Feminine being even, as 2, in frequency and masculine being odd as 3 in frequency = 5.
The number five symbolizes meditation; religion; versatility. It represents the five senses (taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing) everywhere except in the East. In the East there are six—the extra being Mind. We find meanings to five in the five petaled flower, five pointed leaves–especially the ROSE. The Rose has much symbolism, but also the lily, vine, all of which represent the microcosm.
The five pointed star depicts individuality and spiritual aspiration, and education when it points upward. The five pointed star pointing downward represents witchcraft, and it is used in black magic. Noted: There is a very broad difference between witchcraft and black magic.
The number five formed the first counting process from which all else came.
Hmm… so what does this magical appearance of the pentagon mean?
If we believe that every pattern has some underlying explanation, can there be a more mundane explanation? I have a possible hypothesis of what lies behind this phenomena… but what do you think? Where did this pattern come from?
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.
Shelly Blake-Plock over at TeachPaperLess has a great post about homework and how it can be structured to act as a “cliffhanger.” As he says:
These days, the homework I give isn’t based on some arbitrary idea of how much work a kid should do ‘at home’ to reinforce something we did in class, but rather it’s a matter of asking the students to do something necessary to prepare themselves for the next class. Homework becomes an act of preparation — and hopefully sparks some anticipation not for seeing what you ‘got right or wrong’, not for seeing if you can jump through that next hoop, but anticipationfor taking part in the next day’s discussion, activities, and learning.
I want homework to be a cliffhanger. I want it to be the device at the end of the chapter of every thriller that won’t let you put the book down until you’ve read the whole thing.
What a cool idea. This makes homework which is often quite predictable into something postdictable (See my previous posts here, here and here). The idea of postdictable is “something that is surprising initially, but then understandable with a bit of thought. I quoted Daniel T. Willingham who said:
… interest is engendered by an appraisal process: that is, a process by which we evaluate the potential interest of something before we delve into it. If we perceive an event to be novel and complex, but also comprehensible, we find it intriguing and worthy of continued thought. Tasks that lack complexity seem too easy. Tasks that lack comprehensibility seem too hard.
It seems to me that this perception of homework by TeachPaperLess is exactly that. It lies at the sweet spot between order and chaos, understandability and incomprehension. Homework then becomes a way to get students to confront new ideas, to prepare the mind to engage with learning. It is forward-looking in the best sense of the word. Again surf over to his site and read the whole article: Homework, from Chills to Thrills.
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.
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)
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!!
A large part of my creativity course, CEP818, (
