What can design do for you?

February 4th, 2010 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Film, Good | Bad Design, Representation, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading No Comments »

TPACK involves understanding the capabilities of technology – understanding how we make meaning with it, how we can manipulate it to communicate, engage and teach. I include below an extraordinarily powerful use of media, created with the simplest of tools, one camera, a couple of people and some music. No 3-d aliens, no fancy digital effects – but (and this is important) the designers clearly have a deep understanding of the nuances of meaning that can be generated through subtle yet powerful use of the tools at hand. Zooms and pans, dissolves and wipes, memories and meanings.

Think about this video when people ask of what value are these new digital tools? Tell them we don’t know – but maybe a few years from now someone will surprise us by creating something this touching and breathtaking.

YouTube Preview Image

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Deconstructing TV news

January 29th, 2010 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Film, Fun, Good | Bad Design, Stories, Worth Reading 1 Comment »

The video below has been getting a lot of attention on the blogs lately, and despite that it is pretty good. No kittens riding skateboards or mentos and Coke here. Just a beautifully constructed take down of TV News. A must see for all media literacy courses.

Check it out.

YouTube Preview Image

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Absolutely brilliant video

January 27th, 2010 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Film, Fun, Good | Bad Design, Puzzles, Representation, TPACK, Technology, Worth Reading No Comments »

The Rethink Scholarship is an scholarship for aspiring art directors and designers to Langara College’s Communication and Ideation Design program. This video is to publicize the program.

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Poetry, Science & Math, OR why I love the web

January 12th, 2010 Punya Mishra Posted in Ambigrams, Art, Blogging, Creativity, Film, Good | Bad Design, India, Learning, Mathematics, Personal, Philosophy, Poetry, Representation, Science, Stories, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading 6 Comments »

A 5th grade science assignment, transformed. A rant about Mother Goose. A math poetry challenge!  How did that come to be? And what does that have to do with loving the Interwebs? Read on…

I had written earlier about how my 10 year-old daughter had been writing poems on science (Scientific Poems or Sci-Po’s for short). It all started with an extra-credit assignment she needed to do for her science class, and a need, I perceived, to keep her blog (Uniquely Mine) up-to-date. She has quite a few written now. For instance here is one about a news item about scientists finding dinosaur eggs (and other dino-stuff) in India (Cluster of dinosaur eggs found in southern India), and here’s the poem:

Read the rest of this entry »

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

eduPUNKing a course website!!

January 11th, 2010 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Engineering, Film, Good | Bad Design, Learning, MAET, Online Learning, Philosophy, Research, Stories, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading 6 Comments »

I had written about the EduPunk movement earlier, in fact had even designed a logo for it.

A brief description of Edupunk can be found on Wikipedia (a google search will reveal many more). Wikipedia describes it as follows:

Edupunk is an approach to teaching and learning practices that result from a do it yourself (DIY) attitude. The New York Times defines it as “an approach to teaching that avoids mainstream tools like Powerpoint and Blackboard and instead aims to bring the rebellious attitude and D.I.Y. ethos of ’70s bands like The Clash to the classroom.”

Well, I am no expert on 70’s bands but the EduPunk title does appeal to me. It appeals to me because for the longest tie the main attraction of digital technology, to me, has been this DIY attitude, the fact that I can, over an evening or two, create a stop-motion movie with my kids (here or here), or mashup a commercial, or, in this case, create my own course website. The final product may not have the finish or sheen of a commercial product but it is in some key way “authentic.” It is mine. It embodies me, my sensibility, my approach, my vision in ways that other products can not.

For my entire tenure here at MSU I have constructed my own course-websites, cobbling them together with what I have often jokingly called “duct-tape and magic.” I have even written about this, long before the EduPunk moniker came along (see links at end of post). What I want to describe in this post are my current experiments (for my CEP817 Learning Technology by Design course) using using Wordpress as a learning management system, and boy am I impressed!! [My partner in crime in this is Kristen Kereluik, a graduate student in our program.]

Read the rest of this entry »

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Finding Nemo, the sea-quel

December 30th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Fiction, Film, Fun, Personal, Photography, Video, Worth Reading 1 Comment »

Our family’s stop-motion animation festival continues with our latest offering: Finding Nemo, the sea-quel!!  This movie was conceptualized by Shreya and filmed by all of us over a couple of days. What was interesting about this movie was just how many technologies got utilized in creating it (a complete list comes at the end of the movie) – and just how seamlessly these different tools could be integrated together. As we have been making these movies I have seen a greater level of sophistication and thinking from both my kids about the possibilities of stop-motion animation in particular and the visual aspects of telling a story through film. I can pretty much step back and let them do it. That has been fun to watch.

Anyway, before the movie, I need to give a shout out to our family friend, Amol Pavangadkar, who made all this possible by helping us create a really cool animation stand. We were inspired by this design and here it is, in use, by Shreya’s friends, as they made their animation movie.

Animation stand

So using this set up we have already created three movies. You can see the first one here, the new year’s card here and the third one below. Enjoy, Finding Nemo, the sea-quel!

YouTube Preview Image

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Stop motion fun

December 22nd, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Film, Fun, Personal, Video, Worth Reading 7 Comments »

My daughter, Shreya, had some friends over yesterday and they created a short stop-motion animation film with the new setup in our basement. Enjoy

YouTube Preview Image

More videos made with my kids can be seen by clicking here.

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Designing for anticipation, Teaching for anticipation

October 19th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Fiction, Film, Fun, Good | Bad Design, Learning, Personal, Philosophy, Psychology, Puzzles, Representation, Stories, Teaching, Worth Reading 3 Comments »

In a couple of previous posts I had talked about the idea of postdiction (see the posts here and here). The argument being that good teaching (among a long list of other good things) is postdictable, i.e. it walks the line between predictability and chaos, and most importantly makes sense post hoc. To make my point I had posted a couple of videos that were good examples of being postdictable.

Closely connected to the idea of postdictable is the idea of creating anticipation and suspense. Once again other artists (particularly those working in temporal media such as film, and advertising) seem to have grasped the importance of this earlier than educators. Good film-makers can create suspense out of pretty much the flimsiest of materials. Think of the first scenes from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. The way the scene builds tension out of a disagreement over whether or not to tip is pitch perfect. There is more tension in that scene than in dozens of other “suspense” thrillers.

However making suspense work is difficult. Navigating this line between predictability and tension over the unknown is a fine art. (This is where, of course, the connection with postdictability becomes most clear.)

Check out the two videos below, which highlight just how fine the line is between succeeding at creating suspense and anticipation and failing to do so. Both of these videos are interesting and well made – both have pace and rhythm but one of them builds anticipation while the other just happens. One tells a story, the other doesn’t.
Read the rest of this entry »

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Darwin film can’t find distributor

September 12th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Biology, Crime, Evolution, Film, Politics, Religion, Science No Comments »

Telegraph article titled: Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’

How sad is that!

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Announcing: Short film competition, cool prize for winner!!

July 8th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Film, Fun, Photography, Publications, Puzzles, Representation, Research, Uncategorized 4 Comments »

Those of you who have been following this blog know, over the past few months I have made a few short videos with my kids. The ones I am most proud of are a set of three made around the words Explore, Create, Share (you can see them all here). There were great fun to make, and have turned out pretty nicely, if I say so myself :-)

These videos have a few things in common. First, they are short (the longest is a minute long) and involve minimal post production, if any. Second, they always focus on a specific word and attempt to express the meaning of the word through video. Third, each video ends with that word represented in some creative, interesting way.

The other day, while talking with Leigh Wolf, I realized that there was no reason why we could not share the joy of making something like this with others. Why not solicit similar videos from other people? One thought led to another and this competition is the result. The rules of the competition are simple – building on the similarities described above.

Prize
  1. Each video MUST have a core theme that can be captured in a word (or two). We recommend choosing evocative words related to learning and technology (like design, innovation, invent and so on).
  2. The video MUST be original i.e. don’t just copy someone else’s idea, or footage. This is NOT a mashup of existing video.
  3. The video should be short (30 seconds to a minute, no more) with minimal editing or post-production.
  4. Each video should end with the thematic word represented in some fashion (see the original videos Explore, Create, Share to see how this works).
  5. The video MUST use one of the music clips available for download below. These clips were composed specifically for this competition by Sonny Mishra, a freelance musician from Seattle. [Music Clip 1 | Music Clip 2]
  6. Once you have created a video, upload it to the web (say YouTube) and send me the link. Please DO NOT send me actual movie files.
  7. All links to movies have to be turned in by Wednesday the 22nd of July, 2009.

A jury consisting of myself, Leigh Wolf, Soham & Shreya (the two people who helped make the first three) and Sonny (the music composer) will judge these movies and nominate the winner. The winner will receive a copy of Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein’s book Sparks Of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools Of The World’s Most Creative People, autographed by the authors. How cool is that!!

Do let me know if you have any questions about this competition. Enjoy!

LET THE GAMES BEGIN!!!

Sparks of Genius

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Rethinking Little Red Riding Hood

July 7th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Fiction, Film, Fun, Good | Bad Design, Philosophy, Poetry, Stories, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Video, Worth Reading No Comments »

Awesome retelling of the old tale… (h/t Steve Dembo @ teach42).

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

As Steve says (you can read his full post here) such remixing can provide interesting opportunities for teachers, particularly given the extremely powerful tools we have access to today. Think for a moment about this video. Constructing it requires, clearly, a knowledge of the technology. This requires some level of effort to acquire but frankly that is not particularly daunting. However this technical knowledge is not enough. To create a piece such as this one, utilizing a variety of narrative devices as well as visual styles and tropes, requires having a sophisticated understanding of visual and cinematic styles, their history and meaning. However, this is not enough either. Most importantly, and possibly hardest to develop, a the soft touch the video show. This is exhibited in the subtle irony and humor and in the fact that the video does not try too hard. This soft touch is the mark of a true artist, a person comfortable in their knowledge, comfortable enough to be willing to play with it, to push it to its limits, and yet, sensitive to not going too far.

Teaching, in my opinion, with our without technology, is similar. One can know the techniques, but that is not enough. One can know their history and how they help make things meaningful. This is valuable but not enough either. It is only when we develop this soft touch, this “feeling for the organism” of teaching that true transformational teaching can occur. This is not easy to achieve – but a goal worthy of aspiring to.

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Making (non)sense of dots & lines

July 6th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Books, Creativity, Design, Fiction, Film, Fun, Good | Bad Design, Learning, Mathematics, Philosophy, Psychology, Puzzles, Representation, Stories, Teaching, Worth Reading No Comments »

I love how these interconnected pipes called the Intertubes lead to serendipitous discoveries. Here are two videos, the first I went looking for, and the second, fell into my lap, so to speak, due to YouTubes related videos section.

The video I went looking for was based on a delightful book I had picked up at a garage sale a few years ago. “The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics” is a little book (20 pages or so) with an intriguing story-line and its geometrical illustrations. The main character is a straight line who is in love with a dot – but sadly she is more attracted to a wild, unruly squiggle. How the simple line develops his talents and wins the love of the dot is told through whimsical (and mathematically sound) illustrations.

I learned later that the famous animator Chuck Jones had made this into a short film. Here it is (thanks to YouTube).

YouTube Preview Image

This is just a wonderful example of how mathematics and art, perception and recognition, creativity and design can come together. This book (and the movie) speak to me at so many different levels. What is most amazing is the ability we humans have to see purpose and meaning in the simplest of lines and curves. So much of art and science depend on this ability to perceive / construct patterns.

Nowhere is this more beautifully (and humorously) illustrated than in this other video I discovered. Written and narrated by Mel Brooks (yes THE Mel Brooks) this animated short film, The Critic, takes a different interpretive stance (crankier and edgier) than the previous narration. That this short animation captures, powerfully how we as humans both seek, and question, the meanings of the patterns we see around us.

YouTube Preview Image

I just finished reading parts of Sheri Turkle’s latest book, Simulation and its discontents, and the parallels to what she is writing about and Mel Brook’s Critic are quite strong. The cranky one man in the short recognizes or “sees” meaning is some of the abstract images he sees on the screen and yet he questions their value. The scientists and designers quoted in Turkle’s book echo some of the same concerns.

What is amazing is that the Mel Brooks short was made in 1963, the Chuck Jones movie was made in 1965 and Turkle’s book was published just this year, in 2009!

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Explore, Create, Share… the videos

June 30th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Blogging, Creativity, Design, Film, Fun, Games, Personal, Philosophy, Publications, Puzzles, Representation, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading No Comments »

Over the past few months I have been working with my kids on creating short thematic videos. The themes we chose were the three words, Explore, Create & Share. Though the videos for Explore and Create got made rather quickly, the video for Share appeared to stump us.

Much to my relief, after weeks of discussion and thinking, we finally have a video for the word share. I am including all three videos here, in sequence, so that you can see just how these three videos work together. All three videos have original music composed by my cousin, Sonny Mishra.

7 tools… one big job: Explore

YouTube Preview Image

Emergence: Create

YouTube Preview Image

… and finally,
A helping hand:
Share

YouTube Preview Image

(Other videos created by us can be seen here.)

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Like to learn, but hate school

June 12th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Fiction, Film, Fun, Good | Bad Design, Learning, Philosophy, Psychology, Puzzles, Representation, Research, Teaching, Worth Reading 7 Comments »

In this TCRecord piece, Daniel T. WIllingham uses what we know about cognitive psychology to explain  Why students don’t like school. He suggests that

although most people believe that humans are good at thinking, it is actually the weakest of our mental faculties… Our minds are biased against thinking, because thinking is slow and effortful. In addition, it’s error-prone; it may not even produce an answer at all, much less a good one.

What we truly hate, according to him are things that are (a) either too easy; or (b) things that are incomprehensible. What fascinates us are problems that hit the sweet spot, not merely unpredictable but rather postdictable. He defines this as being initially be surprising, but then be understandable with a bit of thought.”As he says:

… 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.

Just two points here. First, most of school, it seems to me, lies at these two extremes, either lacking in complexity OR lacking in comprehensibility. Combine this with the diversity of student interests and background it is hardly surprising that even students who like to learn, learn to hate schoo.

Second, I had never heard of this term “postdictable” before but I think it is going to become a part of my vocabulary from now on. It helps me explain and categorize educational activities that work from those that don’t. Additionally it helps me explain movies and books I like – from ones that don’t. I know I hate predictable plots and stories (something I am trying to get my daughter to realize particularly around the typical Disney fare she so seems to love). However, complete unpredictablity is also a pain – a waste of time. Movies I like are postdictable… surprising at first glance but understandable later. Cool.

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Is a lecture just a lecture?

May 5th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Blogging, Creativity, Design, Film, Good | Bad Design, Learning, Representation, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Video, Worth Reading 4 Comments »

My mashup of a commercial has been on YouTube for a while and just yesterday I noticed that someone had left a very thoughtful comment… and that comment got me thinking… and hence this posting.

To start with, if you haven’t seen the videos here they are again.

Here is the original commercial:
YouTube Preview Image

And my response:
YouTube Preview Image

The comment by user witchyrichy to my mashup was as follows:

Nice mashup…but I’m not sure that I agree that a lecture is still a lecture. The technology makes it possible to break that lecture into segments, review different sections, and even, as you did here, cut and paste the important pieces into something new. I listened to a talk by Steinem through Yale’s itunes site: yes, it was a lecture but it was one I would have never heard otherwise, one I could share with others, etc. So, a lecture isn’t always a lecture, imho.

I think the witchyrichy makes a really good point here and something that had been nagging me a bit. What is somewhat ironic is that Matt Koehler and I have been trying for the past year or so to develop a new form of presentation, one that takes a lecture and makes it dynamic. A good example would be the keynote we gave at the SITE 2008 conference Thinking Creatively, Teachers as Designers of Technology, Pedagogy & Content. We “appropriated” a bunch of ideas from Larry Lessig and Dick Hardt (and in the case of the SITE keynote, Steven Colbert!).

To add (self)-insult to irony, I have blogged about lectures and how they can be creatively constructed previously here. Read my earlier posting about The 60 second lecture.

To sum it up, it appears that I may have gone a bit overboard with my critique of a lecture. That said, the larger point I was trying to make in my mashup, about a lecture not necessarily being the best use of technology for teaching, still stands.

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

7 tools… one big job: Video Explore II

May 3rd, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Film, Fun, Good | Bad Design, Personal, Puzzles, Representation, TPACK, Technology, Video, Worth Reading No Comments »

A few months ago I had created a video mashup of a commercial (see the original and my mashup here). This video ended with three key words, encouraging people to Explore, Create, Share! I then got the idea for creating short videos to represent these three ideas.

I also set some constraints on myself. First, these videos would be short! This meant each video would be between 30 seconds to a minute in length. Second, these videos would be, as far as possible, one continuous shot with minimal post-production and editing. Third, these videos would always end with a typographical representation of the word. Fourth, and finally, these videos would have some kind of a “surprise” at the end.

I was helped in my task by my kids and my cousin Sonny Mishra who composed three original clips of music for the three videos. Sonny has done an amazing job. All three pieces of music are unique, attempting to express musically the theme of the video. That said, all three pieces have a certain family resemblance, so that they all sound connected somehow, at a deeper level.

I have been working on these videos, off and on, with my kids for the past few weeks. We have created original videos for two of the three themes, Explore and Create. Here is the one on Explore (the video on Create can be seen here).

YouTube Preview Image

Though I liked what we had come up with for Explore, I also felt that the video was flawed. Essentially, everything happens so quickly that it is difficult to see, till the end, what the objects are that were picked up from the basket. This I felt, robbed some of the impact of the video. So we decided to shoot it again in a slightly different manner. Did it work? Find out for yourself by seeing 7 tools… one big job!. Another change was that this time my daughter was the performer!

YouTube Preview Image

What do you think?

(Other videos created by me, with our without my kids, can be seen here.)

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Guest blogging for Nashworld: TPACK video

April 8th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Blogging, Creativity, Design, Film, Learning, Online Learning, Stories, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading 8 Comments »

Sean Nash over at Nashworld asked me to guest blog for this week while he is out with his students doing some really cool stuff.

Here is a link to my posting: A TPACK video mashup!.

I end the post with a couple of videos, one a commercial and the other my mashup response to it. You can see the videos in context on Nashworld or just see them in isolation here. It does make sense to see them in the sequence below.

Here is the original commercial:
YouTube Preview Image

And my response:
YouTube Preview Image

Enjoy.

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Brilliant stop motion

March 24th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Film, Fun, Good | Bad Design, Photography, Representation, Video No Comments »

Just came across this on Nina Paley’s blog… and it just blew me away!

YouTube Preview Image

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Slumdog night (and Rahman)

February 22nd, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Film, India 2 Comments »

Slumdog rolled into the Oscars tonight. More important to me were the two Oscars for A. R. Rahman for original score and song. It is time that the world recognized his genius. Here is a cartoon by Kaladhar Bapu from his site Point Blank


A.R. Rahman by Kaladhar Bapu

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

The Allegory of the Cave

February 17th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Film, India, Philosophy, Religion, Representation, Video, Worth Reading 1 Comment »

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (see Wikipedia entry) illustrates “our nature in its education and want of education.” It is maybe one of the most famous allegories in literature and philosophy, a precursor to the kinds of mind-games (think brain in a vat) that philosophers like Dennett engage in today [Where am I? is a good example of this genre].

I am not sure I quite buy into the argument being made in the allegory of the cave, or whether there is one “strict” interpretation of it. The other day I stumbled upon a lovely, stop-motion animated, version of the allegory. Check it out below: Read the rest of this entry »

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

January 26th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Engineering, Film, Fun, Games, Good | Bad Design, Poetry, Representation, Technology, Video, Worth Reading 1 Comment »

… Or Why I love the web.

I stumbled upon a piece (Lotus Blossom) by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries the other day… and it was like nothing else I had ever seen. At some superficial level it looked like kinetic typography, but both simpler and more complex at the same time. For a while I didn’t know what was going on, but, slowly and surely, I got caught up in the flow of the music and the text, the resonances and dissonances. This was something quite different, and new with a creative and yet uncompromising aesthetic sensibility. Murakami (see here and here) came to mind, for some reason.
Read the rest of this entry »

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

The more things change…

January 25th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Creativity, Design, Evolution, Film, Learning, Research, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading 1 Comment »

I had posted earlier about a recent commercial that, though arguing at one level that technology can fundamentally change education, seemed to stick to the standard-lecture (albeit in different and cooler modes of transmission).

Just how little the discourse around educational technology has changed over time (while the technologies have changed drastically) was brought home to me recently through a book I borrowed by Patrick Dickson. Before I describe the book let me provide you one quote from that book.

The scope and nature of man’s learning have always been commissioned by the mediums of instruction which were available. The need for adapting himself to the changing conditions of his environment focused man’s attention upon bettering the tools by which he acquired learning…The modern school is forced to meet the demands of a rapidly changing civilization. Today the world of the learner is almost unbounded. He must acquire facts relating to a bewildering variety of places and things; he must acquire appreciations of far-reaching interrelationships. The curriculum and methods of teaching must undergo a continuous appraisal. New subject matter and new devices for instruction are being scrutinized for their potential contributions to the learning process.

Read the rest of this entry »

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Another New Year’s card

January 2nd, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Film, Fun, Personal, Video, Worth Reading No Comments »

We just created another New Year’s Card / Video. Check it out:


Shreya’s Magic Touch

YouTube Preview Image

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Solving the rubik cube, blindfolded

January 2nd, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Creativity, Film, Fun, Personal, Puzzles, Representation, Video, Worth Reading No Comments »

A YouTube video of Soham solving the rubic cube blindfolded!

YouTube Preview Image

[Thanks for Michael Gondry for the idea.]

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Harold Pinter, RIP

December 25th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Fiction, Film, Personal, Stories No Comments »

One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness — Harold Pinter (1930 – 2008).

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

New media, new genres

December 12th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Creativity, Design, Evolution, Film, Online Learning, Philosophy, Representation, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading No Comments »

There is an interesting article in today’s NYTimes titled Content and its discontents by Virginia Heffernan. In this article she makes the argument the new digital, online media require new ways of representing information, new ways of thinking about how ideas are wrapped and presented, in short they require the development of new genres. As the article says, and I quote:

This argument concedes that it’s not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms. All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries — music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows — are designed for a world that no longer exists. They fail to address existing desires, while conscientiously responding to desires people no longer have.

There is a parallel here to the way in which Matt Koehler and I have articulated the TPACK framework.
Read the rest of this entry »

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

London Underground Map

November 8th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Film, Good | Bad Design, Representation No Comments »

One of my favorite pieces of design is the London Underground Map. It has been replicated all over the world – from Mumbai to Tokyo. Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to a BBC 4 video made in 1987 about this map. Read the rest of this entry »

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Of games, mood and age

October 27th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Fiction, Film, Fun, Games, Learning, Personal, Representation, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading No Comments »

I love reading. I love watching movies. I love over-analyzing books and movies, seeking to find pattern and structure, motifs and motives. I love to break them down in my mind and put them back together again. I read reviews of books and movies by the ton, sometimes while reading the book or watching the movie. It allows me to get another perspective on the book or the movie and I find that it enriches my reading/viewing. I have over time developed, what I think is, an independent mind and taste, what Schon has called an “inner gyroscope” that allows me to read other people’s views on a book or a movie and still maintain my own sensibility and response.

All this fails when I get to video games. I do not play video games and not because I haven’t tried. I find them hard to engage with, difficult to master (the mapping between mashing buttons and the action on screen seems just too arbitrary) and too much of a demand on my time (which I have very little of to spare). So when I read about how video games are the new medium of creativity and expression – I have a wistful feeling of loss. I read the words but there is no real-world referent to which I can personally connect to.
Read the rest of this entry »

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

The greatness of teachers

October 13th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Film, Personal, Politics, Religion, Stories, Video No Comments »

I discovered Hulu TV a few weeks ago and have been using it to catch up on previous episodes of The Daily Show. I decided today, as I was working on a presentation to watch Crawford. It is a documentary about “a small town thrust into big politics when George W. Bush moves in next door. Gritty, authentic and often funny.”

This post, however, is not about the documentary (watch it yourself and form your own opinion) but rather about one person in the documentary – the school teacher.
Read the rest of this entry »

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Wong, Mishra, Koehler & Adams (2007)

September 24th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Books, Creativity, Design, Film, Fun, Learning, Psychology, Representation, Research, Science, Stories, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Video 4 Comments »

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

AddThis Social Bookmark Button