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:

• Happy 2011 (last year’s stop motion card)
• Happy 2010 (stop motion card made in 2009)
• Happy 2009 (stop motion card made in 2008)
• Explore | Create | Share (3 short videos with typographical twists at the end)
• Finding Nemo, the sea-quel (a stop motion sequel to Finding Nemo)
• Shreya’s friends animate their names
• A commercial mashup
• or, view the complete collection (including the great Hari Puttar trailer)

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.

Enjoy

Sketching on the iPad, a set on Flickr.

It was a great evening full of friends, food and devotional music. I am not a very religious person but there is something about devotional music (irrespective of which religion it may be) that always touches a chord with me.

Anyway, here are the pictures I took the other day. I particularly loved capturing the moon over the temple. Enjoy.

Ganapati Festival BTL 2011, a set on Flickr.

We hope you have had a great summer are ready to get back to school! We (Punya Mishra & Kristen Kereluik) will be your instructors for CEP818.  You can find out more about us by visiting our websites. This note is to welcome you to the class and offer some specifics about what you will need to do before class starts. Please read this note carefully since it contains important information on things that need to be done before the class starts.

As you may know, CEP818 is a fully online class; there are no plans to meet face-to-face, unless that includes our digitized photos beamed over the Web. We will begin the class on Wednesday, August 31. Please note that the class will NOT be conducted through ANGEL. We will send you an email (to your MSU address) with the more details closer to the start of the semester. For now, we provide a little bit about the class followed by some information about what you need to do to prepare for it.

Creativity is of increasing importance to educators, both for their professional success and that of their students, particularly given the complex, rapidly changing world we live in. The emergence of the knowledge economy (and the knowledge worker) means that tasks are rarely “given” or structured. We are now expected to operate in a complex and chaotic ecology where our very survival and personal identity is tied up in improvising knowledgeable answers to largely unanticipated problems. It has been argued that the solution to these concerns is an increased emphasis on creativity.

So, how is it that you can start to think more creatively for yourselves, apply those methods to your teaching, and pass on some to your students? Well, it is really, really easy (well maybe not really, really easy, but it is often not as hard as we make it out to be). It can also be a lot of fun.

A critical part of becoming creative is being able to play—particularly with ideas or concepts – and feel comfortable in doing so. The activities in this course will seek to develop such an approach through, what we call, “thinking tools.” In an interactive series of modules we will explore these tools and their relationship to creativity. Each of the issues/topics will also be illustrated with multiple examples from the world of education, psychology, and business, interspersed with games and puzzles connected to the ideas being discussed.

Here are some things we would like you to do to prepare for 818:

• Buy (or otherwise obtain) the book: Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein. This will be our core text. Note: Amazon.com lists the book for as low as $5.50, though you may have your own favorite bookstore. You are not required to have to have read the textbook before class – but feel free to dip into it…
• Be prepared technologically:
• Have a computer with a high-speed Internet connection, a standard productivity suite (word-processing, presentation tools, etc.), an up to date browser (we recommend Firefox or Chrome) with standard plug-ins (PDF reader, Flash viewer, etc.). Note: If you can access the reading and the movies below you should be good to go.
• You should also have access to a digital camera: We plan to do some photography through the semester, so – so it will be good for you to have one just for yourself (at least for the duration of the course). It doesn’t have to be a very fancy one, though if you have one, that’s great.
• Read a book chapter and watch a video
• Download and read the attached chapter by Csíkszentmihályi on Enhancing Personal Creativity from his book, Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. http://bit.ly/bQ7Lx
• Watch this video by Dr. Ken Robinson where he argues for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. http://bit.ly/2tkgtH

Finally, the most important thing you can do to prepare for 818 is to come to the course website on the first day of class with an open mind and a willingness to play.

We look forward to working together this fall. Drop us an email (punya@msu.edu or kereluik@msu.edu) if you have any questions or concerns. Please remember to put CEP818 in the subject line.

Take care
Punya Mishra and Kristen Kereluik

When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far. Now, having been stuck with the library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. “Why is she doing that?” they whisper. “Why doesn’t she just Google it?

This is how Gopnik describes Clay Shirky:

… the author of “Cognitive Surplus” and many articles and blog posts proclaiming the coming of the digital millennium—is the breeziest and seemingly most self-confident. “Seemingly,” because there is an element of overdone provocation in his stuff (So people aren’t reading Tolstoy? Well, Tolstoy sucks) that suggests something a little nervous going on underneath.

I think this attitude (Tolstoy sucks) is something that has bothered me greatly. Do we have to demean Tolstoy in order to prove the superiority of our new toys? I recently, during a trip to France, re-read (after 30 years or so) Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It took me a while to get used to the rhythms of the language, but once I did, it was a wonderful experience, and brought home to me the beauty of a delicately crafted complex sentence, something I think we may have lost to a certain extent today. Again, just to make it clear, I am not making a Nicholas Carr, “technology is making us shallow” argument here, not the least because I read the book mostly on my iPad / iPhone and I doubt I would have read it otherwise.

Incidentally, Gopnik is as critical of the nay-sayers of today’s technologies. Writers like like Nicholas Carr, William Powers and Sherry Turkle receive their fair share of scorn (though I am not including any more quotes here).

Finally I would like to end with Gopnik’s commentary on how we often see new technologies as both the greatest and the worst things to have happened to us (at least till the next technology comes along).

… at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.

Read the entire essay: The Information: How the Internet gets inside us.

The effect gets its name from “the image on the tins and boxes of Droste cocoa powder, one of the main Dutch brands, which displayed a nurse carrying a serving tray with a cup of hot chocolate” which in turn repeats the same image (just in small size) and so on… for ever. In fact when I visited the Netherlands a couple of years ago, I made it a point to pick up a box of Droste cocoa power – just so that I could have a box of my own! This is what the box looks like:

Over the years I have tried to play with this but my attempts have been crude at best – more a function of my limited knowledge of Photoshop than anything else. All this changed last Friday, when I found out about the Droste App for the iPhone/iPad. I bought a copy and spent the weekend playing with it. It has been great fun and below are some images I created. Enjoy.

The sessions went really well and I have included below (for the record) the slides from both my presentations as well as some photographs I took both at the event and after. I would like to take a moment to thank Mike and his team (including Dr. Aksir Kumar and Richard Singh among others) for both inviting me to Singapore and hosting me for the past couple of days.

• PDF of my presentation slides
• PDF of my workshop slides

I also got to catch up with a couple of friends when I was here. One of them, Alfred Low, is someone I had never met, though we have known each other for a few years now. Alfred had contacted me a while back regarding his interest in TPACK and we have stayed connected by email and Facebook for a while. It was great to finally meet up with him. Here are the two of us catching up over a couple of beers.

I also met up with Aurobindo Ghosh a faculty member at Singapore Management University. Aurobindo (and his wife) were also at Urbana-Champaign when I was there as a graduate student. We met up again after 13 years… a lot of water has passed below the bridge in the meanwhile (my son was just two years old when I left UIUC). What was great how easily we picked up pretty much from where we had left off, 13 years ago!

Finally, a slideshow of photographs I took during my few days here.

Now, due to this interest, my TPACK-related Google Alert often provides links to work being done down-under. Recently I was treated to two video mashups based on the SITE2008 Keynote that Matt Koehler and I presented at Las Vegas.

These videos were created by Mike Sisley, at The University of Canberra, as a part of a special focus on TPACK for English, literacy and History. Mike is a TPACK advocate and seeks to create resources for the teachers of the content areas and created these mashups for this purpose. The first has an autotuned version of my voice (!!!) and the second has an original song called the Shulman Shuffle.

For some reason the embed codes don’t seem to work, so you will have to navigate over to Vimeo to watch them. Check out

• TPACK – Refrain: wicked problem
• TPACK: Adaptation of the Shulman Shuffle

What fun!

There is only one rule: Astonish us! In all art we look and listen for what we have not experienced quite that way before. We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond in a new way.

I read this quote and immediately realized that this rule applies to teaching as well. I have often described teaching as doing two things – making the strange familiar (an eclipse of the sun is caused by the moon falling into the earth’s shadow) or making the familiar strange (all matter is essentially empty space). What is common is the sense of surprise we experience in both cases.

It appears to me that very often we forget the value of astonishment and awe in teaching and learning. This is where the quote above really connects with my idea of teaching. Repeating the quote but by changing just one word—replacing “art” with “teaching.”

There is only one rule: Astonish us! In all teaching we look and listen for what we have not experienced quite that way before. We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond in a new way.

How do we as educators meet this goal of “astonishing us all.”

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).

He also runs FlipScript.com, a site dedicated to creating high quality ambigrams on demand. The results are actually quite good, far better than previous attempts to accomplish this task.  Don’t miss his demonstration short story made up of more than 30 ambigrams.

If you are interested in visual wordplay these sites may be excellent time-sinks!

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).

Dear Mr. Mishra,

I am currently working on a poetry research project for school, and one of the requirements is researching five different poets. While looking for people who wrote palindromic poetry, I found your website and decided to use you in my project. The only problem is that I can’t find much information about you for my research. If you could, please respond to this e-mail with a little information about your history (i.e.-date and place of birth, family relations, etc.) as well as your inspiration for writing your palindromic poems. Thank you for your support!!!!!
Sincerely, Jake

P.S.- I am an eighth grader from Colorado and an aspiring poet.

Now I don’t consider myself a poet in any serious sense of the word (my dabbling in mathematical poetry or palindromic poetry notwithstanding). But it is great feeling when something you create and put out there in the world connects with someone else, someone who you would never otherwise have met or gotten to know. Here is what I wrote back to Jake:

Dear Jake –
Thank you so much for writing to me. I am honored to make it to your list of poets and glad that you are interested in palindromic poetry.

As for my history: I am professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing MI. I am originally from India where I studied engineering and design before coming to the US and getting my PhD. My wife is a graphic designer and I have two kids: my son who is a freshman in high school and my daughter who is in 6th grade.

Ever since I was a kid I have always been interested in puzzles and mathematics and poetry and visual design. That I think led to a habit of playing with words and images… so I do a lot of doodling and sketching (specially when I in meetings). I am fond of asking questions and looking at things around me in new ways. For instance, I love photography, on my Flickr site you will find photos of silly things like finding alphabets in cracks, and faces in everyday things. See this link and this one…

• Alphabets in cracks
• Faces we see

Then there are the videos I make with my kids. For instance see the new year’s card we made recently.

This also led to my creating ambigrams, which are words that are written in a special ways so that they can be read multiple ways. You can find a bunch of such designs on my website.

So I guess, palindromic poetry emerged out this desire or propensity to see the world in weird ways. And the challenge of writing poems that read the same backward and forward was inherently interesting. I particularly enjoyed writing ones that flipped in their meaning when you cross the half-way point. For instance in the poem “Me as I sit” the poem switches from me watching you to you watching me!

Finally, as must have noticed, from the dates, most of these were written a bunch of years ago when I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois. I haven’t written too many recently but the fact that they are on my website leads people to them – and I form all kinds of cool connections – such as the email I just received from you. A year or so ago I heard from someone who uses my poetry to teach poetry to inmates in prison (how cool is that!). You can read about that here.

That’s all for now.. I would love to read any palindromic poetry you may have written, if you are comfortable sharing them with me. Thank you again for your interest in my work. I look forward to hearing from you and let me know if there is anything else you need to know.

take care ~ punya

Note: I got Jake’s (and his parent’s) permission to post our correspondence on this blog under the condition that I not include his email address or other contact information.

Many moons ago I had written about the idea of the web as small pieces loosely connected (read Gandhi, ambigrams, creativity & the power of small pieces loosely joined) that allow people to pursue their passions and share it with the world at large. This is what gives the web its power, and this is also why I am not as comfortable with the barricaded worlds created by Facebook, which would not have allowed someone like Jake to easily find me, (but that is a rant for another day).

To understand the significance of April 2, 2011, I have to go back 28 years, back to the summer of 1983.

I had just finished 10th grade, and that summer I took a trip to the hills of North India, as a part of a social work volunteer effort. I remember sleeping on the floor in this little unfurnished hut up in the hills, spending the days digging what would be the foundation of a village school. We had no electricity, no TV, the our toilet was to go out in the woods.

We did have a tiny transistor radio and we used that to listen to the Prudential Cricket World Cup, taking place in far away England. The West Indies were favored to win, the English were pretty good, and Australia and New Zeland weren’t too bad either. But India was no where in the picture, and no one really expected anything from our team. Our record, before this date had been dismal at best. But amazingly enough, India, led by Kapil Dev, this young Jat from Harayana, somehow made it to the semi-finals where we were facing England. There was little hope that we would go any further. The fact that we had made it that far was victory enough!

I remember, one late night, in this little room, with a bunch of kids my age, from different schools from around North India, crowded around the little radio, listening to the commentary of this semi-final game being played half-way across the globe. I don’t remember many of the details but two things do stand out. I remember hearing the commentator describing this young Indian batsman, Sandeep Patil, destroying the English bowling. And I remember, after the game was over, and India had won and made it to the finals, all of us, 16-17 year olds, standing up, in our pajamas, in this candle-lit room, spontaneously, beginning to sing the Indian National Anthem. Loudly, surely off key, but with gusto and pride.

A few days later I was back home in Delhi, watching the finals on our black-and-white TV. I remember West Indies destroying the Indian batting and then just as they started batting, the TV transmission died. (This was actually quite common back then.) I ran back to my radio, to keep up with the game, while keeping an eye on the TV, just in case the game came back on. I missed seeing the great catch by Kapil Dev that got rid of Viv Richards (who single handedly could decimate any opposing team). And then the West Indies wickets started to fall, and the TV came back, and I watched, what was the most amazing sight, the mighty West Indies collapse, and, wonder of wonders, India winning the world cup!

That was a defining moment for my generation and I remember it as clearly as it was yesterday. I doubt you can meet any Indian of around my age for whom this is not an unforgettable memory!

India, as a nation, had been going through a tough time. The Indira Gandhi government’s usurpation of power in 1975 (with the declaration of Emergency) was not too far from our memories. The government that had come after that had been woefully underwhelming, not even lasting a full term. Punjab was in flames, due to an insurgency that would (a few years later) consume Indira Gandhi herself. In the middle of all this was the world cup! It pulled us all, across India, together in ways that cannot be described. This victory was a turning point for all of us, a way of saying that our time had come. After this, there was little that we could no do!

Well a lot has changed in India since then. But India has never repeated that feat. India had never won another world cup.

Till today.

It took 28 years, but after a great game against Sri Lanka, in the 2011 world cup finals, India has done it again. Emphatically, and with grace India has won the world cup. Along the way India knocked out Australia (the winner of the past three competitions) and Pakistan (arguably as big a game as the final). As Joe Biden said, in a slightly different context, this is ****ing huge!

A new defining moment for a new generation.

A wordle of some of the ideas that we touched upon can be found below (thanks Nick Sauers)

You can find a PDF document of my slides as well as a PDF of the demotivational posters created by the participants. (Even if you don’t see my slides, you MUST see the posters… they are funny and worth a moment of your time).

A couple of participant took notes during the day and have kindly made them available:

• Nick Sauer’s Notes | Blog posting
• 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.

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.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, the entire talk is now available online as a video. You can see it in its entirety by going here: http://gcpsx.coeps.drexel.edu/videos/dgvls_ep2public/

Enjoy!