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.
I completed the Capital City River Run Half Marathon today. This race has become an annual event for me, this being my 7th outing so far (the first three years being a 10 mile run before it shifted into a half-maraton). [See links here, here and here]. I completed the race in 2 hours and 11 minutes (a perfect 10:00 minute per mile pace). This was a better pace than what I had achieved in the past three years, so that, I guess is an achievement.
Though much is said about the “loneliness of a long distance runner” (based on Alan Silitoe’s story with the same title), I know for a fact that I could not have completed this race if it weren’t for a large number of people, most of them strangers, who encouraged me and pushed me to try harder. Foremost among them, in today’s race, were Pacers Lisa and Chris who kept a steady 10 minute-mile pace, allowing me to stay with them. And they did this while dressed, not in running gear, but rather in somewhat elaborate costumes, and carrying a flag, so that they could be easily visible to all of us.
Early in the race I got in front of the Lisa and Chris and just let them chase me to the finish line. At the end of the race I got a chance to thank Chris and have my picture taken with him. Here it is.
Who knew that the best way to run a race was to have a pirate chase you till the finish line!
I am hurting a lot right now (the perils of not having trained properly and enough) but I am thrilled at my new timing. This isn’t my best pace but it is maybe the most satisfying. I had run a half marathon in approximately 2 hours and 5 minutes, but that was 6 years or so ago, when I was younger and much better trained. Since then I have been trying to run a 10 or less pace – and today was the day!! The goal next year is to shave 15 seconds of my time so that I can end up in the 9 min + category. But again that is a year away… The goal right now is to hobble over to the medicine cabinet and get myself some ibuprofen!
I have always been interested in what lies at the intersection of science and art. There are of course many different ways of looking at this. There is the idea of scientific creativity being both similar to and different from artistic creativity. And then there is the idea of artistically representing scientific ideas. I have written about this elsewhere in the context of poetry (both scientific poetry / sci-po or mathematical poetry / math-po). I have also argued that this process of “translation” from one medium to another is a very powerful way of both understanding the issues at hand but could also be an interesting teaching tool. For instance see these sci-po’s written by Sean Nash’s students. As I had said before, echoing Sean, in the context of writing a mathematical proof in verse (click here if you are interested), this act of writing a poem about mathematics forces you to truly and deeply understand the idea before you can start playing with it.
Such artistic representations of science can also be a powerful tool for outreach – to communicate often abstruse and complex ideas to a wider audience. One of the best approaches that has received some attention in the past years is Dance your Ph.D. As the Science Mag website says
The dreaded question. “So, what’s your Ph.D. research about?” You could bore them with an explanation. Or you could dance.
That’s the idea behind “Dance Your Ph.D.” Over the past 3 years, scientists from around the world have teamed up to create dance videos based on their graduate research. This year’s contest, launched in June by Science, received 45 brave submissions.
Today, judges—including scientists, choreographers, and past winners—announced the finalists in four categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences. Each receives $500.
Greg Casperson is a graduate student in our Ed Psy & Ed Tech program. He has been engaged, over the past few months, in the most interesting experiment. He carefully selects and posts to his website one poem every day! Greg’s RSS feed has become one of the first things I check out every morning. He has impeccable taste, since, for one reason or another, he seems to select poems and poets that I love.
I had been wanting to blog about his “poem a day” website for a while now but then he did something that caused me to question his taste! He posted a poem written by me! I must admit I loved the attention but, truth be told, I am not sure I deserve being in such exalted company. What he posted this Friday was a poem I had written and posted on my blog, a few months ago. I wrote this poem in response to a poem by Grace Paley. I had come across Paley’s poem in a book I had picked up at a sale. Though I loved the original poem, something about it bothered me. I even read it to my kids and discussed my concern with them. Then, later that evening, I felt the urge to write a response. And an hour or so later, there it was, Poem or Pie. Greg, for reasons known only to himself, decided to do a double-poem day and chose to link to my post.
Whether or not you like my poem, I strongly recommend adding Greg’s website to your RSS feed. Trust me, there is no better way to start the day than by reading a thoughtfully selected poem. And did I mention that Greg has impeccable taste (his occasional forays into pleasing his program faculty aside).
A véjà du experience is about looking at a familiar situation but with fresh eyes, as if you’ve never seen it before. It forms the basis of an assignment I give in my CEP818, Creativity in Teaching & Learning course. The assignment is described in greater detail here, but the core idea is to take multiple photographs of some everyday object in such a way that the viewer cannot easily determine what the object is! More here.
Today, I spent some time with my kids re-doing the assignment. My son suggested taking pictures of his X-Box 360 but we finally went with an object selected by my daughter. Here are the pictures. What do you think it is?
I am currently teaching a course on Creativity in Teaching & Learning and as a part of that I was searching for an interesting image to highlight a note I was posting to the class. I wanted an image that represented, in some cool manner, the multi-dimensionality of perception, how the “position” we take, defines what we see. Not satisfied with what I was coming up with (via Google or Flickr) I started doodling and pretty soon I had a new triplet ambigram.
Triplet ambigrams are 3-d shapes that cast different shadows depending on where you shine light on it. Now every shape (or most shapes) cast different shadows when light falls on them from different direction – the issue is to make these shadows interesting. In the case of triplet ambigrams, the challenge is constructing the simplest object that can make interesting and different shadows.
Here is what I came up with. This three-d shape casts three different shadows – each of which is a letter-form, in this case the letters A, B & C. How cool is that.
I have created a few more of these things before. Here is one for CFT (Cognitive Flexibility Theory). I had posted this triplet earlier in the context of the periodic table of elements here.
And another for Cognitive Technology Society. This logo was selected for use by the organization and then they changed their mind, or the organization vanished (one or the other).
Finally, Matt Koehler has mocked up a version of the game online. He created it for the EPET Hybrid PhD program he was teaching this summer. Though he isn’t sure the game is really ready for “prime-time” he does have it available on his website. Check it out: The TPACK Game, Matt Koehler version. The instructions are simple:
In the TPACK Game, you consider how Technology (T), Pedagogy (P), and Content (C) work together by randomly choosing two of the three (C, P, and T), and thinking deeply to find the third that makes them all work together in a pedagogically sound way to teach the content.
France is being attacked by alien beings! This summer in France I noticed characters from 80′s video games in the strangest of places. For instance, see this one, that I found while walking somewhere near the Latin Quarter in Paris.
And though I took a picture of just one, I noticed these pixilated, bit-mapped graphics (from some Space Invaders type of game) all over the place. I was intrigued but not enough to research it in any way.
Just a couple of days ago I was reminded of this when I saw some stickers of similar characters on Kristen Kereluik’s laptop and told her about the sightings in France. Well, she did the requisite Google search and sent me a few links. As it turns out these are the artistic creations of an artist named (no surprise here), Invader. As Invader’s wikipedia says:
Invader (born 1969) is a French street artist who pastes up characters from and inspired by the Space Invaders game, made up of small coloured square tiles that form a mosaic. He does this in cities across the world, then documents this as an “Invasion”, with maps of where to find each invader.
A few weeks ago I posted a note about an assignment I gave my students in the on-campus version of the MAET program. They had completed an unit on motivation and had watched the RSA / Daniel Pinkvideo and their task was was to create demotivational posters, (along the lines of those on despair.com) using ideas either from their readings/discussions or from the Pink video.
The posters were a huge success. In fact Daniel Pink tweeted them (Thanks Daniel) and lots of his followers ended up on my website to see the work done by the students, which is all very cool.
Well, I am now in Rouen, France, meeting with the students in the off-campus MAET program. I got a chance to work with each of the groups (representing year 1, 2 & 3) and had them create similar posters as well. So now we have a total of 17(!) posters. It is interesting to see just how different they are, even the ones that tackle the same concept do it differently.
I have included all of the posters below — the one’s from East Lansing as well as the one’s created here at Rouen. Click on the words to see the posters (the names of the students who created them is provided below each of the posters).
I love finding interesting faces. I am not speaking of the ones on people (though I like interesting ones there as well) but rather the unexpected faces we find in things around us. I have been doing this for a while now and have a flickr set devoted to this. Here are some interesting examples from my set, you can of course see all the of them by going to my set titled Faces We See.
A face in an auto-rikshaw
Bhubaneswar, India
A “scream” in wood,
Kinawa Middle School, Okemos, MI
.
A row of scared concrete faces
Outside Salt Lake City airport, Utah
A nice smiley face in a vending machine
Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris
I am not alone in this as this recent Huffington Post slide-show and this Mastercard commercial (that I wrote about here). My internet searches also pulled up this Audi Commercial.
The TPACK Radio/Video show that we had created for ISTE is now available on Vimeo. I think this version is easier to embed and view (as opposed to a 21MB download, as it was the previous time around).
A fake radio/video show created for ISTE2010 by Punya Mishra with Matt Koehler (and a bunch of other people who are thanked in the video). We were asked to create a video for ISTE, a conference that neither of us (Punya or Matt) could attend. Our goal was to create an engaging 15 minute video that would convey our ideas about technology integration in teaching, specifically the TPACK framework. The entire thing (including the two Mastercard & UPS commercials) was scripted, shot and edited over 4 days. More details (and credits here)
Here is the second of the two commercials created specially for our ISTE Radio/Video show. The first one (a take-off on the UPS/Whiteboard commercials can be seen here). Enjoy. As always, the director’s commentary is provided below.
The backstory: I have, for many years now, wanted to create a short video along the lines of the Mastercard “Priceless” commercials. I have had many different ideas, but never really got a chance to do so. So when I came up with the idea of the Radio/Video show for ISTE, I decided this was the time to go do it.
The activity shown here (with tennis balls, flip cams, markers and transparencies) is one that I have actually done multiple times, in venues around the world. This is a simple activity that exposes a fundamental misconception people have about how objects fall. The question I ask is where the tennis ball would fall if dropped by someone in three different conditions: standing still, walking or running. Most people say that the ball would fall at the feet in the first case (right answer), and behind the person in the other two cases (wrong answer). It turns out that the ball always falls at the feet of the person – assuming, of course, that the person keeps moving at the same speed after letting go of the ball. Why the ball does so has to do with Newton’s First Law, something many people can recite back to you, even while getting this question wrong.
After I get all the responses (and it is always amazing to me just how many people get it wrong), I ask people to go and create a video of the actual experiment. I typically give them 45 minutes to an hour to do the entire thing. There is something to be said for being able to see what “really” happens, to go frame-by-frame through it. It better than any physics lesson, this activity exposes people to just how wrong their intuitions were.
There are many layers to this assignment. In some cases I have had people tape a transparency sheet to their computer screens and then track the parabolic path of the ball. You can go ahead and measure the height of the person’s hand knowing the frame-rate of the video, actually calculate the value of g, acceleration due to gravity.
Anyway, that assignment became the core idea behind the video. The entire commercial was shot, narrated and edited one Sunday afternoon. I got a group of my daughter’s friends together and we shot the still frames of them dropping the ball and shooting the video. The script was narrated by my son. Despite multiple takes he could not correctly pronounce the word “pedagogy” so tweaked the script to drop that particular word (which of course meant that Technology and Content were out as well!). The tag line “There is some knowledge you are born with, for everything else there’s TPACK” emerged out a conversation with Matt Koehler.
Our ISTE Radio/Video show needed a few commercials to break the monotony – so we created a couple. Here is the first one, a take on the UPS / Whiteboard commercials. Watch and enjoy (director’s commentary provided below).
The idea for this video came from my wife, Smita. I was talking with her about possible commercials to spoof, and that we needed something that people would recognize right away. She suggested the UPS-whiteboard commercials and bingo! I knew this was the one. A bit of doodling on paper and watching some of the original commercials on YouTube later, the strong resemblance between the UPS logo and the intersection of the three circles (that make up TPACK) struck me. And, as they say, the rest just fell into place. One of the things nice about the UPS commercials is the manner in which the “long-haired guy” changes the image with little moves here and there. I think our version does the same, at two different levels. The first is the manner in which the seeming UPS logo is shown to really be the crucial meeting point of the three circles, and then, at the very end, how the color of the marker changes from green to red! Tiny touches but they make all the difference, if you ask me.
The star of the commercial is Mete Akcaoglu, a doctoral student in our program, selected for his hair (we needed someone with longer hair to correspond with the star of the actual commercials), his “cool” Turkish accent, and his acting ability. Essentially what happened was that Mete just happened to walk by my office and got immediately “volunteered” to be the star. Not that he had much choice I do think he did a great job.
We checked out a variety of places with whiteboards (meeting rooms etc.) but all of them had some problem or the other (excessive glare, strange reflections, and inadequate lighting). Finally, Leigh Wolf was gracious enough to lend us her office (even though, I am sure, it was a huge distraction). The commercial was filmed with a Flip camera and edited with iMovie. Matt Koehler found us the right music – and 20 minutes later, we had a final version.
You can see the commercial in “context” by going directly to the ISTE10 TPACK radio/video show, but be prepared to spend 15 minutes on the entire program.
I just spent a day at MICDS in St. Louis talking with a small but select group of teachers about creativity in teaching, the role of big ideas, the meaning of TPACK, the importance of trans-disciplinary learning (among other things). What a wonderful way of spending the day! This visit was organized by Elizabeth Helfant at MICDS. Apart from the workshop, it was also wonderful to finally meet up with Mr. Nashworld, Sean Nash himself. Sean and I have been blogging buddies for a while now and it was great to finally meet up with him.
As a part of our activities today I had all the participants crate i-Images. I have written about i-Images on this blog before (see here and here).
i-Images are the brainchild of David Wong and you can find his page on i-Images here.
Anyway, here are some of the i-Images created today. I do think they are pretty cool and thought provoking, each in its own way. Click on the images below to see what the workshop participants created. Enjoy.
I have never been able to make to the ISTE (formerly NECC) conference since it falls bang in the middle of my summer teaching. This year was no exception. The only problem is that, this year, Matt and I had been invited to a special forum by SIGTE (titled “Considering the “C” in TPACK: Curriculum-based Technology Integration”) neither of us could be there. (Bummer!) So instead, we were asked to make video!
The idea of a 15 minute video of the two of us speaking into a camera was not very appealing… So we did something different. Doing something different was appropriate given our interest in creativity and the fact that our talk was about TPACK! So 4 days and untold hours of work later, here is the video that was presented at ISTE. [Halfway through this I realized that it may have taken less time to have just flown to Denver and made our presentation!]
I should also take moment to thank Sarah McPherson, New York Institute of Technology, for organizing the session and the rest of the panelists (Glen Bull, Judi Harris, Ann Thompson and Denise Schmidt) for their support. Ann Thompson and Denise Schmidt deserve a special thanks for stepping in at the last minute to cover for Matt and me.
Thanks also to Leigh Wolf for narrating and hosting the radio show, and providing her office to shoot the UPS commercial; Mete Akcaoglu for starring in the faux-UPS commercial; Soham Mishra for narrating the faux-Mastercard commercial and Shreya Mishra and her friends for starring in it.
Just a warning, the video is 15 minutes long and a 21 MB download.
I have been a big fan of Despair.com and its quirky, dark humor. I particularly love the demotivational posters, with their beautiful inspiring photographs coupled with some deeply cynical or depressing message.
Today students in my MAET summer program completed a unit on motivation. They read the standard Ed Psych motivational literature (Dweck etc.) and also watched the RSA / Daniel Pink video (that I had linked to here). And then, they created a series of demotivational posters. These posters were created in Google Presentation, with images from Flickr and most importantly they had to use their ideas from either the readings or from the Pink video. [Incidentally the video was not created by Daniel Pink, nor by RSA, but rather by Cognitive Media.]
Here is what they came up with, click on the words to see the posters. The names of the students who created them is provided below the titles.
Incentives
Scot Acre
Patrick Gillespie
Marc Compton
Shawn Telford
Individuality
Kerry Guiliano
Aaron Moran
Mike Bammer
Julie Howe
Addy Hamilton
Motivation
Barb Bedford
Cheryl Schaefer
Hope Andres
Stacey Schuh
Rewards
Grace Bammer
Mary Wever
Jessica Steffel
Sarah Blazo
Curiosity
Craig McMichael
Chloe Tingley
Lial Miller
Katie Lorey
An interesting challenge that remains has to do with how we reconcile projections of the earth with the actual shape of the earth. For instance the Mercator projection distorts what are straight lines into curves and vice versa. Of course complicating all this is the fact that what we think of as straight lines needs to be reconfigured somewhat to meet the demands of a spherical surface i.e. the whole idea of a great circle.
I recently came across a very cool web site which uses Googlemaps to map a straight walk on the surface of the earth. Check out map.talleye.com
The moment you try this out you realize just how complex a process it is to go from the Mercator projection to understanding the same path on a sphere. This also reminded me of the maps of the earth that show the demarcation of day and night on its surface. Check it out at daylightmap.com.
[More information on the Mercator projection can be found here and on great circles here.]
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.” – Jim Jarmusch
More Jim Jarmusch quotes here. Nice design of a layout for this quote here. Photo credit Emily Smith from flickr.
My friend and colleague Leigh Wolf forwarded me this article on Edward Tufte: The Many Faces (And Sculptures) Of Edward Tufte. I have been a fan of information design guru Edward Tufte’s work for years (decades?). I love his emphasis on clarity and simplicity in presenting information. I love the fact that he designs and publishes his own books (so that he can have full control over each and every aspect of the presentation). What I didn’t know of was his playful artistic side. It turns out that ET (as he is known) is also an artist, crafting giant metal sculptures in his “back yard” (if you can call the hundreds of acres that stretch behind his house a “back yard!”).
Over the past few years I have been thinking quite hard about the idea that creative people are not creative in just one area but rather tend to play within and across multiple disciplines or areas. Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein have in their book Sparks of Genius often talked about how the most creative scientists are polymaths, often having artistic and other interests that go beyond their immediate professional interests. In fact they argue, and I would tend to agree with them, that creativity cannot be forced into one box or domain. Creative individuals are curious about everything and often engage in creative activities in multiple areas, though they may specialize in just one area (usually the domain they are most known for).
This is true for the most creative people I know. For instance, consider Douglas Hofstadter (best known for his book Godel, Escher & Back and is work in Artificial Intelligence) dabbles in everything from mathematics to music, wordplay to art. Similarly Scott Kim (best know as a puzzle game designer) creates ambigrams and composes music, plays the drums and teaches mathematics using dance!
In my own way I have tried to do the same. Everything I do, from creating ambigrams to teaching, from photography to developing keynote presentations, from being a parent to advising students on their research, seems to me to be connected and inter-woven. I think my success as a researcher and scholar (to whatever extent I have been successful) derives from this “dabbling” across disciplines.
What is sad, however, is how much such “dabbling” is frowned upon. Through high-school and college, through graduate school and even as a faculty member, I have been advised, always by by well-meaning people, to focus, to find my niche, to become an expert on one thing. I have resisted it, mainly because knowing just one thing, seems, at least to me, such an impoverished way of being.
And I understand why I have received the advice I have. We live in a specialized world. A world where expertise is valued. And an expert, after all, is someone who knows more and more about less and less. There is no space for dabbling in this world of.
But I wonder about that. I have a friend who is a successful professor of civil engineering. Turns out, that as he was growing up, what he really wanted to be, was a chef! I haven’t had a chance to talk to him about this but I wonder how his vision of being a chef influences what he does as a researcher and a teacher? Does it contribute (in some subconscious manner) to his work? Or has he suppressed it completely?
Either way I see it as a tragedy, in the first case because we haven’t developed a way of speaking of these influences, and in the second case because a possible, fruitful career was nipped in the bud.
The sad thing is that I am seeing school do the same thing to my kids, in fact to most kids I know. NCLB has not helped either. Don’t get me wrong. This is not an argument for some form of dilletantism (dabbling for the sake of dabbling). Not at all. What I am recommending (thanks to the Roob-Bernstein’s for this term) is polymathy. One of my students, Danah Henriksen, is currently working on a dissertation on looking for polymathy in teachers. As she says:
“Polymathy” may be thought of as an informed enthusiasm for more than one field of knowledge or expertise, or excellence in several realms that might seem distant from each other. It has been suggested that what makes polymaths so successful and fluidly creative is an ability to cross-pollinate ideas and information. People who open their minds to, and who learn from, multiple knowledge areas can apply new information and unique ways of thinking from one discipline into another.
This for me is the biggest reason for supporting such playing around in multiple areas. These experiences at the fringes (so to speak) of our professional lives, provide us with newer ways of being in the world. They allow us to see the world in new ways. They allow us to question things the field may have taken for granted. Just as Tufte says at the end of the piece, my goal, is to “make people see a little differently.” Turns out one of the best and easiest ways of doing so is by seeing through different disciplinary eyes.
We need to provide better opportunities for our students to do the same.
I have always been interested in the manner in which people use (or re-use) everyday things for purposes they were never intended for. Be it a piece of red tape to mark a glass door so that people don’t slam into the glass (as I see at the MSU clinical center every time I go there) or use a chair to prop open a door—these are examples of everyday creativity. I have used different phrases or words to describe this phenomena (particularly in the context of educational technology), everything from situational creativity to repurposing to jugaad.
So imagine my pleasure at serendipitously chancing upon a book titled Thoughtless Acts?
This book by Jane Fulton Suri and IDEO
invites you to notice the subtle and amusing ways that people react to the world around them. These “thoughtless acts” reveal how people behave in a world not always perfectly tailored to their needs and demonstrate the kind of real-world observational approach that can inspire designers and anyone involved in creative endeavors.
Its a neat little book, filled with photographs of different “thoughtless acts” i.e. (to quote from the book):
… intuitive ways in which we adapt, exploit, and react to things in our environment; things we do without really thinking.
Some actions, such as grabbing onto something for balance, are universal and instinctive. Others, such as warming hands on a hot mug or stroking velvet, draw on experiences so deeply embodied that they are almost unconscious. Still more, such as hanging a jacket to claim a chair, have become spontaneous through habit or social learning. Observing such everyday interactions reveals subtle details about how we relate to the designed and natural world. This is key information and inspiration for design, and a good starting point for any creative initiative.
What the book emphasizes, for me, is the the value of “learning to see” – a distinction between recognition (which is seeing the world through existing frameworks) and perception (seeing the world as it is!). (Related posts here.) I have argued that this distinction between recognition and perception is the crux of true creativity. To quote myself (see original post here):
Perception is about seeing things for what they are, while recognition is about seeing things for how they have been labeled or how we have seen them in the past.
Anyway, the book, Thoughtless Acts? is a pleasure to browse and a quick Google search revealed (no surprise there) a website that goes with the book. What else but thoughtlessacts.com. The website allows you to preview the book as well as contribute observations of your own.
And if you wonder what this has to do with education technology, take a moment to follow these links. In brief, I have argued that there is no such thing as an educational technology. What we have are a range of technologies that we can repurpose, re-see, and re-envision as being educational technologies. Be it using a audio editing tool such as Audacity as a data analysis tool or a GPS device to teach mathematics, teachers are designers of experiences for their students. Experiences that allow them to engage with the world, with deep ideas of content! (TPACK anyone?). But these technologies don’t come as a given, with their pedagogical purpose stamped all over them. Educators have to work on “re-seeing” them for their own selfish (educational) purposes.
Martin Gardner died five days ago. Gardner was an influential writer about mathematics and was one of the greatest influences on me (and my friends) as I was growing up. His recreational mathematics column was the main reason I subscribed to the Scientific American back in high school. A few years ago a couple of my high-school friends wrote a mathematical novel (see my posting about Suri & Bal’s A Mathematical Ambiguity) and the high point for them was the fact that Martin Gardner agreed to write a blurb for the back cover. (My point of pride was that I was thanked in the acknowledgments page, putting me cheek-by-jowl with Martin Gardner!).
More personally, it was through Gardner’s writings that I was introduced to authors like Douglas Hofstadter, Raymond Smullyan, Scott Kim and James Randi — people who in turn ended up becoming immense influences on my thinking and way of looking at the world.
Martin Gardner, through his writing, his sense of humor and playfulness, his emphasis on rationality as a tool for understanding the world, his love of mathematics and learning, will always be with me. I know that in some powerful, deep and fundamental way, he made me who I am today.
I have written about the value of seeing humor in the futility of existence (see this and this) but humor can also be found in the existence of futility. Below is a motivational video that demonstrates this fact. Enjoy…
As the young man says, “You can do anything that you think that you can do.” Well, may be not!
How can anybody resist this flowchart / visual representation of Hey Jude! Check it out. Don’t you just hear the song as you move through the boxes and arrows.
I have been tracking the Hitler-Downfall parodies for over two years now and it seems that they keep getting better and better. But over the last few days comes the news that Constantin films, which owns the rights to the original movie asked YouTube to find and take down every video that included a clip from the film. So the parodies have been vanishing from YouTube, which is a tragedy for creative freedom and the the right to create and disseminate parodies. This was one of the funniest Internet memes, capable of delivering pitch-perfect commentary on everything from Hillary Clinton’s loss in the Democratic Primaries, to the fact that the iPad did not have a camera! Farhad Manjoo has a great article about this meme (and links to a couple of awesome parodies), titled: YouTube vs. Der Führer
One of the interesting points he makes about the Content ID technology that YouTube uses to identify copyright infringement. As he says:
At its heart, Content ID is like a souped-up version of the FBI’s fingerprinting database. The entertainment industry keeps sending YouTube new reference files for movies, TV shows, songs, video games, and other content. YouTube scans every new upload and the millions of videos in its database against each of these files. David King, a YouTube product manager, told me that the system can find extremely fuzzy matches. It can spot when a copyrighted video has been transformed in some way by an uploader—for instance, it can finger a basketball game even if you pause, rewind, and then replay a clip from it, and it can identify Eric Cartman if you record a clip of South Park by holding your camera up to your TV.
How amazing is that! Also Manjoo points out that one of the smartest things that Constantin films could have done is take advantage of this free publicity to run advertisements for the original movie/DVD. As Manjoo says,
Constantin never bothered to exercise its rights to run ads on the Downfall clips… according to YouTube, the vast majority of content owners who take part in Content ID are now recouping revenue from videos rather than pulling them down. Constantin would have earned a lot of money—not to mention avoided a lot of bad publicity—had it done the same thing.
It appears that some of the clips have started coming back, as users complain about their videos being taken down. YouTube policy automatically posts videos back if a copyright infringement claim is contested.
Personally, this has been a video / remix that has already given me hours of entertainment. It is a simple idea but with great potential and a wonderful example of the creative possibilities of giving people the opportunity to appropriate, mix and publish media.
I recently read the following poem by Grace Paley and just had to write a response. Anyway, here’s the original poem:
The Poet’s Occasional Alternative by Grace Paley
I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper
the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor
everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it many friends
will say why in the world did you
make only one
this does not happen with poems
because of unreportable
sadness I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership I do not
want to wait a week a year a
generation for the right
consumer to come along
And here’s my response (this has been edited after it was first posted)
Poem or Pie by Punya Mishra
I just read this poem
about a poet who chose to
bake a pie,
than write a poem!
It was weird, since in my hands
was a poem, not a slice of pie!
Was this the poem
That was not written?
And where was the pie?
Its existence, of course, had to be inferred,
assumed, taken at face value…
which made me question
whether that pie ever really
existed
having caught one
possible contradiction
I doubted everything.
I read this poem to my daughter
Who was more forgiving
maybe, she said, they baked
a pie AND wrote a poem
I wasn’t buying that!
Because in my heart I knew
that poets will do anything
lie, steal, stab and kill
to get the right slant on an idea
To get the right hook
that will make the reader smile
and pull them in to
Wallow in the here-nowness
Of baking a pie, and poking fun
At airy-fairyness of poetry
(in a poem no less). Who could resist
that?
But the truth is
I know it, and you do too,
that some days, a poem beats a pie
Though it is cute, in a self-deprecating
humble kind of way,
to claim the reverse.
Teaching with technology, for me, is all about repurposing technology. Such repurposing requires creative play. Our presentation at SITE 2010 was around some creative micro- and macro-design tasks that can help foster such creative repurposing. I just came across this 1964 Jonathan Winters / Jack Paar video that makes the same point but in a far more interesting manner. Enjoy.
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As he said, “Here’s a stick…” he said, “Make me believe in something.”
So there’s this guy who wants to get into a balloon. Don’t ask why but he does. So he inflates these large balloons and tries to squeeze into them. And he fails for the most part. And of course all of this is documented on YouTube. For instance you can see his second try here. The best part though, at least for me, was his third try, when he does get in. Watch!
The part that completely cracked me up was what he says right after he finally achieves success. I am sure all of us who have had to strive to achieve something, have often felt something similar when we actually achieve it. There is this felling of wondering what we would do next. What would be our new goals?
I think he captures it best when he follows up: “Hey guys, I’m finally inside the balloon.” with “What Now?”
Indeed, what now?
I wonder if Neil Armstrong felt the same thing after he made his “small step for man but giant step for mankind” statement. Or Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay felt the same way after reaching the peak of Mt. Everest.
I do think he did a great job.
