Punya Mishra's Web

I have often talked of repurposing as being key to creativity, particularly for teachers using new technologies. (See previous postings on this topic here and here, and here and here.) Imagine my surprise when this past Sunday’s comics-page had a comic on this very issue. The strip is called Jump Start below is the specific set of panels on repurposing.

The cartoon is given above.

There have been various descriptions of the TPACK game… some of which I have written about earlier.

• The first instance is something Judi Harris, Matt and I used at the 2007 NTLS meeting at Washington DC. You can find out more about it here.
• Second, is a submission by Karen Richardson from Virginia, written up in the February 09 TPACK newsletter.
• And earlier this year, I had blogged about a game developed by the Littleton School District in Colorado.

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.

Enjoy.

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 Pink video 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).

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
Teamwork Melanie Hosbach Fiona Scott Andrew Melmoth	Rewards 2 Sarah Pickles Katie Shefren Joost Guttinger Renee Codsi	Mastery Theresa Hamilton Larissa Lisayo Miguel Herrera	Dreams Cheytoria Hickey Bridget Reed	Grades Kristi Dix Patricia Liff Rugh Gadson Olivia Shillings
Autonomy Frances Snowden, Jessica Maisonnave, Andrea Ouimetto	Mastery2 Paul Blackwell, Brigette Jensen, Candace Marcotte	Collaboration Bill Marland, Christina Popowski, Jillian Johnson, Jamie Perry	Creativity John Hogan Michelle Cox Sean Sweeny Rehb Rajab Alfred McDonnel	Financial Incentives Dean Halverson Ashley Priem Shaza Ahmed Lauren Cortesi Camiella Hudson
	Material Incentives Rawad Bon Hamadan Jason Shulha Eliza Mantyh Patty Kolinski	Motivation 2 Bossel Deiry Susie Dina JP Bennett Kelly Cunningham Kristin Bergeron

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).

TPACK Radio/Video Show ISTE 2010 from Punya Mishra on Vimeo.

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.

See the Whiteboard/UPS commercial or the entire ISTE10, Radio/Video Show.

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.

My daughter on her blog has a new poem / haiku called Sweat, a haiku with one glich. She is in India right now where the temperatures are easily in the 90′s – which I guess explains the genesis of the poem. What was more interesting, to me however, was the manner in which she, quite instinctively, breaks up a word in the poem. Interestingly, she regards that as a “glich!”

Here is the poem.

Sweat

Sticky, icky, ew!
I wipe it off, and it trick-
les, right back again!

“trick-”

“-les”

down the page. Reminds me of one of my favorite poets, e.e.cummings and how he plays with words. For instance here is a poem by him

l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness

It takes a bit of effort to read but it is worth it. With some thought you will see that in the parenthesis is the phrase “a leaf falls,” broken up so that it runs down the page, rather than across it. So instead of “a leaf falls” you read

(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)

Of course breaking it all up forces you (the reader) to read the lines in slow-motion, with pauses as it were. Also the shape of the letters comes through now as do the alliterative / symmetric “le” “ll” and “af” “fa” sounds. There is a visual and audio pattern here… a verbo-visual pun maybe. Sort of what Shreya did with the word “trickles.”

But there is more…

Outside the parenthesis is the word “loneliness” broken up so that you can see the words “one” sandwiched between two “L’s.” The “L” is written in lower-case, which again makes it look like the number “1″ or capital “I.”

l
one
l
iness

So the repetition of the idea of “one” or “I” (once as “one” and twice as the number or the “I”) emphasizes the solitary nature of this experience. It could be 1 leaf falling, or one person watching one leaf fall… And all the pieces come together to set up a sad mood of one lonely person watching one leaf fall

How clever of mr. cummings. And how cool that Shreya, discovered something similar in breaking up “trickles” into two parts, showing how the sweat actually

“trick -

- les”

down.

To me it is an indication of her increasing comfort with language. It is only when we are comfortable with the rules that we start to break them, and it is there that true creativity and one’s one “writerly” voice emerges. So I would argue, despite Shreya’s thinking that it is a glitch, that it is not. It actually her noticing a pattern, imposed on her by the syllable count required by the Haiku structure itself, and then using that constraint for a creative purpose.

As for the mis-spelling of “glich” – I hope she doesn’t correct it. Because the poem now does have one glitch, the mis-spelling of the word “glitch.” How self-referential!!

All in all, what a wonderful way to begin a Sunday, reflecting on creativity and writing, inspired by a poem written by 11 year old Shreya. How very cool!!

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.

Kristine M Kamper	Lynn Mittler	Chris Rappleye	Stephanie Madlinger
Lisa Huxley	Sean Nash	Sean Nash	Sean Nash

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

Determining the shape of the earth is something I have written about previously. For instance, see this post on seeing the shape of the earth using eclipses. (A somewhat similar effect could be seen in my photo of the moon during a lunar eclipse). On the web, I found another way of computing the shape of the earth through studying the turbulent wake of a ship.

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.]

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.

Back in 2007, I was second author on a paper titled Teacher as Filmmaker, in which we described an approach to teacher professional development that involved teachers creating short, evocative movies, which we called iVideos. You can read the paper and abstract (below).

Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Siebenthal, 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.

In our Masters program in Educational Technology at Michigan State University, K-12 teachers create “iVideos” – short, two-minute, digital videos designed to evoke powerful experiences about educative ideas. For example, an iVideo might enable viewers to experience the vastness of space, the interconnection between people and their environment, the timeless themes in great literature, and other compelling subject-matter ideas. How might these teacher-made iVideos serve as catalysts for teacher technology education and professional development? We describe the conceptual foundation of iVideos by building on the metaphor of teacher as filmmaker – an idea that highlights how teachers and filmmakers both strive to create powerful experiences for their audiences. In doing so, we argue that teachers are enabled to transform ideas and practice by immersing themselves in deep pedagogical consideration of subject-matter, significance, audience, learning, epistemology, and aesthetics. We also discuss how this approach develops teachers’ competency and efficacy with technology.

A week or so ago I received an email from Dr. Matthew Kearney, from University of Technology, Sydney informing us that, inspired by our work (as laid out in the above paper) students in their “pre-service teacher education elective class chose to make some ‘idea videos’ on a range of current issues in K-12 education.” You can see these movies by going to

http://sites.google.com/site/teacherivideos/

It feels great to know that our work was useful (and even inspiring) to others. Dr. Kearney adds that:

I would like to invite any interested student teachers at MSU to view an ‘ivideo’ of interest from our gallery and leave their reactions as a ‘comment’ at the bottom of the relevant page. (Our student teacher ‘filmmakers’ will be monitoring these pages for any feedback / comments / questions on conceptual or technical aspects of their iVideos.)

PS Please feel free to forward this invitation to any other teacher education institutions / staff who may be interested in this exercise.

Please take a moment to check out these videos. They are quite well done and worth a moment of your time. Drop a comment if you can, it will mean a lot to the students.

Three different news-stories/articles came to my notice today all connected by the infamous brood parasite the cuckoo. The first is a part of Olivia Judson’s blog (on the NYTimes) on biology and life (read Cuckoo! Cuckoo! here), the second is is about how scientists have tried to understand what it is that the cuckoo does to trick other birds into caring for the cuckoo’s eggs (read, Scientists Get Bird’s-Eye View of How Cuckoos Fool Their Hosts) and the third is regarding a new way of engineering design and optimization inspired by the Cuckoo! (read about the ‘Cuckoo Search Algorithm‘ here)  .

Olivia Judson makes a very important point about how our perceptual systems prevent us from seeing the world “as is.” For instance, as it turns out what we “see” when we see a cuckoo’s egg is very different from what the bird sees. As one of the articles say:

In the past, this kind of analysis was tackled by humans comparing eggs by eye, but human vision differs hugely from that of a bird. Birds can see ultraviolet light and because they have four types of cone in their eyes, compared with three in humans, they see a greater diversity of colour and pattern.

What this means is that over evolutionary time, cuckoos and the host birds are engaged in an arms-race to develop better and better deception (on the cuckoo’s part) and detection (on the part of the host birds) mechanisms. As a consequence one of the host birds studied:

… lay probably the most diverse range of eggs of any bird in the world, and this is likely to be an outcome of the long co-evolutionary battle with the Cuckoo Finch.

The eggs are analogous to a bank note, in terms of the variety and complexity of markings, perhaps to make them very hard to forge by the parasite.

So the same techniques used by currency designers to reduce forgery (the intricate markings that are the defining characteristics of today’s currency notes) is used by the host birds as well. Of course forgers keep coming up with better techniques to trick us, as do the cuckoo birds… all this of course leading to a runaway race where every innovation by the forgers (read cuckoo birds) has to be matched by the police (read host birds).

Now, it turns out that a couple of engineers have take this a step further, utilizing the idea of this evolutionary war to develop a better search algorithm! So what we have here is an interesting confluence of evolutionary forces and the manner in which scientists have tried to understand how these forces work and leading to the development of new technologies and techniques for solving engineering problems. How very cool is that!

All this is interesting in and of itself, but there is a deeper point about perception being made here that I would like to highlight. Olivia Judson says it much more eloquently than I ever could, so I quote:

Which makes me wonder: what are we missing? Like the birds — like any organism — our sensory system defines the way we perceive and interact with the world, and it is limited in important ways…

And in a more metaphorical way, the sight of the cuckoo chick makes me wonder what we miss by our routine habits of thought. To what extent do our preconceived notions narrow our perception of the planet, and ourselves?

What a great question? What are we not seeing? How do we learn to see?

Followers of this blog (and people who have seen my presentations on creativity) know that this idea of “learning to see,” is in my opinion, the most critical first step towards being creative. I have talked of this in terms of “recognition v.s. perception” and it underlies my arguments for repurposing technology (that I go on and on about, most recently here). I think it is important that we continually ask ourselves this question that Olivia Judson leaves us with:

To what extent do our preconceived notions narrow our perception of the planet, and ourselves?

In other words, what are we not seeing?

(H/T Ken Friedman for the first and third links and Google for the third).

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.

Excusado by Edward Weston

I have written earlier about the idea of veja du (which ended up becoming an assignment in my creativity class). To recap:

… if déjà vu is the process by which something strange becomes, abruptly and surprisingly familiar, véjà du is the very opposite. It is the seeing of a familiar situation with “fresh eyes,” as if you have never seen it before. So if déjà vu is about making the strange look familiar, véjà du is all about making the familiar look strange!

I was, this morning, provided and excellent example of veja du by one of the participants in my CEP817, Learning Technology by Design seminar. Steve Wagenseller pointed us to the photograph above, Excusado by Edward Weston and also linked to an essay by Marco Bohr on this photograph. I would strongly recommend looking at some other photographs by Weston (the tight closeups of vegetables are fantastic) and reading this essay “Excusado by Edward Weston“. A couple of key quotes. In this first quote Bohr places Edward Weston’s work within the broader context of art (and art movements) particularly drawing attention to the similarities and differences between his picture of a toilet and another (more famous) toilet that featured in the history of 20th century art.

Just like Marcel Duchamp eight years earlier, although this stands in a completely different context, he gave character to a toilet with his own recognizable ‘handwriting’. Duchamp had said that the perception of his urinal instillation was transformed by putting it in a gallery and calling it art. Weston transformed the perception of a toilet by capturing its pure aesthetic value in his defined style…

The next quote (and this is how Bohr finishes his essay) captures, for me the essence of the veja du assignment and takes it one step further, to comment on all that we do.

‘Excusado’ means to look at your object from different perspectives. For me it also means to get closer to the center of interest. It means that the light shapes the form and the form shapes the light. ‘Excusado’ means that there is no excuse for not making a beautiful picture even if it is toilet.

Think about that last sentence for a moment:

Excusado” means that there is no excuse for not making a beautiful picture even if there is a toilet.

Wow! What does that mean for me as a teacher? As a parent? As colleague? There are no excuses …

Steven Johnson has a great essay on the future of text title: The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book.

I recommend reading the full thing but here is a quote that sort of captures his vision (though there is more, much more). Here is a great quote:

WHEN TEXT IS free to combine in new, surprising ways, new forms of value are created.

In another section he speaks of the page that results when you do a Google search for the word “journalism.”

Who is the “author” of this page? There are, in all likelihood, thousands of them. It has been constructed, algorithmically, by remixing small snippets of text from diverse sources, with diverse goals, and transformed into something categorically different and genuinely valuable. In the center column, we have short snippets of text written by ten individuals or groups, though of course, Google reports that it has 32 million more snippets to survey if we want to keep clicking. The selection of these initial ten links is itself dependant on millions of other snippets of text that link to these and other journalism-related pages on the Web. Along the right side of the page, we have short snippets of text written by five advertisers, mostly journalism schools as it happens, though they are in a silent competition with other snippets of text created by other advertisers bidding to be on this page. And then we have the text in the search field, created by me, which summons this entire network of text together in a fraction of a second.

What you see on this page is, in a very real sense, textual play: the recombining of words into new forms and associations that their original creators never dreamed of. But what separates it from the textual play that I was earnestly studying twenty years ago is the fact that it has engendered a two hundred billion dollar business.

In his article Is Google making us stupid? the author Nicholas Carr takes Sergi Brin to task for something he had said in a 2004  interview with Newsweek. Brin is quoted as saying “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

What is the relationship of information technology and cognition? What about human creativity? What role does technology play, if any, in getting us to be less or more creative? Read the rest of this entry »

I just came across this page of excellent logo designs. Some of the designs may need a moment or two to truly register. Check out 20 Unique and Creative Logo Designs.

Here are couple of my favorites.

Slate magazine is running an interesting series by Julia Turner on signs and their design. Two articles are now up

• The Secret Language of Signs: They’re the most useful thing you pay no attention to. Start paying attention.
• Lost in Penn Station: Why are the signs at the nation’s busiest train hub so confusing?

This is looking to be a fascinating series with four more articles forthcoming.

Just came across this video about Milton Glaser. If you are interested in design you have to watch it for yourself. But here’s a quote that stayed with me:

The possibility for learning never disappears. Basically you have to admit you never learn it.

Tom Johnson’s Adventures in Pencil Integration is the smartest, sassiest blog I have come across in a long time. This is how the sidebar describes the blog/author.

The year is 1897 and Tom Johnson works for a small school district. This is the story of the journey to move into the twentieth century with paper and pencil integration initiatives.

Yes, this is entirely fictional and any relation to “real life” is entirely coincidental.

What is amazing about API is not just how funny it is (it can be absolutely hilarious), or how intelligent it is (we’re talking IQ and EQ!), how scathing it can be (Ooh! that must have hurt) but how it manages to still have a strong humanistic core. At the end the teacher’s voice rings true, speaking to us across the decades. The blog is written tongue firmly in cheek, inspired by  current discussions about technology integration.

But API is not a one trick pony. If it would have been just that (replace computer with pencil and repeat) this blog would get boring very fast. But API is much more than a simple one-note satire. What I have come to appreciate and love about this blog is that I often find it difficult to pinpoint the exact position the author will take next. For instance, if you read “Sorry but you need to learn to use the sharpner” I took it to be a biting piece of satire poking fun of non-tech teachers. This is how it starts

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

The math-po (and sci-po) stream keeps flowing. Math Mama Writes, who started the whole math-poetry movement has some more on her blog, and here is Erin Nash with some really beautiful biological poetry. And of course, here’s her husband Sean Nash having his students writing poetry too. Of course let’s not forget my daughter Shreya (who sort of started this whole thing) and her sci-po’s at her blog Uniquely Mine.

Below are some thoughts about math-poetry – but you can ignore all that and scroll right down to the poem: The infinity of primes!

Math art by durentu

Through all this I have been plugging away at my math poetry. I know the original challenge was to write something to motivate students to learn math (and I did write one along those lines). But more interesting to me has been this theme I have picked up, which is of writing proofs as poetry. I know many people have described mathematics in poetic terms but I am trying something slightly different here. I am trying to explain theorems (as in these couple of instances, see here, here, here and here) and speficially in the poem included below, I am actually trying to construct a mathematical proof in rhyming verse.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

I received an email from Michael Porter of the Littleton Public Schools in Colorado about a version of the TPACK game Michael and his colleagues recently conducted with their K-12 Leadership team (building principals and district administrators). I know that Matt Koehler and I had discussed a TPACK mashup game in our SITE 2008 Keynote but what Michael and his colleagues have done is something different. Essentially they gave their participants a set of scenarios that they then had to evaluate using a TPACK lens. They ended up what  a set of “scatter plots” that reveal the manner in which each of the scenarios integrated technology, pedagogy and content. Read the post (The TPACK game) to see just how this plays out.

Photograph of “scatter plot” generated by the TPACK game,
Image credit Littleton Public Schools & Michael Porter

Read the rest of this entry »

Sean had this wonderful post on his blog (Is this a sluggish strategy?) about this whole scientific and mathematical poetry that is going around. He links to some excellent sci-po’s written by his students (see Pushing Scientific Thought Into Art) and also provides a nice protocol for those who want to apply it in their own classrooms.

It is amazing to me just how this idea has spread. It has en-livened my life, I can say that much. Anyway, I wanted to say thanks to Sean (and his students) – and what better way to say it than in verse. So here is: For Sean & his students

Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, for one reason or another, I did a Google search for the word “recursion.” According to Wikipedia, recursion

… in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition; specifically it is defining an infinite statement using finite components.

This is a screen shot of what Google gave me as a result of my search: (Click on the image for a larger version).

Look carefully at what Google suggests. It says.

Did you mean: recursion

The exact same word that I had searched for… For a moment or two I thought I had found a glitch in Google’s suggestion mechanism… but it suddenly hit me, that this was exactly what recursion meant! If I clicked on that link I would be taking the first step into an endless cycle, an infinite loop, which would end only when I “got it.”

This has been an inside joke amongst programmers for a while. Wikipeda provides one example from a hypothetical dictionary that goes as follows:

Recursion

If you still don’t get it, see: “Recursion”.

So in some sense Google provides a “working definition” of the word – that explains it better than just reading a definition in a dictionary. How cool is that. I think it is little games like this one that make Google so much fun to use.

(I must add that this is not a new discovery. The Wikipedia page about recursion does mention this Google trick – but it was new to me!)

A tangent, a line and a circle
A math poem

Image credit: chrstphre (on Flickr)

A point outside a circle,
shoots out two lines
one heading for the center
the other more feline
smoothly kisses the curve
That delicate swerve
of the ball and then, abruptly
turns to the center,
making an angle
and meets the first
which went on straight
To thus form a triangle.

The angle formed by the tangent
And the other line, the radius
the mathematical mind sees
is exactly 90 degrees!

And funnily enough, it doesn’t matter
where the initial point is, the starter
Where ever it may be
(as long as it is outside the circumference)
The angle will always be 90!
Did that make sense?

A poem on the fact that a tangent to a circle is perpendicular to the radius drawn to the point of tangency. See image below

Image from ETC, an online service of Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse