Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

The last session of the day was led by Dr. Nancy Law, Director, Centre for Information Technology in Education, University of Hong Kong. Her session was titled Using ICT to support learning: lessons learnt from international studies
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Geetha Narayanan, Director Mallya Aditi International School and Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, is someone I have wanted to meet for a long time. One of the pleasures of of this conference is getting an opportunity to hear her speak … and I was not disappointed.
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I have blogged previously about the challenges faced by higher education (here and here), exacerbated (or maybe revealed) by new technologies. Here is an essay by Charles Murray — not a person I thought I would ever cite approvingly
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Just found out about Dimdim (bad name!) from Manas Chakrabarti’s blog, At Any Rate. Dimdim is an opensource, free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees. Hmm… Wonder if I can use this in the creativity course (Mike are you listening?).

The next session State of ET in India Today and was led by fellow BITSian Manas Chakrabarti (now an independent consultant).
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During Dr. Jalaluddin’s keynote I took some time to search online for some reports, prompted by what he had been saying. (Yes I was listening not just browsing). Read the rest of this entry »

I am trying to live blog the conference: Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity [Full agenda here]. Let us see how far I can keep this up.
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I leave for India tomorrow to participate in a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity being held in Bangalore from the 20th to the 22nd of August. The meeting is organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International Youth Foundation and “is designed to bring together education and education technology practitioners, scholars and experts, academicians and students for an exchange of ideas aimed towards creative approaches and solutions for technology use in teaching and learning.”

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In response to my previous posting titled How artists work, Leigh Wolf pointed out a book (Curious Minds: How a child becomes a scientist). I had not heard of this book before and a quick google search led me to this page. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine you are standing in front of a bathroom mirror; how big do you think the image of your face is on the surface? And what would happen to the size of that image if you were to step steadily backward, away from the glass?

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I just came across a rather different kind of news aggregator, at least compared to Google. The brainchild of Guy Kawasaki (ex-Apple evangelist and tech guru) you have to check out AllTop. This may actually become a regular destination for me.

While researching my previous post about véjà du and Abraham Wald I came across “The Back of the Napkin Blog” (a.k.a. Digital Roam). This blog is devoted to visual thinking and representation. Very cool and very interesting… well worth a visit. Turns out that there is a posting here about Abraham Wald and his WWII insight. You can read it here: The hole story, What you don’t see will kill you. You can see the author’s page here.

David Pogue has couple of great examples in his latest posting about bad design in the world of software. Check out: It’s the Software, Not You. Potentially useful in CEP817/917…

My research and scholarship has mostly been in the area of educational technology - i.e. how to improve / facilitate learning through the use of technologies. David Brooks in his latest op-ed (The biggest issue) in the NYTimes flips this around somewhat. Citing research by Goldin and Katz he argues that over the past century there has been a “race between technology and education.”
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Patrick Dickson just forwarded me an essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled The Sensuous Classroom: Focusing on the Embodiment of Learning [Subscription required]. In this article Suzanne Kelly, the author, bemoans the absence of the physical body from online classrooms. I beg to differ… Read the rest of this entry »

NYTimes article on how publishers are responding to the advent of peer-to-peer sharing of textbook files. Check out First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.

In a previous posting I raised the question about when does a piece of technology become an educational technology?

One of the coolest pieces of technology today is the iPhone. Can it function as an educational technology?
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People have often argued that digital technologies change the role of teachers from (as it is commonly described) a “sage on the stage” to a “guide on the side.” Personally, I have my doubts about this, complicated somewhat by my recent experiences with GPS technologies.
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Check out Story of Stuff or watch the movie…
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In my summer classes I have the participants complete a video assignment on understanding. This year as always my students worked in groups over a week-and-a-half to select their topics, develop interview protocols, video tape people as they answered their questions, and then edit the footage into a tight 4-5 minute documentary. Here are the projects they created (I am still waiting on one): Read the rest of this entry »