véjà du for the first time ever!

by | Monday, August 04, 2008

I learned a new term today, véjà du. As we all know (didn’t I write a posting about this earlier?) déjà vu (or paramnesia) from the French meaning “already seen” describes the experience of feeling that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously. It has also been called “a glitch in the matrix! 🙂

In contrast to this, a véjà du experience is about looking at a familiar situation but with fresh eyes, as if you’ve 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! A wonderful phrase… one that makes perfect sense the moment you hear it.

I heard this term on a podcast by Bob Sutton who credits it to George Carlin. A website here also attributes it to Bill Taylor. Sutton in his talk provided a great example of véjà du, which I looked up and found more about here and I quote:

A famous statistician, Abraham Wald, was asked during World War II to help out the Air Force. A lot of bombers were being shot down over Germany, and they wanted to reinforce the planes with armor. You can’t put armor everywhere, because the plane would be too heavy to get off the ground. So where, Abraham Wald, was asked, should you place the armor? They had records of where the planes returning from Germany had been shot at, because there were big gaping holes. So Dr. Wald started tallying things like the planes that returned with holes in the left wing and the planes that returned without holes in the left wing. It soon became apparent what to do, because the data represented only two of the four groups. There was no data on bombers that didn’t return from Germany. So Dr. Wald noted the few areas of the bombers where holes were NEVER found. These were the areas that needed heavy armor, because any bomber hit in those areas must not have been able to make it back to England.

You can find a brief biography of Abraham Wald here

Topics related to this post: Creativity | Design | Fun | Representation | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Creativity @ Plymouth, year 3

I spent some time last week with each of the MAET cohorts at Plymouth England. I have blogged about my time with Year 1 here and Year 2 here (as well as some other posts here and here). This is about what I did with the Year 3 cohort. As usual, I did my TPACK and...

iPhones, higher ed & faculty resistance

Today's NYTimes has a story Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod about universities handing out iPhones and iTouchs to freshmen. A part of this may be making specific universities look "cool" to their incoming students - a requirement in the highly competitive world of...

Exploring Organizational Creativity & Mindfulness with Ravi Kudesia

Exploring Organizational Creativity & Mindfulness with Ravi Kudesia

Recently our on-going series on creativity, technology and learning for the journal TechTrends has focused on the relationship between mindfulness and creativity, particularly in educational contexts. Our first article set the stage for a deeper dive into this...

The benefits of doodling!

Finally science has proved what I knew all along, doodling is a sign of an alert mind and may actually help memory!! Another justification for this, I guess.

Pogue on design

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...

21st Century Competencies, what are they? New article

Back in June 2011 I was in Paris for EduSummIT: Building a Global Community of Policy-Makers, Educators, and Researchers to Move Education into the Digital Age. EduSummIT was organized by UNESCO (along with other partners) and brought together over 120 scholars,...

MSU college of Ed leads US News rankings!

The 2012 U.S. News rankings of graduate programs in education have been released and there is good news for our college and department. Overall, the College of Education at Michigan State is ranked 17th which is where we were last year. It appears that our reputation...

CEP818: First note

The following note just went out to all the students signed up for CEP818, Creativity in Teaching and Learning (Fall semester 2011).  We hope you have had a great summer are ready to get back to school! We (Punya Mishra & Kristen Kereluik) will be your instructors...

TPCK book signing

One of the important events at the New Orleans AACTE meeting was the release of the TPCK Handbook for Educators and the book signing. This was the first time I had ever participated in a book signing and it was great fun. Here are some photographs from the event......

4 Comments

  1. Tony DeRosa

    Actually, what Carlin said was, it’s that feeling you get when you’re somewhere and you suddenly realize you’ve never been there before. I like what you wrote though!

    Reply
  2. Robert Wilkinson

    Actually, it pre dates Carlin. I first saw it in a British University Rag mag( a magazine constructed with all manner of jokes during “rag week” to make money for charity.

    It’s explanation was a joke: “Deja Vu” as is rightly pointed out means the vague feeling you have already seen something. “Veja Du” is when you KNOW you have already seen something and you cannot believe it is f*****g happening again!!

    Reply
  3. Doug Baxter

    I love the obscure reference to George Carlin.
    Nice!!

    Reply
  4. Brooke Peiffer

    I am excited to be taking CEP818 this semester. I had never heard of veja du, but as kids, my friends and I called it vuja de. It meant the same thing, or maybe it was a name we applied to a completely novel situation.

    Reply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Digital Photo Assignment: “Véjà Du” « MAET Instructor Vault - [...] So if “déjà vu” is the process by which something strange becomes, abruptly and surprisingly familiar, “véjà du” is…
  2. No excuses! Veja du (or don’t you) | Punya Mishra's Web - [...] Worth Reading | No Comments » Other related posts and pages: |véjà du, on seeing anew | véjà du…

Leave a Reply to Brooke Peiffer Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *