Design for democracy

TPACK & the moon OR why I love the web

Mar 27, 2009

I recently blogged (here and here) about the experiment conducted by students in Italy that allowed them to use publicly available NASA audio recordings from the moon landings to determine the distance between the earth and the moon. I bit more online research led to...

Fibonacci’s Poem

Dec 11, 2019

Fibonacci’s PoemDecember 10, 2019 (!)OneWordIt startsSlow but sureExpanding out numerically, adding moreMarching forward, doing the math, not asking why Knowing the ratio of words, in this line and previous, will equal Phi!A number, elegant, emergent, magical; found...

Tell me a story: Delightful design in an airport

Apr 2, 2023

“Design doesn’t need to be delightful for it to work, but that’s like saying food doesn’t need to be tasty to keep us alive” — Frank Chimero I am always looking for examples of good and bad design in the world around me. Good design is rare, functional and at the same...

Computerized aesthetics… what’s right with that idea?

May 14, 2009

I just came across this... Online System Rates Images by Aesthetic Quality Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has launched the Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine (ACQUINE), an online system for determining the aesthetic quality of an image. The online photo-rating...

New edited series on Research to Practice

May 19, 2013

A few months ago I was invited (by the Educational Technology & Management Academy, an Indian educational organization) to write a series of short practitioner-oriented articles for a new educational e-magazine they were starting. The idea was to introduce to a...

Generative AI is WEIRD!

Dec 19, 2023

Note: This blog post was almost entirely written by ChagGPT based on an analysis of a set of images I had uploaded onto it. The image above (Weird AI) is an original typographic design created by me. The background sky was created by Adobe Firefly. To give some...

4 AM: A poem

Jul 17, 2019

Note: This poem was lightly edited March 10, 2025. 4 AMJuly 17, 2019 The stupid smoke detectorsBeep IncessantlyThere are two of themRunning this conversationWith each otherThrough the night Their batteries dyingOr dead Funnily enoughThey fall silent During the dayLull...

Seeing in the dark

Apr 14, 2008

All of us have walked through a sun-dappled forest. However, few of us have noticed that underneath are feet are thousands of little perfect circles. This is often difficult to see because these little perfect circles often overlap into irregular globs of sunlight....

No excuses! Veja du (or don’t you)

Apr 30, 2010

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...