Engineering education, past & future

Wine + GPT4 + Code Interpreter: WOW!!

Jul 11, 2023

OpenAI just released Code Interpreter. It allows you to execute Python code within a live working environment. One of the things that it allows us to do is take data files and conduct data analysis and create graphs and charts. Not knowing what that meant I decided to...

TPACK Dissertation by Lisa Hervey

May 11, 2011

A couple of years ago I visited the Friday Institute at North Carolina State University. I had a wonderful time meeting old friends and making new ones. One of the old/new friends was doctoral student Lisa Hervey. As a part of her dissertation Lisa had been interested...

David Zola, Educator Extraordinaire

Mar 17, 2019

A teacher affects eternity—Henry Adams I remember the first time I saw David Zola teach. He was on stage in front of 200+ undergraduate students with a plastic cup of wine in his hand. The wine had been poured for him by a teaching assistant from a bottle hidden in a...

Supernormal Stimuli: From Birds to Bots

Mar 21, 2025

Picture this: a small bird desperately trying to balance atop an egg so enormous it keeps sliding off, while its own perfectly good eggs lie abandoned nearby. This absurd image has stayed with me since childhood, when I first encountered it in a popular science book...

Creativity in teaching, a workshop

May 26, 2009

The Office Faculty and Organizational Development at MSU conducts an annual Spring Institute on College Teaching and Learning every summer. The past week was their 15th such event (details here) and I was asked to conduct a workshop on Creative Teaching. I was...

The font of truth i.e. the beauty of Baskerville

Aug 9, 2012

I have been a great fan of Baskerville, the font for a long time. I love the manner it looks on a page and most importantly I love its italic ampersand! Check it out below... isn't that beautiful. I remember setting my doctoral dissertation in Baskerville and...

Design at Apple (a his-story)

Nov 3, 2015

Fast Company has compiled an oral-history of design at Apple. It did so through interviews with many of the key players in Apple's history. It is a his-story because, though there are some women who show up... the main narrative is about guys, Steve Jobs, Jonathan...

Creativity, Technology & Teacher Education

Aug 24, 2015

Danah Henriksen and I recently edited a special issue of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education (Volume 23, Number 3, July 2015) devoted to Creativity, Technology and Teacher Education. This special issue is organized thematically around eight articles...

Design is for life

Feb 25, 2008

Quote for the day: Parents look at their children today when they are 3 years old and say "Oh god!, He doesn't know how to operate the computer! How is he going to go ahead like this?" They should instead be worried if their child doesn’t know design. They should say,...