Another New Year’s card

Learning styles in the classroom? What BS! (But Bing Chat doesn’t care.)

Mar 9, 2023

One of the most enduring myths in education is that of learning styles. I had written about it back in 2009 in a blog post titled: Teaching to learning styles: What hogwash. But it a myth that does not seem to go away, maybe because it seems to have some kind of...

Bad poetry time: Clerihews

Mar 15, 2009

Just when you thought I had run through all the bad poetry I can spew (see here for my palindromic poems) here is another set of poems I had all but forgotten about. A few years ago I got hooked into writing Clerihews. For the uninitiated: The clerihew is a bit of...

Designing shared spaces, one example

Dec 16, 2013

Design is about engineering. It is about art. And most importantly it is about the psychology of individuals and groups and their interactions with artifacts. I am always on the lookout for examples of good (or bad) design. Sadly I too often come across the latter...

Hype & Luck: Gratuitous Self-Promotion (2024 Edition)

Mar 3, 2024

It is natural, if you have been working in a field for a while, and have been somewhat successful, that some accolades will come your way, just by dint of being around long enough. As Bing Chat wrote, when asked to create a funny, self-deprecating profile of me in the...

The Desk, the Test, the LMS: The 5 Spaces for (re)Design in Education

Nov 30, 2023

What do a teacher's desk, the PISA test and Learning Management Systems (LMS) have in common. Apart from being educational technologies, they are also the heart of a book chapter that Melissa Warr, Kevin Close and I just published in a book titled Formative Design in...

Chimp number sense…

Jan 9, 2008

A video, brought to you by Slate, titled "How smart are chimps?" I apologize in advance for the commercial at the beginning of the video.

Pomes on Creativity II

Jul 21, 2009

Yesterday I had blogged about poems written by the year I students at the Plymouth MAET program. Today I spent time with the 2nd year cohort and this is what they came up with. Enjoy. There once was a hidden tiger in all, at times it will make you think you’ll fall....

Learning futures: Designing the horizon

Jan 12, 2021

I was recently invited (along with Sean Leahy and Jodie Donner) to present at the Winter Games, Digital Immersive Experience organized by ShapingEDU at Arizona State University. Our talk was titled Learning Futures: Designing the Horizon. We described our session as...

Martin Gardner, RIP

May 27, 2010

Martin Gardner, 1914 - 2010 Martin Gardner died five days ago. Gardner was an influential writer about mathematics and was one of the greatest influences on me (and my friends) as I was growing up. His recreational mathematics column was the main reason I subscribed...