Technology, creativity & illusion

by | Monday, January 12, 2009

Marco Tempest is magician who loves technology, or a techno-geek who happens to be a good magician. He brings an unique amalgam of high-tech and magic to his shows (see this article for details), but that is not what is most impressive about his work. What is impressive is his relatively low-tech side, the one that loves to puzzle viewers with nothing more than a cell-phone camera. These short videos are always single, extended takes, with no editing or post-production whatsoever!! These videos, many of which are hosted on youtube, have to be seen to be believed. The level of creativity, ingenuity, planning and timing is just amazing. Here is one:

[youtube width=”425″ height=”355″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvbQQnvxXDk[/youtube]

Bruce Tognazzini famously saw a parallel between magic and software design… I can also see a parallel between magic and education, to capture the mind of the viewer, to make them think. I must add though that it is important in the case of education (and not necessarily the case in magic or software design) that the curtain be pulled down and the subterfuge revealed. That said, the power of the first aha! moment cannot be denied.

I guess in parallel to my question of, how does a technology become an educational technology, is the question, how does a technology become a magical technology?

A few randomly selected blog posts…

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Corporations as Paperclip Maximizers: AI, Data, and the Future of Learning

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The end of the university II

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EDUsummIT 2017: Summary Report

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EDUsummIT 2017 is the fifth International Summit on Information Technology (IT) in Education (EDUsummIT 2017) recently held in Borovets, Bulgaria, on September 18-20, 2017. EDUsummIT 2017 was co-hosted by the University of Library Studies & Information...

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Yesterday I met with Sanjaya Mishra, a scholar and researcher in the area of distance education. Sanjaya and I first met at the Vidyakash conference a bunch of years ago and we clicked almost immediately. I always enjoy meeting up with him when I am in Delhi, though...

EPET @ SITE in New Orleans, the video

Sandra Sawaya has created a video from photographs taken during our recent sojourn to New Orleans for SITE2013. I think it captures a bit of what we did over there - lots of photos of food and friends, and some presentations. Enjoy.

Jugaad, educational toys from Junk (TPACK at work)

I had written earlier about the idea of Jugaad, the quintessential Indian idea of situational creativity. One of the masters at this is Arvind Gupta. Check out his website for tons of wonderful science toys and experiments that can be made from stuff we typically...

Poem or Pie

I recently read the following poem by Grace Paley and just had to write a response. Anyway, here's the original poem: The Poet's Occasional Alternative by Grace Paley I was going to write a poem I made a pie instead     it took about the same amount of time of course...

Self-similarity in math & ambigrams 3/3

Self-similarity in geometry is the idea of repeating a similar shape (often at a different scale) over and over again. In other words, a self-similar image contains copies of itself at smaller and smaller scales, such as the image below of the word "zoom."...

Happy 2010! Stop motion movie

I have had a lot of fun this year playing with video. Most of these experiments were done with my kids (nothing like combining work with pleasure). One of the things we had done last year was a stop motion new year's card. So we just HAD to create one this year as...

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