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AI is WEIRD: Part II

Dec 22, 2023

Note: The image above is an original design - showing "AI" embedded in the word "WEIRD" Update - March 30, 2025: A few days ago ChatGPT announced a new version of their image generation tool claiming that it was "natively multimodal model capable of precise, accurate,...

Pomes on creativity

Jul 20, 2009

I am in Plymouth, England, for a week, as a part of our off-campus MAET program. I spent time today with the first year cohort, talking with them about creativity in teaching (with our without technology). One of the short (5-10 minutes) activities they completed...

Why don’t students like school… In 30 mins!

Aug 8, 2013

One of the challenges faced by all instructors is ensuring that students actually read the textbook. This summer we came up with a innovative assignment to address this issue. The book in question was Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School? A cognitive...

The art of having it both ways!

Aug 23, 2025

Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.)~ Walt Whitman; Song of Myself, 51 Last week I published two blog posts on the same day, which is relatively rare – but it does happen. What is truly rare is that in these two...

Shape of the earth, top 10 reasons

Jun 21, 2013

I have written previously about determining the shape of the earth... for instance, here is a post on seeing the shape of the earth using eclipses. (A somewhat similar effect could be seen in my photo of the moon during a lunar eclipse). On the web, I found...

Center for American Progress Webinar: AI in Education

Oct 29, 2024

I had the pleasure, this morning, of participating in a panel discussion organized by the Center for American Progress, titled Leveraging Technology To Equip K-12 Students for Success. Although the title covered a broad view of technology, our focus was specifically...

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...

To Dublin and Back: Keynote at UCD

May 24, 2025

I recently had the opportunity to deliver the keynote address at the 8th annual University College of Dublin's Teaching & Learning Symposium in Dublin. The theme was "Innovative Futures: Engaging Learners," and I spoke on "The Ecological Imperative: Redesigning...

The mysterious pentagon

Nov 1, 2010

There are interesting patterns all around us. Here is one I found the other day. We were boiling lentils in a shallow bowl... and then, out of nowhere emerged an almost perfect pentagon! The almost perfect pentagon that showed up on the surface of the boiling lentils!...