Postdictable, the commercials

by | Thursday, October 15, 2009

I had written earlier about the idea of “postdictable” which was defined as something that is “surprising initially, but then understandable with a bit of thought.” It lies at the spot between predictability and total chaos. The movie Sixth Sense is postdictable in the best sense of the world. Good teaching I believe needs to be postdictable. That is what keeps us engaged, keeps us waiting for more, the payoff as it were. And best of all, once all the pieces are in, we can’t wait to go back and review everything again, to see just how beautifully the whole thing holds together. There is a strong aesthetic component to this – a sense of wholeness, closure, elegance, and inevitability. Good poems have this quality, as do mathematical theorems. A well crafted lecture or a lesson plan has this quality as well. In my mind these ideas are closely tied to the Dewey’s idea of experience and to the idea of design. Hopefully I will have a chance to explore these connections in a later post but for now, here are a couple of commercials that I think were postdictable in a really cool kind of way.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7MVtgXMclI[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mTLO2F_ERY[/youtube]

Incidentally the Explore, Create & Share series of videos I made with my kids attempt to capture some of these same qualities!

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Autonomy, mastery, purpose

This presentation of a talk by Daniel Pink has been making the rounds on the Interwebs. I am including it here just as a personal reminder for me to use in my teaching AND as an example of a wonderful presentation style. Check out RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising...

TPACK and online learning

Matt Koehler and I just completed a talk on TPACK and online learning for the Faculty Seminars in Instructional Technology. The Faculty Seminars are a semi-annual two-day series of short courses for faculty who want to learn about using technology in instruction....

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

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...

Nerdview or being stuck in our worldview

I recently received a note from a graduate student as an unnamed university. This student wrote to me after having assigned the TPACK handbook chapter (co-authored with Matt Koehler) to a bunch of pre-service teachers, and suggested that the chapter was hard to read,...

Hello ASU

Hello ASU

Today is my first official day at Arizona State University. Though I have been here in the Phoenix area for a few days already, I truly start today. As I had written in my earlier post, I will be the new Associate Dean for Scholarship (as in scholarly and research...

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...

New video from ITEC

I was recently at the Iowa Technology & Education Connection (ITEC) conference in Des Moines IA. I had a wonderful time meeting old friends and making some new ones. I was also asked to be part of a video that would be shared with ITEC members and other online...

Of math and ambigrams: Exploring Symmetry

Ambigram for Symmetry displaying rotational symmetry I have been writing a series of articles for At Right Angles (a mathematics education magazine) with my friend Gaurav Bhatnagar on the art and mathematics of ambigrams. The first article in the series (Of Art and...

2 Comments

  1. Patrick Diemer

    Those videos were great but your explanation of how it relates to teaching was better. Please keep on posting!

    Reply
    • Punya Mishra

      Thanks Patrick. You know you are an educator when you tend to see everything (and I mean everything) through the lens of teaching and/or learning.

      Reply

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