Putting technology first

by | Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Don Norman has a great essay titled Technology First, Needs Last that I strongly recommend. We have been making a similar argument in some of our more recent pieces, see here and here

What do you think of Norman’s ideas? Read it first and come back here to discuss what it means for teaching with technology. Can innovation in teaching only happen when we put technology first? What about content? and pedagogy?

A few randomly selected blog posts…

On finding the right (parking) spot

I had posted earlier about a "virtual speed bump" a visual illusion that make drivers think that they were approaching a speed bump when in actuality it was just a design cleverly painted on the ground. Now here's another one: Directions in a car park... As the...

Happy Valentine’s Day: Old/New ambigram

Happy Valentine’s Day: Old/New ambigram

I had made this design a while back, just hadn't posted it online. (Actually a hand-drawn version is on this website somewhere.) Have a great day, everyone!

Penang update

Today was my presentation at the University Sains Malaysia. I was picked up this morning by Abdul Hamid, a huge beefy man, with little English, but a great smile. A beautiful half-hour drive along a sea-side highway led us the University which is perched somewhat on a...

Community Design Lab at Madison

Community Design Lab at Madison

One of the greatest pleasures of my work here at ASU (with the Office of Scholarship & Innovation) has been the work we have been doing with local school districts. Essentially we collaborate with partner districts and community organizations to develop...

The tensions inherent in creativity

The tensions inherent in creativity

The next article in our series (Rethinking technology and creativity for the 21st century) for the journal Tech Trends is now available online. This article has an interview with Dr. Mark Runco, Distinguished Research Fellow of the American...

New ambigram book, with 3 of my designs

Ambigrams Revealed: A Graphic Designer's Guide To Creating Typographic Art Using Optical Illusions, Symmetry, and Visual Perception is a new book edited by Nikita Prokhorov. The book showcases the works of ambigram artists from around the world. It includes...

Research to practice : 3 articles

Matt Koehler and I are co-editors for an ongoing series of articles "From Research to Practice" for Education Matters, an educational magazine published by Educational Technology & Management Academy (ETMA). ETMA is non-profit organization based in New Delhi...

Total eclipse of the sun: An experiment with visual AI

Total eclipse of the sun: An experiment with visual AI

In a previous post I explored some of the visual capabilities of ChatGPT. This is a continuation of those experiments, where ChatGPT helped me identify the date and time of a solar eclipse based on a photo I took decades ago, as a graduate student at the University of...

Praise-blame ambigram in 3D

Jon Good has been playing around with some new 3D printers we just bought and this is what he printed for me - a 3-D version of the "praise-blame" ambigram (click here for the 2-D version). How cool is that! So what you are seeing in the top half is the printed...

1 Comment

  1. bombaimer

    technology is one of the most important debates our days. last night I read an article about “what are the 10 things you’d like to have” and everyone had a top 10 technological things.

    Reply

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