véjà du, all over again

by | Saturday, September 04, 2010

A véjà du experience is about looking at a familiar situation but with fresh eyes, as if you’ve never seen it before. It forms the basis of an assignment I give in my CEP818, Creativity in Teaching & Learning course. The assignment is described in greater detail here, but the core idea is to take multiple photographs of some everyday object in such a way that the viewer cannot easily determine what the object is! More here.

Today, I spent some time with my kids re-doing the assignment. My son suggested taking pictures of his X-Box 360 but we finally went with an object selected by my daughter. Here are the pictures. What do you think it is?


A few randomly selected blog posts…

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

An essay by Mohsin Hamid (titled My reluctant fundamentalist) about the process of writing his novel "The reluctant fundamentalist." What stands out in this piece is an excellent description of the extended and often painful act of creation - in this case a novel. I...

TPACK Newsletter 8 (Feb 2011)

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #8: February 2011 Welcome to a new year and to the eighth edition of the TPACK Newsletter! Please forgive our long delay in getting this “mega-issue” to you. We’ll do a lot of “catching up” with what has been happening with TPACK worldwide in...

Thank you, Chile!

Rotate I spent the past seven days in Chile, six days in Santiago and one in Valpariso. It was absolutely wonderful. My trip was sponsored by the Faculty of Education at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC is one of the nation's premier universities), as...

Announcing the Numeroscriptor, great quote

What a wonderful quote... Already every bank of any importance probably uses calculating machines. It is not likely that the fatiguing and uncertain process of having arithmetical calculations of any sort performed in the brains of clerks will survive the improvements...

Photo triplets

Christopher Bowhuis (a student in our summer on-campus MAET program) provided me a two minute tutorial on cloning myself, or anybody else for that matter. I had to go home and try it out with my kids (and a few of their friends who just happened to show up). Below are...

Technology Integration in Higher Education

Matt Koehler and I led a session on Technology Integration in Higher Education: Challenges & Opportunities for a day-long symposium titled: Colloquium on the Changing Professoriate. This is how our session was described in the program book/website: Technology has...

Let children play: From evolutionary psychology to creativity

Let children play: From evolutionary psychology to creativity

As a part of our ongoing series on creativity we recently spoke with Dr. Peter Gray, professor of Psychology at Boston College. Dr. Gray’s interest in creativity emerges as a consequence of his background in evolutionary psychology and interest in how humans (and...

Shulman on learning

Shulman on learning

One of my favorite quotes about learning. From this article, Taking Learning Seriously the entirety of which is worth reading. But for now here is the quote, and a visual (just because): Learning is least useful when it is private and hidden; it is most powerful when...

Guide on the side, the GPS story

People have often argued that digital technologies change the role of teachers from (as it is commonly described) a "sage on the stage" to a "guide on the side." Personally, I have my doubts about this, complicated somewhat by my recent experiences with GPS...

8 Comments

  1. Punya Mishra

    A corkscrew it is! This is what the overall object really looks like.

    or click here to see all the images

    Reply
  2. Amy Strange

    I’m going to agree with Randy that it looks like a corkscrew.

    Reply
  3. Jung

    I think this is a part of the lawn spreader!!

    Reply
  4. Kylie

    Corkscrew?

    Reply
  5. Mary

    part of a table umbrella???

    Reply
  6. Heather Nordman

    Telescope?

    Reply
  7. Randy Johann

    It looks like a corkscrew.

    Reply

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