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…

Design: Fixing clocks | Negotiating Systems

Design: Fixing clocks | Negotiating Systems

I just came across a quote from Alan Kay while browsing the web. Alan Kay is a programmer, educator, jazz musician and one of the key inventors of computing as we know it today. He received the A. M. Turning award (informally known as the Nobel Prize of Computing) and...

University courses using TPACK

Matt Koehler and I rarely (if ever) explicitly mention the TPACK framework in our teaching. Of course the framework guides all that we do in class - but we have never really felt the need to throw another acronym (or series of acronyms such as TK, CK, TPK and so on)...

A pome a day

Greg Casperson is a graduate student in our Ed Psy & Ed Tech program. He has been engaged, over the past few months, in the most interesting experiment. He carefully selects and posts to his website one poem every day! Greg's RSS feed has become one of the first...

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #13, December 2012

TPACK Newsletter, Issue 13, December 2012 Welcome to the thirteenth edition of the (approximately quarterly) TPACK Newsletter! TPACK work is continuing worldwide, and is appearing in an increasing diversity of publication, conference, and professional development...

Photos from the AT&T Award ceremony

The award ceremony for the 2008 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards was last Friday. I drove back from Purdue in time to be there - mainly because I wanted to hear how people would respond to our faux radio interview 🙂 The event went off well, and people...

Happy Teacher’s Day (new ambigrams)

September 5 is Teacher's Day in India. It is celebrated on the birthdate of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Indian philosopher and statesman who was also the first Vice-President and the second President of India. He famously said, "teachers should be the best minds in the...

Going crazy with i-Image

In a previous post I had described David Wong's ideasarecool.com website and his idea of making i-Images. As David describes them, i-Images are "professional, provocative images that seize the viewer's attention and, more importantly, spark their imagination." Anyway,...

Visually representing a song

How can anybody resist this flowchart / visual representation of Hey Jude! Check it out. Don't you just hear the song as you move through the boxes and arrows.

Summer travel 2008 photographs

I have been taking photographs as I travel around Asia (what I have previously described as my multi-national TPACK tour) and uploading them onto Flickr as and when I can. Go to the photographs

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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