Of math and ambigrams: Exploring Symmetry

Penang update

May 12, 2008

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...

TPACK & Activity Types

Nov 26, 2008

Judi Harris, Matt Koehler and I just submitted an article on Activity Types and TPACK. We had presented this at AERA last year and it took a while getting it ready to submit as a journal article. In this paper we combine the work that Judi (and her colleagues) have...

Failure has to be an option

May 20, 2010

I just read this great interview with Diane Ravitch on Slate.com (The wrong stuff). Diane Ravitch started out under George H.W. Bush as a strong supporter for NCLB (and all that goes with it, educational testing, school choice, charter schools etc. etc. etc.)....

On beauty in banality

Jan 19, 2009

Does beauty transcend banality and inconvenience? If this story about a violin virtuoso, Joshua Bell, playing on the subway station is any indication, we do not have "a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever...

Into mindfulness & creativity

Apr 15, 2022

We have covered a wide range of topics in our ongoing series on creativity, technology and learning (in the journal TechTrends), including 30+ interviews with some of the top scholars in the field. More recently we have been trying to create a series of 2-4 articles...

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...

Eye Twisters

Jan 23, 2008

Eye Twisters: Ambigrams & other Visual Puzzles to Amaze and Entertain is a book edited by Burkard Polster, a professor of mathematics at Monash University. It features some of my work... From the back cover: Eye Twisters is all about ambigrams--words that are...

Academic publishing, a changing world

Jul 10, 2008

A few months ago I had posted a note about Harvard faculty considering and passing a resolution to freely publishing all their scholarship online (see this and this). Now it turns out that faculty at the Stanford University, School of Education have gone the same...

The carving of Carver

Jan 19, 2008

Creativity and collaboration. Authorship and editorial prerogative, who has the final say, and who should receive the credit? Here is an article in Drexel University's Magazine "The Smart Set" about the role Raymond Carver's editor played in "finalizing" his stories....