4 AM: A poem

by | Wednesday, July 17, 2019

4 AM
July 17, 2019

The stupid smoke detectors
Beep

Incessantly
There are two of them
Running this conversation
With each other
Through the night

Their batteries dying
Or dead

Funnily enough
They fall silent during
The day
Lull you into thinking
It is ok
It was just a glitch

But as night falls
And you walk
Around the house
Switching off lights
Doing the routine
You hear them start

First it is one
Then the second
Joins in
Soon after

Reaching out
To the other
Across the darkness

Their batteries dying
Or dead.

Topics related to this post: Art | Fun | Personal | Poetry | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

TPACK @ AERA, New York

In a few weeks TPACK will be going to AERA. There are a couple of events scheduled: First, is a symposium titled: Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK): A Conceptual Framework With Examples for Integrating Technologies Into Teacher Education [download...

Charleston, SC for SITE 09

I am off to Charleston, SC for the SITE 2009 conference. . I can't believe it has been a year since Matt Koehler and I presented our Keynote. I am sending this note sitting in the Michigan Flyer bus (making good use of their free wi-fi) and am looking forward to a...

Malik, Mishra & Shanblatt win best paper award

Qaiser Malik called me yesterday to tell me that a paper we have been working on: Malik, Q., Mishra, P., & Shanblatt, M. (2008). Identifying learning barriers for non-major engineering students in electrical engineering courses. Proceedings of the 2008 American...

Putting technology first

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...

The Brahmin connection

A funny (and yet somewhat sad) story ... So I am in Nagpur airport waiting for my flight, which had been delayed, and I struck up a conversation with a young man there, as one is wont to do. We of course started by complaining about the airlines, then moved on to...

Blast from the past: Technology, representation & cognition

Blast from the past: Technology, representation & cognition

I published my first academic article (a book chapter) in 1996 when I was a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. My the advisor, Rand Spiro, had been invited to write a chapter for an edited book and asked me if I would be willing to join him...

STEM teaching & leadership for urban educators

STEM teaching & leadership for urban educators

The MSUrbanSTEM project was one of the best projects I have ever been part of.  We worked with 124 Chicago Public School STEM educators over three years, in an effort to develop their teaching and leadership in the STEM areas. We have written about this...

Turing’s Tricksters: How AI Hijacks Our Social Instincts

Turing’s Tricksters: How AI Hijacks Our Social Instincts

In a recent article in The Atlantic (Shh, ChatGPT. That’s a Secret), Lila Shroff delves into the surprising willingness of people to share intimate details with AI chatbots. To be clear, this did not come as a surprise. Readers of this blog will know this is something...

A different language

I have always been interested in how we use words to capture intangibles. For instance wine connoisseurs have developed a specialized language (which sadly is quite opaque to me) to explain to each other characteristics of wine. So the words "fruity" and "dry" have...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *