The revolution will be twittered

by | Monday, June 15, 2009

The recent (and ongoing) evens in Iran sadden me deeply… but also give me hope. The scenes and news emerging from there speak of courage and a need and demand for freedom. What is also amazing has been the use of technology particularly twitter to get news out of the country.

A few decades ago it was audio-cassette technology that led to the fall of the Shah of Iran. Ayotollah Khomeni had been exiled to France and his speeches would be secretly smuggled into Iran – where an informal underground network of people would dub and re-dub these tapes and pass them around. New technologies lead to new ways of sharing information, new ways to mobilize.

My heart goes out to these protesters as I obsessively track news coming out of Iran. The two best sources of news on this are Andrew Sullivan’s  Daily Dish and The Lede of the NYTimes. Or better still follow the incoming Twitter-feeds collected here.

Topics related to this post: Blogging | Creativity | Evolution | News | Politics | Religion | Stories | Technology

A few randomly selected blog posts…

No excuses! Veja du (or don’t you)

Excusado by Edward Weston I have written earlier about the idea of veja du (which ended up becoming an assignment in my creativity class). To recap: ... if déjà vu is the process by which something strange becomes, abruptly and surprisingly familiar, véjà du is the...

Designing Theory: New article

Designing Theory: New article

Theory is of incredible importance to scholars and researchers. Theories allow us to understand, explain and predict phenomena in the world. That said it is often difficult to say just where theories come from. The standard model—that data lead to laws, that in turn...

Christine Greenhow visit + new ambigram

Christine Greenhow from the University of Maryland visited the College of Education this past week. She gave a talk and met with various faculty members and graduate students. I had met Christine a couple of years ago when we had both been invited to the National...

Student engagement in school, the tale of 2 graphs

Gallup recently released a poll on student engagement - and the main finding is that "the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become." As the post says: The Gallup Student Poll surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than...

Teachers ARE designers (in many different ways)

Teachers ARE designers (in many different ways)

One of the pleasures of academia is working with awesome graduate students. This paper is an example of such a collaboration. Melissa Warr, for some reason or the other, decided to do a network analysis of some of the top-cited papers related to teaching and design....

Word cloud

Tag or word clouds are visual visual depiction of user-generated tags or words on a website. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. Fonts, color, layouts can also be used to convey information. Now Kara Sevensma...

Best practice v.s. PGP

Best practice v.s. PGP

I was recently in a discussion with members of the AACTE committee on Innovation and Technology about the term "best practice." This search for best practice (or practices) is something one hears about all the time in educational (and ed tech) circles. We want to list...

When does the brain make up YOUR mind?

When does the brain make up YOUR mind? Does this question make any sense? Anyway, this was prompted by an article that showed that "Researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making...

Chinese-English Ambigrams

During my travel through Taiwan and Hong Kong, I usually opened my presentations with some bilingual ambigrams - words that can be read in Chinese AND English. These ambigrams were created by David Moser, someone I got to know, virtually, through Doug Hofstadter's...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

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