I just received a gift in the mail. It was a box and in the box was One of those cool push pin toys... How cool is that! In the box was a short note that went: Hi Dr. Punya! It was a pleasure to meet you during the Quest Alliance Seminar in Bangalore. I really enjoyed...
Posts related to: Art
Partial to PartiallyClips
I Stumbled Upon PartiallyClips, a web-based comic strip based on clip art. The rules are simple, "No changes to the art from frame to frame ... Never use the same clip in two strips. No repeating characters." It it amazing just how well this works, despite these...
Wordle, McCain v.s. Obama
As I was playing with Wordle (see previous postings here and here) I realized that it could be used for political analysis. So here are John McCain and Barack Obama's acceptance speeches as a word-map. Can you without, my telling you so, figure out which is which? A...
véjà du, on seeing anew
I recently learned about véjà du (see here to learn more). I was sufficiently intrigued by this idea to use this as an assignment in the CEP818, Creativity in Teaching and Learning course I am currently teaching (with Mike DeSchryver). The assignment students were...
Word cloud, redux
I guess I could not get enough of the Wordle application. So here are some more that I created since yesterday. Click on the thumbnails to see a larger picture: Word map created from the all the words used in Mishra & Koehler 2006 (TCRecord article) &...
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...
Understanding Chromics
Scott McCloud is one of my favorite people. His book Understanding Comics is just wonderful and I have used it in many of my classes. It is a great way to start a course. Scott made news recently for creating a 38 page comic book to introduce Google's new browser...
An IQ test for color
If there is an IQ test for everything, why not one for color. This is Howard Gardner multiple intelligences run rampant. Check out the Color IQ test. BTW, my score was 27 (where 0 is a perfect score and 99 is as bad as you can get!). Irrespective of what you think of...
Fortunate
I had discovered the amazing poet Szymborska (on this very blog a while ago). And then today in my mailbox was another poem by her, sent in by a friend. We're extremely fortunate A poem by Wislawa Szymborska We're extremely fortunate not to know percisely the kind of...
Photoshopping in the cloud
Cloud computing maybe the next big thing. Google Apps and Chrome, gmail and flickr, YouTube and Yahoo Groups, I am moving more and more of what I do online. Even this blog in some way is an example of how I archive my work on the net. And today I discovered Pixlr....
Jugaad, India-genous creativity
Jugaad is a Hindi word which does not have a straight forward equivalent in English. I guess the closest phrase I would say would be "situational or indigenous creativity," the ability to make do creatively with the tools/resources one has at hand. On Jugadu.com I...
Undo & the the progress of technology
I have wondered what it would be like if life had an undo button, and what we would do without all this cool technology we have? I guess this is what happens when we use technology for too many hours a day. I was reminded of this when I Stumbled-Upon this online comic...
The media debate, politically speaking
There is a recurring debate in the ed-tech community about if media make a difference. One argument is that media is akin to a conveyance system bringing in supplies (content). At some level it doesn't matter if the content is brought by a truck or a train, a bullock...
Twittering a tale
My favorite short short story is by Hemmingway. It is all of six words long - but boy, does it pack a punch. It goes, "For sale, baby shoes, never used." Wow! It turns out that such short stories are not merely a novelty. The advent of Twitter and microblogging, with...
Orissa Folklore
Just got an email from a fellow Mishra (no relationship, at least I don't know of any), Dr. Mahendra Mishra who works as the state tribal education coordinator in my home state of Orissa as a part of it's Primary Education Program (more at www.opepa.in). Mahendra He...
Limp Kiss
Just Stumbled upon this: A Poem by Nichita Stãnescu Tell me, if I caught you one day and kissed the sole of your foot, wouldn't you limp a little then, afraid to crush my kiss?... more here
Truly grasping 4-D
Understanding 4D while living in a 3D world. A stunning series of videos (freely available for download or online viewing) that teach you how to to visualize four dimensions. Titled Dimensions, these videos were created by a French professor of mathematics in...
Day 3: Meetings & Workshop
Day 2 ended with my meeting KHari (aka Chairman) and Rags (aka Chore) - two BITS batchmates, whom I hadn't met in almost 18 / 20 years. It was great catching up with them - but what that meant was that by the time I got back to my room I was totally exhausted and...
Heading to India
I leave for India tomorrow to participate in a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity being held in Bangalore from the 20th to the 22nd of August. The meeting is organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International...
The making of “Editing is Cool”
I had posted about this really cool video I recently found (see Life is about editing). Behold my surprise when one of the comments on the blog was from none other than Allee Willis (see her wikipedia page here, and personal website here). It was just great to hear...
Digital before his time
A recent story in the NYTimes about Peter Gabriel (An Old Rocker Gets Digital) brought back memories of Peter Gabriel's album covers. It tells you a lot about me that I know album covers better than I know his music! During his time with Genesis and later, when he...
Fear, awe and the algebra of the pendulum
In response to my previous posting titled How artists work, Leigh Wolf pointed out a book (Curious Minds: How a child becomes a scientist). I had not heard of this book before and a quick google search led me to this page. Edited by John Brockman (the brains behind...
Life is about editing
A fun and thought provoking, recursive music video by Allee Willis titled "Editing is Cool." The video attempts to capture the process of creating this very video, from the lyrics, to the music to the special effects and so on. Denise Caruso (at Salon) quotes Allee...
How artists work
An interesting (and growing) collection of "habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done. And in the specific anecdotes and the way people describe their own relationship to their own work." Kind of cool and...
Beauty in science
An evocative image from today's NYTimes about our improved understanding of the beautiful phenomena known as the northern lights. You can read the story here, but I would like to quote from the end of the article: The next time you see the northern lights, you’ll be...
On finding the right (parking) spot
I had posted earlier about a "virtual speed bump" a visual illusion that make drivers think that they were approaching a speed bump when in actuality it was just a design cleverly painted on the ground. Now here's another one: Directions in a car park... As the...
Calvin & Jobs!
This is just too good to be true! Also see here and here.
Solzhenitsyn, RIP
Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken -- Christopher Hitchens Alexander Solzhenitsyn is no more. He was not an easy author to read - and the last time I read him was...
By the numbers
Today's NYTimes story about an economist ranking art by the numbers (see A Textbook Example of Ranking Artworks) bothered me a bit. As the article says, David Galenson's method is based not on the aesthetic qualities of the artwork but rather on "how frequently an...
Visual thinking
While researching my previous post about véjà du and Abraham Wald I came across "The Back of the Napkin Blog" (a.k.a. Digital Roam). This blog is devoted to visual thinking and representation. Very cool and very interesting... well worth a visit. Turns out that there...