Vijay Iyer, (http://vijay-iyer.com/) is an Indian-American jazz pianist and composer. He is a MacArthur Genius grant winner and is currently Franklin and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University and is widely regarded as being one of...
Posts related to: Art
Perceiving & Patterning as skills essential for creativity
We have been writing a series of articles for Tech Trends titled Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century. You can see the full list here. One of the key focus areas of these articles is on what we call trans-disciplinary thinking i.e. a set of...
MAET Words: 123 creators – 1 cool video
This summer over 120 educators met in three different locations both here in the US and overseas, as a part of the Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) program hybrid classes. The video below, visualizing a quote by Steve Jobs, was created by all of us -...
Self-similarity in math & ambigrams 3/3
Self-similarity in geometry is the idea of repeating a similar shape (often at a different scale) over and over again. In other words, a self-similar image contains copies of itself at smaller and smaller scales, such as the image below of the word "zoom."...
Having fun with TPACK (songs, skits & more…)
A search on YouTube reveals a wide range of videos related to TPACK. Most of them are serious descriptions of the framework (heck, I have created a few of those myself). But there is a smaller genre of TPACK videos that don't necessarily seek to explain the...
A couple of images… (for the heck of it)
Here are two images I created recently... August is the 8th month, so here is a little design to celebrate that fact! I had no particular reason to create this... but then again why let that get in the way of doing something... anything! The next is an image based on...
Ambigrams in new book
The Art of Deception: Illusions to Challenge the Eye and the Mind is a new book edited by Brad Honeycutt. Brad is a graduate of Michigan State (Go Spartans!) and maintains a blog (anopticalillusion) devoted to optical illusions. A few of my designs have ended up on...
Creativity in the lives of accomplished teachers
How do exemplary teachers incorporate creativity in their teaching? In this dissertation study, Danah Henriksen interviewed National Teacher of the Year award winners (and finalists), to better understand their beliefs, interests, and practices involving creative...
Of math and ambigrams: Exploring Symmetry
Ambigram for Symmetry displaying rotational symmetry I have been writing a series of articles for At Right Angles (a mathematics education magazine) with my friend Gaurav Bhatnagar on the art and mathematics of ambigrams. The first article in the series (Of Art and...
Designing shared spaces, one example
Design is about engineering. It is about art. And most importantly it is about the psychology of individuals and groups and their interactions with artifacts. I am always on the lookout for examples of good (or bad) design. Sadly I too often come across the latter...
10 seconds is all it takes … to judge a teacher
I just read of the sad demise of Nalini Ambady, social psychologist at Stanford. Her research on the accuracy of first impressions connected with me (from the moment I first glimpsed it). As the NYTimes reports (Nalini Ambady, Psychologist of Intuition, Is Dead at 54)...
Creativity, Technology & Teacher Education, Call for papers
We (Punya Mishra and Danah Henriksen, faculty at Michigan State University) are currently planning a special issue for the Journal of Teacher Education and Technology, on the topic of creativity. At the moment, we are looking for brief abstract submissions from...
Banksy’s biggest trick OR why I hate art museums
I have been a fan of Banksy, the subversive British street artist, for a long time. I love the visuals he comes up with, the subversive quality of his art and most importantly his ability to take art out of the galleries into the real world. His most recent trick,...
Seeing mathematics everywhere…
Dame Kathleen Ollernshaw was deaf since the age of 8. Despite this she had an amazing life as a mathematician, amateur astronomer, politician (she served as mayor of Manchester as well as in the Thatcher administration) and mother. To learn more about her read this...
A NEW definition of creativity: Next article in series
The latest in our series Rethinking Technology and Creativity in the 21st Century is now available. The article was co-authored with Danah Henriksen (and the Deep-Play Research Group) and it titled: A NEW approach to defining and measuring creativity. In this article...
26 years ago… My first publication!
Back in 1986, Anand Narasimhan and I wrote a short story titled "We all fall down," that was published the popular-science magazine Science Today. Science Today, edited by Mukul Sharma who wrote science fiction himself, was maybe the only outlet where you could...
The search for pattern, beauty & intelligent life…
Connecting birds nests to "crop circles under the ocean" leading to some thoughts on perception, beauty and finding intelligent life in the universe (or maybe even on this planet). The other day I found a bird's nest on my front lawn. Most probably it had fallen down...
Why don’t students like school… In 30 mins!
One of the challenges faced by all instructors is ensuring that students actually read the textbook. This summer we came up with a innovative assignment to address this issue. The book in question was Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School? A cognitive...
Who wrote this poem?
Back when I was a graduate student I got bitten by the bug of palindromic poetry - poems that read the same when read backwards. This is consistent with my love for ambigrams and other kinds of symmetrical wordplay. I had posted them on the web a while ago...
Design thinking, some resources
I teaching CEP817, Learning Technology by Design in the spring semester. This is a course I love but it also one that needs to be redesigned. So I am always on the look-out for new resources that can help me rethink the class. I just came across the following website:...
Living words, MAET Summer 2013
Steven Jobs famously said, Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were...
New ambigram: Motivation
Just as the subject line says, new ambigram design this time for the word "motivation"
Symmetry: new ambigram
I love the idea of self-reference, words or sentences that refer to themselves in some manner or another. For instance consider the sentence, This is a sentence. This is an example of a relatively benign self-referential sentence. Other examples may not be less...
Curt becomes Bonk (and vice versa)
Curt Bonk is Professor of Instructional Systems Technology in the School of Education at Indiana University. Curt is one of the most fun academics I know. He is also a good friend. That's us at the COSN conference earlier this year. What I didn't remember was that...
Trans-disciplinary creativity takes root (slowly)
I wanted to bring attention to two articles that came across my desk today. The first was in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled Creativity: a Cure for the Common Curriculum on efforts at range of universities seeking "to train students in how innovative thinkers...
Algebra, version 2
I had posted yesterday a new ambigram for the word "algebra." It was a mirror-reflection design i.e. it reads the same when reflected in a mirror. What I liked about the design was the fact that it actually looks like an algebraic equation with a left-hand-side and a...
New ambigram, Algebra
I have been thinking about the relationship between ambigrams and mathematics - instigated in no small part by an email conversation with Gaurav Bhatnagar. That inspired me to create ambigrams of words that are related to mathematics. There are a few ideas percolating...
2 diagrams: 21st century knowledge synthesized & 7 trans-disciplinary skills
As I go around presenting my work around 21st century learning I get requests for some of the visuals I show. In particular, I have been receiving requests for Synthesis of 21st Century Knowledge 7 trans-disciplinary skills for creativity in the 21st century If you...
New Gandhi ambigram
The quest for a better design continues... Much better, I think, than my previous attempt
New ambigrams for AERA
I was invited to give two talks at the the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco. One was a Ignite presentation (5 minutes, 20 slides set to move at 15 seconds per slide), and the other was an ED Talk (sort of like a TED talk...