Political debates are heavily analyzed - by pundits and laypeople alike. I had my own minor visual contribution to this discourse through this WordMap/Cloud of the third and final debate between McCain and Obama . Such wordmaps are fun to create and see but are not...
Posts related to: Creativity
We feel fine
We Feel Fine is a web-installation, "a self-organizing particle system," art project that is powerful and touching - building as it does on people's emotions, harvested from blog postings from around the world. As the designers say, "We hope it makes the world seem a...
Microblogging in the classroom
I have written quite a bit about how a technology can become an educational technology (see this, this, this and this). This is a non-trivial task that all educators face, and requires situational creativity in re-purposing / re-designing the existing tool to meet...
Jared Diamond on creativity, innovation and wealth
Jared Diamond has an article on edge.org, somewhat provocatively titled: How to get rich? The question his after is simply, "what is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation,...
Creativity, genius & age
Malcolm Gladwell has a great essay in a recent New Yorker on the relationship between genius and age. It is popularly believed that genius is often tied up with precocity. There are two aspects to this. First, creativity requires the energy and brashness of youth....
London Underground Map
One of my favorite pieces of design is the London Underground Map. It has been replicated all over the world - from Mumbai to Tokyo. Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to a BBC 4 video made in 1987 about this map. Check it out here Here is a link to the Wikipedia page...
Representing the election
How does one best represent all the voting information that we now collect as a part of the electoral process? Here are a few websites that really stood out for me. Send me any more that you have and I can add them to the list. The first is a series of cartograms...
Nerdview or being stuck in our worldview
I recently received a note from a graduate student as an unnamed university. This student wrote to me after having assigned the TPACK handbook chapter (co-authored with Matt Koehler) to a bunch of pre-service teachers, and suggested that the chapter was hard to read,...
On designing the body
Corpus 2.0 by Marcia Nolte is a set of seven portraits illustrating how the human body could adjust itself to the design of products, including a hole in the lips for smokers and an extended shoulder for holding a phone. Very strange and very interesting, check it out
Of games, mood and age
I love reading. I love watching movies. I love over-analyzing books and movies, seeking to find pattern and structure, motifs and motives. I love to break them down in my mind and put them back together again. I read reviews of books and movies by the ton, sometimes...
WordMapping the debate
I created two WordMaps (using wordle.net) using all the words used by Obama and McCain during their third and final debate. Kind of interesting. Check them out (Click on the image for larger versions, hosted on Flickr). Wordle created using all the words used by...
Ads in Video Games
A couple of people have emailed me about the Obama campaign inserting advertisements into video games. Check out this Flickr set with screenshots of these advertisements. Most of the press is reporting that these ads show up in just racing games but as these...
Students video premiere on aftered.tv
This just in. Leigh Wolf just informed me that a video created by three of her students this past summer accepted by AfterEd - a web-based video channel produced by EdLab at Teachers College, Columbia University. New content is published weekly, including news,...
Plagiarism update, VI
I guess this is the final update on the David Jiles, Ph.D. plagiarism saga. Those of you who came in late can get the complete picture by starting from David Jiles, Ph.D., Creativity Expert, Plagiarist! The sequence continued as follows: Emailing a plagiarist |...
The pleasures of being a teacher
Yesterday, as I was watching the second presidential debate, and following various bloggers who were live-blogging the event, I took a moment to check my email. I found that I had received a note from a former student. This individual had been in my summer cohort last...
Wicked problems, Design & Horst Rittel
Matt Koehler and I have often talked about the wicked problems of design and teaching with technology (most specifically in our handbook chapter on TPACK). We take the idea of wicked problems from a classic paper written by Rittel and Weber back in 1973. As Wikipedia...
Update V
Here is an email from Rita Selle-Grider, of Young Bright Minds & Inventors Academy. I have spoken about her response (which I admired, contrasting it with some of the other responses I have been getting). I include the complete email below (with her permission). What...
Update IV
Chris from Creativity Portal dropped off a "strong" message to me on my website (see it here). Just a couple of points. First, I have not received the email they sent me (I do not question the fact that they did send it) - just that I did not receive it. I checked my...
Update III
David Jiles Ph.D.'s book is no longer available on the Lulu.com website. Another example of delete and hope the world will forget that I didn't do my homework. See here and here for more on this issue.
Plagiarism, update II
Just heard back from Innovation Tools. They are changing the status of the articles by Dr. Jiles to "not visible" till, as they say, "the matter is settled." It is not clear to me what "settled" means. I doubt that David Jiles Ph.D. is emailing me (or anybody else)...
David Jiles plagiarism issue, update
An update on the ongoing saga of David Jiles, Ph.D. For context see this. (Please note the David Jiles referred to in these posts is NOT Professor David Jiles of Iowa State University and Cardiff University.) I have heard back from some of the websites that had...
Plagiarism, note to Root-Bernstein’s and Creativity Portal
Here are some emails (for the record) that I have sent recently to the Root-Bernstein's (the authors of Sparks of Genius) letting them know of how their intellectual property has been stolen by David Jiles, Ph.D. Details in my original posting: David Jiles, Ph.D.,...
Emailing a plagiarist
I am sending the following email to David Jiles, Ph.D. whose plagiarism I have documented in this posting: David Jiles, Ph.D., Creativity Expert, Plagiarist. The email is as follows: Dear Dr. Jiles -- I have some questions and concerns about your book "Creativity and...
David Jiles, Ph.D., Creativity Expert, Plagiarist!
I do not know who David Jiles, Ph.D. is. I do know that he is a plagiarist, an intellectual crook and a thief of the highest order! I do not write these words lightly. I was first informed of this by Mike Deschryver and have over the past few days attempted to look...
Political poetry
What do Donald Rumsfeld and Sarah Palin have in common? Turns out that they both deliver speeches that can, at be, without much effort, converted into poetry. Check out this and this. Some of them are quite briliant.
GeoGreeting!
I often do an assignment with my students where they go looking for letterforms in nature. Leigh Wolf just sent me this link to GeoGreeting.com which takes the same idea - but conceptualizes it on a global scale. Check out this example.
Why I like naps
... because scientific research shows that sleep enhances creativity 🙂
Drawing hands
Image says it all...
100 greatest mathematical theorems
Title says it all... check it out.
Picturing poetry
Nashworld pointed me towards PicLits a website that he describes as being "part visual literacy, part refrigerator poetry, part… fun." Check out his posting or visit PicLits.