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Posts related to: Creativity
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.
Wong, Mishra, Koehler & Adams (2007)
Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Adams, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. To appear in M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press. Abstract:...
Mishra & Girod (2006/2007)
Mishra, P., & Girod, M. (2006/2007). Designing learning through learning to design. The High School Journal. 90(1). 44 – 51. Reprinted in K. M. Cauley, & G. Pannozzo, (Eds.), Annual Edition: Educational Psychology 07/08. McGraw-Hill: NY. Abstract: This paper...
Ghee Happy
Sanjay Patel is an animator at Pixar and has come up with a beautifully designed book about Indian gods and goddesses. Check it out at his website, whimsically called GheeHappy. [You will need to go to the site FAQ to understand what that means.] The illustrations are...
The commodification of ugly
Noah, one of the students in my design doctoral seminar sent me this video by Ze Frank. Check it out.
Summing up NTLS
Joel Colbert and I were asked to sum up the previous two days of work that was conducted during the NTLS meeting in Washington DC. We created a presentation (with some help from Joel's graduate student, Cesar Gonzalez. We took advantage of the fact that the 19th was...
Brilliant advertisement
I don't want to give anything away... watch it once and then once more... [Youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQbl1c63Ofo]
Defining design (one view)
I am on the Design Research Listerv and every once in a while a discussion rages online about the defining design. Gunnar Swanson (of the Gunnar Swanson Design Office and faculty at at East Carolina University) has created a flash movie that (as he says) "lays out...
Glass half full?
Just discovered a great riddle/puzzle site: [wu:riddles]. As the site says: The riddles are organized by difficulty ... easy, medium, and hard. Then there is the microsoft section, consisting of weird, open-ended consulting-style questions. The cs and putnam sections...
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...
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...
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...
Teachers & technology, a quote
Just heard this in a talk by Sugata Mitra, titled Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer .... should be! — Arthur C. Clarke See the entire video...
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...
Spore & learning about evolution
A NYTimes story about Spore, the new game / toy designed by Will Wright (Playing God, the Home Game) speaks about its connection to evolution. As the article says, Mr. Wright and his publishers at Electronic Arts deserve all the credit they have received from some...
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...
Capturing CAPTCHA or If it can be outsourced…
... it will. We have all see CAPTCHA's (aka Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). They are images with somewhat garbled text on them that websites used to tell humans from automated programs. The idea is to prevent prevent...
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...
Design for age, design for all
The NYTimes has a story (For the Advanced in Age, Easy-to-Use Technology) about companies that are creating tools that are "helping those in their 60s maintain their youthful self-images." What is interesting is that these technologies are typically not directly aimed...
Visualizing mathematics
I love visual proofs of mathematical theorems. One visual proof I use quite often in my design courses (CEP817 or CEP917) is a visual proof of the fact that the sum of consecutive odd numbers is a square number. In other words: 1 + 3 = 4 = 22 1 + 3 + 5 = 9 = 32 1 + 3...
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...
Design for democracy
Very nice piece in today's NYTimes about ballot design (How Design Can Save Democracy). The article offers a list of problems with the traditional ballot and suggests a solution. A good example of the value of information design. Check it out here