For one reason or another I have not been bitten by the ambigram bug for a while - till suddenly a week or two ago, two new ambigrams popped into my head. A bit of work with Freehand later... here they are. Enjoy Computer Fiction
Creativity in teaching, a workshop
The Office Faculty and Organizational Development at MSU conducts an annual Spring Institute on College Teaching and Learning every summer. The past week was their 15th such event (details here) and I was asked to conduct a workshop on Creative Teaching. I was...
Computerized aesthetics… what’s right with that idea?
I just came across this... Online System Rates Images by Aesthetic Quality Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has launched the Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine (ACQUINE), an online system for determining the aesthetic quality of an image. The online photo-rating...
Is a lecture just a lecture?
My mashup of a commercial has been on YouTube for a while and just yesterday I noticed that someone had left a very thoughtful comment... and that comment got me thinking... and hence this posting. To start with, if you haven't seen the videos here they are again....
Appreciate the magic…
Louis CK on appreciating the magic of technology... [youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOtEQB-9tvk[/youtube]
Of teaching & cooking
Elizabeth Helfant over at Digital Learning Environments Blog has an interesting posting titled The Pancake principle. She makes a connection between technology integration and making pancakes, and offers three tenets of the Pancake principle. This posting is inspired...
7 tools… one big job: Video Explore II
A few months ago I had created a video mashup of a commercial (see the original and my mashup here). This video ended with three key words, encouraging people to Explore, Create, Share! I then got the idea for creating short videos to represent these three ideas. I...
The first 100 days, on Facebook
This is just absolutely brilliant!! In particular check out the URL that Dick Cheney sends to Obama, approximately half-way down the page. (You will have to copy and past the url).
Too cool for school: Using the TPACK framework
Matt Koehler and I just published an article in Learning & Leading with Technology, the membership magazine of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). The complete citation is as follows: Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2009, May). Too Cool for...
Exploring visual space with mathematics
Stacy Clause just sent me this very cool link to an article titled Exploring logo designs with Mathematica. In this article, Chris Carlson, of the User Design Group at Mathematia shows how one can mathematically develop variations on commercial logo designs by the...
Rube Goldberg website
Just found out about this through a list-serv I am on. Very cool. Hema is a Dutch department store (started back in 1926 and has over 150 stores all over the Netherlands). Check out HEMA's product page... and just wait a couple of seconds and watch what happens. Don't...
Create… Emergence!
I ended the mashup TPACK commercial with the following words, Explore, Create, Share! Over the past couple of weeks my kids and I have been working on a series of short videos around these three words. The first one we made was around the idea of "Explore," titled To...
Profesor 2.0, blurring the boundaries
I am in Chicago to give the Keynote address at the 2009 DePaul University Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference. The conference theme this year is Engaging Minds: Pedagogy and Personalism. I was invited by Sharon Guan (she was part of the AACTE Innovation &...
Mea maxima culpa
I try to be scrupulous about giving credit where it is due and yet I messed up big time. This happened over a year ago and to my dismay I did not think about it or realize it till this moment. A year or so ago we received the 2008 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology...
Explore: To see … or not to see
I have been working with my kids on a series of short videos around the themes of Explore, Create, Share. These three words were used in my video mashup of a commercial (see the commercial AND my mashup here). Original music for this series was created by my cousin,...
Twittering in class, what’s the big deal?
Noah Ullman just forwarded me this story in the The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Professor encourages students to pass notes during class via twitter. It is amazing to me that this merited being called news. If you have been following this blog you know that...
Guest blogging for Nashworld: TPACK video
Sean Nash over at Nashworld asked me to guest blog for this week while he is out with his students doing some really cool stuff. Here is a link to my posting: A TPACK video mashup!. I end the post with a couple of videos, one a commercial and the other my mashup...
New presentation tool
Todd Edwards at Miami University just told me about this new presentation tool called Prezi.... You have to see it to believe it. Just amazing. Check it out at http://prezi.com/
Tech as tool, medium & network
I just discovered (through the serendipitous connectibility of Google Alerts) about Teaching Thursdays a blog from the University of North Dakota. It is a collaborative venture between Anne Kelsh (Office of Instructional Development) and Bill Caraher (Department of...
Bic to vase: Cool idea
A vase for a daisy, made from a plastic bic pen. (Website here).
Master’s course wins ATT Award
Just got the news from Carrie Albin, Outreach Coordinator of our Educational Technology Certificate Program (which is part of our Master's in Educational Technology program) that our CEP810 (Teaching for Understanding with Computers) course earned first place in the...
TPACK & the moon OR why I love the web
I recently blogged (here and here) about the experiment conducted by students in Italy that allowed them to use publicly available NASA audio recordings from the moon landings to determine the distance between the earth and the moon. I bit more online research led to...
Following up on lunar distance
A followup to my previous posting about the Italian kids calculating the distance to the moon using recordings from the Apollo Space program. As I read the story on the technology Review website, I came to the comments made by readers. One stuck out. This is what...
From Tech to Ed Tech: Distance to the moon
For one reason or another, I have three consecutive posts regarding the earth and sun and moon - i.e. the local area in the solar system. I had just completed my previous postings (on on seeing through eclipses and measuring the radius of the earth) when I came across...
Creativity at Wake Forest
I presented yesterday at a conference a Wake Forest University titled: Creativity: Worlds in the Making. I was part of a panel that included Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein and Todd Siler. More details about the panel and links to my presentation can be found below....
Milap09
I took photographs at the Milap 2009, the annual cultural program organized by the Indian Cultural Society of Greater Lansing. Click on the photo below to view the photos (hosted on Flickr).
Bad poetry time: Clerihews
Just when you thought I had run through all the bad poetry I can spew (see here for my palindromic poems) here is another set of poems I had all but forgotten about. A few years ago I got hooked into writing Clerihews. For the uninitiated: The clerihew is a bit of...
Why I love the web…
I don't know if anyone has been following the back and forth following my posting about the Periodic Table of Typefaces (see Yet another periodic table...). In brief, I was quite critical of the design of this table and made that point in no uncertain terms. Imagine...
Palindromes in video and poetry
Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to this extremely creative YouTube video. The funny thing is that I had seen this a while ago but I didn't get it. Of course now that Leigh explained it to me, it seems so obvious. Anyway, the narration is crafted in such a way that it...
Yet another periodic table…
The ongoing saga of mis-representing the periodic table for any darned list of objects continues... Here is a new one sent in by my friend and colleague Patrick Dickson: A periodic table of Typefaces. Now I won't beat a dead horse here, (Nashworld has a great posting...