Unoriginal Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds,...
Teacher as filmmaker: An update from down under
Back in 2007, I was second author on a paper titled Teacher as Filmmaker, in which we described an approach to teacher professional development that involved teachers creating short, evocative movies, which we called iVideos. You can read the paper and abstract...
My favorite Internet meme (and how it almost died)
I have been tracking the Hitler-Downfall parodies for over two years now and it seems that they keep getting better and better. But over the last few days comes the news that Constantin films, which owns the rights to the original movie asked YouTube to find and take...
What can design do for you?
TPACK involves understanding the capabilities of technology - understanding how we make meaning with it, how we can manipulate it to communicate, engage and teach. I include below an extraordinarily powerful use of media, created with the simplest of tools, one...
Deconstructing TV news
The video below has been getting a lot of attention on the blogs lately, and despite that it is pretty good. No kittens riding skateboards or mentos and Coke here. Just a beautifully constructed take down of TV News. A must see for all media literacy courses. Check it...
Absolutely brilliant video
The Rethink Scholarship is an scholarship for aspiring art directors and designers to Langara College's Communication and Ideation Design program. This video is to publicize the program.
Poetry, Science & Math, OR why I love the web
A 5th grade science assignment, transformed. A rant about Mother Goose. A math poetry challenge! How did that come to be? And what does that have to do with loving the Interwebs? Read on... I had written earlier about how my 10 year-old daughter had been writing...
eduPUNKing a course website!!
I had written about the EduPunk movement earlier, in fact had even designed a logo for it. A brief description of Edupunk can be found on Wikipedia (a google search will reveal many more). Wikipedia describes it as follows: Edupunk is an approach to teaching and...
Finding Nemo, the sea-quel
Our family's stop-motion animation festival continues with our latest offering: Finding Nemo, the sea-quel!! This movie was conceptualized by Shreya and filmed by all of us over a couple of days. What was interesting about this movie was just how many technologies...
Stop motion fun
My daughter, Shreya, had some friends over yesterday and they created a short stop-motion animation film with the new setup in our basement. Enjoy [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTkhuEfTAnk[/youtube] More videos made with my kids can be seen by clicking...
Designing for anticipation, Teaching for anticipation
In a couple of previous posts I had talked about the idea of postdiction (see the posts here and here). The argument being that good teaching (among a long list of other good things) is postdictable, i.e. it walks the line between predictability and chaos, and most...
Darwin film can’t find distributor
Telegraph article titled: Charles Darwin film 'too controversial for religious America' How sad is that!
Announcing: Short film competition, cool prize for winner!!
Those of you who have been following this blog know, over the past few months I have made a few short videos with my kids. The ones I am most proud of are a set of three made around the words Explore, Create, Share (you can see them all here). There were great fun to...
Rethinking Little Red Riding Hood
Awesome retelling of the old tale... (h/t Steve Dembo @ teach42). Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo. As Steve says (you can read his full post here) such remixing can provide interesting opportunities for teachers, particularly given...
Making (non)sense of dots & lines
I love how these interconnected pipes called the Intertubes lead to serendipitous discoveries. Here are two videos, the first I went looking for, and the second, fell into my lap, so to speak, due to YouTubes related videos section. The video I went looking for was...
Explore, Create, Share… the videos
Note: This post was updated on March 21, 2024 since some of videos were not showing up for some reason. Over the past few months I have been working with my kids on creating short thematic videos. The themes we chose were the three words, Explore, Create & Share....
Like to learn, but hate school
In this TCRecord piece, Daniel T. WIllingham uses what we know about cognitive psychology to explain Why students don't like school. He suggests that although most people believe that humans are good at thinking, it is actually the weakest of our mental faculties......
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....
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...
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...
Brilliant stop motion
Just came across this on Nina Paley's blog... and it just blew me away! [youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY[/youtube]
Slumdog night (and Rahman)
Slumdog rolled into the Oscars tonight. More important to me were the two Oscars for A. R. Rahman for original score and song. It is time that the world recognized his genius. Here is a cartoon by Kaladhar Bapu from his site Point Blank A.R. Rahman by Kaladhar Bapu
The Allegory of the Cave
Plato's Allegory of the Cave (see Wikipedia entry) illustrates "our nature in its education and want of education." It is maybe one of the most famous allegories in literature and philosophy, a precursor to the kinds of mind-games (think brain in a vat) that...
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
... Or Why I love the web. I stumbled upon a piece (Lotus Blossom) by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries the other day... and it was like nothing else I had ever seen. At some superficial level it looked like kinetic typography, but both simpler and more complex at the...
The more things change…
I had posted earlier about a recent commercial that, though arguing at one level that technology can fundamentally change education, seemed to stick to the standard-lecture (albeit in different and cooler modes of transmission). Just how little the discourse around...
Another New Year’s card
We just created another New Year's Card / Video. Check it out: Shreya's Magic Touch [youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOrRsXaFE3o[/youtube]
Solving the rubik cube, blindfolded
A YouTube video of Soham solving the rubic cube blindfolded! [youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymi-iG8uhR4[/youtube] [Thanks for Michael Gondry for the idea.]
Harold Pinter, RIP
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness — Harold Pinter (1930 - 2008).
New media, new genres
There is an interesting article in today's NYTimes titled Content and its discontents by Virginia Heffernan. In this article she makes the argument the new digital, online media require new ways of representing information, new ways of thinking about how ideas are...
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...