Our first family vacation in over three years! New Jersey to visit relatives, Delaware to visit friends, and New York city for the big city excitement! Hectic but great fun. I took over 500 photographs, got back home and deleted around 200 of them - the remaining are...
Posts related to: Fun
TPACK handbook review
Matt Koehler just pointed out a hilarious review of the TPACK handbook on Amazon.com. It is short, pithy and completely unconnected to the book. The review, apparently written by Richard Delgado at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, in its entirety is: ...a...
The (type)face of Obama
As a follow-up to a previous posting about the many (type)faces of politics, here is an article in the NYTimes titled To the letter born, discussing the manner in which the Obama campaign has leveraged the use of typography in their campaign.
Googling me…
I wish I had a Googleganger (also known as a Google twin), but with a name like mine, I doubt that is going to happen anytime soon.
Dances for Cause, photographs
This past Saturday the Okemos High School auditorium hosted Dances for Cause, a fund-raiser for Habitat for Humanity. My daughter, Shreya, performed a dance with her dance group (the same dance they had performed for Milap 2008). Also on the program were dances from...
New course: Creativity in teaching & learning
Announcing a new online course for the fall semester 2008:Creativity in teaching and learning Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently… You can praise them, disagree...
I can’t believe they patented that!
I just came across Inventor's Spot, a website that showcases inventions and innovations from around the world. They claim to be "the most popular invention website in the world." Be that as it may, this a site that I think I would find extremely useful in my 817 and...
Forget MMORPG, its time for MMLSG
NYTimes article titled, Storming the Campuses on the next big thing on college campuses: GoCrossCampus! This new kind of a game (and game genre) has been described as Multiplayer Locally Social Gaming and the way it is spreading, it may soon need to add "Massively" to...
Cosmetic changes
I have made some cosmetic changes to the way the blog looks. The sidebars are now light blue, to differentiate them from the middle (content heavy) column. Once I did this I realized that I did not need that boxy border around the middle column, and pouf, it was gone....
Undo this
Wouldn't it be great if life came with an undo key-stroke-combination? Just a thought I threw out today during a meeting which led to a discussion of how this could be a great movie idea. Seems intriguing...
Academic novels
I have been reading Moo by Jane Smiley, off and on for a while now. It is a satire of academia set in a fictional Mid-western university called Moo U. It has been suggested that Moo U is a stand in for Iowa State, an university I know well since Smita went to school...
More sketches
A few weeks ago I had blogged about my experiments with sketching on a Wacom graphics tablet. Here are more sketches I have created in the meanwhile. You can see them here as a webpage or view it as a slide show.
India Breakfast, a photo report
The India themed breakfast at the College of Education, a kick-off for India Week, was a great success. [Here is a previous blog entry announcing this (and other) events.] I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who helped out, and also provide...
The brilliantly twisted mind of PES
I discovered PES a couple of years ago when searching for examples of stop motion animation on the web. One glimpse of his work and I was smitten. Combine a prefect sense of timing and shot composition with a whimsical and surrealistic point of view and you get some...
East Lansing in the NYTimes
Olivia Judson has a great column in the NYTimes about evolution. Today's column titled "Stop the mutants" is a thought experiment on how evolution would fare if all mutations were to magically stop. It is an interesting article, and in keeping with her previous...
India Week @ Erickson Hall
The Indian community in the greater Lansing area celebrates India Week every year (more or less) around March. [More details here and here.] As a part of this event I (and other members of the College of Education) have been organizing an Indian themed breakfast and...
Milap 2008
The Indian Cultural Society of greater Lansing (ICS) held its annual cultural program Milap 2008 this past Saturday. It was a great program with traditional and Bollywood dances, songs, and other performances. My daughter Shreya's dance troup, performed a Kathak dance...
Math-Music, serious game design
My 8 year old daughter, Shreya, came to me the other day and said that she had designed a learning game. I asked her to draw it out for me and here is what she had created. The game is called Math Music and I guess, it builds on the Guitar Hero idea, but adds...
Amruta Patil’s Family Album
A few weeks ago I had featured Nina Paley, animator and story teller. I just discovered another amazing talent: graphic artist Amruta Patil. I got know Amruta through the desi blog ultrabrown which recently featured an interview (Amruta Patil and Kari: A short Q&A)...
The many (type)faces of politicis
Leigh Graves Wolf forwarded to me a link to an NPR story about fonts and the presidential campaign. As the USA network slogan goes, "Characters welcome." You can follow the story here: Character matters. Following a few more links led me to some more sites: (1)...
Total eclipse of the moon
Tonight was a full lunar eclipse - the last one we will have till December 2010. Lucky for us we had a pretty clear sky - a welcome change from the past few days. Shreya and Soham and I tracked it since it started till it was almost complete - and then they had to go...
Of play and games
Some thoughts on play and games inspired by a recent article in the NYTimes Magazine titled "Taking Play Seriously". Based on the article I argue that play is essential for learning... I also throw in some thoughts about the distinction between play and games, and why...
Sketches of life
I have had a Wacom tablet for a while now but haven't really gotten down to playing with it... till a couple of days ago. I started with rough drawings / sketches of friends and family. Take a look and let me know what you think.... You can click on the images to see...
Seeing patterns with eyes closed
Oliver Sacks has a fascinating piece in today's NYTimes (titled Patterns, as a part of his NYTimes blog, Migranes, perspective on a headache). Oliver Sacks describes the visual auras he has suffered through his life as follows: tiny branching lines, like twigs, or...
New Orleans (photos)
I took a couple of hours off to walk around New Orleans in the French Quarters taking pictures. Here they are... Click on the image for more pictures...
TPCK book signing
One of the important events at the New Orleans AACTE meeting was the release of the TPCK Handbook for Educators and the book signing. This was the first time I had ever participated in a book signing and it was great fun. Here are some photographs from the event......
Street Use
In blogging Kevin Kelly's piece on "Better than free" (read that post here), I came across another site that he maintains, titled "Street Use," self-described as follows: This site features the ways in which people modify and re-create technology. Herein a collection...
Going crazy with i-Image
In a previous post I had described David Wong's ideasarecool.com website and his idea of making i-Images. As David describes them, i-Images are "professional, provocative images that seize the viewer's attention and, more importantly, spark their imagination." Anyway,...
Ideas are cool
My colleague and friend David Wong has this cool idea, about making ideas cool. Actually, he has been espousing these ideas for a while now (check out his scholarly publications, in particular The Rebirth of Cool [Word doc]). But now this academic has stepped out of...
Creativity…
There is an absolutely dull and pointless story in today's NYTimes on creativity. Though it is titled Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work, this story clearly did not take much time to write. I agree not all articles in the Times are (or need to be) hard news......