A great article titled the: The Subtle Technology of Indian Artisanship: From saris to hand-painted signs, design thinking is an unacknowledged force in Indian craft by Ken Botnick & Ira Raja. I have written about ideas such as these earlier, particularly in the...
Posts related to: Good | Bad Design
Autonomy, mastery, purpose
This presentation of a talk by Daniel Pink has been making the rounds on the Interwebs. I am including it here just as a personal reminder for me to use in my teaching AND as an example of a wonderful presentation style. Check out RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising...
Inspiring creativity, when more is more…
We have all heard the statement that "less is more" and in many instances that may actually be true. Good design, for instance, often is based on the KISS principle, which, come to think of it, maybe an example of Less is More. That said, there may be situations where...
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...
Thoughtless acts? Technology, creativity & teaching
I have always been interested in the manner in which people use (or re-use) everyday things for purposes they were never intended for. Be it a piece of red tape to mark a glass door so that people don't slam into the glass (as I see at the MSU clinical center every...
No excuses! Veja du (or don’t you)
Excusado by Edward Weston I have written earlier about the idea of veja du (which ended up becoming an assignment in my creativity class). To recap: ... if déjà vu is the process by which something strange becomes, abruptly and surprisingly familiar, véjà du is the...
Cool logos
I just came across this page of excellent logo designs. Some of the designs may need a moment or two to truly register. Check out 20 Unique and Creative Logo Designs. Here are couple of my favorites.
(de)Signs, a series on Slate
Slate magazine is running an interesting series by Julia Turner on signs and their design. Two articles are now up The Secret Language of Signs: They're the most useful thing you pay no attention to. Start paying attention. Lost in Penn Station: Why are the signs at...
The beautiful futility of art
Just came across this video about Milton Glaser. If you are interested in design you have to watch it for yourself. But here's a quote that stayed with me: The possibility for learning never disappears. Basically you have to admit you never learn it....
Avoid cliche’s like the plague
Just came across this great comment in an article titled Let us now praise the cliche This Article "Let us now praise...the cliche" made me mad as a wet hen. The Article-Writer thinks cliches are the best thing since sliced bread. Well, I hate to take the wind out of...
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...
The infinity of primes (proof as poem)
The math-po (and sci-po) stream keeps flowing. Math Mama Writes, who started the whole math-poetry movement has some more on her blog, and here is Erin Nash with some really beautiful biological poetry. And of course, here's her husband Sean Nash having his students...
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.
The TPACK game, Littleton version
I received an email from Michael Porter of the Littleton Public Schools in Colorado about a version of the TPACK game Michael and his colleagues recently conducted with their K-12 Leadership team (building principals and district administrators). I know that Matt...
Teaching design, some ideas
I recently received an email from a teacher in Poland, seeking advice for a curriculum outline for their Design Technology Section. They said, and I quote: Unfortunately, I have minimal experience with the subject as a teacher or as a student in my younger years,...
Stuck with Google (recursively)
The other day, for one reason or another, I did a Google search for the word "recursion." According to Wikipedia, recursion ... in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own...
Art, design & teaching great quote
Steve Wagenseller, a student in my 817 Learning Technology by Design seminar wrote something so cool in the class forum that I felt that it was worth recording on my blog... ...One of the differences between art versus design is that a user has to approach the art,...
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...
New ambigram logo for ideaplay.org
I had written previously about a blog started by students in our Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Ph.D. program (ideaplay.org) and had designed a couple of ambigrammatic logos for them. You can see the original post here. Here is one of the original...
Number (non)sense & flatulence!
Numbers are a gas! (Image credit: Phillie Casablanca) Numbers are seen as being critical to developing our understanding of a subject. As Lord Kelvin, (1824-1907) said: ... when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something...
Putting technology first
Don Norman has a great essay titled Technology First, Needs Last that I strongly recommend. We have been making a similar argument in some of our more recent pieces, see here and here... What do you think of Norman's ideas? Read it first and come back here to discuss...
Creating Palindrograms, aka palindromic ambigrams
Ambigram.com is a website about ambigrams and the people who make them. Lots of cool stuff for enthusiasts and novices alike. They often conduct competitions and other fun challenges for readers. One recent one was related to palindromes. In brief, they challenged...
Mastery=unconscious (contd.)
Robin Revette Fowler sent me a message on Facebook regarding my recent posting(s) about moving from incompetence to mastery (see the two previous posts here and here). She took issue with my idea that mastery requires some kind of meta-level, self-awareness. She said...
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...
Postdictable, the commercials
I had written earlier about the idea of "postdictable" which was defined as something that is "surprising initially, but then understandable with a bit of thought." It lies at the spot between predictability and total chaos. The movie Sixth Sense is postdictable in...
William Kamkwamba, TED talk
I had written a couple of days ago about William Kamkwamba, a Malawian high school student who built a windmill by looking at pictures in a book. From Bob Reuter's website (Keep IT Simple!) I discovered a TED talk that William had given in England, back in July....
A boy and his windmill
The Daily Show featured William Kamkwamba, a Malawian high school student who built a windmill by looking at pictures in a book! I have always been a fan of jugaad, the idea of indigenous creativity using the detritus that seems to be a function of our modern world....
Barcode yourself
Now that all of us are commodities, with personal brand names (and brand value) it is time to take the next step. It is time to get your own barcode! A quick scan with a barcode reader and your worth will be known to one and all. I was prompted to thinking of this...