I am a huge fan of Stateside with Cynthia Canty, a radio show on Michigan Radio. So imagine my excitement when I was interviewed by her about my ongoing exhibition (Deep-Play: Creativity in Math & Art through Visual Wordplay) at the MSU Museum. The interview was...
Posts related to: Representation
Deep-Play: Creativity in Math & Art through Visual Wordplay
I have been creating ambigrams for years now... and I feel extremely lucky that what started as a personal interest and passion has led to some wonderful experiences and learning. These include a series of articles on the mathematics behind these visual designs and...
My ambigram design in Brain Games TV show
I am a huge fan of the show Brain Games on the National Geographic channel. Brain Games focuses on the workings of the brain and the reasons we do what we do. The show is quite creative about how they explain ideas, using a range of techniques games, visual illusions...
Embodied Thinking: New article
Photo: Punya Mishra; Santiago, Chile, 2014 Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century is a series of articles we have been writing for Tech Trends. The latest article in the series has just ben published. This article focuses on Embodied Thinking as a...
Inside-Out: Happy 2015
Every winter break (for the past six years) our family creates a video to welcome the new year. This is no ordinary video. It requires days of discussion, planning, construction, shooting, and editing. Our videos never feature us (expect maybe a still-shot of the...
International Coffee Day (new ambigram)
Yesterday was International Coffee Day. In celebration (one day late but hey... ) here is a new ambigram for coffee. Enjoy.
21st century learning, TPACK and other fun stuff
I have been invited to participate in the 2014 Educational Technology Summit: Empowering Educators to Enhance Student Learning in the Digital Era. This conference is being organized by Common Sense Media, Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands, & the LEAD Commission. I...
Vijay Iyer, polymathy and trans-disciplinary creativity
Vijay Iyer, (http://vijay-iyer.com/) is an Indian-American jazz pianist and composer. He is a MacArthur Genius grant winner and is currently Franklin and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University and is widely regarded as being one of...
Perceiving & Patterning as skills essential for creativity
We have been writing a series of articles for Tech Trends titled Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century. You can see the full list here. One of the key focus areas of these articles is on what we call trans-disciplinary thinking i.e. a set of...
MAET Words: 123 creators – 1 cool video
This summer over 120 educators met in three different locations both here in the US and overseas, as a part of the Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) program hybrid classes. The video below, visualizing a quote by Steve Jobs, was created by all of us -...
Self-similarity in math & ambigrams 3/3
Self-similarity in geometry is the idea of repeating a similar shape (often at a different scale) over and over again. In other words, a self-similar image contains copies of itself at smaller and smaller scales, such as the image below of the word "zoom."...
Having fun with TPACK (songs, skits & more…)
A search on YouTube reveals a wide range of videos related to TPACK. Most of them are serious descriptions of the framework (heck, I have created a few of those myself). But there is a smaller genre of TPACK videos that don't necessarily seek to explain the...
A couple of images… (for the heck of it)
Here are two images I created recently... August is the 8th month, so here is a little design to celebrate that fact! I had no particular reason to create this... but then again why let that get in the way of doing something... anything! The next is an image based on...
Creativity in the lives of accomplished teachers
How do exemplary teachers incorporate creativity in their teaching? In this dissertation study, Danah Henriksen interviewed National Teacher of the Year award winners (and finalists), to better understand their beliefs, interests, and practices involving creative...
EPET at SITE, 2014
SITE2014 (the annual conference of the Society of Information Technology in Teacher Education) is being held in Jacksonville, Florida starting the 17th of March. As always, the Educational Psychology and Educational Technology program at MSU has a significant presence...
21st century learning article receives ISTE award
Back in July 2013, the Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education (JDLTE) published our paper on 21st Century Learning. This paper written with Kristen Kereluik, Chris Fahnoe and Laura Terry looked at over a dozen different 21st century learning frameworks and...
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #18, December 2013
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #18: December 2013 Welcome to the eighteenth edition of the (approximately bimonthly) TPACK Newsletter! TPACK work is continuing worldwide. This document contains recent updates to that work that we hope will be interesting and useful to you,...
Why don’t students like school… In 30 mins!
One of the challenges faced by all instructors is ensuring that students actually read the textbook. This summer we came up with a innovative assignment to address this issue. The book in question was Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School? A cognitive...
Living words, MAET Summer 2013
Steven Jobs famously said, Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were...
Teacher knowledge for 21st century learning: New article
Click on diagram to download a hi-res version This article has been a while coming... but our paper on an analysis of 21st century learning frameworks and implications for teacher knowledge is finally in print. A previous version of the paper can be found here. Here...
Shape of the earth, top 10 reasons
I have written previously about determining the shape of the earth... for instance, here is a post on seeing the shape of the earth using eclipses. (A somewhat similar effect could be seen in my photo of the moon during a lunar eclipse). On the web, I found another...
New ambigram: Motivation
Just as the subject line says, new ambigram design this time for the word "motivation"
Symmetry: new ambigram
I love the idea of self-reference, words or sentences that refer to themselves in some manner or another. For instance consider the sentence, This is a sentence. This is an example of a relatively benign self-referential sentence. Other examples may not be less...
Curt becomes Bonk (and vice versa)
Curt Bonk is Professor of Instructional Systems Technology in the School of Education at Indiana University. Curt is one of the most fun academics I know. He is also a good friend. That's us at the COSN conference earlier this year. What I didn't remember was that...
New ambigram, Algebra
I have been thinking about the relationship between ambigrams and mathematics - instigated in no small part by an email conversation with Gaurav Bhatnagar. That inspired me to create ambigrams of words that are related to mathematics. There are a few ideas percolating...
2 diagrams: 21st century knowledge synthesized & 7 trans-disciplinary skills
As I go around presenting my work around 21st century learning I get requests for some of the visuals I show. In particular, I have been receiving requests for Synthesis of 21st Century Knowledge 7 trans-disciplinary skills for creativity in the 21st century If you...
Sternberg: New ambigram
A new ambigram for Robert Sternberg, psychologist.
New ambigram book, with 3 of my designs
Ambigrams Revealed: A Graphic Designer's Guide To Creating Typographic Art Using Optical Illusions, Symmetry, and Visual Perception is a new book edited by Nikita Prokhorov. The book showcases the works of ambigram artists from around the world. It includes...
Creativity Symposium at SITE2013
We just completed our symposium at SITE titled: Breaking Disciplinary Boundaries in 21st Century Learning: Creative Teaching with Digital Technologies. The symposium consisted of 7 presentations followed a summary by Teresa Foulger (of Arizona State University). In...
EPET at SITE 2013
SITE2013 (the annual conference of the Society of Information Technology in Teacher Education) is being held in New Orleans starting next week. The Educational Psychology and Educational Technology program at MSU has a significant presence at the conference. This...