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...
Technology integration, looking forward to the past
Tom Johnson's Adventures in Pencil Integration is the smartest, sassiest blog I have come across in a long time. This is how the sidebar describes the blog/author. The year is 1897 and Tom Johnson works for a small school district. This is the story of the journey to...
The opposite of truth
Niels Bohr, the 1922 Nobel Laureate in Physics once said: The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth. I was reminded of this when I saw this TED video. Check it out... (h/t Andrew...
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...
Douglas Adams, technologies & anticipatory plagiarism
Image Credit Leeks As readers of the blog know, Matt Koehler and I work together quite a lot. In fact we just rotate author-order in our papers since it is hard to keep track of individual contributions. (I would like to claim that the cool ideas are mine - but again...
The futility of existence
I stumbled across this little machine that shuts itself off once it has been switched on! How cool is that. I don't have an clue whom to credit it to and would appreciate a heads up on that. I was reminded of the myth of Sisyphus which led to a great piece of...
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...
Palindromic poetry in prison, introducing Sandra Gould Ford
Those who follow this blog know that I love visual wordplay. This is most commonly seen in my ambigram work but another area where I have spent some time is in writing palindromic poetry. I wrote a whole series of poems when I was in graduate school at Illinois and...
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...
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...
All you can cheat, part II (a response)
Patrick Diemer commented on my previous posting, All you can cheat, the web & learning by saying: Do you have any words of wisdom or resources on how to create appropriate questions? This sounds great, but easier said than done in my humble opinion. I started...
All you can cheat, the web & learning
Now here's an important story coming out of Denmark: Students in Denmark Allowed Full Access to the Internet During Exams I have always been a believer in allowing students to use any resources they can during examinations. If we care about authentic assessment, what...
From incompetence to mastery, the stages
One who knows and knows he knows is a wise man, Follow Him One who knows and knows not he knows is asleep, Awaken him One who knows not and knows he knows not is a child, Teach him One who knows not and knows not he knows not is a Fool, Avoid him. -- Attributed...
Jere Brophy, 1940 – 2009
There is a nice article in the State News about Jere Brophy including quotes from his daughter Cheri Spier, my department chair Dick Prawat, and my former advisee (now faculty member at Drexel) Aroutis Foster. Read MSU professor dies, honored by colleagues as field...
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....
Leigh Wolf @IgniteLansing
Leigh Wolf, my partner in crime as far as the MAET program goes, recently presented at Ignite Lansing. She talked about her two passions, teaching and food (not sure which order to place these). Specifically she talked about food photography and the connections she...
Of certainty & doubt
The NYTimes has a op-ed piece today by Max Blumenthal about an obscure letter Eisenhower wrote to "Robert Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran." Biggs was worried by ambiguity and uncertainty he seemed to observe in president Eisenhower. He wrote that he:...
TPACK in a podcast
Just discovered a podcast on TPACK (titled Understanding TPCK) at the msad75mltinews website. It appears to be based on the article (Too cool for school) that was recently published in Learning & Leading with Technology.
Bringing sensory richness to bleak scientific texts
A while ago I had written about how we use language to capture intangible ideas - and the risks associated with not paying attention to these intangibles. I had said (though you can read the complete post A different language): For instance wine connoisseurs have...
Obtuse can be right!
My daughter, whose creative exploits have been featured here before (for instance see her design for a math-music game), now has a blog, titled Uniquely Mine. It features original writing (poems, stories) by her. Do check it out. You can find regular updates on this...
Creativity @ Plymouth, year 3
I spent some time last week with each of the MAET cohorts at Plymouth England. I have blogged about my time with Year 1 here and Year 2 here (as well as some other posts here and here). This is about what I did with the Year 3 cohort. As usual, I did my TPACK and...
Design and creative repurposing: Thinking about Ed Tech
One minute design ideas... http://www.dailymotion.com/fr/video/x93dzc_lota-1-objet-en-moins-de-1-min_creation I had posted something similar here (from Bic to vase). There is something deeper here than just cool design ideas though. What this video highlights is...
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...