Sean Nash of Nashworld (recognizing a fellow data visualization junkie in me) had sent me this link a while ago ... but I just got around to it today. Check out FeedVis. So what does FeedVis do - think of it as a tag-cloud generator on steroids. Lots of fun there -...
Posts related to: Technology
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...
designing research | designing technology
Matt Koehler and I usually have a end of semester show-case of work done by the students in our classes. This semester Matt has been teaching CEP955 (Research design and methods for educational psychology and educational technology) and I have been involved with...
Contruction (sic)
Check out this page of examples of bad design. Some of these look too crazy to be true - but who knows... stranger things have happened. Interestingly enough the title of the page is "Award winning contructions!" I wonder if that is deliberate. Site worth sharing with...
Games, claims, genres & learning II
Aroutis Foster and I recently published a chapter in the Handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education (I had posted about it earlier here). The handbook seeks to provide a comprehensive coverage of the use of electronic games in multiple fields....
Alien games paper, published
I had posted earlier that a paper on gender and video games had been accepted for publication. Well, it is published now, full reference, abstract and link to PDF given below. Heeter, C., Egidio, R., Mishra, P., Winn, B., & Winn, J. (2008). Alien Games: Do girls...
Koehler & Mishra (in press)
Just for the record, Matt Koehler and I have a new piece in press. I should note that significant portions of this paper were condensed and updated from Mishra & Koehler (2007), with permission from AACE. Email me if you want a draft copy. The complete reference and...
TPACK & Activity Types
Judi Harris, Matt Koehler and I just submitted an article on Activity Types and TPACK. We had presented this at AERA last year and it took a while getting it ready to submit as a journal article. In this paper we combine the work that Judi (and her colleagues) have...
Money for nothing, and your clicks for free!
I knew that website developers would go to great lengths to rise in Google rankings. What I didn't know was just how far people were willing to go, till I received this email. Note: I have deleted all the links and names, since that would be giving free publicity to...
Microblogging in the classroom II
I had blogged earlier about my attempts at using micro-blogging in my face to face classroom. As I had said after the experiment At the end of the class, upon being quizzed, the students seemed to feel that this experiment had been a success and would like to do it...
ISTE: SIGTE Webinar on TPACK
The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conducts a series of webinars for its members. Matt Koehler and I just completed one today for ISTE's Special Interest Group for Teacher Education (SIGTE). The webinar was titled Technology Integration in...
Engineering Education, past & future II
A couple of weeks ago I made a presentation (with Neeraj Buch) to a group of engineering educators from India. This was a meeting organized by the College of Engineering and the Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education. Having made this presentation once I had...
Analyzing political debate
Political debates are heavily analyzed - by pundits and laypeople alike. I had my own minor visual contribution to this discourse through this WordMap/Cloud of the third and final debate between McCain and Obama . Such wordmaps are fun to create and see but are not...
We feel fine
We Feel Fine is a web-installation, "a self-organizing particle system," art project that is powerful and touching - building as it does on people's emotions, harvested from blog postings from around the world. As the designers say, "We hope it makes the world seem a...
Microblogging in the classroom
I have written quite a bit about how a technology can become an educational technology (see this, this, this and this). This is a non-trivial task that all educators face, and requires situational creativity in re-purposing / re-designing the existing tool to meet...
Natural v.s. Artificial Intelligence in Teaching
The field of educational technology is littered by attempts to replace the teacher by creating some kind of a technological learning system that would make the teacher redundant. All such attempts have failed. This has, however, not prevented people from trying. This...
Jared Diamond on creativity, innovation and wealth
Jared Diamond has an article on edge.org, somewhat provocatively titled: How to get rich? The question his after is simply, "what is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation,...
Jeff Keltner from Google Education to talk today
There has been a great deal of interest in the educational use of cloud computing tools such as Google Docs in the College (and at MSU at large). Though these tools are often free and easy to use, they come with concerns about intellectual property and ownership of...
Engineering education, past & future
Neeraj Buch and I were invited to talk to a group of engineering educators from India. This was a meeting organized by the College of Engineering and the Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education. The topic I spoke about was was Improving Engineering Education:...
On designing the body
Corpus 2.0 by Marcia Nolte is a set of seven portraits illustrating how the human body could adjust itself to the design of products, including a hole in the lips for smokers and an extended shoulder for holding a phone. Very strange and very interesting, check it out
Of games, mood and age
I love reading. I love watching movies. I love over-analyzing books and movies, seeking to find pattern and structure, motifs and motives. I love to break them down in my mind and put them back together again. I read reviews of books and movies by the ton, sometimes...
Representing me
Sharon Guan with the Instructional Design & Development Group at DePaul University has invited me to present at a faculty conference next April. I will be speaking about the manner in which new technologies are pushing us to blur the lines between the professional and...
Why blog
Andrew Sullivan is one of my favorite bloggers, not because I agree with all that he says there is a certain sensibility that emerges as you follow his blog for a while that appeals to me. He has a great piece in The Atlantic Monthly titled Why I blog?. Speaking of...
WordMapping the debate
I created two WordMaps (using wordle.net) using all the words used by Obama and McCain during their third and final debate. Kind of interesting. Check them out (Click on the image for larger versions, hosted on Flickr). Wordle created using all the words used by...
Ads in Video Games
A couple of people have emailed me about the Obama campaign inserting advertisements into video games. Check out this Flickr set with screenshots of these advertisements. Most of the press is reporting that these ads show up in just racing games but as these...
Who said this?
A quote in today's oped in the NYTimes, about how this current financial crisis is difficult to understand since many of the decisions were taken by computer programs. The author quotes someone as follows: the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a...
The value of research
A few years ago I was asked to talk to some major donors of the College as a part of the kick-off of the MSU Capital Campaign. The text below is what I had written out prior to giving the talk. It is not an exact transcript of what I actually said, since I...
Students video premiere on aftered.tv
This just in. Leigh Wolf just informed me that a video created by three of her students this past summer accepted by AfterEd - a web-based video channel produced by EdLab at Teachers College, Columbia University. New content is published weekly, including news,...
The pleasures of being a teacher
Yesterday, as I was watching the second presidential debate, and following various bloggers who were live-blogging the event, I took a moment to check my email. I found that I had received a note from a former student. This individual had been in my summer cohort last...
Wicked problems, Design & Horst Rittel
Matt Koehler and I have often talked about the wicked problems of design and teaching with technology (most specifically in our handbook chapter on TPACK). We take the idea of wicked problems from a classic paper written by Rittel and Weber back in 1973. As Wikipedia...