I was recently invited to present a keynote address at the 21st Century Instructional Technology Conference (titled Elements of Technology) at the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Nevada. Clark County is the 5th largest school district in the country with...
Posts related to: Worth Reading
Triplet from China
The triplet ambigrams keep flying in. This new one came in an email from Chunlei Zhang, a faculty member at East China Normal University, having received his Ph.D. in Curriculum & Teaching from Beijing Normal University. He was inspired after reading my previous...
New triplet Ambigram (Now in 3D)!
A few weeks ago I had shared a few triplet-ambigrams I had designed. For the uninitiated a triplet ambigram is a 3-d shape that cast different, and interesting, shadows depending on where you shine light on it. For instance here's a triplet ambigram that casts three...
Creativity ambigram
Here's a new ambigram I designed at the kick-off for the MSU Creativity Initiative. I will have more information on that in a later post but for now... enjoy. Creativity, any which way you look at it.
Creative Idiots share their process
Slate Magazine is running a series on Creative Pairs, or why Two is the Magic Number! Written by Joshua Wolf Shenk the series seeks to understand: What makes creative relationships work? How do two people—who may be perfectly capable and talented on their own—explode...
Preparing educators for the 21st Century
Back in March of this year, Joel Colbert (friend and former chair of the AACTE Innovation and Technology Committee) spent a few hours working together on a document that AACTE was going to put out. Yesterday, at the meeting of the NTLS meeting in Washington DC, I...
How to complete a half-marathon
I completed the Capital City River Run Half Marathon today. This race has become an annual event for me, this being my 7th outing so far (the first three years being a 10 mile run before it shifted into a half-maraton). [See links here, here and here]. I completed the...
The art of science
I have always been interested in what lies at the intersection of science and art. There are of course many different ways of looking at this. There is the idea of scientific creativity being both similar to and different from artistic creativity. And then there is...
A pome a day
Greg Casperson is a graduate student in our Ed Psy & Ed Tech program. He has been engaged, over the past few months, in the most interesting experiment. He carefully selects and posts to his website one poem every day! Greg's RSS feed has become one of the first...
Rethinking homework, some thoughts…
Shelly Blake-Plock over at TeachPaperLess has a great post about homework and how it can be structured to act as a "cliffhanger." As he says: These days, the homework I give isn't based on some arbitrary idea of how much work a kid should do 'at home' to reinforce...
véjà du, all over again
A véjà du experience is about looking at a familiar situation but with fresh eyes, as if you’ve never seen it before. It forms the basis of an assignment I give in my CEP818, Creativity in Teaching & Learning course. The assignment is described in greater detail...
ABC-Triplet Ambigram
I am currently teaching a course on Creativity in Teaching & Learning and as a part of that I was searching for an interesting image to highlight a note I was posting to the class. I wanted an image that represented, in some cool manner, the multi-dimensionality...
Jumpstart Repurposing
I have often talked of repurposing as being key to creativity, particularly for teachers using new technologies. (See previous postings on this topic here and here, and here and here.) Imagine my surprise when this past Sunday's comics-page had a comic on this very...
TPACK game, the Matt Koehler version
There have been various descriptions of the TPACK game... some of which I have written about earlier. The first instance is something Judi Harris, Matt and I used at the 2007 NTLS meeting at Washington DC. You can find out more about it here. Second, is a submission...
Space Invaders in Paris
France is being attacked by alien beings! This summer in France I noticed characters from 80's video games in the strangest of places. For instance, see this one, that I found while walking somewhere near the Latin Quarter in Paris. And though I took a picture of just...
On surviving a Ph.D.
I just discovered (H/T Daily Dish) Matt Might's website and his writings on graduate school, academia, and the professoriate. Matt is funny, cogent and most importantly insightful. I recommend his writing to anybody who is interested in getting into graduate school,...
New Literacies & TPACK
I recently (through the magic of Twitter) found out about an initiative New Literacies Teacher Leader Institute 2010. This institute was organized by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education, the New Literacies Research Lab at the...
Demotivational Posters II
A few weeks ago I posted a note about an assignment I gave my students in the on-campus version of the MAET program. They had completed an unit on motivation and had watched the RSA / Daniel Pink video and their task was was to create demotivational posters, (along...
About face
I love finding interesting faces. I am not speaking of the ones on people (though I like interesting ones there as well) but rather the unexpected faces we find in things around us. I have been doing this for a while now and have a flickr set devoted to this. Here are...
TPACK Radio/Video Show, now on Vimeo
The TPACK Radio/Video show that we had created for ISTE is now available on Vimeo. I think this version is easier to embed and view (as opposed to a 21MB download, as it was the previous time around). TPACK Radio/Video Show ISTE 2010 from Punya Mishra on Vimeo. A fake...
TPACK commercial II, Mastercard “Priceless”
Here is the second of the two commercials created specially for our ISTE Radio/Video show. The first one (a take-off on the UPS/Whiteboard commercials can be seen here). Enjoy. As always, the director’s commentary is provided below....
TPACK commercial, UPS/Whiteboard version
Our ISTE Radio/Video show needed a few commercials to break the monotony - so we created a couple. Here is the first one, a take on the UPS / Whiteboard commercials. Watch and enjoy (director's commentary provided below)....
On breaking the rules (and words)
My daughter on her blog has a new poem / haiku called Sweat, a haiku with one glich. She is in India right now where the temperatures are easily in the 90's - which I guess explains the genesis of the poem. What was more interesting, to me however, was the manner in...
Cool i-Images at MICDS
I just spent a day at MICDS in St. Louis talking with a small but select group of teachers about creativity in teaching, the role of big ideas, the meaning of TPACK, the importance of trans-disciplinary learning (among other things). What a wonderful way of spending...
ISTE 2010, TPACK Radio/Video Show!
I have never been able to make to the ISTE (formerly NECC) conference since it falls bang in the middle of my summer teaching. This year was no exception. The only problem is that, this year, Matt and I had been invited to a special forum by SIGTE (titled "Considering...
Demotivational posters
I have been a big fan of Despair.com and its quirky, dark humor. I particularly love the demotivational posters, with their beautiful inspiring photographs coupled with some deeply cynical or depressing message. Today students in my MAET summer program completed a...
Walking in a straight line
Determining the shape of the earth is something I have written about previously. For instance, see this 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...
Indian creative genius
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...
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...
Dabbling to see: A rant
My friend and colleague Leigh Wolf forwarded me this article on Edward Tufte: The Many Faces (And Sculptures) Of Edward Tufte. I have been a fan of information design guru Edward Tufte's work for years (decades?). I love his emphasis on clarity and simplicity in...