I have written about the value of seeing humor in the futility of existence (see this and this) but humor can also be found in the existence of futility. Below is a motivational video that demonstrates this fact. Enjoy…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XI3U8eupNQ[/youtube]
As the young man says, “You can do anything that you think that you can do.” Well, may be not!
A few randomly selected blog posts…
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...
Back in the day, Matt Koehler and I had come up with a game to help teachers creatively explore the TPACK framework. There are some traces of this on this website (see here and here) but many of these links are dead. One that still exists is this YouTube video by Lisa...
I just created a personalDNA map for myself. Turns out I am a Benevolent Inventor... beats being a benevolent dictator I say! However, this posting is concerned not with what the survey found out about me but rather about what I learned about the survey. Let's get the...
I just starred in a movie! Turns out that they are making a documentary about the conference and were interviewing various participants. So I ended up out holding a microphone in front of a conference banner (that would be the background), speaking into a video...
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,...
Teachers College Record chooses a couple of articles each week to offer freely to visitors to its website. These are featured in their email newsletter (TCRecord this week), and goes out to thousands of people. Imagine my surprise when I opened my newsletter a few...
Chain-Rotational ambigram design for the word "design."One can read the word both clockwise from the top or anti-clockwise, from the bottom. Our latest article in the series we write for the journal TechTrends (under the broad rubric of Rethinking Technology...
NYTimes article on how publishers are responding to the advent of peer-to-peer sharing of textbook files. Check out First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.
This is the third of three blog posts about how media influence our thinking. This is the second of three blog posts about how media influence our thinking. The first post, uses the invention of writing and print to unpack the meaning of McLuhan’s statement, “The...
Thanks Stewart. I have always appreciated your comments on this blog. This one was no exception. The inclusion of pastrami, gratuitous as it may have been, was just right. As the young man in the video says, “You just have to believe in yourself, formulate a plan of action, and follow through with it.” A perfect recipe for a massive headache.
Absurdity and futility are the soul of humor. That and pastrami. I find that too often people live in crisis, losing perspective. Humor is a balance. It’s a speedbump that stops the slide down the wrong end of the roller coaster.
When I was diagnosed with cancer many years ago, my doctor wanted to operate immediately. I put him off, explaining that “Wrestlemania” was only a week away and I needed to know who won the heavyweight championship before going under the knife. He lectured me about the danger and attempted to negotiate alternatives with me. We could DVR the event, he suggested. Perhaps I could be isolated until I could relive the event so the outcome wouldn’t be spoiled.
His voice was deep with concern and thick with empathy. A consummate professional. And all I wanted was a chuckle from him, or at least a smile. It was working the wrong room at Vegas.