véjà du, all over again

by | Saturday, September 04, 2010

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 here, but the core idea is to take multiple photographs of some everyday object in such a way that the viewer cannot easily determine what the object is! More here.

Today, I spent some time with my kids re-doing the assignment. My son suggested taking pictures of his X-Box 360 but we finally went with an object selected by my daughter. Here are the pictures. What do you think it is?


A few randomly selected blog posts…

Happy Diwali

Happy Diwali For an interactive card click here ... . Remember to turn your volume way up, and click anywhere in the sky above the Taj Mahal for some environmentally friendly, fireworks.

STEM Futures at AAAS

STEM Futures at AAAS

ASU recently hosted, what is known as, the world's largest scientific gathering, the annual conference of the American Association of the Advancement of Science. As as part of this conference I was invited, along with Ariel Anbar and Trina Davis, to talk about our...

Day 2, after lunch, Kozma

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...

Fact / Fiction, ambigram

Yesterday after I had posted my two latest ambigrams (see them here) I got a message on Facebook from my cousin Sonny (the one who composed the cool music for my Explore, Create videos) saying Big deal. I can make "fact" and "fiction" blur together till they are...

Ghee Happy

Sanjay Patel is an animator at Pixar and has come up with a beautifully designed book about Indian gods and goddesses. Check it out at his website, whimsically called GheeHappy. [You will need to go to the site FAQ to understand what that means.] The illustrations are...

The search for pattern, beauty & intelligent life…

Connecting birds nests to "crop circles under the ocean" leading to some thoughts on perception, beauty and finding intelligent life in the universe (or maybe even on this planet). The other day I found a bird's nest on my front lawn. Most probably it had fallen down...

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...

21st Century Competencies, what are they? New article

Back in June 2011 I was in Paris for EduSummIT: Building a Global Community of Policy-Makers, Educators, and Researchers to Move Education into the Digital Age. EduSummIT was organized by UNESCO (along with other partners) and brought together over 120 scholars,...

Two new photosets

I just uploaded two new photosets onto to Flickr. They are: Best of 2007 A photoset documenting the past 12 months (mostly family related stuff) Matt & Punya There was a recent article in the New Educator about the work Matt and I do together (the TPCK stuff). Here...

8 Comments

  1. Punya Mishra

    A corkscrew it is! This is what the overall object really looks like.

    or click here to see all the images

    Reply
  2. Amy Strange

    I’m going to agree with Randy that it looks like a corkscrew.

    Reply
  3. Jung

    I think this is a part of the lawn spreader!!

    Reply
  4. Kylie

    Corkscrew?

    Reply
  5. Mary

    part of a table umbrella???

    Reply
  6. Heather Nordman

    Telescope?

    Reply
  7. Randy Johann

    It looks like a corkscrew.

    Reply

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