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…

Creativity is just connecting things

Steve Jobs retired as CEO of Apple this past week. The Wall Street Journal marked this event by creatingSteve Job's Best Quotes compendium. There are all worth reading - but a couple stood out for their connection to this course. Creativity is just connecting things....

Robert Pirsig, 1928 – 2017

Robert Pirsig, 1928 – 2017

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was one of those books that have influenced me deeply. I read it when I was in high school and read it again and again, almost obsessively for a while. It was my companion through college, graduate school and beyond. I...

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)....

School design in MLFTC News

School design in MLFTC News

One of the most exciting projects we have been involved with in the Office of Scholarship and Innovation (OofSI) has been our partnership with the Kyrene School District. We have written about it previously (on the OofSI site as well as on my website),...

Day 2 Morning session, Mishra & Light

I just completed my presentation Education Technology and Teacher Education, the TPACK framework. I think it went well, though you have to talk to ask the audience what they "really" think. I had been allocated 60 minutes for my talk - but Radha and I discussed...

Happy New Year, from the College of Education, MSU

The college of Education at Michigan State University just came out with a video titled Year in Review. You can see the video below. I would like to point out that a couple of projects I am involved with made it into the video. They include the project with the Azim...

7 tools… one big job: Video Explore II

A few months ago I had created a video mashup of a commercial (see the original and my mashup here). This video ended with three key words, encouraging people to Explore, Create, Share! I then got the idea for creating short videos to represent these three ideas. I...

The gullibility of experts

Does it matter whether a brownie is served on a paper plate or on china? Is the Patagonian Toothfish less tasty than the Chilean Bass? In an earlier posting (perception of taste) I had cited research showing that wine with an expensive price tag was judged to be...

SITE 2008: A preview

Matt and I are at the SITE conference next week. He has blogged about it here... so I need to do my bit. We have a busy schedule at Las Vegas, which means less time for all the fun stuff. The big one is the Keynote by Matt and myself (more details below). Here is a...

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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