Mark Ambinder at the Politics blog at the Atlantic President Obama plans to name Howard A. Schmidt, a veteran cyber security warrior with experience at senior levels of government and industry, to fill a long-anticipated cyber coordinator position at the National...
Posts related to: Blogging
On picturing words, tech-mix an old school idea
Students in my CEP 818 (Creativity in Teaching and Learning) have been using digital photography to explore a variety of topics related to trans-disciplinary creativity. I hope to showcase some of their work on this blog once the semester gets over. In the meanwhile,...
New ambigrams for a new blog!
What do you think this is? Take a guess...Well, it is the top half of a lake-reflection ambigram. What this means is that if you reflect what you see along a horizontal line at the bottom of the image, the picture you will then get will spell a word. Can you figure...
Shreya’s blog, new Sci-Po’s
Shreya, my daughter has a blog, Uniquely Mine. An RSS feed from her blog can be found right here (just scroll down and see the right column). Anyway, over the past few weeks she has been doing something for extra credit for the science class. Her fifth-grade teacher...
Color me Creative
I just ran across this blog (Color Me Katie) that just blew me away. Katie Sokoler is a freelance photographer and street artist living in Brooklyn - and her blog just throbs with life, and energy and the sheer pleasure of living. That's her down there blowing bubbles...
Obtuse can be right!
My daughter, whose creative exploits have been featured here before (for instance see her design for a math-music game), now has a blog, titled Uniquely Mine. It features original writing (poems, stories) by her. Do check it out. You can find regular updates on this...
Visual proofs
I just came across these lovely visual mathematical proofs. For instance consider the following sequence: 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ... = 1 and then see the following image on the blog!! How cool is that!!!! I had posted about something similar earlier (see visualizing...
Explore, Create, Share… the videos
Note: This post was updated on March 21, 2024 since some of videos were not showing up for some reason. Over the past few months I have been working with my kids on creating short thematic videos. The themes we chose were the three words, Explore, Create & Share....
The revolution will be twittered
The recent (and ongoing) evens in Iran sadden me deeply... but also give me hope. The scenes and news emerging from there speak of courage and a need and demand for freedom. What is also amazing has been the use of technology particularly twitter to get news out of...
Is a lecture just a lecture?
My mashup of a commercial has been on YouTube for a while and just yesterday I noticed that someone had left a very thoughtful comment... and that comment got me thinking... and hence this posting. To start with, if you haven't seen the videos here they are again....
TPACK Newsletter #3: May09 Edition
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #3: Late April 2009 Welcome to the third edition of the TPACK Newsletter, now with 362 subscribers (representing a 30% increase in the last two months!), and appearing bimonthly between August and April. If you are not sure what TPACK is,...
Of tools and disciplines (OR the TPK in TPACK)
One of the many things I have to do as a faculty member is review grant proposals. This is an important service to the field, but truth be told, given how busy I am I do see it as somewhat of a chore. I was recently reviewing some educational research proposals for a...
Guest blogging for Nashworld: TPACK video
Sean Nash over at Nashworld asked me to guest blog for this week while he is out with his students doing some really cool stuff. Here is a link to my posting: A TPACK video mashup!. I end the post with a couple of videos, one a commercial and the other my mashup...
Tech as tool, medium & network
I just discovered (through the serendipitous connectibility of Google Alerts) about Teaching Thursdays a blog from the University of North Dakota. It is a collaborative venture between Anne Kelsh (Office of Instructional Development) and Bill Caraher (Department of...
Following up on lunar distance
A followup to my previous posting about the Italian kids calculating the distance to the moon using recordings from the Apollo Space program. As I read the story on the technology Review website, I came to the comments made by readers. One stuck out. This is what...
Serendipitous Connectability… a short history of an idea
A while back I had written about the idea of "serendipitous connectability;" the idea that the web allows us to "to run across things that are stunning in their ability to connect to us in powerful, emotionally touching ways." I was prompted to do this by clicking on...
Why I love the web…
I don't know if anyone has been following the back and forth following my posting about the Periodic Table of Typefaces (see Yet another periodic table...). In brief, I was quite critical of the design of this table and made that point in no uncertain terms. Imagine...
SITE08 Keynote YouTubed!
I just found out (via These Apples are Delicious blog, and more specifically this posting: Creative Teachers) that the keynote that Matt and I presented at SITE08 is now available on YouTube! Somebody went through the effort of breaking up the video into 5 parts and...
Representing DNA as code
What does it mean to represent something? Sean Nash (of Nashworld) and I have been having some fun at the expense of periodic representations (my post and his response) and even children's books. I had been wanting to write about this for the past few days but travel,...
Gandhi, ambigrams, creativity & the power of small pieces loosely joined
This is an extended piece on the manner in which the web, small pieces loosely joined, can lead to “serendipitous connectabilty” (something I had written about earlier here). All this is situated in a story that connects cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader, Oriya...
EduPunk: The logo
I had written about the EduPunk program and my natural affinity to it here. What I forgot to add in that posting was an EduPunk logo I had created. This logo was made using photos of letterforms from Flickr. There is a handy-dandy tool created by Erik Kastner called...
Finding myself in EduPunk
Matt Koehler introduce me to the idea of edupunk. As this Chronicle story (Frustrated With Corporate Course-Management Systems, Some Professors Go 'Edupunk') says, Edupunk seems to be a reaction against the rise of course-managements systems, which offer cookie-cutter...
Responding to my reading…
I had written a response to Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist a while ago (read it here). Yesterday, I received a note from Irfan critiquing my take on the novel. This is what he wrote: Punya, I read the novel and it does not seem to me, as you interpret,...
A different vision of the web
T. H. Nelson coined the word "hypertext" and more than anyone else, and much earlier than anyone else, truly understood how computing technology would change the text and print. One of my most treasured possession is a copy of his double-book ("Computer Lib: You Can...
Ambi-poetry: A mathematician reinterprets ambigrams
My friend Gaurav Bhatnagar (I had blogged about his new book, Get Smart: Math Concepts here), for some reason, known only to him, has decided to create a poetry-blog based around my ambigrams. Each posting consists of one ambigram (taken from my large collection of...
Blogging has been light
the past few days, primarily due to "beginning semester" blues. I hope to get back to full strength pretty soon... there are bunch of things I would like to blog about just a question of finding the time 🙁
A year of blogging
It was exactly a year ago, on the first of January 2008, that I began blogging (see first posting here). When I started I wasn't sure how well this blogging thing would work out. Now 12 months and 376 posts later - I have to say that I have truly enjoyed this. I had...
Visualizing feeds
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 -...
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...
We feel fine about ambient findability (really?)
Most of us live our lives with the assumption of practical obscurity - i.e. the idea that what we do, even in public places, is essentially private. There are just too many people and just too few ways of tracking us individually. So we were for the most part,...