In this TCRecord piece, Daniel T. WIllingham uses what we know about cognitive psychology to explain Why students don't like school. He suggests that although most people believe that humans are good at thinking, it is actually the weakest of our mental faculties......
Posts related to: Creativity
Harris, Mishra & Koehler, 2009
Harris, J., Mishra, P. & Koehler, M. J. (2009). Teachers' Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge and Learning Activity Types: Curriculum-based Technology Integration Reframed. Journal of Research on Technology in Education. In this paper we critically...
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...
Computer Fiction: Two new ambigrams
For one reason or another I have not been bitten by the ambigram bug for a while - till suddenly a week or two ago, two new ambigrams popped into my head. A bit of work with Freehand later... here they are. Enjoy Computer Fiction
Creativity in teaching, a workshop
The Office Faculty and Organizational Development at MSU conducts an annual Spring Institute on College Teaching and Learning every summer. The past week was their 15th such event (details here) and I was asked to conduct a workshop on Creative Teaching. I was...
Computerized aesthetics… what’s right with that idea?
I just came across this... Online System Rates Images by Aesthetic Quality Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has launched the Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine (ACQUINE), an online system for determining the aesthetic quality of an image. The online photo-rating...
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....
Appreciate the magic…
Louis CK on appreciating the magic of technology... [youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOtEQB-9tvk[/youtube]
Of teaching & cooking
Elizabeth Helfant over at Digital Learning Environments Blog has an interesting posting titled The Pancake principle. She makes a connection between technology integration and making pancakes, and offers three tenets of the Pancake principle. This posting is inspired...
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 first 100 days, on Facebook
This is just absolutely brilliant!! In particular check out the URL that Dick Cheney sends to Obama, approximately half-way down the page. (You will have to copy and past the url).
Too cool for school: Using the TPACK framework
Matt Koehler and I just published an article in Learning & Leading with Technology, the membership magazine of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). The complete citation is as follows: Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2009, May). Too Cool for...
Exploring visual space with mathematics
Stacy Clause just sent me this very cool link to an article titled Exploring logo designs with Mathematica. In this article, Chris Carlson, of the User Design Group at Mathematia shows how one can mathematically develop variations on commercial logo designs by the...
Rube Goldberg website
Just found out about this through a list-serv I am on. Very cool. Hema is a Dutch department store (started back in 1926 and has over 150 stores all over the Netherlands). Check out HEMA's product page... and just wait a couple of seconds and watch what happens. Don't...
Create… Emergence!
I ended the mashup TPACK commercial with the following words, Explore, Create, Share! Over the past couple of weeks my kids and I have been working on a series of short videos around these three words. The first one we made was around the idea of "Explore," titled To...
Profesor 2.0, blurring the boundaries
I am in Chicago to give the Keynote address at the 2009 DePaul University Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference. The conference theme this year is Engaging Minds: Pedagogy and Personalism. I was invited by Sharon Guan (she was part of the AACTE Innovation &...
Explore: To see … or not to see
I have been working with my kids on a series of short videos around the themes of Explore, Create, Share. These three words were used in my video mashup of a commercial (see the commercial AND my mashup here). Original music for this series was created by my cousin,...
Twittering in class, what’s the big deal?
Noah Ullman just forwarded me this story in the The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Professor encourages students to pass notes during class via twitter. It is amazing to me that this merited being called news. If you have been following this blog you know that...
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...
New presentation tool
Todd Edwards at Miami University just told me about this new presentation tool called Prezi.... You have to see it to believe it. Just amazing. Check it out at http://prezi.com/
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...
Bic to vase: Cool idea
A vase for a daisy, made from a plastic bic pen. (Website here).
TPACK & the moon OR why I love the web
I recently blogged (here and here) about the experiment conducted by students in Italy that allowed them to use publicly available NASA audio recordings from the moon landings to determine the distance between the earth and the moon. I bit more online research led to...
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...
From Tech to Ed Tech: Distance to the moon
For one reason or another, I have three consecutive posts regarding the earth and sun and moon - i.e. the local area in the solar system. I had just completed my previous postings (on on seeing through eclipses and measuring the radius of the earth) when I came across...
The beauty of the web: Shape of the earth
While searching for information for my previous posting on using eclipses to see, I came across an interesting paper that provided yet another way of figuring out the shape of the Earth. Lynch, D.K. (2005). Turbulent ship wakes: further evidence that the Earth is...
Using eclipses to see
Let me start with two questions: First, what is the shape of the Earth? And two, what shapes does the sun cast on the ground when filtered through the leaves of a tree? Of course we know the answer to the first question. The pictures from space show clearly this...
Brilliant stop motion
Just came across this on Nina Paley's blog... and it just blew me away! [youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY[/youtube]
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...
Creativity at Wake Forest
I presented yesterday at a conference a Wake Forest University titled: Creativity: Worlds in the Making. I was part of a panel that included Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein and Todd Siler. More details about the panel and links to my presentation can be found below....