Postdictable, the commercials

by | Thursday, October 15, 2009

I had written earlier about the idea of “postdictable” which was defined as something that is “surprising initially, but then understandable with a bit of thought.” It lies at the spot between predictability and total chaos. The movie Sixth Sense is postdictable in the best sense of the world. Good teaching I believe needs to be postdictable. That is what keeps us engaged, keeps us waiting for more, the payoff as it were. And best of all, once all the pieces are in, we can’t wait to go back and review everything again, to see just how beautifully the whole thing holds together. There is a strong aesthetic component to this – a sense of wholeness, closure, elegance, and inevitability. Good poems have this quality, as do mathematical theorems. A well crafted lecture or a lesson plan has this quality as well. In my mind these ideas are closely tied to the Dewey’s idea of experience and to the idea of design. Hopefully I will have a chance to explore these connections in a later post but for now, here are a couple of commercials that I think were postdictable in a really cool kind of way.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7MVtgXMclI[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mTLO2F_ERY[/youtube]

Incidentally the Explore, Create & Share series of videos I made with my kids attempt to capture some of these same qualities!

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Ganapati Festival Photographs, 2011

The Hindu god Ganesh (the elephant-headed one) is celebrated across India, and the world, around this time of the year. The Hindu community in Lansing is no exception. A couple of days ago I was asked to take pictures of a music program at the local temple. It was a...

You have a life?

Story in the NYTimes (forwarded to me by Leigh) titled: Professor as an open book, about how "professors of all ranks and disciplines are revealing such information on public, national platforms: blogs, Web pages, social networking sites, even campus television." Of...

McLuhan on Silver Lining for Learning (5/3)

McLuhan on Silver Lining for Learning (5/3)

This is the fifth of what was supposed to be a three post-series 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 medium is the message.” The second post, focuses on a...

The Postman always rings twice: Unpacking McLuhan (3/3)

The Postman always rings twice: Unpacking McLuhan (3/3)

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...

Photos from the AT&T Award ceremony

The award ceremony for the 2008 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards was last Friday. I drove back from Purdue in time to be there - mainly because I wanted to hear how people would respond to our faux radio interview 🙂 The event went off well, and people...

Cleaning and coding Interviews with AI

Cleaning and coding Interviews with AI

I have previously written about how AI can possibly help with qualitative research AND how how AI has given me a superpower which is the ability to write computer programs. Well this post is an extension of both of these topics. To provide some context, for the past...

Heading to India

I leave for India tomorrow to participate in a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity being held in Bangalore from the 20th to the 22nd of August. The meeting is organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International...

Wikipedia minor fail

I recently received the following email: Sir, I was reading the article in Wikipedia on 'Samarangana Sutradhara' (King Bhoja's treatise on Architecture). I was of the impression that there is no translation of the work in English. Though the article says that there is...

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...

2 Comments

  1. Patrick Diemer

    Those videos were great but your explanation of how it relates to teaching was better. Please keep on posting!

    Reply
    • Punya Mishra

      Thanks Patrick. You know you are an educator when you tend to see everything (and I mean everything) through the lens of teaching and/or learning.

      Reply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Making Teaching suspenseful and post-dictable – A reflection task « explore. create. share. - [...] line between predictability and chaos, and most importantly makes sense post hoc. See these posts here and here on…
  2. Rethinking homework, some thoughts… | Punya Mishra's Web - [...] Designing for anticipation, Teaching for anticipation | Punya Mishra's Web on Postdictable, the commercialssharmila on Demotivational postersmapquest directions on…
  3. Designing for anticipation, Teaching for anticipation | Punya Mishra's Web - [...] Stories, Teaching, Worth Reading | 3 Comments » Other related posts and pages: |Postdictable, the commercials | Teaching design,…

Leave a Reply to Punya Mishra Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *