Cool i-Images at MICDS

by | Tuesday, July 06, 2010

I just spent a day at MICDS in St. Louis talking with a small but select group of teachers about creativity in teaching, the role of big ideas, the meaning of TPACK, the importance of trans-disciplinary learning (among other things). What a wonderful way of spending the day! This visit was organized by Elizabeth Helfant at MICDS. Apart from the workshop, it was also wonderful to finally meet up with Mr. Nashworld, Sean Nash himself. Sean and I have been blogging buddies for a while now and it was great to finally meet up with him.

As a part of our activities today I had all the participants crate i-Images. I have written about i-Images on this blog before (see here and here).

i-Images are the brainchild of David Wong and you can find his page on i-Images here.

Anyway, here are some of the i-Images created today. I do think they are pretty cool and thought provoking, each in its own way. Click on the images below to see what the workshop participants created. Enjoy.

Kristine M Kamper

Lynn Mittler

Chris Rappleye

Stephanie Madlinger

Lisa Huxley

Sean Nash

Sean Nash

Sean Nash

A few randomly selected blog posts…

The “O” in Obama

Steven Heller continues his series on political typography and branding with an interview with the design team that developed the now iconic symbol for the Obama campaign. Check out The "O" in Obama. Previous postings on this theme can be found here and here.

How not to conduct research

Note: This post has been edited somewhat to (a) clearly hide the url, which I had not done a good job of before; and (b) to add a few suggestions in the last paragraph for some strategies to make it easier for the participants to take part in the study.  (September...

New ambigrams, Mert-Demir and one more…

I recently received an email with the following request: I am an engineer living in Turkey and I am going to have my second son hopefully in April and I would love to have their names as a tattoo. However having such a special work that will remain with me for my...

iPhones, higher ed & faculty resistance

Today's NYTimes has a story Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod about universities handing out iPhones and iTouchs to freshmen. A part of this may be making specific universities look "cool" to their incoming students - a requirement in the highly competitive world of...

Who said this?

A quote in today's oped in the NYTimes, about how this current financial crisis is difficult to understand since many of the decisions were taken by computer programs. The author quotes someone as follows: the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a...

Correlates of creativity

Just came across this on the Ph.D. design list (a listserv for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design) from a posting by Charles Burnette. He quotes Donald MacKinnon, author of a large study on creativity in the arts, sciences and professions: If I...

Why teachers should care about beauty in science

Why teachers should care about beauty in science

Figure 1. “We are a way for the universe to know itself” - Carl SaganScience is one of the most powerful ways to engage with the beauty of the universe.We use science to understand the cosmos and, in the process,find beauty in our understandings and...

On making computation visible

Here is a cool video about a "a mechanical, binary adding machine that uses marbles to flip the bits" - in other words a computer made of wood, that works at a pace that we can grasp! Marvelous. (HT: Collision Detection). Check out the video: [youtube width="425"...

Jeff Keltner from Google Education to talk today

There has been a great deal of interest in the educational use of cloud computing tools such as Google Docs in the College (and at MSU at large). Though these tools are often free and easy to use, they come with concerns about intellectual property and ownership of...

3 Comments

  1. emanuel - frases lindas

    While i-Images might be a fine solution to working through a creative block, I still ponder what is happening on a more abstract level to inhibit the process.

    Reply
  2. Punya Mishra

    Stewart, I think you ask a really tough question.. and one that many people would love to get the answer to. My sense is that genuine creativity lies at this interesting tension between order and chaos. And in some ways being creative is about balancing between these two. Too much order is boring, too much chaos is incomprehensible.

    So in some sense, the i-Images help both the teacher and the student get the big picture of a domain.

    Not sure if I answered the question or not…
    ~ punya

    Reply
  3. stewart sternberg

    i-Images are an interesting creative expression, and I can see some great applications for them in the classroom, and even have some ideas of different means of creating them. That being said, I have a question which this blog posting provoked for me. I don’t know why this came to mind, but here it is: “What is the greatest obstacle to creativity?” I know this is a no-brainer of a question, because it is obviously different for each person. That being said, I think it is nonetheless worth consideration. While i-Images might be a fine solution to working through a creative block, I still ponder what is happening on a more abstract level to inhibit the process.

    Reply

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