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…

Ambigrams & Mathematics at HYSA

Ambigrams & Mathematics at HYSA

The Gary K. Herberger Young Scholars Academy (HYSA) is a school designed for highly gifted students in grades 7-12 affiliated with the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and Arizona State University. Last Friday I had the pleasure and honor of working with all the...

WHY: The most important question of all

Why do anything at all? This blog post is a collection of videos and images that I have collected over time that speak to the pointlessness of trying to find an answer to this question and how one question, even if answered, leads to many more. This is the kind of...

On writing less badly

I just came across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, 10 tips on How to Write Less Badly [H/T Geekpress]. It is not that I agreed with every point being made there but a couple of them (To become a writer, write!; Find a voice, don't just get...

Me & We in AI

Me & We in AI

What does generative AI mean to me? And to us? These key questions were part of a special exhibit curated by students in the DCI 691: Education by Design course I taught this fall. Education by Design is my favorite class to teach. It is a course about design—design...

Koehler & Mishra (in press)

Just for the record, Matt Koehler and I have a new piece in press. I should note that significant portions of this paper were condensed and updated from Mishra & Koehler (2007), with permission from AACE. Email me if you want a draft copy. The complete reference and...

Creativity, genius & age

Malcolm Gladwell has a great essay in a recent New Yorker on the relationship between genius and age. It is popularly believed that genius is often tied up with precocity. There are two aspects to this. First, creativity requires the energy and brashness of youth....

It’s only a game…

... but what if real people die? Excellent article by William Saletan on Slate about a new breed of war-toys that blur the line between video games and real war. As the article says, "if looks and feels like a video game. But it kills real people." As it turns out,...

The intangibles of teaching

Jim Garrison and A. G. Rud have a wonderful article on TCRecord on Reverence in Classroom Teaching. Though, reverence may be "too exalted a word to associate with the practical and often mundane activities of teaching," it appears to me that ignoring these deeper...

TPACK Newsletter (#1)

Judi Harris, Matt Koehler, Mario Kelly and I have been working on setting up a regular TPACK newsletter. The first edition of the newsletter went out to subscribers yesterday. I am including the newsletter here for archival purposes. If you are interested in signing...

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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