I just stumbled upon this website of witty and original t-shirt designs. Two of my favorites are "Experimental music" (included below) and "Puzzled Putter." You can see all the designs here.
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 -...
New media, new genres
There is an interesting article in today's NYTimes titled Content and its discontents by Virginia Heffernan. In this article she makes the argument the new digital, online media require new ways of representing information, new ways of thinking about how ideas are...
designing research | designing technology
Matt Koehler and I usually have a end of semester show-case of work done by the students in our classes. This semester Matt has been teaching CEP955 (Research design and methods for educational psychology and educational technology) and I have been involved with...
Contruction (sic)
Check out this page of examples of bad design. Some of these look too crazy to be true - but who knows... stranger things have happened. Interestingly enough the title of the page is "Award winning contructions!" I wonder if that is deliberate. Site worth sharing with...
Alien games paper, published
I had posted earlier that a paper on gender and video games had been accepted for publication. Well, it is published now, full reference, abstract and link to PDF given below. Heeter, C., Egidio, R., Mishra, P., Winn, B., & Winn, J. (2008). Alien Games: Do girls...
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.
Microblogging in the classroom II
I had blogged earlier about my attempts at using micro-blogging in my face to face classroom. As I had said after the experiment At the end of the class, upon being quizzed, the students seemed to feel that this experiment had been a success and would like to do it...
Engineering Education, past & future II
A couple of weeks ago I made a presentation (with Neeraj Buch) to a group of engineering educators from India. This was a meeting organized by the College of Engineering and the Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education. Having made this presentation once I had...
Death & Taxes
I am always on the lookout for new and interesting visual representations of complex data and just discovered Death & Taxes, 2009: "is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected...
Analyzing political debate
Political debates are heavily analyzed - by pundits and laypeople alike. I had my own minor visual contribution to this discourse through this WordMap/Cloud of the third and final debate between McCain and Obama . Such wordmaps are fun to create and see but are not...
We feel fine
We Feel Fine is a web-installation, "a self-organizing particle system," art project that is powerful and touching - building as it does on people's emotions, harvested from blog postings from around the world. As the designers say, "We hope it makes the world seem a...
Microblogging in the classroom
I have written quite a bit about how a technology can become an educational technology (see this, this, this and this). This is a non-trivial task that all educators face, and requires situational creativity in re-purposing / re-designing the existing tool to meet...
Tweaking the design
I have been blogging pretty seriously now for 10 months now and am quite enjoying it. I have made some changes to the design of the site that may be worth explaining. As I have blogged over the past few months, I have come to realize that I typically make three kinds...
Jared Diamond on creativity, innovation and wealth
Jared Diamond has an article on edge.org, somewhat provocatively titled: How to get rich? The question his after is simply, "what is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation,...
London Underground Map
One of my favorite pieces of design is the London Underground Map. It has been replicated all over the world - from Mumbai to Tokyo. Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to a BBC 4 video made in 1987 about this map. Check it out here Here is a link to the Wikipedia page...
Representing the election
How does one best represent all the voting information that we now collect as a part of the electoral process? Here are a few websites that really stood out for me. Send me any more that you have and I can add them to the list. The first is a series of cartograms...
Engineering education, past & future
Neeraj Buch and I were invited to talk to a group of engineering educators from India. This was a meeting organized by the College of Engineering and the Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education. The topic I spoke about was was Improving Engineering Education:...
Nerdview or being stuck in our worldview
I recently received a note from a graduate student as an unnamed university. This student wrote to me after having assigned the TPACK handbook chapter (co-authored with Matt Koehler) to a bunch of pre-service teachers, and suggested that the chapter was hard to read,...
On designing the body
Corpus 2.0 by Marcia Nolte is a set of seven portraits illustrating how the human body could adjust itself to the design of products, including a hole in the lips for smokers and an extended shoulder for holding a phone. Very strange and very interesting, check it out
Of games, mood and age
I love reading. I love watching movies. I love over-analyzing books and movies, seeking to find pattern and structure, motifs and motives. I love to break them down in my mind and put them back together again. I read reviews of books and movies by the ton, sometimes...
When is a picture of a sandwich more than a sandwich?
The answer is that when that picture has been taken by someone you know and it ends up on the NYTimes Freakonomics blog! Long story short, a picture of a sandwich taken by Leigh Wolf has been used by the cool people over at Freakonomics to illustrate a story. Check it...
WordMapping the debate
I created two WordMaps (using wordle.net) using all the words used by Obama and McCain during their third and final debate. Kind of interesting. Check them out (Click on the image for larger versions, hosted on Flickr). Wordle created using all the words used by...
Ads in Video Games
A couple of people have emailed me about the Obama campaign inserting advertisements into video games. Check out this Flickr set with screenshots of these advertisements. Most of the press is reporting that these ads show up in just racing games but as these...
Students video premiere on aftered.tv
This just in. Leigh Wolf just informed me that a video created by three of her students this past summer accepted by AfterEd - a web-based video channel produced by EdLab at Teachers College, Columbia University. New content is published weekly, including news,...
The pleasures of being a teacher
Yesterday, as I was watching the second presidential debate, and following various bloggers who were live-blogging the event, I took a moment to check my email. I found that I had received a note from a former student. This individual had been in my summer cohort last...
Wicked problems, Design & Horst Rittel
Matt Koehler and I have often talked about the wicked problems of design and teaching with technology (most specifically in our handbook chapter on TPACK). We take the idea of wicked problems from a classic paper written by Rittel and Weber back in 1973. As Wikipedia...
Political poetry
What do Donald Rumsfeld and Sarah Palin have in common? Turns out that they both deliver speeches that can, at be, without much effort, converted into poetry. Check out this and this. Some of them are quite briliant.
GeoGreeting!
I often do an assignment with my students where they go looking for letterforms in nature. Leigh Wolf just sent me this link to GeoGreeting.com which takes the same idea - but conceptualizes it on a global scale. Check out this example.
100 greatest mathematical theorems
Title says it all... check it out.