Sean had this wonderful post on his blog (Is this a sluggish strategy?) about this whole scientific and mathematical poetry that is going around. He links to some excellent sci-po's written by his students (see Pushing Scientific Thought Into Art) and also provides a...
Palindromic poetry in prison, introducing Sandra Gould Ford
Those who follow this blog know that I love visual wordplay. This is most commonly seen in my ambigram work but another area where I have spent some time is in writing palindromic poetry. I wrote a whole series of poems when I was in graduate school at Illinois and...
TPACK Newsletter, #6 Jan-Feb, 2010
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #6, January/February 2010 Welcome to the sixth edition of the TPACK Newsletter, with 642 subscribers (representing a 13% increase during the past 2.5 months), now appearing twice each fall and spring semester. If you are not sure what TPACK is,...
Art, design & teaching great quote
Steve Wagenseller, a student in my 817 Learning Technology by Design seminar wrote something so cool in the class forum that I felt that it was worth recording on my blog... ...One of the differences between art versus design is that a user has to approach the art,...
Poetry, Science & Math, OR why I love the web
A 5th grade science assignment, transformed. A rant about Mother Goose. A math poetry challenge! How did that come to be? And what does that have to do with loving the Interwebs? Read on... I had written earlier about how my 10 year-old daughter had been writing...
eduPUNKing a course website!!
I had written about the EduPunk movement earlier, in fact had even designed a logo for it. A brief description of Edupunk can be found on Wikipedia (a google search will reveal many more). Wikipedia describes it as follows: Edupunk is an approach to teaching and...
Nature v.s. nurture, what are we missing
Jordy Whitmer over at the Birmingham School district forwarded me this link to this really cool video by George Kembel on Awakening Creativity. There is a lot in the video to ponder and discuss but I want to focus on something he said about music learning that really...
Phoenix rising
Mark Ambinder at the Politics blog at the Atlantic President Obama plans to name Howard A. Schmidt, a veteran cyber security warrior with experience at senior levels of government and industry, to fill a long-anticipated cyber coordinator position at the National...
Teaching to learning styles, what hogwash
There is an article in today's Chronicle titled Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students. I have been somewhat skeptical of the learning styles literature for a while, not the least for hearing the phrase being bandied about without much...
On picturing words, tech-mix an old school idea
Students in my CEP 818 (Creativity in Teaching and Learning) have been using digital photography to explore a variety of topics related to trans-disciplinary creativity. I hope to showcase some of their work on this blog once the semester gets over. In the meanwhile,...
Putting technology first
Don Norman has a great essay titled Technology First, Needs Last that I strongly recommend. We have been making a similar argument in some of our more recent pieces, see here and here... What do you think of Norman's ideas? Read it first and come back here to discuss...
All you can cheat, part II (a response)
Patrick Diemer commented on my previous posting, All you can cheat, the web & learning by saying: Do you have any words of wisdom or resources on how to create appropriate questions? This sounds great, but easier said than done in my humble opinion. I started...
All you can cheat, the web & learning
Now here's an important story coming out of Denmark: Students in Denmark Allowed Full Access to the Internet During Exams I have always been a believer in allowing students to use any resources they can during examinations. If we care about authentic assessment, what...
Jere Brophy / Motivation Ambigram
A new ambigram created in memory of Jere Brophy, world renowned scholar on psychology of motivation. The ambigram reads, "motivation" one direction and "Jere Brophy" when rotated by 180 degrees. Click on the image to see a larger version, hosted on Flickr....
TPACK moving in international circles
My friend, Martin Oliver, over at the London Knowledge Lab sent me the following link about a TPACK related publication that appeared in the International Journal of Education and Development Using Information and Communication Technology, aka IJEDUICT. (Boy, that's a...
TPACK newsletter #5, Oct – Nov 09
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #5: October/November 2009 Welcome to the fifth edition of the TPACK Newsletter, now with 568 subscribers (representing a 15% increase during the last two months!), and appearing bimonthly between August and April. If you are not sure what TPACK...
Unconscious competence, continuing the dialogue
Ken Friedman, whose article I had used as the basis of my previous posting, From incompetence to mastery, the stages dropped me an email in response to my critique. To provide some context, (you can read my full post here) I had suggested in my posting that it may be...
From incompetence to mastery, the stages
One who knows and knows he knows is a wise man, Follow Him One who knows and knows not he knows is asleep, Awaken him One who knows not and knows he knows not is a child, Teach him One who knows not and knows not he knows not is a Fool, Avoid him. -- Attributed...
Designing for anticipation, Teaching for anticipation
In a couple of previous posts I had talked about the idea of postdiction (see the posts here and here). The argument being that good teaching (among a long list of other good things) is postdictable, i.e. it walks the line between predictability and chaos, and most...
AACTE Webinar series coming up!
I chair the committee on Innovation & Technology of the American Association for Innovation & Technology (AACTE). The committee has been working hard with people over at AACTE (Rachel Popham deserves a big shout out) in organizing a webinar series coming up November...
Postdictable, the commercials
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...
William Kamkwamba, TED talk
I had written a couple of days ago about William Kamkwamba, a Malawian high school student who built a windmill by looking at pictures in a book. From Bob Reuter's website (Keep IT Simple!) I discovered a TED talk that William had given in England, back in July....
A boy and his windmill
The Daily Show featured William Kamkwamba, a Malawian high school student who built a windmill by looking at pictures in a book! I have always been a fan of jugaad, the idea of indigenous creativity using the detritus that seems to be a function of our modern world....
TPACK newsletter #4, Aug – Sept 09
Welcome to the fourth edition of the TPACK Newsletter, now with 494 subscribers (representing a 36% increase during the last four months!), and appearing bimonthly between August and April. If you are not sure what TPACK is, please surf over to www.tpack.org...
Ron Clark Academy, scalable?
Scott McLeod over at Dangerously Irrelevant posted a video of a CNN story about the Ron Clark Academy and asked whether something like this was scalable? Watch the video as you ponder this question. Embedded video from CNN Video This is a question often asked of me,...
New forms of doctorate
The Institute of Education, University of London is organizing a series of seminars on New forms of doctorate i.e. the manner in which multimodality and e-learning are influencing the nature and format of doctoral theses in Education and the social sciences. This is a...
Leigh Wolf @IgniteLansing
Leigh Wolf, my partner in crime as far as the MAET program goes, recently presented at Ignite Lansing. She talked about her two passions, teaching and food (not sure which order to place these). Specifically she talked about food photography and the connections she...
San Diego Unified School District embraces TPACK
I had written recently about TPACK being the top story on eSchoolNews (see TPACK is top story on eSchoolNews or go directly to the article: TPACK explores effective ed-tech integration). What I didn't realize at that time is that there were actually three stories...
The end of the university II
From my end of the university as we know it series, here is another article, this time from The Washington Monthly, titled College for $99 a Month: The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities. Here are some key...
Seeing differently (veja du with video)
I am always looking for examples of looking at the world differently - of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. This is of course connected with the veja du assignments I give my students. I just came across a couple of very interesting video examples...