Much has been written about Steve Jobs in the past few weeks since his passing but the best piece I have come across is the eulogy by his sister Mona Simpson. Mona Simpson is an author and professor of writing and delivered this eulogy on Oct. 16 at his memorial...
9/11/2001 – 9/11/2011
For Whom the Bell Tolls — John Donne No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manner of thine own Or of thine...
A great honor: 10 most influential people in Ed Tech
I just found out that I made "The Big 10: The Most Influential People in EdTech for 2011." This list is created by the Tech & Learning journal—a magazine for Ed Tech leaders. This news came as a total surprise to me since I did not know that I was even in the...
SITE presentations: 21st Century learning, TPACK and more…
I had a bunch of presentations at the recently concluded SITE2011 conference at Nashville TN. There is a lot to post about the conference, particularly the presentations I made at the beginning of the day... but that will have to wait until later. This posting is...
Christine Greenhow visit + new ambigram
Christine Greenhow from the University of Maryland visited the College of Education this past week. She gave a talk and met with various faculty members and graduate students. I had met Christine a couple of years ago when we had both been invited to the National...
Demotivational Posters II
A few weeks ago I posted a note about an assignment I gave my students in the on-campus version of the MAET program. They had completed an unit on motivation and had watched the RSA / Daniel Pink video and their task was was to create demotivational posters, (along...
June 18 or June 25, 1178?
In my summer teaching I often start the day with some examples of interesting things that happened that day in history. It is a fun way to start the day, and I seek to find examples that connect with things/issues we are covering in class, often related to technology,...
Exciting!! Edupunk refresher, hybrid PhD & more…
A few weeks ago I had posted about the hybrid Ph.D. program that we recently announced. There has been terrific interest in this program (but we are still looking for more people - so keep the emails and questions coming). As we were reviewing the various emails we...
MAET virtual help desk
Theresa Hamilton & Amy Gracik are two of our Technology Interns in Education. They are now part of a pilot project to offer software technology support to students in our MAET program. This help-desk available online at http://groups.google.com/group/maetsupport....
Goldbach is back! New math poem
I guess once the bug bites, it never really lets go. So here's another poem (to follow this and this and this). As it turns out this is my second poem on the Goldbach Conjecture. I realized after I had written the first one that I had actually messed up the history a...
The mathematical “i”
I guess 'tis the season of Math-Po's! Sue VanHattum, whose challenge started all this, commented on my recent Math-Po (Math-Po (Mathematical Poetry): Goldbach’s Conjecture) by providing an example of her own writing, a poem titled Imaginary Numbers Do the Trick. That...
Math-Po (Mathematical Poetry): Goldbach’s Conjecture
My previous post (Poetry, Science & Math, OR why I love the web) mentioned a challenge by Sue VanHattum of "Math Mama Writes" to "write a little kids’ poem ... and that tells of the beauty of math, or, that mentions math and challenge, both in a positive way."...
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...
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...
Happy Diwali
Happy Diwali For an interactive card click here ... . Remember to turn your volume way up, and click anywhere in the sky above the Taj Mahal for some environmentally friendly, fireworks.
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...
Quick Design Video: Are you ready for the future?
Leigh Wolf and Ken Dirkin, instructors in the year III of the MAET program in Plymouth have been assigning, what they call, Quick Design assignments. These are quickfire challenges for students to showcase their talents under pretty severe constraints (of time,...
Announcing: Short film competition, cool prize for winner!!
Those of you who have been following this blog know, over the past few months I have made a few short videos with my kids. The ones I am most proud of are a set of three made around the words Explore, Create, Share (you can see them all here). There were great fun to...
3 pieces of wisdom, one muddled conclusion
Just came up with this in response to something Leigh had said on Facebook... thought it ought to be saved for the future: Great fools think that birds of a feather seldom differ together! I wonder what it means? Can you identify the three nuggets of wisdom that went...
Hard hat area…
I am working on changing the layout of my blog... so be prepared for sudden and abrupt changes (as well as possible downtimes). Apologies to all but it has been a while since I played with the layout and its been getting kinda boring around here...
Translation, Technology & TPACK: Reflections on French Lieutenant’s Woman
Note: When Sean of Nashworld asked me to guest blog while he was gone I had a couple of different things I wanted to write about. Something I had been wanting to write about for a long time was the idea of how different media engender different ways of meaning making....
Decision science, neural Buddhists & the loopy brain of David Brooks
I do not understand David Brooks. Brooks is an op-ed columnist for the NYTimes. For the most part his columns are right-of-the-political wing nuttiness, garbed in some erudite clothing. I am not linking to them here but his past few op-eds suggesting that McCain would...
Posting from an iTouch
typing on this keyboard is still kind of painful, though I am getting better every word I type.
Visualizing mathematics
I love visual proofs of mathematical theorems. One visual proof I use quite often in my design courses (CEP817 or CEP917) is a visual proof of the fact that the sum of consecutive odd numbers is a square number. In other words: 1 + 3 = 4 = 22 1 + 3 + 5 = 9 = 32 1 + 3...
Obama’s gmail account
Did you know that any email sent to barackobama@gmail.com goes to an Indian software developer! Strange but true!
Mishra, Dirkin & Cavanaugh, 2007
I have been teaching summer course in our master's program for years now and for the most part have found them to be the most enriching teaching experiences I have had. These are intense 8 hours a day, 5 days a week programs that typically go on for a month. [We are...
YouTube & Research
In a previous post I mentioned a new study on children and the internet recently completed by Warren Buckleitner for Consumer Reports Web Watch. Anyway, towards the end of the post I mentioned how the final report includes links to YouTube videos of the actual data...
Laptops in the classroom
Ira Socol has a great post on his blog (SpEdChange) titled Humiliation and the modern professor, in which he speaks to the issue of students bringing laptops to the classroom. Some professors have banned laptops from their classes (I personally know a couple who would...
2001, 40 years after
Musings on local newspaper headlines, 2001 A Space Odyssey, media and creativity, and ending with some thoughts on the meaning of life... a lot to fit into one blog post but again I had the weekend to work on this. I read our local newspaper, the Lansing State Journal...