Experiencing data

Tongue-tingling interface lets you taste data - New Scientist - New Scientist

This could be an amazing way to teach students to "experience" data, instead of just talking about them.

Clay Shirky and Complexity

Okay, first, it's been a million years since the last post. I have been involved with my doctoral research and generally way too busy. Nevertheless, it seems time to get back to work.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing, I found this article/broadside by Clay Shirky. He talks about complex systems generating more complexity until there is a collapse:

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

You can read the whole piece here.

It left me wondering, how much does this apply to education?

Telekinetic Twittering

Here on CNN.com is a very cool article about people being able to Twitter by just thinking.

Wilson, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering, was confirming an announcement he had made two weeks earlier -- his lab had developed a way to post messages on Twitter using electrical impulses generated by thought.

Now THIS is Digital Storytelling

Extreme Collaboration

 

 

The New York Times has a nice piece today about a group of elementary school students who played chess with an astronaut on the International Space Station.

After their game, and after he returned to Earth, they all met to talk about the experience.

Now, that's extreme collaboration via technology!

Analog Blogging

It is now so important to be connected via wired and wireless devices. We can, for example, blog from our desktops, laptops, cell phones, Blackberry devices. In the office, at home, in libraries, in coffee shots, on the subway, etc.

And this is assuming that blogging is fast enough for our communication needs.

But, what if you were in a non-connected place and wanted to comment on the world around you. How about blogging on a blackboard.

Here is a really interesting story of just such a project by a man in Monrovia. Check it out.

The Odyssey on Twitter

This is really clever. A guy named Eric Alt re-imagined the Odyssey if Odysseus had been sending updates via Twitter.

Here is an example:

Here's a link.

This is a phone? This is a computer?

David Pogue had a nice piece in the NY Times celebrating a very cool application for the iPhone called Ocarina.

The application lets you hold down virtual "holes" and blow into the device (yes, blow). You are able to create music by doing this. Check out the video:



But there is another cool feature. I'll let Pogue describe it:

If you tap the little globe at the bottom of the screen, the screen changes. Now you see a map of the world--and you start hearing the Ocarina performance of one person, in one city (indicated by animated sound waves on the map), who's playing the thing *right now*. Sometimes it's the halting fumbles of a rank beginner; sometimes it's a lovely melody played by someone who's got the hang of it. You can hit a Next button to tune in to another stranger, and another, all around the world.
It's a brain-frying experience to know that you're listening to someone else playing Ocarina, right now, in real time, somewhere else on the planet. (And then you realize that someone, somewhere might be listening to *you*!)

So, my questions are:
Is this (just) a phone?
What does this mean in terms of using technology for learning/communication/collaboration?

Nice Model

I saw this image posted at BoingBoing.

An artist put together real objects to model the user interface for Photoshop.

Very nice.

User created art

Speaking of giving students a voice, this week the new NPR news show The Takeaway did a piece on some art installations that directly involved the voices of the audience.

One of the exhibits is an installation in Queens.

... visitors to Olafur Eliasson’s "Take Your Time” exhibit at P.S. 1 in Queens can don cellphone cameras and document their movements through the exhibit, in turn becoming part of the show’s online element.

The others mentioned also were very creative in involving the audience, blurring the line somewhat between who is the creator and who is the audience.

These piece move me because it makes me think about what's possible in a classroom.

Newsrooms and Classrooms

I heard an interesting story on NPR's On the Media today

The theme of this week's show was the physical newsroom, and the particular story dealt with two responses to changes in the newsroom.

One part that was very interesting talked about technology, especially computers, has changed the soundscape of the newsroom. Once noisy, with the clacking of typewriters and phones and other equipment, they are now eerily silent. In fact, some newsrooms pump in "pink noise" to add sound where there is none and where there used to be lots.

I tried to think about how classrooms would/do sound differently as technology becomes more and more integrated. What old sounds will be gone? What new sounds (and new conversations) will take their place?

Take a listen.

It may seem strange

I just saw this commercial for Cisco (well, I saw the English language version, but YouTube only had this Italian version).


I don't care that much about Cisco and I don't care that much about skateboarding. But I do care about the possibility of using technology for collaboration.

Now, as you are watching, replace the skateboard with ANYTHING from our curricula or learning environment.

What happens when our students are given a voice?

A Cool Tool

Thanks to the folks at AcademHack, I have been playing around with Evernote, a combination desktop/web tool for capturing and managing notes of all types. You can add tags (of course). You can search and collect all kinds of notes, pictures, sounds, etc. It can search for words within pictures.

The biggest thing for me, however, was watching the getting started video. As I watched it, I thought it would make a really interesting tool in the classroom for talking to students about collecting, categorizing, and retrieving information and materials.

Let me know what you think.

One from many or Many from many?

Scott McLeod recently published an interesting set of diagrams on his Dangerously Irrelevant blog (which is incredibly worth reading, by the way). He uses them to tell a story.






The story he wants to tell is about what seems to most effectively contribute to a creative economy.

I certainly agree with him, but saw them as telling another story as well. I saw them as depicting the ends of a spectrum of the relationships between teachers and students in a classroom. Does a teacher shape everything into "one right answer" or does he/she allow possibility to arise from these relationships in the classroom.

This dilemma is a very real one for me right now. The school year so far has been about living out the question: "What happens when students get to use their own voice?"

In most cases, my experience is that of a profound thing of beauty. The kinds of things that make teaching (and life) worth while.

I thank Scott for giving diagrammatic representation to my experience.

Some amazing art

A colleague shared some of Peter Callesen's art with me today.
In some of it, he creates 3-dimension paper sculptures. The rule is that each one is made from only one piece of paper.

There's an example of one above.

Here is what the artist says about his work:

My paper works have lately been based around an exploration of the relationship between two and three dimensionality. I find this materialization of a flat piece of paper into a 3D form almost as a magic process - or maybe one could call it obvious magic, because the process is obvious and the figures still stick to their origin, without the possibility of escaping. In that sense there is also an aspect of something tragic in most of the cuts.

The cool thing for me, in looking at them, is the progression from the more simple relationships between the figures and the original piece of paper (like the skeleton) to those where the relationships are more and more complex.

It made me think of the process of ownership, where knowledge or skills move from something that belongs to someone else to something that belongs to you. The relationship between you and the knowledge and/or skills gets deeper and deeper and deeper.

Check them out here.