This video is pretty astounding. What you’re seeing are “creatures” that were generated based on an algorithm that worked in a way that the creatures would change from iteration to iteration in order to become better at a specific task, essentially evolving. What makes this video even more impressive is that this demonstration is from […]
This video is pretty astounding. What you’re seeing are “creatures” that were generated based on an algorithm that worked in a way that the creatures would change from iteration to iteration in order to become better at a specific task, essentially evolving.
What makes this video even more impressive is that this demonstration is from 1994. This is definitely something I would expect to blow my mind if it were new today but it was done years ago!
Today’s video is not educational so much as it is historic. This simple video shows how the man who led a nation was mourned by his people. But stepping away from the tragedy itself, I like how this video represents a certain window of time. When thousands of years from now people are learning about […]
Today’s video is not educational so much as it is historic. This simple video shows how the man who led a nation was mourned by his people.
But stepping away from the tragedy itself, I like how this video represents a certain window of time. When thousands of years from now people are learning about how technology developed through the years, videos like this will represent a very unique time period where we have the technology, but just barely.
It makes me think of Michael Jackson’s funeral. Not to say the broadcasters didn’t handle it with as much respect as they could, but the whole thing seems heavy-handed in comparison. You’ve got the 3D news graphics, the little network watermark in the corner, the constant reminder that it was indeed being broadcast live. Once again, I’m not saying it was covered incorrectly, they were just following the standards that have been set for years. But you have to admit, Churchill’s does seem a bit more graceful.
Now this may all just be a matter of perception. People 50 years from now could be looking back at Jackson’s funeral thinking about how quaint it was. I still believe though that this era represented by the Churchill film will be known for producing some of the purest and most genuine representations of history we’ll ever see.
Think about all the people you know, not just friends, but acquaintances as well, people who you can meet and remember a little about them. Maybe not their birthday, but their profession, an idea of their family situation. I would say this would cover at least 100 people in your life. Now imagine if these […]
Think about all the people you know, not just friends, but acquaintances as well, people who you can meet and remember a little about them. Maybe not their birthday, but their profession, an idea of their family situation. I would say this would cover at least 100 people in your life. Now imagine if these 100 people were the only people. This would mean you would know 1 person who is starving. You would know 25 who are without cell phones, 23 don’t have shelter.
If you saw a few people suffering, would you not help them? Would you not give that starving person a sandwich, give one of those 23 a place to sleep on your couch, or maybe even join them under the stars on a nice night. Would you not try to do something to help them?
If every person in the world gave one meal to someone who is starving, we could greatly change the world. If we gave books to schools that are without supplies, we could greatly change illiteracy. Challenge your students to look into charities that reach out to people, and do something to help them. If they are able to donate, that would be great, if they can only promote the charities, that is also wonderful. But if there were only 100 people in the world, you would know people who are suffering.
This absolutely fascinates me. Functionally, these objects are as good as spheres, yet they’re edged and asymmetrical. Looking at these shapes it never would’ve entered my mind that they might possibly have an unchanging width. Even though I can’t think of a practical use for this kind of object, I can say that it could […]
This absolutely fascinates me. Functionally, these objects are as good as spheres, yet they’re edged and asymmetrical. Looking at these shapes it never would’ve entered my mind that they might possibly have an unchanging width. Even though I can’t think of a practical use for this kind of object, I can say that it could possibly turn people around to the idea that math can be interesting. Just maybe.
A health craze has seemed to take over this country, finally. With obesity at epidemic levels, and America being the least healthy developed country, it is about time we begin trying to take better care of ourselves. Meat is a staple in the diets of many Americans, and their social lives. The all American past […]
A health craze has seemed to take over this country, finally. With obesity at epidemic levels, and America being the least healthy developed country, it is about time we begin trying to take better care of ourselves. Meat is a staple in the diets of many Americans, and their social lives. The all American past time is centered around hot dogs. Most summer holidays involve a cook out. And there is an national debate as to what the best hot dog, hamburger, or barbecue is. Could this be the cause of our ill health?
According to this infographic, there are other ways to get the protein and Vitamin D necessary to sustain ourselves. Meat eaters also, on average, have higher cholesterol, and is a major cause of cancer. Raising the animals we use for meat also takes a lot of grain and water.
Have your students do research into various diet plans and try to create a meal plan for one day that follows this diet. This diet must give a person everything necessary to live, in a healthy way, with no excess. Have you students compare their diets with those they find.
Ants are possibly one of the more interesting creatures on this planet. Hundreds of them will work together as if they have one brain and it’s all for the survival and the betterment of their colony. Walking around through the woods, you could have any number of layers of ant colony below your feet without […]
Ants are possibly one of the more interesting creatures on this planet. Hundreds of them will work together as if they have one brain and it’s all for the survival and the betterment of their colony. Walking around through the woods, you could have any number of layers of ant colony below your feet without knowing it.
Well Walter Tschinkel is more interested in ants than any of us. Now I’m not wild about the fact that he has to wipe out entire colonies of ants in order to do his research, but he had his idea and followed through with it and now we have these intricate and detailed representations of how exactly these colonies are structured and organized. Like it or not, you’re going to be blown away by the result.
My reflections & reactions are in red and italics
I thought I would take some time to go through the notes I took at ISTE last week and include here some of the ideas that struck me – for what ever reason. This will probably consist of short observations of new ideas and new twists on old ones. As I’ve probably written before, I attend these conferences for the language, new ways of thinking and talking about modernizing education. With 30 years in ed tech, new technologies are usually a surprise.
While at the conference, a number of people, glancing over my shoulder, asked how I was taking notes. I was using GoodNotes, which I like using because I’m actually writing the notes with a stylus, and I find that I’m process ideas differently in long-hand than when I type them. Also, I can import or take photos with the iPad, such as shots of presenter slides or of the presenter — on top of which I can write down notes or comments. Below is an example notes page. I took a photo of this Hack Education conversation to anchor the notes to a specific place and time.
ISTE, for me, started with Hack Education, formerly known as the “EduBloggerCon.” The first impression that hit me, not long after the first conversation began, was how difficult it is to truly visualize, in general terms, the changes we were talking about – and how do you promote School 2.0, when it can’t easily be seen. If you can’t point to it, how do you describe it to non-educators? As I wrote in a previous blog, I suspect that an answer might be to focus more on “Student 2.0,” someone we can point to – and then design education around that.
Another barrier to retooling classrooms, that became even more apparent to me last week was the lack of consistency in leadership. Some of the most interesting schools that I have seen, have recently had their innovative programs squelched by new leadership – leaving the innovators little choice but to move on.
I think that one of the great brain-wrinklers of the day came from David Jakes, who said,
“We need to shift from a focus on’Engagement’ to focusing on ‘Empowerment.’“
I’ll jump ahead here to another hacker quote quote. I do not remember who said it, but,
“The person who does the work is the person who does the learning.”
If working is what leads to learning, then learners need tools that empower them to accomplish that work.
Someone else said,
“We’re actually looking for a rebirth of old ideas! “
So true and something that we too often forget.
There was some discussion about our use of the word “FAIL” in conversations about education, as we promote the value of failure in learning. Common notions about failure, after all, are entirely contrary to this positive spin. But I feel that if we can get people, adults, to think about the learning that they’ve done since leaving classrooms, and how that learning was accomplished, they will come to see that failure is an essential part of learning. I thought that this was an interesting acronymic arrangement for failure.
| F | – | First |
| A | – | Attempt |
| I | – | In |
| L | – | Learning |
I jotted down a number of apps mentioned during the Tech Smackdown – and many thanks to Steve Hargadon for his attempts to keep the self-promoting venders out of the fray. I’ve not had a chance to look at all of these, but here are a few that I made note of.
Somebody asked whether “gamification” was just a marketing scheme? This got me to thinking and I concluded that if we do not understand how games help us to learn, the mechanisms that provoke learning, then marketing is probably a pretty accurate description of our attempts to “gamily” (See my reflections of Jane McGonigal’s Keynote). The comment probably came from a conversation about using badges for motivation. Someone said that if all you’re using is badges, then that’s not gamification. It’s badgification.
There was much conversation about why and how you would plant the awarding of badges in the classroom. I suggested that some badges needed to be hidden, a surprise that students happen upon — the reward for doing something productive that was not an expressed outcome – the learning along the way. Also, badges should not just be something that you wear. Badges should also be a passport to doing things or going places that you couldn’t before — new powers, so to speak.
McGonigal said that “reality is broken.” She said that a billion gamers around the world are using a connected device to play a game during any given hour. The game-nation is a network.
People spend 400,000 years playing Angry Birds a day.
92% of 2 year olds play video games (what are they going to think when we give them a textbook?)
Gamers spend 80% of their time failing.
McGonigal said that,
“The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression!“
That called to mind a quote by George Bernard Shaw,
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.“
One of the most interesting learning scenarios that I heard of at the conference was relayed by Cheryl Lemke. In a literature class, the students were reading Hamlet. The teacher created Twitter accounts for each of the main characters, and then assigned students to the accounts. They were encouraged to comment on the play, as they were reading it, in the voices of the characters. Very cool!
Lemke also said, “Give students non-googlable assignments!” I’m not sure that is entirely accurate. I’d say,
“Don’t test with questions that Google can answer.”
Will Richardson said, “The path to becoming a better teacher is becoming a better learner!” I agree with that entirely – and I believe that part of the key here is becoming a more self-aware learner, not just learning but reflecting on how you are learning. Here’s another quote shared by Richardson:
“We can’t be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion.”
— Margaret Wheatley
Richardson then had us talk with each other about what confused us, and during that conversation it occurred to me that if you’re not confused, then you’re not paying attention – and
I regret that too many educators are not paying attention.
There is too much momentum behind making schools better. They don’t need to be better nearly as much as they need to be different. It’s a different world and school is not a “right of passage.” It’s a right of vantage. Its the right to be positioned in true relevance to yourself, your environment, your time, your culture, your economy and your world and the skills to participate.
He suggested that we are shifting from an institutionally controlled world to a world that is becoming self-organized. There are three starting points, according to Will Richardson:
I think that there is a lot to think about in this list. Self-organized learning is not only a movement, but it is a necessity. It’s the self-organized learner that will succeed in a rapidly changing and flattening world – and it is entirely counter to the desires of the global education reform movement (GERM).
Design thinking is also a necessity, in that we’re all going to be solving problems and improving conditions, not just the engineers. Designing solutions with elegance, well, that is its own reward.
The maker movement is both solution and symptom. Its one more clue to a rapidly flattening world. Old institutional structures no longer support us and our individual needs. I am also starting to question our economic structures, but that’s for a different conversation.
Gary Stager was a perfect follow-up with his emphasis on the maker movement. He suggests
Three Game Changers
The real game change, he continued, is that shop and academics merge.
Too cool!
I do not clearly remember the context, but one of Stager’s slides stated that, “A good prompt is worth 1,000 words.” Good prompts have…
Three Qualities
Here is my interpretation of Stager’s list. A prompt must be clear and concise. It must be cloudless, as cloudless as a person’s own personal unarticulated observation of a problem. It should also NOT, in any way, suggest the solution. The learner has free reign to design and execute a personally-designed plan. Finally, if the end product can be assessed by any prior-established assessment routine, then the task was not about innovation. It was about compliance. I would suggest that there may be assessment methods that might work, but they wouldn’t be multiple choice, they would not question the designers – and institutional assessment isn’t part of the (learning) process anyway.
The School 2.0 unconference session, facilitated by Steve Hargadon, served to further refine my notions that it isn’t School 2.0 that we need to focus on, but student 2.0. That’s not my term, and I don’t particularly like it. We need a more descriptive term that does not dishonor the old teaching styles, which had their place in their time.
Sylvia Martinez put the icing on the cake of Gary Stagers presentation. Tinkering as pedagogy makes the best sense to me. Its how I learn. No-one could ever have taught me to program. Playing with code is the only way I could learn, and I would suggest, the best way to learn. She suggested that
“Many of the best programmers were, at some point in their lives, told that they were not good a math.”
I think that doing math to numbers and using math to work numbers are two entirely different things.
Qualities of the Tinkering Mindset
In many ways of thinking, Jason Ohler was the high point of my conference experience. It was a spotlight session in a large hall, so the atmosphere was that of a keynote, and his presentation exceed in quality and content any of the other “keynotes” of the conference. It’s been a long time since I saw Ohler present, but I don’t remember it being anything like this.
He used the phrase, “trends that bent,” and suggested that the three trends that are influencing education are
The trends that he included in the conference program were
Ohler added in
Predictive Anticipation
Vs.
Choice and Breadth
Ohler went on to suggest we watch http://www.kurzweilai.net for evidence of new trends. It’s in my Flipboard now.
About Adam Bellow’s keynote. I have to say that if the conference had opened with that presentation, I would have been a bit disappointed. But as a closing keynote, Bellow nailed it. He honored ISTE, the learning, the tech and our continuing struggles to make formal education as close to real life as possible.
Over the past couple of years, Adam’s presentation style, his confidence on stage, and his content have improved many fold. He’s one of those unique individuals who has been a teacher, but also understands today’s emerging information and communications technologies – as a builder. He’s a programmer and a communicator, and that combination is a rare jewel.
You can see my entire set of notes [here].
Ask people in different parts of the country this question and you will get different answers. Ask people where I am from, and the most common answer will be “Because God prefers UNC.” Others will say it is a reflection of the ocean. But then why is the ocean blue? Because it is a reflection […]
Ask people in different parts of the country this question and you will get different answers. Ask people where I am from, and the most common answer will be “Because God prefers UNC.” Others will say it is a reflection of the ocean. But then why is the ocean blue? Because it is a reflection of the sky. Excuse me?
Well here is the truth as portrayed by an infographic created by designers at Visual.ly. This infographic is fairly scientific, and I will admit I do not completely understand it. I understand that wavelengths affect the color we see out of all the colors that are available, but the rest went over my head. I went to school to study history and not science.
Before producing this infographic, have your students discuss why the sky is blue. Have each student produce a short hypothesis, share it in small groups, and discuss the merit behind each. Then share this infographic and see how close students came to the truth.
The Fourth of July is a celebration of this country’s independence from Britain. As yesterday’s infographic showed, what occurred on July 4th, 1776 was not even recognized in England, and barely even shared. Also, as yesterday’s infographic showed, some Americans do not even understand what we celebrate on July 4th, aside from chemical reactions in […]
The Fourth of July is a celebration of this country’s independence from Britain. As yesterday’s infographic showed, what occurred on July 4th, 1776 was not even recognized in England, and barely even shared. Also, as yesterday’s infographic showed, some Americans do not even understand what we celebrate on July 4th, aside from chemical reactions in the sky, alcohol, cookouts, and family gatherings. So what is the biggest thing this country does to celebrate this random day at the beginning of the summer? Shoot off fireworks, and this infographic shares this information in a great way.
The fireworks industry is a billion dollar industry, $940 million for the Fourth of July, plus New Years and other celebrations throughout the year. And launching a spectacular show requires more than just a lighter. Aside from the chemistry involved in creating the firecracker, it also requires physics to know at which angle to shoot it to reach the ideal location. How many people on neighborhood streets are doing physics problems as they light the fuse?
In addition, this infographic shares the difference between a variety of shows across the country. It shows how much is fired, how much it costs, and how many people view the various shows. Why do you suppose some shows are more popular than others? What information needs to be gathered in order to give a better idea as to the reasons behind the popularity.
Finally, ask your students to choose a topic, find something that stands for this topic, and use it in an entire infographic to share data, just like this infographic did in its use of firecrackers.
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| This HDR-rendered photo was made by Trey Radcliff, one of the preeminent HDR photo artists. His blog is Stuck in Customs. |
Several of my friends on Facebook have asked me to explain HDR. Since any attempt would exceed 140 characters and the typical Facebook status post, I thought I would post it here.
I should insert that the author is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or medical advice. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. 😉
I am also not a professional photographer. The following description reflects my knowledge of HDR, as I understand it right now. As an amateur photographer, I am learning, as much and as quickly as I can. I only have so many years left to make the best picture that I can.
First off, there is a concept about photography today that has been repeated to me several times recently. Taking a picture is different from making a picture. Taking a picture is simply capturing an image as accurately as the camera is capable. Making a picture involves a whole lot more. It uses the camera and other devices, both hardware and software, to capture not only the image, but also what inspired the taking of the image — and sometimes adding to the image in order to inspire further reactions.
First, HDR solves a problem. The human eye can register a limited range of light frequency — color. Cameras can register even less. It can not match what the eye sees. This is one reason why so many pictures end out being less dramatic than the subject being photographed.
Enter HDR, which stands for High Dynamic Range. It works like this. Many cameras have a feature called bracketing. When switched on, the camera takes three (usually) photographs of the subject, at three different exposures. One photo will be dark, one light and the third pretty close to the exposure your camera would take normally. Many cameras will allow the photographer to set the degree of separation between exposures. I usually divided mine by 2.0 fStops. Don’t worry about knowing what an fStop is.
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| -2.0 fStops | 0 fStops | +2.0 fStops |
To process the HDR requires special software. I’ve started using Photomatix, which is fairly high end – but not really all than much better than HDRtist Pro, which is much less expensive. The software looks at each of the exposures and brings out the best that that exposure offers, combines them into a single photograph. The result is a picture that more closely matches what the eye of the photographer saw.
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| HDR rendered photo. Click the photo to see an enlarged version on Flickr. |
I heard someone recently say that HDR enables the photographer to capture more closely, what it was that inspired him to take the picture. Better contrast. Colors that pop.
Since the software can identify and exaggerate different elements of three different photos, the photographer can alter how the elements are presented and blended, resulting in photos that are more surreal. There is a good deal of artistry possible, though many push this too far, for the sake of a cool picture — myself included. These are frowned upon by accomplished photo artists, as artists are prone to do.
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| This photo was taken outside my hotel window in San Antonio last week. I pushed the software to produce an image that exaggerated what the eye was seeing. |
About half of my HDR photos were made with a Nikon D5100 (bought it used). I usually have it on a tripod when taking an HDR, because it is crucial that each of the three photos be as close to the same framing as the others. I have had success at making HDRs without a tripod, but just as often not.
on my iPhone, I use an app called Pro HDR. It allows me to select the lightest part of the subject and the darkest, and then it takes two photos at two exposures Pro HDR does a pretty darn good job of blending the two into a satisfying photograph. But for the best and highest resolution photos, I use the Nikon. Again, it’s good to have your iPhone on a tripod, but I also get satisfactory results without it.
Many cameras come with HDR switches. Both my Nikon and my iPhone have them. But the cameras take care of everything for you, leaving the photographer with no control — no artistry. There are also apps out there take a standard photo and exaggerate elements to simulate the HDR effect. This is cheating, in my opinion.
But what ever gives you satisfaction.
It’s why we make pictures.
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