Gastro Street Station

csessums:

The gastrointestinal system represented as a subway map via laughingsquid.com

Coral crochet: knit to save the planet

An exceptional exhibit of craft as art in Scottsdale, Arizona, at www.scottsdalecoralreef.com, where hundreds of pieces of creative crochet are on display. What makes this of special interest to adult educators is how hundreds of “middle-aged nobodies” took up the creative call of science journalist Margaret Wertheim:

The “Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project” exhibtion in Scottsdale, comes on the heels of exhibitions in Chicago, New York, London and Los Angeles. In all of these cities we’ve held workshops and invited participation in the creation of this woolly environment. To our amazement thousands of women have shown up and close to 1000 have made pieces included in an exhibition. Every one of these women, has told us how important it is to them to have their work recognized and validated in an authoritative art gallery space.

Via Design Observer.

Parental controls for my inner child

One of the things that draws me to teaching online and taking courses online is that I enjoy being on the web. I would spend many hours a day following my curiosities anyway, so I might as well get paid for it. But then there’s the down side. My curiosity gets the best of me, and when I’m working on an online course, it’s so easy to get distracted by all of the amusements just a Google search away. With my inner child running amok, I decided it was time to set some boundaries.

When I’m writing, such as a paper for a class I’m taking or even new content for a web course I’m teaching, I need a quiet, undistracted area to work in. I used Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.6) to create a new user account on my 13-inch MacBook called Writing. This user account does not have administrator privileges, and I set it up using Parental Controls to only give me access to essential applications. I’ve been surprised how much this helps to have a separate environment to keep me focused and away from all my usual temptations.

Occasionally I will receive a pop-up reminding me that a piece of software I’ve requested is not on the permitted list of applications. That gives me a moment to stop and think if I really need to go there. I can cancel the dialog, or I can use my administrator credentials from my main laptop account to allow one-time or ongoing use of the application. It may seem silly, but it is really worth having my notebook nanny stop me and ask me if I really need to be doing this. Most often I’ll pick the “just once” option so that I’ll be asked again the next time.

There’s also times when my inner child needs a “time out.” A simple little donationware app with the delightfully appropriate name Freedom (http://www.macfreedom.com/) allows me to cut myself off from web access for a time of my choosing. For example I can give myself 60 minutes of email-free bliss to focus on the task at hand.

These two approaches to time on task may just help me finish graduate school and my dissertation by saving me from distractions such as writing this blog post.

Visualizing visual design

Flowcapping: Golden Parachutes from Jess Bachman on Vimeo.

An Interview with Howard Gardner

Dancing Data

Synchronous Objects [synchronousobjects.osu.edu] is a dazzling new web project designed to explore choreography through the visualization of movement as data.

The interdisciplinary project has combined the arts and the sciences in a beautiful interactive site. Synchronous Objects reveals the interlocking systems of organization in William Forsythe’s ensemble dance One Flat Thing, reproduced. The project uses the movement of the dancers as a stream of data that can be visualized in more than a dozen different ways. The site is a visual delight, and the project is a remarkable example of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Punctuating the Difference: Academia vs. Industry

John Maeda, designer, author, and president of the Rhode Island School of Design, presents an insightful look at the perspectives found in academia and industry, and he does so using a visual metaphor of punctuation marks.

It is common to hear from industry, “Why are academics so insular?” And alternatively from academia, “Why is business so short-sighted?” The stereotypes fit in some cases, but I like to think that there’s a simpler way to understand how the two worlds differ in terms of the “punctuation marks” that define the desired outcomes of the two crafts.

Academia vs. Industry: The Difference Is in the Punctuation Marks

Guten Touch

Designed for the Red Bull Music Academy 08, Guten Touch is an interactive art installation that involves people into a natural relationship with technology.

Alien/typewriter

Alien/typewriter via www.wired.com

What Will They Be Doing 20 Years from Now?

The words “high-stakes testing” always make my blood boil, but this short article caught my attention on MIT’s Tomorrow’s Professor blog. Author Virginia Malone brings a great perspective on the concept of modern adult literacy as embedded in the roles of adults. She writes:

Literacy beyond reading, writing, and basic mathematics requires the acquisition of knowledge and skills that support lifelong learning, problem solving, decision making, and mentoring. While teachers are compelled to teach the wide variety of knowledge and skills required by state standards, they cannot forget that their students will need to function in the adult world.

Should it be a surprise to me that there are K-12 educators who think beyond state standards to what knowledge and skills future adults might really need to negotiate the world?