WAM app 1.0
PreRamble: This is brilliant — a win-win-win scenario that leverages the synergy between three different realms as a way to innovate and educate. The University of Minnesota journalism department has charged its students to create a smartphone app for the Weisman Art Museum (WAM) that encourages audiences to learn and engage with art. This past ...
Who’d a thunk it?
Pre-Ramble: Just back from the Learning & the Brain Conference sponsored by The University of Chicago – and my brain is PACKED with new, fascinating ways to look at learning and performance through the lens of cutting-edge advances in neurological research. This three-day “interdisciplinary forum” brought together researchers, clinicians and educators who provided insight – both heavy on ...
Turn up the heat
Pre-Ramble: Nothing fires me up more than an article titled, “How to Fire Up U.S. Innovation” (WSJ, 4/12/11) … As an adult-onset geek, the mere thought of things being innovated makes my heart beat a little bit faster. In the piece, Vinton Cerf, chief Internet evangelist (?) at Google, lays out a few key dynamics that ...
What’s in a name?
Pre-Ramble: Plenty, that’s what! A friend of mine … well, an admired acquaintance really, is a partner in Pollywog, “an unconventional branding agency” … an enterprise that comes up with highly purposeful/catchy names for businesses, organizations, products, services, events – you name it. (heh.) Made up of creative professionals from some of the world’s largest ...
Curiosity and opportunity
Pre-Ramble: I love hearing stuff about kids who are crazy good at science. Yesterday’s NY Times Magazine (Sunday, 2/27) featured ”Youth.” Two of them, Matt Fernandez and Akash Krishnan, friends from Portland, Oregon, had built a computer program that can recognize “feelings” in human speech patterns for their high school science fair. In a nut-shell, the very cool algorithum ...
The adjacent impossible
Pre-Ramble: Among the many characterizations of the mechanisms behind creative thought, creative thinker and author of the book “Where Good Ideas Come From,” Steven Berlin Johnson suggests that a necessary pre-condition to innovation – one presumably born out of a creative process – is trafficking in the high potential waters of “the adjacent possible.” Who’d a thunk ...
The creativity gap
Pre-Ramble: As a grantwriter specializing in education-related issues, the primary goal of nearly every project I work on is to “increase academic achievement in underperforming student groups,” also known as, “closing the achievement gap.” Do the math. A concerted effort to foster high academic achievement for students as they prepare to join the “college and career ready, 21st-Century, ...
Educational kryptonite
Pre-Ramble: The next in a tidy little series of blog posts I had planned about the Project Zero conference was going to feature the power of the learning environment. I was going to talk about how inspiring, and reverent really, it was to partake in lofty discussions around the imperative of education with such a cast of renown experts ...
Plenary session
Pre-Ramble: I know a lot of words. I mean, as a writer I use them in one way or another practically every day, … so, I’m always intrigued/annoyed when I come across a word I don’t know. A quick scan of materials for the Project Zero conference that I attended last week, revealed that a whole bunch of “plenary sessions” ...
