Last week, I introduced my visual literacy students to the fascinating and entertaining documentary film “Helvetica“ in which world famous designers praise and berate the ubiquitous typeface. My students were amazed at the force and passion with which these designers spoke about simple sans-serif lettering.

This morning, I’m catching up on some twitter discussions only to find a New York Times article on a similar topic- Mistakes in Typography Grate the Purists The author bemoans how knowing too much about type can cause an ongoing discomfort in a world awash with poor typography.

Some examples include a Gothic church with signage set in the same font as the front page of National Lampoon magazine or incorrect use of period type in movies:

I still find it bizarre to see type or lettering that is wrong by years in a period movie in which the architecture, furniture and costumes are impeccable, and where somebody would have been fired if they were not

Matthew Carter, typography designer, Cambridge, MA

While I don’t hope that my students find themselves continually annoyed at poor use of typography and other design principles, I do hope that their awareness will increase and that they begin to notice examples that could be made better through better application of these principles.

(in an interesting aside on the immediacy of Web 2.0, the Wikipedia article on Cooper type already cites the 2 day old NY Times article I previously mentioned.)

This video was sent to me by a colleague at work.

I was immediately reminded of Daniel Pink, author of “A Whole New Mind” and frequent writer about emotionally intelligent design. Let’s face it, no amount of cajoling, criticizing or high pressuring can compete with sensitivity to the feelings of the intended audience. As a teacher, I prefer trying to find fun ways to communicate ideas, rather than badgering, lecturing and otherwise intimidating my students into learning what I think is important. To me, it just makes sense.

In 2007 Vinton Cerf, a founding father of the Internet wrote that what this country needs is another Sputnik to reinvigorate science education. After reading Cerf’s article, last spring I did a research project on the National Defense Education Act. The NDEA was the US response to the launch of Sputnik, hoping to improve schools and better compete with the perceived Soviet threat.

Today, on Daniel Pink’s blog, I find another interesting reference to this landmark event. This time it was a video of James Paul Gee discussing education reform. A few of the highlights I picked up on in the video include:

• Global competition will be the new Sputnik, and American education has a 50% chance it will experience the first real reform in 100 years as a result.
• Teachers have become de-professionalized, letting textbooks, testing and politicians make curriculum decisions rather than teachers making professional decisions about what and how best to teach. (Not an indictment of teachers, just a statement of current reality.)
• Innovation and creativity are not emphasized enough because many schools are simply test-prep academies.
• Social media helps to create “passion groups” through which people with similar passions can come together
• Teachers learning to use new digital tools are model learners for students

If you have 11 minutes or so, why not enjoy the entire video?

I’ve been noticing over the past several years some really rad pumpkin designs around Halloween. My suspicion is with the onset of digital photography coupled with manipulation software, it is becoming easier for the average person to put a fairly complex design on a pumpkin.

In my Visual Literacy class, we’ve spent a fair amount of time studying all of the basic design elements such as value, shape, space, line, composition, etc. We have done a number of value studies, vector drawings and image manipulations. I began to wonder after looking at the cool pumpkin designs floating around the Internet if 1) I could create my own design from an image, and 2) if it would make a good assignment for my students to try.

I found an image from Sendak’s “Where The Wild Things Are” book. I manipulated it in Photoshop, increasing the contrast so I basically had two values, black & white. I experimented with a number of ways of achieving this, the Threshold adjustment seemed to work fairly well. But my pattern was ultimately developed in Illustrator using the pen tool.

It looked something like this:

In the process of creating this pattern, I realized that I had experienced this type of design before when I worked in a screenprinting shop. Whenever we would print a light color on a dark fabric, I found that I had to think in reverse by creating a negative of what I wanted the final result to be. Since the light of the candle in the pumpkin would shine through the cut areas, I needed my highlight areas to be the shapes I drew, and leave the dark areas as whitespace. It was a great exercise in negative/positive space.

After completing my design on the computer, I printed it, and taped it on my pumpkin. I use a sharp pointy thing to poke holes through the pattern into the pumpkin so I could see where my cut lines would be. Then I carved out the cut areas according to the pattern. One thing I didn’t do so well was consider the complexity of carving in the pumpkin. I put too many fine details in, and often didn’t leave enough pumpkin flesh between my cut areas in my design to make a solid structure, so I had to improvise when doing the actual carving.

One thing we discussed in class was the possibility for a middle value as well as a black and a high key value in this design. In pumpkin carving, some have discovered that removing the skin, but not cutting all of the way through the flesh, you can achieve a middle value as well. (Some examples are shown here.)

Now I’m not the best pumpkin carver in the world. In fact, I’ve never done anything much more complex that the traditional triangle eyes, and toothless grin of a regular old jack-o-lantern, but I really wanted to test my design skills. After transferring my design to the pumpkin, I carefully carved it out and here is my result:

And here is what my pumpkin looks like all lit up:

What do you think?

I’d say this is a keeper assignment. I can’t wait to see what my students come up with for their designs, and if they will have the patience to actually carve it out.

Now that I have sort of figured this out, next year I suppose I will have to try a design with a middle value as well.

Happy Halloween!

Saw this on a co-worker’s Facebook page. Thought I’d share it here as it is worth spending 1:51 minutes of your life looking at. I found the animation & videography compelling, and the poem’s not bad either!

Sometimes I take it for granted that colleagues and friends know about most of the same technology tools that I know and use, but it just ain’t so! Likewise, they know about things that I don’t know about, so I am taking it upon myself to write a post compiling a list of  the tech tools that I use on a regular basis and hoping that other folks will do the same. (If you do, please comment here with a link to your list.)

These aren’t tools that I’ve heard about and dinked around with a bit; these are things I have discovered that have enough value that I keep returning to them. I will post my list here and I’m hoping you will comment with tools you frequently use as well.

• Google the reigning king of all search engines. I frequently use Google Image Search as well.
• Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia (everyone uses this now, right?)
• Wikimedia Commons is a great place to find Creative Commons licensed images.
• Magnatune is an excellent repository of low cost and Creative Commons licensed music.
• Firefox Web browser extraordinaire. Love it for the 3rd party add-on tools
• Stumble Upon use it to find a random website that matches your interests or to drive traffic to sites you like. I use it’s Firefox plugin
• Diigo has all but replaced my browser favorite bookmarks. Save sites you like online, share with others, highlight & comment right on webpages.
• Camstudio is a free screen capture tool that saves AVI and SWF video files.
• Tinyurl is a web address shortening tool. If you send URLs to people shorten ‘em up with Tinyurl
• Edublogs is where I do my education blogging. Free blogs have ads, but paid supporters are ad free.
• Twitter is becoming my communication tool of choice. Love the conversations, and I can still block spammers there.
• Tweetdeck is an awesome program I use to do most of my Twittering.
• Facebook is how I keep up with students, family & friends.
• YouTube is where I post videos
• Flickr is a place I store & share digital photos online.
• ShrinkPictures is a cool little website to “webify” your digital photos too big to e-mail or post online
• Alice is 3-D virtual software that teaches the basics of computer programming, and also lets you make fun, interactive stories
• Scintilla is a text editor that highlights computer programming and html code. I make most of my web pages with it.
• Google Docs is a great way to create online documents you can share & collaborate with. Online surveys are surprisingly easy to create. Includes word processing, spreadsheet, slideshows as well.
• Audacity is an excellent audio editor I love to use.

One tool I would use if I didn’t have Photoshop is Gimp. Gimp is a free photo editing program that is quite popular.

I am sure there are many others I haven’t thought of, but these are the free tools that I use most often. When I need a piece of software and I want to see if there is something free, the first place I look is Sourceforge which is where open source programmers share their work with the world. Check it out, you might find something there you really use and like.

On my wish list is a free non-linear video editor and a free vector drawing tool. Do you know any?

For a while now, I have been pondering the notion of literacies beyond that of the written word, particularly that of visual and new media literacies. In the fascinating article “Expanding the Concept of Literacy” Elizabeth Daley goes so far to propose that multimedia and the language of the screen is the current vernacular; a true new literacy equal in importance to traditional literacy of the printed word. It seems to me that educational institutions have a long way to go towards recognition of non-traditional literacy, however I have observed some progress on occasion.

For example, Daniel Pink recently wrote about how the University of Pennsylvania, which normally assigns a book to the incoming freshmen class to study and analyze, this year has assigned a famous painting for study and consideration. I find the story interesting because it suggests a broad recognition of visual literacy as a valid and important field of study at that institution.

Intrigued, yesterday I tweeted the story out, seeking thoughts on the idea and unfortunately have been away from my computer for a day and wasn’t able to reply to anyone who responded. Some things are ill-suited for discussion on twitter anyhow, and this story and its accompanying ideas seems too big for 140 characters, so I wrote this quick post to continue the discussion. Here are some of the ideas that were suggested:

Chris wants to open a can of copyright worms…

Chris, I know we are in a mash-up world, but I’m going to have to learn a whole bunch more about copyright before I could effectively lead such a discussion. And it seems like the more I learn about it, the more confused I get. Still, it would certainly be interesting! How much is fair-use? How much can you expect to use before you get into legal trouble, etc.?

Jeff gets right to the heart of the matter with a suggestion of turning it into an explicit lesson in visual literacy…

Most of my students are definitely left-brain oriented, and this suggestion would certainly lead to some lively debates and discussions. What do you think of doing this debate-style and just randomly having people argue for and against? I would love to get some engineering technology students arguing for visual literacy because I certainly more often hear arguments against needing this kind of knowledge.

Then we have Dr. Taylor confusing the heck out of me…

This is why I think some things are better discussed somewhere other than twitter. When we abbreviate to the point that the message becomes confusing, maybe it’s time to take it to the blog? Rel ` icons? Is that religious icons? Ren ` ports to Cubists & Bacon? Not sure what ren ` ports is either.

I’m liking your postcard idea, but would like some further clarification on this before I comment further. I hope you can take my gentle ribbing, but either I’m just too tired or too thick-headed to decode that last tweet.

We have some terrific ideas starting us out here, I’m wondering if anyone else would like to weigh in?

At my school, we have a freshman experience class, although I am not directly involved with it. I’m not sure if they have an assigned reading assignment, but something that the incoming freshmen could do together to start developing critical thinking skills I think would be awesome. Why not a painting? Congratulations Penn, I think this is a fabulous idea for welcoming new students to college, and getting their feet wet in the world of literacy. Perhaps a video lesson might be great as well. Show them an indie or foreign film that none of the students are likely to see.

What do you think of using a film for developing visual literacy? Video is definitely a part of this generation’s lives, the trick is finding a film that they haven’t seen yet.

One film I have shown past groups of students is the French film Amélie. It is full of complementary colors and stunning visual imagery. I have yet to have a student who has seen it before I have shown it to them. Most are skeptical that they can watch and enjoy a non-English film with subtitles, yet most are surprised at how well they can follow the story.

If you have more ideas & suggestions on developing visual & new media literacies, I would love to hear them! I’m particularly interested in seeing detailed plans on how these literacies are being taught.

I’m also interested in hearing what you think about the whole notion of alternative, non-printed literacy.

I awoke early this morning because today is the 2nd Annual Fun With Science Day in Clyde, KS. Last year, on the Saturday before the kids started back to school, we held the first  science fun day in the park and it was a big hit. In our town of 500 people, we had more than 40 kids show up for the event, and I suspect we will have as many or more today.

I think this is a great time of year for an event like this because the kids are getting bored and ready to get back to school. Our event is geared for K-6 grade children, but anyone who’s a kid at heart will have a good time.

This year I am particularly excited because I’ve managed to convince a real research scientist to join us for the event. Dr. Sundeep Rayat from K-State’s Chemistry Department is coming to show the kids some cool chemistry stuff. (Check out her web-page to see how super-smart this lady is!) The cool thing is that I didn’t really know anyone from the Chemistry department until I met Dr. Rayat at the Wakonse Conference on College Teaching. Through that common experience, we have developed a friendship that ultimately has enabled the kids in tiny & very rural Clyde to rub elbows with a world-class scientist this weekend. How cool is that?!?

Recently I uploaded some never before seen videos from last year’s Fun With Science Day. This first one shows the kids experiencing conservation of angular momentum. This is the same rule of physics that allows an ice skater to speed up while spinning by raising their arms and bringing their mass towards the center.

This video shows the kids playing with “Oobleck” or “Cornstarch Goo” which is a non-Newtonian liquid. Isaac Newton described the basic properties of a liquid, which most liquids do posess, but this liquid defies the rules. It is part liquid and part solid, depending on its environment. A strong impact aligns the molecules letting it behave like a solid, while a gentle touch releases the molecules and it behaves like a liquid. Isn’t that weird? And the kids love it! You just mix enough water into cornstarch to make a batter, and this is what you get!

The weather calls for a chance of showers today, but I’m hoping we can pull this event off without getting soaked. I just looked at the radar map and everything is north of us right now, but some cells are firing up out west of us, which means we could catch some rain later today.( It’s been an unusually wet and cooler summer. Normally in the 90’s & 100’s and bone dry this time of year, but yesterday was pleasant, only 88 degrees.) But I’m keeping my fingers crossed. A lot of people have put in a lot of work to make this event happen, so hopefully we’ll make this one happen today without any bad weather.

Back in the late 1980’s, when I just joined the Navy, I happened across a book with a catchy title, “School is Hell” by Matt Groening. It was a compilation of comics by the guy who would later create “The Simpsons” tv program. This was a time in my life when I had just spent 13 years in a place where I struggled to fit in, to be successful and to be myself. I felt like school was hell, so I bought the book. (As you might imagine, when underachiever Bart Simpson came out, I was a ready-made fan.)

I recently rediscovered this book. Here is a sample called, “What I learned in school“. Take note of what he writes about the 3rd grade. I had that very experience myself. Although I was never sent off to the special room in the basement, I vividly recall being demoted from the “silver” group to the “brown” reading group.

I think the teacher’s 12th grade comment also provides us some vivid insight into how creativity is valued in the classroom.

Now, just for fun, check out the “Teacher’s Guide to Words that Make a Kid Snicker”