- Aaron Sorkin Is Writing Some Kind of ‘Social Network’ Sequel Because ‘I Blame Facebook For January 6’ Riot at the U.S. Capitol
- The Student-Led Protests Aren’t Perfect. That Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Right.
- Shaping the Future of Learning: The Role of AI in Education 4.0
- For philosophy newbs: five thinkers to follow today.
- Survey Finds Many Gen Zers Say School Lacks a ‘Sense of Purpose’
- Bukowski Reads Bukowski: Watch a 1975 Documentary Featuring Charles Bukowski at the Height of His Powers
Month: April 2024
A bit of techno typing
What happens when you give kids support and an open playground?
Austin Kleon’s son, Owen, dropped his latest SoundCloud album.
He’s 11.
My favorite track, Typing, is embedded here. It’s a banger of creativity. And heavily influenced by Kraftwerk and Daft Punk, just like I am.
Oh, the possibilities.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. If you’ve enjoyed the insights and stories, consider showing your support by subscribing to my weekly newsletter. It’s a great way to stay updated and dive deeper into my content. Alternatively, if you love audiobooks or want to try them, click here to start your free trial with Audible. Your support in any form means the world to me and helps keep this blog thriving. Looking forward to connecting with you more!
NASA, Voyager, and long-term project-based learning
The premise for the first Star Trek film featuring the original series cast proposes that a probe from Earth, Voyager 6, traveled so far and accumulated so much information as it traveled the cosmos that it achieved sentience. And when it did, it wanted to return to “The Creator” and deliver all that information.
Trust me, that first Star Trek movie is the most “sci-fi” of the entire series, except maybe Star Trek: Beyond.
While no probe named Voyager 6 ever launched, the idea of a probe transmitting data back home after traveling billions of miles is still very much a reality and not science fiction.
However, you may have heard that Voyager 1, launched nearly 50 years ago, began transmitting gibberish back to NASA a few months ago. Many feared the worst. Voyager kept transmitting data, signifying it was alive, but something happened to the data transmissions.
After five months of work, the Voyager team worked some coding magic to restore the code and restart regular transmissions.
“When the time came to get the signal, we could clearly see all of a sudden, boom, we had data, and there were tears and smiles and high fives… Everyone was very happy and very excited to see that, hey, we’re back in communication again with Voyager 1. We’re going to see the status of the spacecraft, the health of the spacecraft, for the first time in five months.”
Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft at JPL
Talk about project-based learning at work…
Perhaps there’s no better example of the importance of project-based learning in schools than a story like this. When has anyone tried to change the code on an object over 15 billion miles from the Earth?
Never. There’s no guidebook for a project like this, no curriculum to refer to, no content standards. Just a group of experts trying everything they know to solve a problem.
And this project has been going for nearly 50 years. Share that with your students when they think they’ve been working on a project for too long.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. If you’ve enjoyed the insights and stories, consider showing your support by subscribing to my weekly newsletter. It’s a great way to stay updated and dive deeper into my content. Alternatively, if you love audiobooks or want to try them, click here to start your free trial with Audible. Your support in any form means the world to me and helps keep this blog thriving. Looking forward to connecting with you more!
Creating Creative Creations
Greetings Starfighters,
I crossed an auspicious milestone this week. I’ve been using Readwise to collect highlights and notes from almost everything I read, whether a book, an ebook, a research article, or an online article. I get a recap daily of 10 different highlights to review.
Of course, I can review more, but that daily reminder is a nice way to remember things I’ve read and thought were important – heck, many blog posts and articles are inspired by those passages.
The Meta-Diaries of Marion Milner: Prescribing Creativity
Marion Milner’s unique approach to self-discovery involved using her creative explorations in literature and art as a therapeutic project. Through her meta-diaries, she abandoned preconceived goals and embraced free writing to uncover hidden thoughts and dark instincts. Milner’s focus on creativity influenced her self-discovery and guided her therapeutic practice with patients like Simon, emphasizing the importance of creative expression for maintaining a sense of the future.
Since 1926, Milner had been writing diaries in which she recorded her impressions of life in ways that seem ordinary enough. She would, for example, note seeing “a little boy in a sailor suit dancing and skipping by himself on his way to look at the sea lions,” or reflect, “I realized how untrustworthy I am in personal relationships … always agreeing with the person present.” But in the thirties Milner turned her diaries, as a sort of raw material, into her first books, which were published as essayistic reflections about her diaries: A Life of One’s Own (1934) and An Experiment in Leisure (1937). In them she invented something new and a genre of her own: a diary about a diary, or what the critic Hugh Haughton has called a “meta-diary.” Contemporaries like W. H. Auden responded with enthusiasm.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. If you’ve enjoyed the insights and stories, consider showing your support by subscribing to my weekly newsletter. It’s a great way to stay updated and dive deeper into my content. Alternatively, if you love audiobooks or want to try them, click here to start your free trial with Audible. Your support in any form means the world to me and helps keep this blog thriving. Looking forward to connecting with you more!
20 Minutes of Charles Schulz Drawing Peanuts Comics
Pardon me as I date myself, but I have loved and always will love the Peanuts comic strips. The cartoons were staples of my childhood, and I have no plans to stop watching them anytime soon.
I love to see creators create, so this 20-minute video of Charles Schulz creating his famous characters is a delight.
If you need more inspiration, here’s a video of Chuck Jones demonstrating how to draw Bugs Bunny and other characters.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. If you’ve enjoyed the insights and stories, consider showing your support by subscribing to my weekly newsletter. It’s a great way to stay updated and dive deeper into my content. Alternatively, if you love audiobooks or want to try them, click here to start your free trial with Audible. Your support in any form means the world to me and helps keep this blog thriving. Looking forward to connecting with you more!
Meta wants to put students and teachers in Quest VR headsets
Meta plans to make Quest VR headsets a key tool for classroom learning, offering students immersive educational experiences. The push for VR in education raises questions about the future of learning and student engagement. Despite concerns like cybersickness and limited accessibility, Meta sees VR technology as a promising avenue for transforming education.
- Meta will release a suite of visually engrossing education apps for teachers to use with students ages 13 and older in time for the fall 2024 semester.
- Teachers will be able to manage multiple Quest devices at once without preparing and updating each device individually.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. If you’ve enjoyed the insights and stories, consider showing your support by subscribing to my weekly newsletter. It’s a great way to stay updated and dive deeper into my content. Alternatively, if you love audiobooks or want to try them, click here to start your free trial with Audible. Your support in any form means the world to me and helps keep this blog thriving. Looking forward to connecting with you more!
Three Writing Tips Backed By Scientific Evidence
As my doctoral colleagues and I near the end of Year 2, we’re thinking more and more about writing our dissertations. While that process involves much research and planning, it also involves a whole heck of a lot of writing.
So, how do you write better? Here are three tips based on scientific evidence:
Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list, and it doesn’t mention the most important part about becoming a good writer…
Writing. All. The. Time. The more you write, the better you’ll get. 2,000 words a day, according to Stephen King.
So, get to writing, my friends.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. If you’ve enjoyed the insights and stories, consider showing your support by subscribing to my weekly newsletter. It’s a great way to stay updated and dive deeper into my content. Alternatively, if you love audiobooks or want to try them, click here to start your free trial with Audible. Your support in any form means the world to me and helps keep this blog thriving. Looking forward to connecting with you more!
There is no audience
Stop worrying about what you think other people think of you and what you do. They don’t care. They’re too busy worrying about themselves.
Teachers and students, this is your call to get busy doing your own thing, and don’t worry about what anyone thinks.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. If you’ve enjoyed the insights and stories, consider showing your support by subscribing to my weekly newsletter. It’s a great way to stay updated and dive deeper into my content. Alternatively, if you love audiobooks or want to try them, click here to start your free trial with Audible. Your support in any form means the world to me and helps keep this blog thriving. Looking forward to connecting with you more!
Magicians on a mountaintop
Greetings starfighters,
With Spring Break this week, I’ve taken some time to practice being creative, even if that meant creativity in the form of some home improvement projects. I even put in a new lighting fixture and bathroom mirror and painted. Extremely productive.
However, as with all creative endeavors, something happens to screw things up. In my case, something’s going on with our dishwasher. Same old story, check some things off the list and add a few more. Our creative work follows the same pattern as we complete one task and then, invariably, find something else to work on or revise old work, whether in our personal or professional lives.
More in this week’s newsletter…
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. If you’ve enjoyed the insights and stories, consider showing your support by subscribing to my weekly newsletter. It’s a great way to stay updated and dive deeper into my content. Alternatively, if you love audiobooks or want to try them, click here to start your free trial with Audible. Your support in any form means the world to me and helps keep this blog thriving. Looking forward to connecting with you more!