ALT Lab

"My research focuses on the development of AI tools to augment user creativity, especially in casual or playful audiences. I specialize in designing and implementing systems that assist users in quickly moving through the possibility space of a creative problem, a genre I call Casual Creators. These systems which have included a design tool for 3D printable necklaces, music visualizations animations, laser-cut robots, and gameplay for a game to crowdsource network security."

" In such times Dada objects amuse everybody, and since these objects are (mostly) made collectively, they are a strong community bond. Amusement (of oneself and others) and the making of art communities are the goals of Dada. Dada is a priori against everything, including goals and itself, but this creative negation is very amusing and is meant to be shared. For one whole century, Dada has delighted in uncovering and using contradictions, paradoxes, and negations, the most important of which are: 1. most people read signs, Dadas make signs, and 2. most people are scared of scary faces, Dada makes scary faces." "

h/t Stan

"What's neat about this is that I didn't have to use any special software while I was writing to make this "video" possible. I was working in plain old vanilla Google Docs. And to show you this one paragraph I liked, I didn't have to present you with the whole document (all 39,154 revisions of it) - I could extract bits and pieces that I thought were interesting, and interleave them in a blog post. Imagine what a high school English teacher could do with that. Imagine what you could do with that if instead of a minor effort by ol' Somers here you had, say, a piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (I've always wanted to watch how TNC writes. If he's ever used Google Docs, it's now possible.)"

I love this: "I worry that most people aren't as good writers as they should be. One thing is that they just don't write enough. Another is that they don't realize it's supposed to be hard; they think that good writers are talented, when the truth is that good writers get good the way good programmers get good, the way good anythings get good: by running into the spike. Maybe folks would understand that better if they had vivid evidence that a good writer actually spends most of his time fighting himself."

"Dr. Moorman conducted a study focused on what meaning VTS had for students exploring how they used VTS in patient care.  Guided by a series of 3 questions, a facilitator chose a work of art and asked students the following questions: 'What is going on in this painting?' 'What are you seeing that makes you say that?' (requiring students to give visual evidence), and 'What more can you find?' (requiring them to look again and scaffold off of others' comments).  Students found their observational skills improved and that they were more open to hearing other's opinions.  They found that they were more likely to give detail to back up observations in their clinical situations and listen to others during report. They also found they used the same line of questioning that the facilitator used when they were seeking more information during clinical rotations during patient care.    "

We had a faculty member who took our students to the VMFA every year for this exercise. The students loved it. I didn't understand its point at the time, but this makes a great deal of sense.

h/t Joyce

h/t David C.

Slick chart building tool

"This report presents an overview of current video practice: the widespread use of video and its costs, the relevance of production value for learning, the pedagogical considerations of teaching online, and the challenges of standardizing production. Findings are based on a literature review, our observation of online courses, and the results of 12 semi-structured interviews with practitioners in the field of educational video production. "

h/t D'Arcy

I don't think this is cognitive bias but it's interesting.

"I'm slowly getting the hang of using my 3D printer to make useful things. Last week, I made sliders for the legs on our pool chairs. This weekend, I made a doohickey to hold our freezer's ice cube container lid in place."

"In Unflattening, Nick Sousanis writes that we need to "discover new ways of seeing, to open spaces for possibilities. It is about finding different perspectives." Stereoscopic vision reveals "that a single, 'true' perspective is false." "

Worth checking out this really brief workflow video on presentation creation

Very good: "Web Design: The First 100 years" http://t.co/wu8jzT6Pq6 (although "the web" is not the right frame, but, details.)