101 Technology Fun
Design Research Camp for girls in grades 6 & 7
July 18-22; July 25-29

LEARN HOW TO:
>> make robotic pets using Lego Mindstorms NXT and Pico Cricket
>> design computer games, websites and virtual worlds
>> be a technology co-researcher in a UBC study
>> edit and animate your own mini-movies

SUMMER FUN FOR FREE:
We welcome all girls in grades 6 or 7. Please note that space is very limited. Registration is complimentary. A nutritious lunch, snacks, and outdoor adventures will be provided daily. Location: UBC Education Building. Program: 9:00-3:30 (with supervision available until 5pm).

APPLY ONLINE: www.101technologyfun.com

101 Technology Fun is part of the UBC Research Project: HOW WE LEARN (Technology Across the Lifespan). The program is made possible with the enthusiastic support of Graduate Students and Teacher Candidates in the Faculty of Education.

If you are interested in a volunteer position, whether it be instruction, curriculum design, photography, videography, or what have you, please contact PJ Rusnak. Thanks!

Chilling words spoken by tween girls in a Nike tv commercial, 1995:

If you let me play, if you let me play sports
I will like myself more
I will have more self-confidence
If you let me play sports
If you let me play
I will be 60% less likely to get breast cancer
I will suffer less depression
If you let me play sports
I will be more likely to leave a man who beats me
If you let me play
I will be less likely to get pregnant before I want to
I will learn what it means to be strong
If you let me play, if you let me play sports

A heartful representation of the Nike ad text (by Jason W):

Jason W's Tagxedo - If You Let Me Play

Here are a few of my favourite typography art works!

Beauty by mrgraphicsguy

Far away from myself
Beauty is hard to discover
It’s a lie.

gun by mou5e
Education is the most powerful weapon

Got a Light by DesertViper

En Masse by clockblock

Don’t worry. You will be alright. I am here to help you. Everything will be ok. We will get through this. I will never leave you. Don’t give up. I am here for you always. You are not alone. I will protect you. I understand you…

The Raven by swordfishll

The complete text of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem.

What Lies Within by um0p3pisdn

Emerson’s: ”What lies before us, and what lies behind us, is nothing compared to what lies within us.”

I Speak Alone by Gordorca

As soon as I open my mouth to speak of any of this…
… My words just crumble as they leave me… Never ever to reach you…

What is education for? Why do we educate? What are students really learning in our classrooms? Are we over-schooled but under-educated?

“Today’s children starting kindergarden this year will graduate in the 3rd decade of the 21st century, a world that will have challenges and opportunities beyond what we can predict, with new possibilities and problems that will demand creativity, ingenuity, responsibility, and compassion. Whether our children will merely survive or positively thrive in the decades to come depends in large measure on the experiences that they have in school” (OWP/P Architects, VS Furniture & Bruce Mau Design, 2010). How might we join school learning to living well and well-being? As the WALL-E Captain famously says: “I don’t want to survive, I want to live!”

What do we want our students to know, do, and be? What is best for our children to learn for the future, and how can they best learn it? How do we educate future innovators (beyond mere conformists or consumers) who are confidently prepared for the opportunities, responsibilities, and experiences of life? How might we encourage “goodness” as part and parcel of school “effectiveness”?

There are no shortage of questions about “21st Century Learning” in a world of increasing instability, uncertainty, inequality, and unsustainability. Statistics estimate that we will reach 7.5-10.5 billion people in 2050 unless a major catastrophe happens. 2.8 billion people in our world live on less than $2 per day. 1.3 billion live on less than $1 per day. 1.5 billion people will never get a clean glass of water today, tomorrow, or any day in their lives. 115 million primary school aged children don’t go to school. And how many millions will go to bed sick and hungry tonight?

The Dalai Lama’s Facebook status on Monday, March 7 is worthy of contemplating:

Whatever the intellectual quality of the education given our children, it is vital that it include elements of love and compassion, for nothing guarantees that knowledge alone will be truly useful to human beings. Among the major troublemakers society has known, many were well-educated and had great knowledge, but they lacked a moral education in qualities such as compassion, wisdom, and clarity of vision.

What is most important for students to know? How do we educate confident, happy, citizens who are committed to sustainability, social justice, and civic responsibility; who are technology-savvy; who have strong morals, cross cultural awareness, and respect for diverse others? How do we teach and learn about managing and ensuring a sustainable world? How do we minimize our reckless abuse of one another and nature? How might education be more relational, compassionate, and caring, such that we might learn how to love ourselves, each other, and the planet Earth playground that we share?

Reference:
OWP/P Architects, VS Furniture & Bruce Mau Design. (2010). The third teacher: 79 ways you can use design to transform teaching and learning. New York: Abrams Books.

Excited as I am by the opportunities for my work to contribute a small but positive difference, I am also concerned by the taken-for-granted, narrowly reductive, rigidly categorized, and solely analytical forms of thinking that are often privileged as scholarship with the greatest currency. As a grad student, the dominant melody line that I hear (over and over) reinforces the notion that I need to more-critically argue my research into existence, for what really matters most are the clear-eyed empirical distinctions that I am able to delineate.

Part of me agrees with the resounding ideologies ”out there, dominating and clanging” as I want my work to be valued by a diverse audience. Another part of me questions: how might I align my empirical research (on how girls learn by design) with core humanistic values that love and respect people and the planet? Empirical evidence is essential for figuring out how to improve the quality of education and life in a more-than-human world. As such, how might I attend to both logical/ factual/ analytical interpretation AND holistic/ relational/ empathic understanding? These questions are increasingly relevant as we move from the Information Age (researcher as knowledge-worker, a well-educated manipulator and deployer of rhetoric) to the Conceptual Age (researcher as meaning-maker, an activist for real-world problems).

As Daniel Pink (2005) writes in his best-seller, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future:

We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computer-like capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathetic, big picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.

It’s undeniably difficult to embrace “goodness” and wholeness in research, including mindful expertise, ethical convictions, and felt experience, but I do believe that writing informed by both “heart” and “head” has transcendent worth. Conforming to well-established traditional research orthodoxies would allow me to bypass my current struggles with integrating and legitimating an evocative, empathic, reflexive, relational, inter-connected, and creative scholarship, however, a passage from Oprah’s Commencement Speech at Stanford University (2008) inspires me to keep leaning into my knowing and being:

“What I know now is that feelings are really your GPS system for life. When you’re supposed to do something or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know. The trick is to learn to check your ego at the door and start checking your gut instead. Every right decision I’ve made—every right decision I’ve ever made—has come from my gut. And every wrong decision I’ve ever made was a result of me not listening to the greater voice of myself.

If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. That’s the lesson. And that lesson alone will save you, my friends, a lot of grief. Every doubt means don’t. This is what I’ve learned. There are many times when you don’t know what to do. When you don’t know what to do, get still, get very still, until you do know what to do.”

So I’m struggling with my research methodology. I stay up late every night reading about it, I fall asleep thinking about it, and I wake up still pondering its potential and possibilities. It’s all that I seem to talk about to anyone and everyone who will listen (an audience I fear is now limited to my daughter’s hamster as I’ve over-exhausted friends, family and colleagues with my “Hamletian” confusion and indecision). Research methodology has taken over my mind… and body (i.e., when I go jogging, I no longer enjoy the music thumping through my headphones – I merely hear a distant background noise for my whirring methodological madness). I’m stuck in an intoxicating space somewhere in-between the traditional disciplinary boundaries of research and story, seeking a fertile place of researchland where I can flourish in my co-constitutive roles of researcher, designer, teacher, learner, and creative being. Why am I trying so hard to integrate a “designerly” methodology? Can educational scholars be storytellers/ storymakers AND learning scientists at the same time?

During my passionate search for alternative research methodologies to traditional academic scholarship, a dear friend shared with me Ronald J. Pelias’ (2004) “A Methodology of the Heart: Evoking Academic and Daily Life”. Please take a moment to consider Pelias’ description of the “soulless” university life of academics (in which who you are is all-too-often equivalent to your CV):

Many scholars have come to understand that what they believed to be claims of truth were best understood as demonstrations of the inadequacy of language or as reflections of their own point of view and political interests. As such ideas took hold, their certainty peeled away from the academic tower like dead ivy. They felt nervous, shaken, unsure when or how to speak.

The crisis of faith appeared in academic circles when a growing number of faculty discovered that the university life was not what they expected or bargained for. They were teaching students who seemed more interested in grades than learning. They were working for administrators who seemed more concerned with the bottom line than quality education. They were going to endless meetings that didn’t seem to matter, writing meaningless reports that seemed to disappear into the bureaucracy, and learning that service seemed to have little effect on others’ lives. Productivity was the motto of the day, so they published article after article that no one seemed to read, particularly those who were the focus of the study. They wrote piece after piece on social issues, but none seemed to make any difference. They researched topics that got them promotion and tenure but seemed removed from who they were. They felt empty, despondent, disillusioned. They felt spiritually and ethically bankrupt.

Then some scholars began to recognize that the emperor and, for that matter, they themselves were wearing no clothes. They started to question why university life had to be that way, why they had to be removed from their work, why only certain forms of discourse counted as knowledge, why they didn’t feel more connected to those they studied, why their mind should be split from their body, why they had to keep their emotions in check, why they could not speak from the heart (p.10–11).

Pelias’ Methodology of the Heart has many followers who believe that any scholarship that “doesn’t break our heart just isn’t worth doing anymore” (p.9). Many more researchers object, however, as they feel intimidated by their passion and therefore use rhetoric to distance it in their work, as bell hooks (2000, xxvii) tells:

“Taught to believe that the mind, not the heart, is the site of learning, many of us believe that to speak of love with any emotional intensity means we will be perceived as weak and irrational”

To which Pelias (2004, p.7–8) responds: “I speak the heart’s discourse because the heart is never far from what matters. Without the heart pumping its words, we are nothing but an outdated dictionary, untouched… I don’t want to go places where the heart is not welcome. Such places frighten me.”

“Are you frightened by the truth?” mocks a Pelias’ critic.

“No, I’m frightened by what poses as the truth.”

Works Cited

hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. New York: William Morrow.
Pelias, R. (2004). A methodology of the heart. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

This program examines how mobile devices and digital media practices can empower today’s youth to direct their own learning.

Watch the preview and view the full story on PBS, Sunday  February 13 @ 10pm  ET/PT.

Take typographical elements (such as the words of a story or a favourite quotation) and bring them to life using “Artext” to reinforce and emphasize the meaning-making potential of your images. For example:

Obama's Deep Set Eyes of Hope

Amnesty International: Help us win the fight for a complete ban of landmines

Art is Breaking the Rules

Death by Topography

Stacy Benson Self Portrait

Helvetica Helbotica

From TRASH to TREASURE

How is YOUR heart divided?

Beautiful Life (by Nate Williams)

Check out this Pepsi TV ad using mainly typographic elements with animation, warm colors and upbeat music – connecting feel-good and energizing messages with the brand’s new logo replacing the letter “O.”

WhatTheFont for iPhone is a must have app for all my fellow typophiles (type geeks & obsessive font lovers). Get out your iPhone, snap a photo sample of the type in question (from a magazine, poster, web, etc), and the font will be identified in seconds. So far, I’ve found this app to be quick and fairly accurate. I recommend spending a couple minutes in Photoshop to lighten or remove the background noise and increase the contrast. What are you waiting for: get off my blog and go What The Font!