PowerPot – An English lesson for e-lab technicians

Imagine that you’re on a camping trip out in the wild, far away from buildings with power sockets. You can’t connect any equipment to the power supply. Your mobile phone needs recharging. Luckily, you and your friends have invented a device that will let you recharge it. What technology is it based on? What spare parts do […]

Designed by Apple in California ad

In my English classes today at Metadesign, we watched and critiqued Apple’s Designed by Apple in California TV ad . This ad, which I stumbled on in Fast Company’s CoDesign blog, has bombed with consumers. The participants gave this feedback: It’s all emotion, they could be advertising anything, which is a turn-off to the more […]

Remembering to remember

I often struggle to remember the names of my students, especially in large classes. Like most people, using my visual and spacial memory helps. Classes with fixed seating arrangements are out because you want students to mix partners. Attendance lists are frowned upon at the institution I am currently working for.  This had me in […]

What psychologists are saying about how technology affects us

Speaking about “The Secret Powers of Time”, Stanford professor emeritus Philip Zimbardo (famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment) explains how various perspectives of time – past, present and future – influence our actions and relationships. There are six main orientation time zones: Past: Past positive (nostalgic), or past negative (regretful) Present: hedonistic (seeking pleasure, knowledge), […]

OK Go: This Too Shall Pass

The new OK Go video doesn’t have them dancing. Instead, it’s all a fantastic machine of falling dominoes and rolling marbles and levers moving handles to open latches, tipping seesaws that release springs to shoot balls into the air that, falling, trigger further chain reactions, like water running through tubes and pouring into vessels that […]

The iThing

I broke my vow not to hang out on Twitter. Well, I had a fun conversation about the iTablet iThing Apple is unveiling today, asking what people thought it should be called. I thought iPad would work. Andy H thought they should go with iLash, or iShadow, iBrow, or iDrofoil. The iDrofoil? a waterproof version? […]

Rocketboom: Augmented Reality

Talked about Augmented Reality, a term coined by Professor Tom Caudell at Boeing, in a class yesterday. Layar, Nearest Tube, the London Underground iPhone app, and Bionic Eye, the same thing for NY, may be great, but Augmented ID freaked us out. Minority Report, here we come!