ITP, a graduate program located in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, explores “the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people’s lives.” ITP is running its second summer camp, a blending of an unconference and artist residency: Conferences like TED leave people energized, full […]
The Fab Academy provides instruction and supervises investigation of mechanisms, applications, and implications of digital fabrication. The academy is a new distributed education platform built on the infrastructure of the international Fab Lab network and taught by MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld and a global roster of visiting faculty and local instructors.
At bildr we are rethinking the ways in which DIY sites have previously approached this world. Typically, the approach has been to showcase an individual’s project, while including instructions that would enable a user to create a duplicate. bildr’s method is quite different.
A few months ago, William Kamkwamba spoke at MIT as he wrapped up a speaking tour of the US with coauthor Bryan Mealer. This video is the whole evening’s presentation, and includes the introductions and question/answer session afterward. William starts at around 11 minutes.
The talk was sponsored by MIT’s Technology and Culture series and he was introduced by Amy Smith of D-Lab. There is a brief segment in the evening on Moving Windmills, a documentary film about William and his story.
Last week, at the annual MassTEC conference an interesting collection of science and technology teachers gathered to share experiences and information. Here are some highlights:
Johanna Bunn of the Boston Museum of Science introduced the Engineering the Future curriculum, with interactive demonstrations of hands-on projects introducing students to structures, fluids and electricity.
The forum on the Massachusetts state science and technology curriculum frameworks introduced a series of strand maps that show how the concepts and possible activities in the various STEM subjects interrelate. Their hope is that existing and new courses could be designed so that they step students through learning ideas within courses and how the courses could build upon each other. Right now the maps are static PDFs, but their goal is to have them be more interactive in the way they connect projects and concepts.
At this year’s Maker Faire, I met Dale Wheat. He was at a counter in the Maker Shed demonstrating his kits. I was impressed at how clever they were, and how inexpensive. We talked for a few minutes, and then I went off to explore. Before the weekend was over, I dropped a few of […]
UVA Microbiologist Martin A. Schwartz has a wonderful article in the Journal of Cell Science about the importance of what he calls “productive stupidity:” I’d like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don’t think students are made to understand how hard it is to do […]
