For better or for worse, I’ve always been a tad obsessive (let’s blame my maternal grandmother, who purchased 5 of the same type of sweater sets or perhaps my paternal grandfather, who’d make the same special “recipe” for weeks on end – we called it “a kick”).  Creatively, this can be beneficial. I have a weird internal engine that propels me to make as many as of whatever-I’m-currently-into-at-the moment as possible. Of course I inevitably get bored and move on, but there ar

Here is the video archive of my 15 min mini keynote ( I was last on a panel of 4) for Alan November’s Building Learning Communities Conference, 2015. I’ve been attending since 2010 and love it every time..this year I did a couple of presentations as well as the keynote and 3 Master Classes (between 4-7 hours each). (to view on the November Learning Homepage, CLICK HERE) One of the slides at the beginning got cut off and the illustrations look a bit purple rather than my signa

The other day (much too long ago for @timbuckteeth’s tastes), I was challenged by the aforementioned Steve Wheeler to write a #blideo response – the first one after the phenomenon of #blimage. The video in question: While this bit of footage is undeniably poignant and a perfect analogy for persistence and stick-to-itiveness, what struck me is the very FACT of the video. Yes, I am going to get CINEMETA (bear with me I dig wordplay) The fact that the cameraman (now probably aff

I hope this works out, but two of my favourite creative compadres, Dan Ryder (@WickedDecent) and Sean Ziebarth (@MrZiebarth ) and I have gone in kahoots to propose an SXSWEdu workshop. Both gentlemen presented this past SXSWEdu and I gave an Ignite talk with EdTechWomen at SXSWEdu14. We wanted to do something that pooled our combined talents and love (ok obsession) for remix and creativity. Dan was brilliant enough to come up with the concept of “Critical Creativity”, and I t

“Blessed are people who see beautiful things in places where other people see nothing” – Camille Pissarro This is the 3rd blog entry in a series of four in which I aim to draw comparisons between the paradigm shift in education today (in particular, the influence of mobile and connected learning), and the Impressionist Art Movement. My main point is that something considered to be avant-garde or revolutionary eventually becomes quite ordinary, and therefore we need not fear s

A few days ago I challenged Steve Wheeler (@timbuckteeth) to compose a blog post based on 1 of a choice of 3 images I sent him. Being the sharp mind he is, he happened to incorporate all three! He volleyed back with this image of bread spilled on the street, and was careful to say he took the photo in Paris. After some rumination here it goes – 3 analogies… Bread as Knowledge One if the first things that struck me was the tone of “waste”. It was particularly intriguing that t

Hopefully you have perused the intro to this blog series. Part II is about HARDWARE (that is, the physical components and technologies that facilitated the Impressionist art movement and how they are analogous to what is going on now) I. Paint Tubes Perhaps most importantly was the invention of the portable metal paint tube – something of course we all take for granted now (Sweden even sells caviar in tubes!). Prior to the invention of such a tube by John Goffe Rand (patented

I’ve been wanting to write about this weird little experiment for a few weeks now. It’s a hybrid of two ideas… I’ve long loved the work of Austin Kleon and although his books Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work! resonate with me most, I dig what he does with blackout poetry using newspapers and Sharpie. He often talks about the lineage of this style of found poetry. It suddenly hit me that an interesting remix would be to use lipstick instead of black pen to cross out ext

I was so honoured last month to be a part of the Adobe Education Ignite talk series with some brilliant peers: Rafranz Davis, Kelly Kermode, and Jeff Larson. Special thanks to Thor Prichard for asking me to be a part of it! In my talk I focused on the nature of creativity and how one can cultivate a daily creative habit, as well as incorporate creativity on a daily basis in one’s classroom. Here’s the video: #makerculture #ignite #adobe #creativity #creative #education

What could I do with 100 days of making? So poses Elle Luna in her #100DayProject Well, to be honest I’m a big proponent of making something everyday and often start my own little to-dos of creative habit/makery…things like my recent #oneword project, where I synthesize the essence of my day and get to practice metaphorical typography. I really wanted to do something collaborative with the #100DayProject. So I reached out to Master of Whimsical Hashtags Dan Ryder aka @WickedD

I had  lovely time keynoting for this event (my first CUE event, actually) December, 2014. I consider this to be a “tweenote”, as mentioned in the talk…it’s an idea that started small, with a tweet, then expanded into a blog post , was refined into an Edutopia blog post,  and finally fashioned into this presentation, complete with over 250 (though you can’t tell from the video) hand-drawn or animated slides. You can see the slide deck here, sans internal vids and my animation

On my plane ride last night I had a thought – what if I could essentialize my day into 1 word? What would be the most important? I am a big fan of creativity in restraint and am currently working on a workshop on Visual Thinking called “Image is Everything” where this sort of minimalistic synthesis is addressed. I also see it as a way to experiment with and practice my typography, since my palette is self-restricted to hot pink and black I really need to play in other ways. P

The other day was Henry Miller’s birthday, so I did my usual #threethirtysketchquote and drew him to post on my various social media accounts (it’s very therapeutic). These were the ones I chose… Great quotes, but come New Year’s Day I was perusing the Internet for some quotes on creativity (for yet another project) and lo and behold I chanced upon this nugget: “Paint what you want and die happy” I decided immediately that could apply to so many things in life, and I’d have t

Woke up this morning listening to Yves Montand and thought why not make Saturdays a time to create and share a sketch quote based on a song I’m chilling out to, then attach the Soundfile (either a YouTube or Soundcloud link) via Thinglink to it! Will probably do Saturdays only, but I need creative routines in my life. They keep me on my toes and give me things to look forward to. They also help narrow focus if other things in life are seemingly flying off handles. What don’t

While at Alan November’s Building Learning Communities (BLC) this summer I was introduced to Mr. Bob Greenberg, developer of a video interview series called “The Brainwaves” (thanks to Tom Whitby for the introduction!). We had a bit of an issue with some construction work going on outside the hotel, but I think it turned out fine. I’m really riffing off some hot-pink Post-It notes I used to brainstorm the night before. Perhaps I’ll take the ones I didn’t use and write a post…

So here’s an idea. This would be great, I think, for students if you are an educator, but I plan to use it in my personal life as well, with my recent pet projects @Serendipidoodle and #threethirtysketchquote We need the “white space” to be creative. Chris Long, who attended my keynote at California State University at Fullerton in May, called it “miracle grow” for creativity (Love!) So my suggestion, as we emerge into an increasingly visual society, is to offer something a b

I’ve been doing what I’ve deemed “Sketchquotes” for about a year now, mostly using the Paper app by Fifty Three. They are sort of mixed in to my Mycongraphy site of metaphorical icons and images I’ve created for slide presentations. The first full week of school is over and boy, when the bell rings at the end of the day I feel like I need to TAKE A BREAK AND MAKE something…anything! That’s when I decided to create #threethirtysketchquote as a tag and a Tumblr blog. The gist i

A while back the lovely Wes Fryer (we’ve never met, except on Twitter, but I’m the type that definitely counts that as “real life”) asked me to share my thoughts about maintaining the spark for innovation. He’s crowdsourcing a keynote, which is something I’ve done in the past and loved it (so much so that I plan to do it again) I like to organize any “tips” I give into short collections of alliterated words – that, and rhyming or assonance, just seems to work for me both as a

As part of the History for Music Lovers project, I wrote the lyrics to this song parody of The Kink’s “Come Dancin’ a while ago and the other half of Historyteachers, Herb Mahelona, recorded it. Originally I had wanted a student to animate it, or to try out Lego stop motion. But after putting that on hold for a while and viewing some cool lyric videos (Katy Perry’s “Birthday” in particular), I thought it might be nice to crowdsource submissions for each lyric line from studen

What if “professional development” became Pro-FRESH-ional Devlopment? I am tempted to begin this short but nonetheless inspired post with an opening line nicked from one of my favourite YouTube channels, the PBS Idea Channel… Here’s an idea… Here’s an idea to remix professional development or at least those “pre-school meetings” we all attend or even weekly faculty meetings (btw isn’t “meeting” crying out for a euphemistic alternative word?) into something more refreshing, en