A weekly newsletter where I share ideas from about nurturing learning and curiosity with technology.
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Time circa 2019
I looked up at the wall from my computer screen and my calendar smiled back with 2021.
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The forgotten art of fun at work
For all the times we ecourage a lack of sugar-coating, we forget to encourage teams to say things kinds things. For all the times we encourage efficiency, we forget to encourage teams to enjoy the process. For all the times we encourage risk-taking, we forget to encourage teams to receive failures with a smile. For…
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Google's new father-son ad will make you cringe
Take 1: Lover On Nov 19, 2009, Google posted an ad to Youtube titled ‘Parisian Love’. It encapsulated all the emotional highs and lows of living with Google Search. It is one of tech’s best ads ever made. The beauty of this ad was that it was not presumptuous. It painted a picture of a…
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She works on a park bench
A scene in 2019 A woman sits on a park bench, writing in her notebook. Another types on her phone. Our perception is that the former is noble, and the latter a drone. Is this because we romanticize the old? Is there something unsettling about the multitude of activities possible on an obscure device? Afterall,…
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Working around Google's reign on education
The question of whether Google impacts the way people learn is as old as Google itself. Opinions about its pros and cons are in constant flux. Fantasizing about retreating into our luddite shells of looking up information in the library is not productive. To live in today’s reality of information retrieval is to be a…
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The Value of After-Class Journals
I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of assigning weekly journals in my class before. Despite preaching to my students every year that they should journal to bolster their learning capacity, I’d never formalized it as a learning tool within the course. This year, in an attempt to show them the value more formally, I…
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Learning how to structure a virtual class
My online lecture on Creativity, Innovation, and Critical Thinking has more than 90 students enrolled this semester. Even before COVID-19, I was constantly searching for new ways to keep the class experiential for such a large group of students. When the university announced last year that the course would be online, I had to revise…
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The pitfalls of virtual workshops
When I give a workshop in person, I don’t have to worry about whether people are familiar with the tools. Participants can focus on the activity, as the cognitive load required to use markers, Post-its, and whiteboards is minimal. These tools have clear affordances and exist in a shared space where the laws of physics…
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I watched a YouTube tutorial. Now what?
My YouTube feed is 40% tutorials, 40% tech reviews and 20% cute animals. I consume more tutorials than is useful, particularly about music production — which is funny because I don’t even make music. I’m pretty confident I’m not alone in this. In fact, “how-to” is one of the most searched terms on Google, and…
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Let go of anchoring bias to build more effective products
Last week, I tried a new video conferencing tool called Around created by a startup with the same name. Having recently raised $15 million in funding, their big claim is that their product can eliminate Zoom fatigue, the newly coined term for exhaustion caused by too much time spent on video calls. Screenshot of around.co…
