Magician Marco Tempest pushes the boundaries on use of iPhones in magic tricks — is it magic, pure electronics, or what we want to see?
Tell us in comments how you could use this shorter-than-usual TEDS video as a bell-ringer, teachers — or as an ice-breaker, meeting facilitators and corporate trainers:
Tip of the old scrub brush to Michelle Gardiner, who suffered my bass playing with quiet equanimity.
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Bell Ringers, Brain learning, Technology, Warm-up exercises | Tagged: Bell Ringers, Ice Breakers, Illusions, iPhones, Magic, Marco Tempest, Meetings, Technology, TEDS, Warmups | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
You gotta admire the bravery of this guy, who came to fatherhood a little late (he claims), and struggles with the fatherliness expectations of a precocious child:
When my wife returned [from a vacation], we settled back into our routine, consisting of 1-2 days per week when we eat dinner out as a family. These events can also be challenging, as our daughter is one of those kids who just cannot sit still for anything. She seems well connected to her surroundings and engages with us and others, but she is perpetual motion personified. So imagine my surprise when the littlest tornado actually sat in her chair for an entire meal!
My wife’s new secret weapon was a series of iPhone apps created especially for toddlers that one of her California girlfriends had recommended. The most popular with our daughter is Letter Tracer, which works as the name suggests. So my daughter was occupied by learning to write her letters. The device and screen provided the engagement that pen and paper hadn’t, and she delighted at being able to successfully trace all the letters of the alphabet, smiling and exclaiming “Look Daddy, I did it!” each time she completed a new tracing. My daughter was having a blast learning how to write her letters, and her parents were enjoying not just her growth but a nice restaurant experience as well.
So, he got his daughter a de-activated iPhone. Seriously.
I’d love to see what Checker Finn would have done in that situation, or Diane Ravitch, or even dear old B. F. Skinner.
Is three too young to get your own iPhone?
Go read the piece. Patrick Hunt at The Apple Blog, “I Gave My Daughter an iPhone – Have I Created a Monster?”
The discussion is good, too. Why can’t this guy be our tech director, in a district where getting technology is like asking for a French dictionary at Republican Party HQ?
1 Comment | Brain development, Brain learning, Education, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Tagged: Brain development, Brain learning, Child Development, Computer Literacy, Education, iPhones, Motor Skills, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Do you recognize this?
It sure looks like a slide rule, doesn’t it?
The last really grand slide rule I had was a fancy aluminum job that my older brother Wes used at the Air Force Academy. It was easily worth a couple of hundred dollars, and it had a very nice leather pouch.
Somebody stole it from me in the football locker room. I never liked football as much after that.
At the University of Utah I got enough ahead to buy a smaller version that still resides somewhere in our house. I actually used it once in a debate round to great effect — it was cross examination debate (not so big back then), on an energy topic. The affirmative (UCLA? USC? One of those two) had a daylight savings case. They rattled off some huge number of barrels of oil to be saved, and on c-x I got it out of them that the number was barrels saved per month. Then I got ’em to confess to how many barrels we actually use in the U.S., daily, and with the slide rule’s help calculated that they were saving one-half of one percent (0.5%), with some rather draconian measures and stiff fines and jail time.
I had the slide rule with me to do homework on the drive to and from the meet across the deserts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico; I used it only to make sure I wasn’t off by an order of magnitude on the calculation — but when I looked up I feared the eyes of the judge were going to inflate and float out of his head. We won the round, I won the speaker points that round, and the judge commented about how facile the negative had been with numbers . . .
But I digress. A little.
Decrepit Old Fool posted that picture. It’s an iPhone — with a slide rule application (“app” to the technoscenti).
Using electrons to mimic an old slide rule! It leaves one speechless, and with a tear in one’s eye.
I’m sure I’d have to play with the thing for a few minutes to figure out how to do percentages again. The slide rule use in that debate round a few decades ago was cutting edge application of the tool at hand. It was not a fancy calculation, or difficult — it was overkill, really, because we all should have been able to do the calculations in our heads, with little fear of being inaccurate. The judge in the round was probably a speech or rhetoric grad student, working on a masters or Ph.D., and hadn’t taken a math class since freshman year. I don’t know if he thought to feel stupid; maybe he hoped the praise for our use of the thing would cover that up.
DOF makes the case that technology shouldn’t make us feel stupid, not if its makers want to sell it. Maybe that has more to do with the demise of the slide rule than the rise of calculators does. It’s a great post over there. Go read it.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 