This sign would be so much better without the threat. It could come across as a humorous reminder to not suck face in public spaces. Instead, this sign is just being asked to be torn off the wall. I’m tempted to do it every time I see it. I suppose I can be a little oppositional at times- but so can our students. Not to mention the threat of a blue slip (read: detention) smacks of an authoritarian environment instead of a caring one.

Here are my entrants into the “No Making-Out” poster category:

Paris

Image source

Gross

Image source

Kisses & Hugs

Image sources: Kisses, Hugs

LOLcat

I believe these still get the point across but in a light-hearted, humorous way. Whaddya think? Anyone else have any good hallway signs?

The Big Picture

Part of the Boston Globe’s online space, The Big Picture posts amazing high quality images of recent events.
Particular posts I found moving/incredible/inspiring:

• Eruption of Chaiten Volcano, Chile
• Soaked Swiss Soccer
• Mississippi Floodwaters in Iowa

Typography as art

I only recently realized there’s this culture of utilizing typography in a wide variety of artistic ways. Some of my favorites:

Kinetic typography

The art of using spoken text to create animated text which extends, adds to, or changes your perception of the original text.

Who’s on First?

V is for Vendetta

Typographic animation

This short animated video utilizes only letters, numbers, and symbols right off the keyboard to tell its story.

Death and Taxes

I just ran across this yesterday thanks to BoingBoing.net. It’s a graphical depiction of the United States federal discretionary budget (i.e. where you income taxes go). Incredibly detailed yet incredible to look at, it’s quick way to visualize the priorities of the government based upon how they fund the various departments. You can zoom and pan around the image at their site to get a better look. If you really like it, you can buy it as a 24-inch by 36-inch poster (that’s roughly 61-cm by 91-cm for those world citizens out there).

Wow! SSOL!

While I tend not to necessarily be a big fan of the latest fad tools (I can be a bit oppositional at times), the pure ease of operation and the beauty/meaning inherent in the created word/tag clouds is quite enrapturing. Although it is extremely interesting and perhaps a big enlightening to see people’s del.icio.us tags in a beautiful cloud, perhaps the true power of this tool is to turn any text into a word cloud. The question that is most important (to me) is whether or not this is just a fun tool to perform a quick trick, or if it can be used to change the way text is interpreted. Any insights?

I did a quick perusal of backlinks and trackbacks from Wordle related posts in my reader just now. Here’s what I found:

• My favorite of the bunch: Amit Argawal turned well known speeches into word clouds. They include A More Perfect Union (Barack Obama), I Am Profoundly Sorry (Bill Clinton), and I Have a Dream (Martin Luther King, Jr.), among others.
• Over at think:lab, Christian Long turned Macbeth into a word cloud

Del.icio.us tag clouds

• Chris Lehmann’s is overly education[al]
• Will Richardson likes tools
• Mike Sansone is more of a business, strategy, marketing, blogging kind of guy
• Tim Stahmer seems to enjoy free, web 2.0, photography, tools
• Anol Bhattacharya goes for web 2.0, business, design
• D’Arcy Norman likes to wordpress, blogcomment, [on] drupal, photography
• Bryan Alexander is all about web 2.0
• Gardner Campbell is into education[al] blog[s and] podcast[s]
• Sarah believes in web 2.0, education
• Wendy Smith likes SCIENCE (and some other stuff)
• Alan Levine is the most well rounded of the bunch, but seems to like hz’s followed by numbers.

And I leave you with my own del.icio.us tag cloud, which I don’t feel gives you a full picture of my interests, but if you knew very little about me, it would certainly give you a little insight:

UPDATE- To emphasize the craze that Wordle has been in the last week, see the image below:

Pro-crast-i-na-tion: I’ve seen all of my students do one of these at some point. I’ve done most, especially the “imaginary computer games with your furniture.”

Kung Fu Bear : I used it as a pep talk for my students while they were working on a presentation project. When you go to the zoo to see a bear, it’s pretty impressive. Bears usually are just lying around at the zoo, so it doesn’t take long to get over the impressiveness and move on. However, this bear decided he was going to take his game to the next level (here’s when I started the video). He wanted people to sit up and pay attention to him. People come from all over to see Kung-Fu Bear. People will watch him for hours. He’s mastered his game. I then told students I didn’t want their presentations to just meet the bare (hardee-har-har) minimums. Don’t just be a lazy bear. Be a Kung-Fu Bear!

21 Accents: Some classes loved it, others hated it. I was badgered by one class to play it multiple times spanning through the end of that week. In another class, I was asked to turn it off about 15 seconds in and never play it again. It’s amazing how different the personalities of my classes are this year.

I Love the World (The Earth is Just Awesome): I posted on this earlier. The class that hated the 21 Accents video loved this one. Wonder if there’s some psychological reasoning behind that…hmm… My other classes enjoyed it, but didn’t constantly demand to see it over and over and over and over…

666: I got the information for this from a RadioLab show (RadioLab totally blows my mind). Want to grab every student’s undivided attention in a class (yep, even the ones who haven’t earned a single credit since 3rd grade)? Throw up a 5 ft. x 5 ft. 666 on your projection screen- the room will almost assuredly fall eerily quiet. Here’s the story I told ‘em about their favorite numbers: It turns out the oldest known manuscript of the book of Revelations says the “number of the beast” is actually 616. Interestingly enough, this is the area code for much of west Michigan (where I spent my undergrad years). I’ve embedded the section of the show below where it tells the full story. Or you can visit the RadioLab episode site.

I’ll try to update you with more good finds as I come across them.

My favorite parts: “I love hot magma!” (0:44) and of course you can’t go wrong with Stephen Hawking actually singing along (0:53)! Now only if it had Neil deGrasse Tyson (my favorite astrophysicist)…