Ed Tech in the Classroom

What's Cool

In creating our i-images and i-videos this week, we've been talking a lot about the "coolness factor" and how it influences our audience. The general premise is that if we educators can present an idea as "cool", then it has more punch. Over at Creating Passionate Users, I came across a great post "How your product can inspire The Nod"

"The Nod"..."that acknowledging, approving, knowing, we're-special look."

You know what I'm talking about. When I got my first i-pod, I instinctually gave "the nod" to students I saw with the white earphones. Now that I HAD the i-pod, I suddenly saw others with theirs, and we shared knowing looks as we passed in the hall. Even Sandal Man mentioned that he had a Mac because it was "cooler."

According to the post,

To give The Nod is to recognize and appreciate another person who "gets it", whatever it is. The Nod is NOT simply a "you have something I have" look....

When we give The Nod to another, it's NOT about the thing we have in common--it's about what having that thing says about us.

I have to wonder: are we MAET year three students buying into the "coolness" factor presented by our professors? And more importantly, are great ideas "cool" to begin with?

Some of the greatest ideas presented us through the ages aren't cool, and no matter of marketing them will make these ideas cool, unless they are watered down.

Take the idea to "Love your neighbor as yourself." Not cool 2,000 years ago, not cool now.

Take Mohandas Gandhi's "An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind." Yeah. A real cool idea that has really caught on, eh?

I like "big idea" premise. What I resist is making the "big idea" a message.  I'm resisting the sound bite of the compressed "punch" that emulates the media. I feel like I'm working as a propagandist who's selling her message, not an educator who's pushing her students to examine various sources and allowing them to make their own choices.

Font Matters

Yesterday during Friday news, year three grad students in the MAET program presented their images. This is the one I created. I toyed with the idea of using a Lichtenstein painting and inserting different fonts in a series of three to demonstrate how font can change the tone of a piece of art. In the end, I decided to use the phrase "I love you" in various fonts on a series of nearly identical images to demontstrate how font and placement of words add meaning to text. The big idea I was trying to portray is this:

It's not just the WHAT, but the HOW. Sometimes, how something is presented can be just as important as the content.

As Virginia Postral says in Looks Matter (Forbes Magazine), "Appearance matters....sometimes it's not just what you say but how you say it."

In web design, print, and publishing, font matters. Font communicates meaning. Imagine the font in the Lichtenstein painting with a cute curly-Q, whimsical font. Not the same message, eh?

(image via artchive)

On an added note, if you're really interested in learning more about font, check out Valerie Kirschenbaum's Goodbye Gutenberg. It's a fantastic coffee table book that everyone picks up. Kirschenbaum, a teacher in the New York, claims to be the first female in 500 years to design her own font. It's a must-read for all teachers interested in literacy and the visual arts.

-Little Ms. Blog

i.images

What's an i-image?

i-image samples- various designers, although we aren't sure who they are.

"perspective" image by Diane Franklin