If you look at all the sci-fi futuristic storylines they all fall into one of four categories: continued growth, collapse, transformation or discipline.
I love workshop week at OCAD. Today we did one on presentations. Who knew there were strategies around staging.
If you want to connect with the audience but make an impactful statement you stand down center.
If you want to appear friendly you stand on the right side of stage.
If you want something to be in the background where it won't distract people you put it on the left side.
I learned about the thesis process for my masters today. I'll have to do a research application to the Ethics Board where I have to prove the benefits of my research outweigh the risks to the participants.
The stages of collaboration
I learned about the Harkness method of teaching today. It's so fascinating to me that there are all these different ways to teach and learn.
Summary of the Harkness method:
- Students sit in an oval table with a teacher. There are 13 people at the table.
- Teacher provides a math problem or a foreign text like Latin and the students through discussion and collaboration figure out how to solve the problem or translate the text.
- If 1 student gets it wrong, the other students ask questions to try and guide the student to the error instead of pointing it out.
- There is little intervention from the teacher and the students teach each other. Toughest part for teachers sometimes is becoming comfortable with prolonged silence. :)
- Grading is based on participation and they have these maps called Harkness maps where they trace with lines the flow of conversation.
Today I was in a workshop called Reverse Archeology where we pick a future scenario and imagine what the world would be like. We then had to create an artifact from that time period.
The scenario we chose was this idea of immortality and how you could potentially achieve that by swapping all your organs for mechanical ones.
That led us to think about biomimicry and maybe how we could choose to enhance your organs. For example, instead of your regular lungs, you could replace it with amphibious lungs that allow you to breathe underwater.
Here's the artifact we produced.
I finally fixed the flat tire on my bike. Turns out a little shard of glass cut through my tire and my tube. I popped in a new tube. I hope the tire holds up, the hole is pretty small.
=( Magic Pony is no longer. The building they are in was sold to a developer and the landlord jacked the rent up. Their online store will still be up though: http://www.magic-pony.com
For 2 years I lived with gaps in my blinds. I finally got them replaced today and when I went to bed, 2 weird things happened.
1) I became really upset and stressed that I couldn't see out the window anymore from bed because I no longer had gaps in the window coverings.
2) I started to cry (okay lightly teared up) that I didn't get a chance to say good bye to them. I wasn't home when they hauled my old blinds away and I felt sad that their feelings might have been hurt because I didn't care enough to stay to see them off and that I discarded them like they didn't mean anything to me.
So bizarre haha!! I had no idea I was so attached to my old, yellowed blinds.
Still 100% cavity free! Awww yea!
