Visual Smarts - Science via Typography

Mumbai-based graphic designer, Kapil Bhagat has created a slew of divinely inspired posters in honor of Science Day in India.  They are a perfect demonstration of how much can be said with typography alone and with the simplist of lines.

Each poster is a visual puzzle based on a scientist and/or scientific concept and each is an absolute delight to unravel.

See all 8 clever posters

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Elegant activism - Infographics at Bashir Watch

BashirWatch.org is an impeccably crafted site that succeeds in allowing users to explore difficult but important information in ways that add clarity and interest.  Bashir Watch is an organization promoting the prompt arrest of Omar Bashir, the Sudanese leader behind the genocide in Darfur.  There is a warrant for his arrest issued by the International Criminal Court for multiple counts of human

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Extreme Accessibility - How to save lives with eLearning

Far from the typical audience of corporate or university eLearning, Thare Machi Education designs lessons on topics like human trafficking and cholera for learners who are extremely poor, mostly illiterate, totally unfamiliar with technology and speak hundreds of different languages.  How's that for a brief?



Thare Machi Education makes very simple life-changing and life-saving messages  

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Graceful interface scaffolding - Learning from Letter School

Letter School, an app by Dutch game maker, Boreaal, is one of the several apps on the market created to leverage touch-screen advantages for supporting preschoolers in learning to make letter shapes.  Like the others, kids use their finger to trace and write letters of the alphabet.  



The animations and sounds in Letter School are delightful, but what I found especially notable was the

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On Memory and the Life of Maps

There are so many childhood objects that leave indelible marks as one grows up, from the microscope that gives you a secret window into invisible worlds, to the medical kit which made you a superhero with the power to fix people.  In his articles, The gears from my childhood, renowned MIT professor and educational technologist, Seymour Papert, explains how playing with and loving gears gave him a

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Paper still the cutting edge

Amid the carnival of EdTech excitement you'd be forgiven for forgetting that our digital technologies are still just tools, added to a bag of tricks that has accumulated over millenia.  Sure, there are some tools we'll probably never go back to (punch cards? slide rules?) but then there are the work horses that have survived for a reason, like pencil and paper.

Educational interface design

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10-year Survey of Online Education

A new report by the Babson Group and the College Board has tracked ten years of online education in the United States revealing that over a third of higher education students now take at least one of their courses online.  Most staff view MOOCs as more of a way to learn about online pedagogy than as a sustainable long-term mode of operation, and although online education is growing, higher

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