BackChanneling is the practice of using computers to maintain live-time or near live-time conversations alongside live events. The term was coined in the field of Linguistics to describe listeners’ behaviors during verbal communication, Victor Yngve 1970. In the classroom, a “backchannel” provides teachers valuable feedback and helps to better engage students. There are a wide […]
Posts By: James May
Creativity and Adjacent Possibilities
Special thanks to the Valencia Technology Club for the invitation to share and discuss tech. On Wed. Apr 5th 2017, I visited the club and shared some of the work the Circles team has been making with our robot and our lightboard. We also discussed creativity and how we could bring a MakerSpace to East Campus. It is […]
FarmBot
Have you seen this? FarmBot Genesis is humanity’s first open-source CNC farming machine designed for at-home automated food production. Pre-order your FarmBot at 25% off during July only to save $1,000. Learn more at https://farmbot.io
Storing Data in DNA
Where do you keep your data? Do you store your files on on your home computer? in your Dropbox? on your Google Drive? on Facebook? New research may change the way we store our data in the future. Researchers out of Columbia University say the new strategy allows for 215 petabytes of data to be stored […]
Metaphors Be With You!
For those of you who attended our February session of Circles on Creativity, you may remember the TEDx talk we used featuring Graham Shaw. In that video, Graham showed us how all of us can be artists if we learn a basic process for drawing. Below you will find another TEDx talk by Graham. This […]
Alamo Colleges Visit
Special thanks to our visitors from Alamo Colleges for allowing the Circles team to share some ideas with them today. As promised, here is the outsourced memory mixtape of our session. Question Framing/Functional Fixedness Discussion It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. Mark Twain […]
Playing with Robots
This week we got to test an idea that has been in development for a couple of months now. Basically, we finished our build and tested a telepresence robot, and all in, it cost about $40.00 dollars (Thanks again Dick for your investment in this project). Our prototype is not yet ready for prime time, so you won’t […]
Pay It Forward with Pizza
I recall a humorous example of dangling modifiers that I saw years ago. “With one quick call, three pizzas saved the day!” How can pizza’s save the day? Well… This video shows just that. This touching video can make a great spark for empathy. Learn how a pizzeria owner solved a community issue of feeding the […]
Do You Have FMOOWMP?
Special thanks to the team at ASU for putting together this humorous take on Office Hours. Do you or your students have FMOOWMP? Click here or watch the video below to learn more. After posting this, we got some feedback offering some interesting ideas for how to increase engagement and reduce FMOOWMP. Do you have […]
Creativity in the Classroom
Would you like to communicate ideas more effectively? Have you ever considered using images that you draw while you communicate? Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin, shows us how to be generative with our ideas through the use of pictures. Can’t draw! Well… as long as you know how to draw these […]
