Following the pathway that water has carved out feels almost like going back in time. Or maybe going forward. The time in a dry riverbed feels different, ambiguous. As one walks the stream bed paved by millions of rocks, memories of water emerge in all the shapes, colors, and textures that conform the landscape. The…
To experience rapid urbanization can be disorienting. Cities and towns that grow too fast have to confront the challenges of collapsing and re-designing their transportation system while keeping moving. Pedestrians, drivers, cyclists, and any other person circulating through the streets of a booming town has to learn how to confront such rapid spatial transformation and…
Although the rotoscoping technique was invented by the Fleischer brothers back in 1910s when animating Koko the clown for their Out of the Inkwell animated series, the deployment of this animation method in the digital film Waking Life (2001) revealed some of the potential that the human-computer symbiosis could have on the technique. Rotoscoping, understood…
This summer I have been working with KLRU-Austin PBS in a collaborative project with 18 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) summer camps. Part of my job as a project manager has involved the preparation of learning resources that can be used by teachers, facilitators, and students that participate in the camps around the Austin…
Last week I had the opportunity of presenting at the DML2015 conference (Equity by Design) a paper on Latino/Hispanic families that emerged from a chapter of my dissertation and draw on data from the Digital Edge project. This presentation was part of a diverse panel that some of my colleagues from the Connected Learning Research…
It rains. It pours. Creeks are running by the bridges. River runs. It has not stopped raining since two weeks ago. Trees, grasses, and all kind of wild plants are growing as I have never seen before in Austin, Texas. Waking up with the pitter-patter sound of raindrops and the gray darkness of cloudy skies…
Time is gold. Minutes are money. Literally, in the streets of Bogota and other Colombian cities, you can buy minutes for hundreds of pesos. Selling time is one of the innovative practices of the urban informal economy. I am not sure when it exactly started but I remember buying minutes in the 1990s. As mobile…