Two of my former professors at Harvard have described "understanding" in ways that I consistently go back to when I think about this word.  David Perkins has said that understanding is knowing both the parts in the context of the whole while also recognizing the whole as the sum of its parts.  Stone Wiske has defined it as being able to think freely and flexible with what one knows.  Yesterday when my brother sent me a New York Times article about Star Wars Uncut and its recent Emmy Award, this notion of true understanding immediately came to mind.

This amazing example of crowd-sourcing was started by someone at the online video site Vimeo.  The original Star Wars (A New Hope) was broken down, start to finish, into 15 second clips.  Then, users were allowed to pick a clip and recreate just those 15 seconds in any way they desired - animation, live action, claymation, flipbook - and submit it back to the site where the Star Wars Uncut team would pick the best ones and put it back together.

If you are even a casual Star Wars fan, it is easy to see that the people who participated truly understood Star Wars.  I think it would be great to see school projects designed this way.  This fall I'm going to talk to a French teacher about trying something similar with her students, perhaps recreating a play they normally do: Les Trois Petits Cochons (The Three Little Pigs).

As a relatively passive Facebook and Twitter user, Flipboard is an amazing application for displaying the content shared by my Facebook friends and people who I follow on Twitter.  Flipboard takes photos, videos, articles, and small updates and displays them in a elegant magazine-style format.  In addition to adding your own Facebook and Twitter sections of the magazine, you can also add other lists and sections curated by others. 

I imagine that in the near future they will add the ability to post items through their app (e.g. status updates, photos, videos) directly from the iPad.  However, even without this feature this app has been one of my favorites thus far for the iPad. Check out Flipboard's promo video on their website.

I've been helping my wife (@LivingLuxe4Less) customize the look of her new blog, www.LivingLuxeForLess.com. Most free website and blog hosts (e.g. Blogger, WordPress, Weebly) have an option to edit the HTML code of a page or element.  You don't need to be a web designer or programmer in order to use the HTML to make the page look exactly how you want.  All you need to know is how to copy and paste.

For this site, which was created in Weebly, we added a couple of HTML elements: a Twitter status widget, an interactive image from Polyvore, and an email sign-up via  Feedburner. First, we had to generate the code for the element in each respective site.  We first went to Twitter's  Goodies section, and followed their easy steps to generate the Twitter status widget. With a few easy clicks, a bunch of code was generated.  We copied it, went to the Weebly interface and selected a "custom HTML" element.  Here we were allowed to paste in the code, and as soon as we saved the element the widget automatically appeared.

The code can look overwhelming but the truth is you don't really have to worry about what it means.  Once you get the hang of embedding html into your website or blog, you'll start to notice that embed html options are available on a ton of websites and services.