Strange creatures
Taking the lead from B-movies and Hallowe’en icons, AmericanMonsters.com reports on mythical creatures recognized around the world. Your "one stop guide to all things cryptozoological" this site catalogs monsters into 13 varieties (from "Formerly-Extinct" to "Beyond Mythology"). More scientific discussions in the same vein can be read at Unexplained-mysteries.com delving also into the topics fof ghosts, extraterrestrials, metaphysics and conspiracy theories. Skeptics however will feel more comfortable at LiveScience.com which links to articles that contest everything from vampires to urban legends while killing all the fun.
Try to incorporate some of these concepts into your classroom with help from the Kennedy Centre's ArtsEdge site. It offers a "Monsters" lesson plan (rubrics included) that encourages your students to ask "How have monsters been viewed, what purpose do they serve, why are they necessary?"
Nightmares
Some of the freakiest monsters are the ones we dream up on our own. Bad dreams, for instance, can often feel seem horribly real, the distress frequently taking hours to fade away. But what if you could transform your nightmares into productive time spent problem solving? This blog entry lists 12 famous dreams that inspired inventions, art and scientific theory. DreamViews.com discusses lucid dreams (dreaming while you are aware that you're dreaming) as a tool to stop nightmares, while tapping into your brain’s most creative moments. Finally, watch and download "Is 4am the new midnight?", a hilarious 10-minute video that draws creepy connections between art, history and popular culture to the "most surreal of hours": 4am.
(Personal) demons and skeletons (in the closet)
Dark hours and dark dreams can be creepy, but you haven't felt your heart skip until you've seen your deep dark secrets posted on the internet. Enter sites We Feel Fine and The Dumpster. "We feel fine: An exploration of human emotion in six movements" uses a data collection engine that scans blog posts for occurrences of "I feel" and "I am feeling" every 10 minutes. It translates its findings into candy-coloured interactive animations that reveal statements like "I feel like my bed is a protection from all the scary things in life" to amazingly much more personal observations with vague allusions to the author's identity. The Dumpster is a similar online experiment which allows users to surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has "dumped" another… More frightening still is this Adbusters.org article, "Loneliness and Technology", which indirectly links the technology that makes Dumpster possible to being a leading factor in the demise of the relationships within its own experiment.
Taking the lead from B-movies and Hallowe’en icons, AmericanMonsters.com reports on mythical creatures recognized around the world. Your "one stop guide to all things cryptozoological" this site catalogs monsters into 13 varieties (from "Formerly-Extinct" to "Beyond Mythology"). More scientific discussions in the same vein can be read at Unexplained-mysteries.com delving also into the topics fof ghosts, extraterrestrials, metaphysics and conspiracy theories. Skeptics however will feel more comfortable at LiveScience.com which links to articles that contest everything from vampires to urban legends while killing all the fun.
Try to incorporate some of these concepts into your classroom with help from the Kennedy Centre's ArtsEdge site. It offers a "Monsters" lesson plan (rubrics included) that encourages your students to ask "How have monsters been viewed, what purpose do they serve, why are they necessary?"
Nightmares
Some of the freakiest monsters are the ones we dream up on our own. Bad dreams, for instance, can often feel seem horribly real, the distress frequently taking hours to fade away. But what if you could transform your nightmares into productive time spent problem solving? This blog entry lists 12 famous dreams that inspired inventions, art and scientific theory. DreamViews.com discusses lucid dreams (dreaming while you are aware that you're dreaming) as a tool to stop nightmares, while tapping into your brain’s most creative moments. Finally, watch and download "Is 4am the new midnight?", a hilarious 10-minute video that draws creepy connections between art, history and popular culture to the "most surreal of hours": 4am.
(Personal) demons and skeletons (in the closet)
Dark hours and dark dreams can be creepy, but you haven't felt your heart skip until you've seen your deep dark secrets posted on the internet. Enter sites We Feel Fine and The Dumpster. "We feel fine: An exploration of human emotion in six movements" uses a data collection engine that scans blog posts for occurrences of "I feel" and "I am feeling" every 10 minutes. It translates its findings into candy-coloured interactive animations that reveal statements like "I feel like my bed is a protection from all the scary things in life" to amazingly much more personal observations with vague allusions to the author's identity. The Dumpster is a similar online experiment which allows users to surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has "dumped" another… More frightening still is this Adbusters.org article, "Loneliness and Technology", which indirectly links the technology that makes Dumpster possible to being a leading factor in the demise of the relationships within its own experiment.