Musician­/artist­/thinker David Byrne is our guest “Brain Mulcher” this issue. “In Search of Connections” inspired Alternatives to connect with the first year students of a brand new program at the University of Waterloo -- Knowledge Integration (KI) in the Faculty of Environment. Take UW-KI students up on their challenge -- try your hand at their first Connections assignment -- challenge your friends, challenge your class.

This is an open-ended free-format assignment about making and articulating thoughtful connections between superficially unrelated pieces of information.

I'm going to give you two pieces of information - a haiku by Basho and an illustration, both seen below. Explore those pieces of information, make some sort of connection(s) between them (perhaps coming out of your own studies, heritage, or passtimes), and express that exploration and connection in some form. I assessed student responses on how (and how well) they explored the initial information, how (and how well) they discovered or invented connections between them, and how (and how well) they expressed those connections in their responses.

Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests
they are about to die

See what connections the KI students made by clicking here

Tell us about your connections by commenting here:
Your email will not be made public. Please provide a web link to your graphic and video response.