Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

Over the past few months I have been working with my kids on creating short thematic videos. The themes we chose were the three words, Explore, Create & Share. Though the videos for Explore and Create got made rather quickly, the video for Share appeared to stump us.

Much to my relief, after weeks of discussion and thinking, we finally have a video for the word share. I am including all three videos here, in sequence, so that you can see just how these three videos work together. All three videos have original music composed by my cousin, Sonny Mishra.

7 tools… one big job: Explore

Emregence: Create

… and finally,
A helping hand: Share

(Other videos created by me, with our without my kids, can be seen here.)

We have been talking about misconceptions in my summer MAET classes and one of my students sent me this hilarious link. There is really nothing much to say… just see it for yourself.

Another video that I saw for the first time today was Father Guido Sarducci teaches what an average college graduate knows after five years from graduation in five minutes.

Two videos, one on misconceptions and the other on retention! Perfect indictment of our educational system! Funny but also sad.

Just came up with this in response to something Leigh had said on Facebook… thought it ought to be saved for the future:

Great fools think that birds of a feather seldom differ together!

I wonder what it means? Can you identify the three nuggets of wisdom that went into this concoction?

The recent (and ongoing) evens in Iran sadden me deeply… but also give me hope. The scenes and news emerging from there speak of courage and a need and demand for freedom. What is also amazing has been the use of technology particularly twitter to get news out of the country.

A few decades ago it was audio-cassette technology that led to the fall of the Shah of Iran. Ayotollah Khomeni had been exiled to France and his speeches would be secretly smuggled into Iran – where an informal underground network of people would dub and re-dub these tapes and pass them around. New technologies lead to new ways of sharing information, new ways to mobilize.

My heart goes out to these protesters as I obsessively track news coming out of Iran. The two best sources of news on this are Andrew Sullivan’s  Daily Dish and The Lede of the NYTimes. Or better still follow the incoming Twitter-feeds collected here.

I now have a facebook username! Hah!

Check out http://www.facebook.com/punyamishra/

In this TCRecord piece, Daniel T. WIllingham uses what we know about cognitive psychology to explain  Why students don’t like school. He suggests that

although most people believe that humans are good at thinking, it is actually the weakest of our mental faculties… Our minds are biased against thinking, because thinking is slow and effortful. In addition, it’s error-prone; it may not even produce an answer at all, much less a good one.

What we truly hate, according to him are things that are (a) either too easy; or (b) things that are incomprehensible. What fascinates us are problems that hit the sweet spot, not merely unpredictable but rather postdictable. He defines this as being “initially be surprising, but then be understandable with a bit of thought.”As he says:

… interest is engendered by an appraisal process: that is, a process by which we evaluate the potential interest of something before we delve into it. If we perceive an event to be novel and complex, but also comprehensible, we find it intriguing and worthy of continued thought. Tasks that lack complexity seem too easy. Tasks that lack comprehensibility seem too hard.

Just two points here. First, most of school, it seems to me, lies at these two extremes, either lacking in complexity OR lacking in comprehensibility. Combine this with the diversity of student interests and background it is hardly surprising that even students who like to learn, learn to hate schoo.

Second, I had never heard of this term “postdictable” before but I think it is going to become a part of my vocabulary from now on. It helps me explain and categorize educational activities that work from those that don’t. Additionally it helps me explain movies and books I like – from ones that don’t. I know I hate predictable plots and stories (something I am trying to get my daughter to realize particularly around the typical Disney fare she so seems to love). However, complete unpredictablity is also a pain – a waste of time. Movies I like are postdictable… surprising at first glance but understandable later. Cool.

Harris, J.,  Mishra, P. & Koehler, M. J. (2009). Teachers’ Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge and Learning Activity Types: Curriculum-based Technology Integration Reframed. Journal of Research on Technology in Education.

In this paper we critically analyze extant approaches to technology integration in teaching, arguing that many current methods are technocentric, often omitting sufficient consideration of the dynamic and complex relationships among content, technology, pedagogy, and context. We recommend using the technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge (TPACK) framework as a way to think about effective technology integration, recognizing technology, pedagogy, content and context as interdependent aspects of teachers’ knowledge necessary to teach content-based curricula effectively with educational technologies. We offer TPACK-based “activity types,” rooted in previous research about content-specific activity structures, as an alternative to existing professional development approaches and explain how this new way of thinking may authentically and successfully assist teachers’ and teacher educators’ technology integration efforts.

I am working on changing the layout of my blog… so be prepared for sudden and abrupt changes (as well as possible downtimes). Apologies to all but it has been a while since I played with the layout and its been getting kinda boring around here…

Yesterday after I had posted my two latest ambigrams (see them here) I got a message on Facebook from my cousin Sonny (the one who composed the cool music for my Explore, Create videos) saying

Big deal. I can make “fact” and “fiction” blur together till they are indistinguishable. Using only my brain! And not much effort, either.

Not to be outdone by a good put-down… I created an ambigram that really makes “fact” and “fiction” blur together… Check it out

For one reason or another I have not been bitten by the ambigram bug for a while – till suddenly a week or two ago, two new ambigrams popped into my head. A bit of work with Freehand later… here they are. Enjoy

Computer

Fiction

The Office Faculty and Organizational Development at MSU conducts an annual Spring Institute on College Teaching and Learning every summer. The past week was their 15th such event (details here) and I was asked to conduct a workshop on Creative Teaching. I was assisted in this by Mike DeSchryver.
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I just came across this… Online System Rates Images by Aesthetic Quality

Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has launched the Aesthetic Quality
Inference Engine (ACQUINE), an online system for determining the aesthetic quality of an image. The online photo-rating system helps establish the foundation for determining how people will react emotionally to a visual image. ACQUINE delivers ratings–from zero to 100–within seconds, based on visual aspects such as color saturation, color distribution, and photo composition. PSU researchers hope to improve upon the system’s current performance level of more than 80 percent consistency between human and computer ratings. “Furthermore, aesthetics represents just one dimension of human emotion,” says PSU professor James Z. Wang. “Future systems will perhaps strive to capture other emotions that pictures arouse in people.”
Wang says that linking cameras to ACQUINE could potentially enable a photographer to instantly see how the public might perceive a photo.

Now this is the ultimate democratization of the idea of aesthetics – of course diluting the idea of the aesthetic encounter to the lowest common denominator i.e. “how the public might perceive a photo.” The assumptions behind that definition of aesthetics are mind-boggling. Let me count the ways in which this is a boneheaded idea… actually let me not, at least at this time. But the link was worth sharing nonetheless. I hope to write more about this … hopefully soon.

Patrick Dickson just quoted e. e. cummings (one of my favorite poets) and I just had to look it up.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting: e. e. cummings

I was reading the final papers written by participants in my CEP 817, Learning Technology by Design seminar and came across this quote by Clement Mok in a paper written by Breanne Edmonds. I wanted to record it for future reference:

Design means being good, not just looking good — Clement Mok

My mashup of a commercial has been on YouTube for a while and just yesterday I noticed that someone had left a very thoughtful comment… and that comment got me thinking… and hence this posting.

To start with, if you haven’t seen the videos here they are again.

Here is the original commercial:

And my response:

The comment by user witchyrichy to my mashup was as follows:

Nice mashup…but I’m not sure that I agree that a lecture is still a lecture. The technology makes it possible to break that lecture into segments, review different sections, and even, as you did here, cut and paste the important pieces into something new. I listened to a talk by Steinem through Yale’s itunes site: yes, it was a lecture but it was one I would have never heard otherwise, one I could share with others, etc. So, a lecture isn’t always a lecture, imho.

I think the witchyrichy makes a really good point here and something that had been nagging me a bit. What is somewhat ironic is that Matt Koehler and I have been trying for the past year or so to develop a new form of presentation, one that takes a lecture and makes it dynamic. A good example would be the keynote we gave at the SITE 2008 conference Thinking Creatively, Teachers as Designers of Technology, Pedagogy & Content. We “appropriated” a bunch of ideas from Larry Lessig and Dick Hardt (and in the case of the SITE keynote, Steven Colbert!).

To add (self)-insult to irony, I have blogged about lectures and how they can be creatively constructed previously here. Read my earlier posting about The 60 second lecture.

To sum it up, it appears that I may have gone a bit overboard with my critique of a lecture. That said, the larger point I was trying to make in my mashup, about a lecture not necessarily being the best use of technology for teaching, still stands.

Louis CK on appreciating the magic of technology…

Elizabeth Helfant over at Digital Learning Environments Blog has an interesting posting titled The Pancake principle. She makes a connection between technology integration and making pancakes, and offers three tenets of the Pancake principle. This posting is inspired by her posting and tries to take the analogy between cooking and teaching a bit further.
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TPACK Newsletter, Issue #3: Late April 2009

Welcome to the third edition of the TPACK Newsletter, now with 362 subscribers (representing a 30% increase in the last two months!), and appearing bimonthly between August and April. If you are not sure what TPACK is, please surf over to www.tpack.org to learn more.

Gratuitous Quote about Technology
"Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons."
– Buckminster Fuller

In this Issue:
-2. Introductory blurb

-1. Gratuitous Quote about Technology
0. In this issue (You are here.)
1. TPACK’s Grandfather
2. Measuring TPACK
3. TPACK-in-a-text(book)
4. Recent TPACK Publications
5. Recent TPACK Presentations
6. The TPACK Handbook as Course Text
7. TPACK-based Dissertations
8. TPACK Wiki Work
9. TPACK Video Mashup
10. Display Your TPACK Proudly!

11. Learning and Doing More with TPACK
–. Un-numbered miscellaneous stuff at the end

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A few months ago I had created a video mashup of a commercial (see the original and my mashup here). This video ended with three key words, encouraging people to Explore, Create, Share! I then got the idea for creating short videos to represent these three ideas.

I also set some constraints on myself. First, these videos would be short! This meant each video would be between 30 seconds to a minute in length. Second, these videos would be, as far as possible, one continuous shot with minimal post-production and editing. Third, these videos would always end with a typographical representation of the word. Fourth, and finally, these videos would have some kind of a “surprise” at the end.

I was helped in my task by my kids and my cousin Sonny Mishra who composed three original clips of music for the three videos. Sonny has done an amazing job. All three pieces of music are unique, attempting to express musically the theme of the video. That said, all three pieces have a certain family resemblance, so that they all sound connected somehow, at a deeper level.

I have been working on these videos, off and on, with my kids for the past few weeks. We have created original videos for two of the three themes, Explore and Create. Here is the one on Explore (the video on Create can be seen here).

Though I liked what we had come up with for Explore, I also felt that the video was flawed. Essentially, everything happens so quickly that it is difficult to see, till the end, what the objects are that were picked up from the basket. This I felt, robbed some of the impact of the video. So we decided to shoot it again in a slightly different manner. Did it work? Find out for yourself by seeing 7 tools… one big job!. Another change was that this time my daughter was the performer!

What do you think?

(Other videos created by me, with our without my kids, can be seen here.)

This is just absolutely brilliant!!

In particular check out the URL that Dick Cheney sends to Obama, approximately half-way down the page. (You will have to copy and past the url).