To cut a long story short, the first article about this new line of work has finally been published. It is a special issue of the journal Educational Technology devoted to Emerging Technologies and Transformative Learning. This special issue was edited by George Veletsianos and Brendan Calandra (thanks for giving us the opportunity) and was co-authored with Matt Koehler (no surprise there) and Danah Henriksen.

Educational Technology had quite stringent word-limits and length requirements, so the final published article is much shorter than what we had originally submitted. And since I had already felt that the original article was shorter than it needed to be… the final version seems more than a bit truncated. For this reason I am providing links below to both the published piece and a longer unpublished version. If I had to choose, I would read the longer version but that need not be your choice.

Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Henriksen, D. (2011). The Seven Trans-Disciplinary Habits of Mind: Extending the TPACK Framework Towards 21 st Century learning. Educational Technology, 51(2) 22-28.

Abstract: In this article we examine the need for fostering transformative learning, emphasizing the roles that trans-disciplinary thinking and recent technologies can play in creating the transformative teaching and learning of the 21st century. We introduce the Technological, Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework as a starting point for discussing the special kinds of knowledge, skills, and understanding that teachers require in order to become effective classroom mediators of transformative learning experiences. Within this framework, we propose seven cognitive tools needed for success in the new millennium, and describe examples of how teachers can repurpose digital technologies to use these cognitive tools. We explore the implications for research and practice.

Here is a link to the longer (draft) version.

Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Henriksen, D. (draft). The Seven Trans-Disciplinary Habits of Mind: Extending the TPACK Framework Towards 21 st Century learning (full version).

May years ago I wrote an essay titled On becoming a website. It was about my experience on teaching online and I suggested somewhat facetiously that in order to be a good teacher online I needed to actually “become” the course website! I started the essay by describing the idea of a cyborg:

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism — a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. It has been argued that we are all cyborgs now (Haraway, 1991). Be it a pacemaker installed in our hearts or a pair of contact lenses in our eyes, technologies are now an integral part of our bodies and our consciousness. … Of course these socially (and increasingly biologically) embedded technologies often become transparent and, in some sense, so deeply intertwined with our existence that we don’t even realize they exist (Brooks, 2002).

Now this idea of a cyborg was somewhat of a rhetorical move, to generate interest in the topic I was writing about. So imagine my surprise when I read the following paragraph.

They gave her The Device when she was only 2 years old. It sent signals along the optic nerve that swiftly transported her brain to an alternate universe—a captivating other world. By the time she was 7 she would smuggle it into school and engage it secretly under her desk. By 15 the visions of The Device—a girl entering a ballroom, a man dying on the battlefield—seemed more real than her actual adolescent life. She would sit with it, motionless, oblivious to everything around her, for hours on end. Its addictive grip was so great that she often stayed up half the night, unable to put it down.

When she grew up, The Device dominated her house: no room was free from it, no activity, not even eating or defecating, was carried on without its aid. Even when she made love it was the images of The Device that filled her mind. Psychologists showed that she literally could not disengage from it—if The Device could reach the optic nerve, she would automatically and inescapably be in its grip. Neuroscientists demonstrated that large portions of her brain, parts that had once been devoted to understanding the real world, had been co-opted by The Device.

What a terrible terrible story. How and why did the parents give the device to a 2 year old! Is this kind of brain damage reversible?

So what IS this device? Well turns out it is a book!

Go back and read the passage again, making that switch! How does that feel?

I had written earlier about Douglas Adams’ rules about technology

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.  (p. 95).

It seems to me that this quote, which incidentally is taken from an article in Slate Magazine, reviewing Sherry Turkle’s latest book, captures the manner in which new technologies are often seen to go against “the natural order of things.”

Whether we like it or not, we are all cyborgs now.

Such artistic representations of science can also be a powerful tool for outreach – to communicate often abstruse and complex ideas to a wider audience. One of the best approaches that has received some attention in the past years is Dance your Ph.D. As the Science Mag website says

The dreaded question. “So, what’s your Ph.D. research about?” You could bore them with an explanation. Or you could dance.

That’s the idea behind “Dance Your Ph.D.” Over the past 3 years, scientists from around the world have teamed up to create dance videos based on their graduate research. This year’s contest, launched in June by Science, received 45 brave submissions.

Today, judges—including scientists, choreographers, and past winners—announced the finalists in four categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences. Each receives $500.

Click here to see and vote for the finalists.

As a part of our activities today I had all the participants crate i-Images. I have written about i-Images on this blog before (see here and here).

i-Images are the brainchild of David Wong and you can find his page on i-Images here.

Anyway, here are some of the i-Images created today. I do think they are pretty cool and thought provoking, each in its own way. Click on the images below to see what the workshop participants created. Enjoy.

Kristine M Kamper	Lynn Mittler	Chris Rappleye	Stephanie Madlinger
Lisa Huxley	Sean Nash	Sean Nash	Sean Nash

Olivia Judson makes a very important point about how our perceptual systems prevent us from seeing the world “as is.” For instance, as it turns out what we “see” when we see a cuckoo’s egg is very different from what the bird sees. As one of the articles say:

In the past, this kind of analysis was tackled by humans comparing eggs by eye, but human vision differs hugely from that of a bird. Birds can see ultraviolet light and because they have four types of cone in their eyes, compared with three in humans, they see a greater diversity of colour and pattern.

What this means is that over evolutionary time, cuckoos and the host birds are engaged in an arms-race to develop better and better deception (on the cuckoo’s part) and detection (on the part of the host birds) mechanisms. As a consequence one of the host birds studied:

… lay probably the most diverse range of eggs of any bird in the world, and this is likely to be an outcome of the long co-evolutionary battle with the Cuckoo Finch.

The eggs are analogous to a bank note, in terms of the variety and complexity of markings, perhaps to make them very hard to forge by the parasite.

So the same techniques used by currency designers to reduce forgery (the intricate markings that are the defining characteristics of today’s currency notes) is used by the host birds as well. Of course forgers keep coming up with better techniques to trick us, as do the cuckoo birds… all this of course leading to a runaway race where every innovation by the forgers (read cuckoo birds) has to be matched by the police (read host birds).

Now, it turns out that a couple of engineers have take this a step further, utilizing the idea of this evolutionary war to develop a better search algorithm! So what we have here is an interesting confluence of evolutionary forces and the manner in which scientists have tried to understand how these forces work and leading to the development of new technologies and techniques for solving engineering problems. How very cool is that!

All this is interesting in and of itself, but there is a deeper point about perception being made here that I would like to highlight. Olivia Judson says it much more eloquently than I ever could, so I quote:

Which makes me wonder: what are we missing? Like the birds — like any organism — our sensory system defines the way we perceive and interact with the world, and it is limited in important ways…

And in a more metaphorical way, the sight of the cuckoo chick makes me wonder what we miss by our routine habits of thought. To what extent do our preconceived notions narrow our perception of the planet, and ourselves?

What a great question? What are we not seeing? How do we learn to see?

Followers of this blog (and people who have seen my presentations on creativity) know that this idea of “learning to see,” is in my opinion, the most critical first step towards being creative. I have talked of this in terms of “recognition v.s. perception” and it underlies my arguments for repurposing technology (that I go on and on about, most recently here). I think it is important that we continually ask ourselves this question that Olivia Judson leaves us with:

To what extent do our preconceived notions narrow our perception of the planet, and ourselves?

In other words, what are we not seeing?

(H/T Ken Friedman for the first and third links and Google for the third).

• “Why Don’t Students Like School?” Well, Duhhhh…
• Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education

For the record, here are a couple of his papers as PDF downloads (I recommend the first, though it may be a bit academic at first glance).

• Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence
• Nature’s Powerful Tutors: The Educative Functions of Free Play and Exploration

And finally here is a video of a presentation he made at the Evolutionary Studies Program at Binghamton University.

Peter Gray: The Human Ancestral Environment for Education, and Its Relevance for Education Today from EvoS on Vimeo.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It is amazing to me just how this idea has spread. It has en-livened my life, I can say that much. Anyway, I wanted to say thanks to Sean (and his students) – and what better way to say it than in verse. So here is: For Sean & his students

For Sean & his students

There’s this high-school teacher named Sean Nash
Never to scared to try anything pedagogically rash
Having written an extended sci-po
On his favorite subject, (no surprise) bio
He now expected his students to add to the stash.

Some people wonder, why? Why did Sean get this curse?
I mean this is science class, what could be worse
Than poems about bugs
And photosynthesizing slugs?
Please, they said, save kids from writing silly scientific verse.

They are in class to learn, the critics say, their days to grind
To strengthen and develop their test-taking mind
Give them definitions to remember
From January to December
Did you forget the mandates of No child Left Behind?

Sean looks at these critics, the nay-sayers, self-appointed
Who critique him for approaches they feel are disjointed
If you really want to see
The value of this, come with me
He says, his voice, for some reason, sharp and pointed

The picture is different in the classroom, as students sweat
Over the essence and meaning of science, they struggle and fret
But with effort and time
They hit on the perfect rhyme
And when done, they share it worldwide, on the Internet.

The value of what they do, the students, they do know it.
And in their poems and other work they clearly show it
Dichotomies they spurn
As they create and learn
The value or being both a scientist and a poet!

Perfect, or absolute, pitch is the ability to name or produce a musical note of particular pitch without the benefit of a reference note. The visual equivalent is calling a red apple “red.” While most people do this effortlessly, without, for example, having to compare a red to a green apple, perfect pitch is extremely rare in the U.S. and Europe, with an estimated prevalence in the general population of less than one in 10,000.

Image credit: Tom Carmony

So think about this for a second. Here is an ability that was once thought to be extremely rare, within the capability of just extremely talented musicians. People born with this talent, as it were. This research, however, shows just how mistaken this view is.

A bit of context may be in order. As it turns out there are fundamental differences between languages in terms of their tonality.

Tone languages – Mandarin and Vietnamese, among many others – are those in which words take on entirely different meanings depending on the tones in which they are enunciated. In Mandarin, for example, the word “ma” means “mother” when spoken in the first tone, “hemp” when spoken in the second tone, “horse” in the third and a reproach in the fourth.

Deutsch and her co-authors measured the prevalence of perfect pitch by means of a direct, on-site test in two populations of music students: a group of 88 first-year students enrolled at the prestigious Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China, all of whom spoke Mandarin, and a group of 115 first-years at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, none of whom spoke a tone language.

What the researchers found is that perfect pitch was not all that rare in people who spoke tonal languages. As Deutsch said,

We found a very clear difference between the two populations,… In Mandarin speakers, perfect pitch appears to be not rare, but rather a readily acquired ability… Perfect pitch for years seemed like a beautiful gift – given only to a few genetically endowed people. But our research suggests that it might be available to virtually everybody.

Photo credit: Moon Child

Think about that last sentence again. Perfect pitch may be available to virtually everybody. It is not a function of nature (as one would assume based on studies conducted in the west) but rather deeply connected to the developmental environment in which the child is steeped in.

This of course brings up the critical question, what other exceptional abilities and talents may we be missing out on developing in our children? How many of the talents we regard as being innate are merely a function of inappropriate nurture? I often hear of people say that they don’t have any mathematical ability? Is that necessarily true? What about artistic ability? How much of it is nature and how much nurture? And how much are we losing out by thinking it is more of the former than the latter?

These questions become even more critical in an age of mandatory testing and No Child Left Behind. What are we losing out on, in this, so called, race to the top?

How sad is that!

What implications do these new technologies have for learning and education? I mean even Mattel is getting into the action… As the article says

The new system Mattel is introducing at computer trade shows is called “Mindflex.” According to the company’s fact sheet: “A true mental marathon, Mindflex exercises the brain in an entirely new way as players learn to continuously control their brain activity.”

So, you ask, how does it work? To train the brain, the user puts on a headband with sensors at the temples and a cable connected to something that looks like a mini miniature golf course. Then the user tries to master the first task: balancing a small ball above an air current, causing it to levitate and making it pass through a plastic ring.

At this time these interfaces work only in one direction, from the brain to the computer. But can the reverse, from computer to the brain be far behind? The power being discussed here is truly revolutionary. We have all known that computers are cognitive tools i.e. working with them changes the way we think. However, at some level changes in brain states are mediated via our senses and through movement, a somewhat inefficient process. What these technologies indicate is the future is in a merging of our brains directly with the computer… where the distinction between us and the machine will be increasingly blurred till we won’t be able to tell one from the other. Imagine having access to Google like search engines whenever a question pops up in our heads? How can we tell where the brain ends and the machine begins?

For instance wine connoisseurs have developed a specialized language (which sadly is quite opaque to me) to explain to each other characteristics of wine. So the words “fruity” and “dry” have specific gustatory connections… What we need to do is develop a language that allow us to somewhat consistently express and represent the intangibles of teaching, somewhat like what Bird does in explaining his music (or wine connoisseurs do when describing wine). The lack of such a language essentially prevents us from recognizing that classrooms are far more than 4 walls, a teacher and a bunch of students… and that aesthetics play a great role in the act of teaching and learning.

Now here is “scientific” proof of what I was saying. In goofing around on the web I came across this article on PubMedCentral titled Six senses in the literature. The bleak sensory landscape of biomedical texts. The authors Raul Rodriguez-Esteban and Andrey Rzhetsky argue that

When we read prose—whether technical or literary—our mind parses sentences to recover their meaning. Yet, the flow of the words themselves can invoke surprising or unexpected sensory responses, even for the writer. Even a very rational and technical text can typically affect the reader on multiple cognitive levels, in addition to its basic task of transmitting the author-intended meaning.

This led them to wonder about the kinds of words used in scientific texts, specifically biomedical texts. Being good scientists, the decided to test this out:

In this study, we therefore analysed the frequencies of use of sensory words and time-related terms in a large collection of biomedical texts, and compared the results with similar analyses of a collection of news articles, a large encyclopaedia, and a body of literary prose and poetry.

And what did they find? No real surprises here:

We found that, unlike literary compositions and newswire articles, biomedical texts are extremely sensory poor, yet rich in overall vocabulary. It is likely that the sensory-deprived writing style that dominates the biomedical literature impedes text comprehension and numbs the reader’s senses and mind.

In conclusion they say:

In short, we believe that scientific prose should be enriched with sensory words, provided that they clarify the meaning rather than obscure it, in much the same way as a good statistical data visualization involves the mapping of abstract data into colours and three-dimensional shapes, to help the reader or viewer discover meaningful patterns.

I think the analogy to visual representation is right on… and I could not agree more with their conclusion.

If I were to summarize what is most generally characteristic of the creative [individual] as we have seen him (sic), it is his high level of effective intelligence, his openness to experience, his freedom from petty constraints, and impoverishing inhibitions, his aesthetic sensitivity, his cognitive flexibility, his independence of thought and action, his high level of energy, his unquestioning commitment to creative endeavor, and his unceasing striving for creative solutions to the ever more difficult … problems he constantly sets for himself.

The question to ponder is, how many of these correlates of creativity are amenable to teaching (i.e. can be taught / nurtured) in the classroom or other contexts and how many are completely outside of our control?

Charles Burnett also provides a couple of references to MacKinnon’s work:

MacKinnon D W. (1962). The nature and nurture of creative talent. Amer. Psychol. 17:484-95.

MacKinnon, D. W. (1978). In Search of Human Effectiveness: Identifying and Developing Creativity. Creative Education Foundation.

One of the biggest myths of representation is that representations are direct one-on-one mapping of the real world. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is important to understand that all representations are wrong – wrong because they, by necessity, have to distort in order to communicate. A map that had all the details of the real world would not be a map – it would be the world! We need a map to get rid of extraneous details, so that we can focus on the important details. As to what is important depends on the purpose for which the representation is being created. Thus underlying every visualization is a theory, a way of looking at the world.

Another way of saying this is in Alfred Korzybski’s statement that “The map is not the territory.” The wikipedia page devoted to this describes this as follows:

The map is not the territory is a remark by Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself, e.g., the pain from a stone falling on your foot is not the stone; one’s opinion of a politician, favorable or unfavorable, is not that person; a metaphorical representation of a concept is not the concept itself; and so on. A specific abstraction or reaction does not capture all facets of its source … and thus may limit an individual’s understanding and cognitive abilities unless the two are distinguished. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, in this sense. [Emphasis mine.]

The best example of this is Magritte’s famous painting (shown below) where a painting of a pipe should not be confused with the real object:

There are a couple of important conclusions that emerge from this. First, a representation is by its very nature limited, constrained, and incorrect. Second, a representation is always for a certain purpose and this purpose emphasizes certain aspects of the phenomena being represented, even while it under-emphasizes or ignores others. Third, understanding a representation requires understanding this purpose. Often this means recognizing and understanding the perspective, the point of view, the theory, or framework that led to the creation of the representation.

So what does have all this to do with representing DNA? Well, I have been thinking about issues related to representation for a while now (see this for a good example of how goofy and serious this thinking can get) and was reminded of it when I stumbled upon an article that specifically looks at DNA as computer code: DNA as seen through the eyes of a coder.

That DNA is information is not a new idea. However, it is when we take it to its limit, to see DNA through the eyes of a computer programmer or coder is to truly see it in a new light. In this piece Bert Hubert takes the idea of DNA as code (as a computer program) to its extreme. Consider for instance this statement:

DNA is not like C source but more like byte-compiled code for a virtual machine called ‘the nucleus’.

He continues in this vein, attempting to mine this metaphor to its limit. For instance, see his explanation of “stem cells” or “junk dna.” I found these explanations extremely powerful ways of thinking about DNA.

Of course the usual caveats apply (the map is not the territory, all representations are limited, blah blah blah…). However the power of a new representation as helping us “see” patterns and connections that didn’t make sense before is palpable.

Pretty cool stuff.

Charles Darwin
12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882

On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, a new Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they “believe in the theory of evolution,” while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don’t have an opinion either way. These attitudes are strongly related to education and, to an even greater degree, religiosity.

It’s been

for crying out loud!