Punya Mishra’s Web

Richard Olsen over in his blog has an extended posting titled The TPACK Framework is fundamentally flawed. It is a long and thoughtful post and I recommend everyone to read it.

I have posted a short response to his posting (it is under moderation but should show up in a while). In the mean-time I am posting my response here – for the record.

Richard,

Thank you for your extended and thoughtful post on the TPACK framework. There is a lot here to respond to but I will be brief…

I think you would be surprised to learn just how much I agree with what you are saying. In fact in our original TCRecord piece we write something along the lines of “Clearly, separating the three components (content, pedagogy, and technology) in our model is an analytic act and one that is difficult to tease out in practice.” As I see it you are arguing that it is impossible (or even wrong) to tease these out. I would disagree.

In my experience the TPACK framework allows different people to see different things. To content area teachers, it allows them to see the value of technologies in representing and engaging with content; to teacher trainers it allows them to think about the significance of content and technology; and to techie types, it shows that there is more to teaching than the tool – it has to do with pedagogy and content.

Every once in a while I meet someone like yourself – someone for whom the TPACK is intuitive – so that breaking things up into pieces just seems wrong.   And for the most part I agree – again as we said in our article: “Viewing any of these components in isolation from the others represents a real disservice to good teaching.”

But these ideas are not intuitive to most people – and this is where I think the TPACK framework comes in useful – as a scaffolding to help people develop in their thinking about curriculum, content, technology and pedagogy.

I agree that is IS wrong is to essentialize the components of the TPACK framework (which I see a lot of people doing – but that is their doing not inherent in how we wrote/conceptualized it). The goal really should be to think about this sweet spot at the center – where these pieces come together. Now whether you call that good pedagogy for content learning – or good pedagogy with technology for content learning is at some level immaterial (I think).

I don’t know if you have had a chance to read the handbook chapter that Matt and I had written. You can find it here
I think this has a better description of the technology issue that you raised – that I (being lazy) don’t have the time to get into.

And finally, there is a famous saying among academics that goes, I don’t care if you disagree with me, just make sure to cite me and spell my name correctly.
I bring that up because you got the first part (citing) but got my name wrong… it is Mishra not Misha

That’s all for now. Take care
~ punya

Many years ago I got bitten by the Ambigram bug and before I knew it I had created hundreds! This was of course long before Dan Brown and Angels and Demons made ambigrams wildly popular. It has been fun to see what was once a fringe activity take on a wider popularity. There was a time that I could actually count the number of ambigram artists on the fingers of my hand, and, in fact, most of us knew each other, either formally or informally. Things are very different today as a Google search will easily reveal, but this also means that keeping track of all that is going on in the ambigram field is extremely difficult.

Over the past few months I have been talking with Mark Hunter a gentleman who is trying to make high quality ambigrams accessible to more people, and to raise awareness of ambigrams worldwide.  He is doing this through two different web sites.

He is also the owner of Ambigram.com, which seeks to be an almost one stop site for all you need to know about ambigrams. He told me about how he spent a considerable sum to purchase the Ambigram.com domain name and has worked hard to grow its membership. He has been quite successful in this and in fact they they recently announced their new Ambigrammy Awards! (How cool is that.) He also maintains a list of artists practicing this craft (your’s truly being one of them).

He also runs FlipScript.com, a site dedicated to creating high quality ambigrams on demand. The results are actually quite good, far better than previous attempts to accomplish this task.  Don’t miss his demonstration short story made up of more than 30 ambigrams.

If you are interested in visual wordplay these sites may be excellent time-sinks!

A few weeks ago I had written about an email that I received from an eighth grader in Colorado. Jake, a budding poet, was interested in learning more about me in the context of some palindromic poetry I had written many years ago. I wrote back to Jake (you can see the correspondence here) and a couple of days ago I received another email from him, this time containing a palindromic poem written by him. With his permission, I am including his email and poem below:

Punya,
Here is the palindromic poem that I wrote recently, but I made it so that the words are reversed instead of just the lines. It adds another layer of difficulty to creating it, and I recommend trying it if you get the chance.

Falling Snow

snow falling gently
on stomping feet
cold stinging
the teasing and laughing children
sculpted beautifully – crystals form
flakes dancing gracefully
tumble and spin
spin and tumble
gracefully dancing flakes
form crystals – beautifully sculpted
children laughing and teasing the
stinging cold
feet stomping on
gently falling snow

How awesomely cool is that! I wrote back to him right away saying

Jake. This is awesome!!!! I just shared it with my family and we were unanimous in our appreciation and praise for your achievement. Not only is it a doubly palindromic poem, an achievement in and of itself, it is a wonderful poem in it’s own right….

Thank you so much for sharing this with me. It completely made my day.

Don’t you just love the open-architecture of the web (and why I resist the closed worlds of Facebook).

I recently received this email:

Dear Mr. Mishra,

I am currently working on a poetry research project for school, and one of the requirements is researching five different poets. While looking for people who wrote palindromic poetry, I found your website and decided to use you in my project. The only problem is that I can’t find much information about you for my research. If you could, please respond to this e-mail with a little information about your history (i.e.-date and place of birth, family relations, etc.) as well as your inspiration for writing your palindromic poems. Thank you for your support!!!!!
Sincerely, Jake

P.S.- I am an eighth grader from Colorado and an aspiring poet.

Now I don’t consider myself a poet in any serious sense of the word (my dabbling in mathematical poetry or palindromic poetry notwithstanding). But it is great feeling when something you create and put out there in the world connects with someone else, someone who you would never otherwise have met or gotten to know. Here is what I wrote back to Jake:

Dear Jake –
Thank you so much for writing to me. I am honored to make it to your list of poets and glad that you are interested in palindromic poetry.

As for my history: I am professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing MI. I am originally from India where I studied engineering and design before coming to the US and getting my PhD. My wife is a graphic designer and I have two kids: my son who is a freshman in high school and my daughter who is in 6th grade.

Ever since I was a kid I have always been interested in puzzles and mathematics and poetry and visual design. That I think led to a habit of playing with words and images… so I do a lot of doodling and sketching (specially when I in meetings). I am fond of asking questions and looking at things around me in new ways. For instance, I love photography, on my Flickr site you will find photos of silly things like finding alphabets in cracks, and faces in everyday things. See this link and this one…

• Alphabets in cracks
• Faces we see

Then there are the videos I make with my kids. For instance see the new year’s card we made recently.

This also led to my creating ambigrams, which are words that are written in a special ways so that they can be read multiple ways. You can find a bunch of such designs on my website.

So I guess, palindromic poetry emerged out this desire or propensity to see the world in weird ways. And the challenge of writing poems that read the same backward and forward was inherently interesting. I particularly enjoyed writing ones that flipped in their meaning when you cross the half-way point. For instance in the poem “Me as I sit” the poem switches from me watching you to you watching me!

Finally, as must have noticed, from the dates, most of these were written a bunch of years ago when I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois. I haven’t written too many recently but the fact that they are on my website leads people to them – and I form all kinds of cool connections – such as the email I just received from you. A year or so ago I heard from someone who uses my poetry to teach poetry to inmates in prison (how cool is that!). You can read about that here.

That’s all for now.. I would love to read any palindromic poetry you may have written, if you are comfortable sharing them with me. Thank you again for your interest in my work. I look forward to hearing from you and let me know if there is anything else you need to know.

take care ~ punya

Note: I got Jake’s (and his parent’s) permission to post our correspondence on this blog under the condition that I not include his email address or other contact information.

Many moons ago I had written about the idea of the web as small pieces loosely connected (read Gandhi, ambigrams, creativity & the power of small pieces loosely joined) that allow people to pursue their passions and share it with the world at large. This is what gives the web its power, and this is also why I am not as comfortable with the barricaded worlds created by Facebook, which would not have allowed someone like Jake to easily find me, (but that is a rant for another day).

I had posted earlier about the paper presentations I was involved with during the recently concluded SITE conference at Nashville. Matt Koehler and I were co-Program Chairs for the conference, and sadly Matt was sick and had to miss the trip. In the photo below the space between Gary Marks and myself, is where Matt would stand, if he had been there. (And of course, Gary would be making rabbit years over his head!)

As program chair I had the usual responsibilities, shake hands with everybody, smile a lot, make announcements, introduce speakers and so on. I tried to make these tasks (particularly the announcements) interesting and fun. Below are some examples of some of some of the things we did.

The first is a presentation in which I introduced our first keynote speaker: Yong Zhao. Yong and I go back a long time (almost 17 years!) so I had lots of stories to share, including one of my son when he was three years old! [See the slides here, PDF].

A few days later, I was asked to announce the poster award winners, I had some fun with that as well, particularly in creating, what I called, a “sting” video, revealing nefarious activities that occurred every SITE conference. Of course this was all good clean fun… You can find the video embedded below and the slides here PDF.

I also took some pictures during SITE. You can find them here

Finally you can see a music-video I created for the closing day reception as well as the final set of slides (once again in PDF format)

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #8: February 2011

Welcome to a new year and to the eighth edition of the TPACK Newsletter! Please forgive our long delay in getting this “mega-issue” to you. We’ll do a lot of “catching up” with what has been happening with TPACK worldwide in this issue, so please sit back and prepare to be impressed with how quickly and far use of this construct has spread!

If you are not sure what TPACK is, please surf over to http://www.tpack.org/ to find out more.

Gratuitous Quote About Technology

“Social networking on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.”

~Aaron Sorkin

In This Issue

-1. Gratuitous Quote About Technology
0. In This Issue (–> You are here)
1. TPACK Newsletter Update
2. Recent TPACK Publications
3. Recent TPACK Presentations
4. Recent TPACK-Related Dissertations
5. Other TPACK Resources
6. TPACK at Upcoming Conferences
7. TPACK Work in Progress
8. Other Types of TPACK
9. Learning and Doing More with TPACK
–. Un-numbered miscellaneous stuff at the end

1. TPACK Newsletter UpdateThe TPACK newsletter currently has 1072 subscribers! This represents a 67% increase during the past year.

2. Recent TPACK PublicationsBelow are recent TPACK publications that we know about. If you know of others that were published within the past several months, please let us know (tpack.news.editors@wm.edu).

Articles
An, H., & Shin, S. (2010). The impact of urban district field experiences on four elementary preservice teachers’ learning regarding technology integration. Journal of Technology Integration in the Classroom, 2(3), 101-107.

Archambault, L. M., & Barnett, J. H. Revisiting Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: Exploring the TPACK framework Computers & Education, 55(4), 1656-1662.

Archambault, L., Wetzel, K., Foulger, T. S., & Williams, M. K. (2010). Professional development 2.0: Transforming teacher education pedagogy with 21^st century tools. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 27(1), 1-4.

Baker, M. A., & Bunch, J. C. (2010). CTRL + AL T +DELE TE: Rethinking how we use technology in the AGED classroom. Agricultural Education Magazine, 83(3), 9-11.

Chai, C. S., Koh, J. H. L., & Tsai, C-C. (2010). Facilitating preservice teachers’ development of Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge (TPACK). Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 13(4), 63-73.

Erdogan, A., & Sahin, I. (2010). Relationship between math teacher candidates’ Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) and achievement levels. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2(2), 2707-2711.

Finger, G., Jamieson-Proctor, R., & Albion, P. Beyond Pedagogical Content Knowledge: The importance of TPACK for informing preservice teacher education in Australia. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology 2010, 324, 114-125. Doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-15378-5_11

Guerrero, S. (2010). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge in the mathematics classroom. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 26(4), 132-139.

Harris, J. B., & Hofer, M. J. (2011). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) in action: A descriptive study of secondary teachers’ curriculum-based, technology-related instructional planning. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 43(3), 211-229.

Harris, J. B., Hofer, M. J., Blanchard, M. R., Grandgenett, N. F., Schmidt, D. A., van Olphen, M., & Young, C. A. (2010). “Grounded” technology integration: Instructional planning using curriculum-based activity type taxonomies. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 18(4), 573-605.

Hur, J. W., Cullen, T., & Brush, T. (2010). Teaching for application: A model for assisting pre-service teachers with technology integration. Journal of Technology & Teacher Education, 18(1), 161-182.

Jang, S-J. (2010). Integrating the interactive whiteboard and peer coaching to develop the TPACK of secondary science teachers. Computers & Education, 55(4), 1744-1751.

Jimoyiannis, A. (2010). Designing and implementing an integrated technological pedagogical science knowledge framework for science teachers professional development. Computers & Education, 55(3), 1259-1269.

Kereluik, K., Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. (2011). On learning to subvert signs: Literacy, technology and the TPACK framework. California Reader, 44(2), 12-18.

Koh, J. H. L., Chai, C. S., & Tsai, C. C. (2010). Examining the technological pedagogical content knowledge of Singapore pre-service teachers with a large-scale survey. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(6), 557-63.

LaFee, S. (2010). Taking the ‘i21? initiative. Education Digest, 76(3), 47-51.

Miller, C., Doering, A. & Scharber, C. (2010). No such thing as failure, only feedback: Designing innovative opportunities for e-assessment and technology-mediated feedback. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 21(1), 65-92. Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/33184

Niess, M. L., van Zee, E. H., & Gillow-Wiles, H. (2010). Knowledge growth in teaching mathematics/science with spreadsheets: Moving PCK to TPACK through online professional development. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 27(2), 42-52.

Oster-Levinz, A., & Kleiger, A. (2010). Indicator for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) evaluation of online tasks. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education-TOJDE, 11(4). Retrieved from http://tojde.anadolu.edu.tr/tojde40/index.htm

Özgün-Koca, A. A., Meagher, M., & Edwards, M. T. (2009/2010). Preservice teachers’ emerging TPACK in a technology-rich methods class. The Mathematics Educator, 19(2), 10-20. Retrieved from http://math.coe.uga.edu/TME/issues/v19n2/v19n2_OzgunKoca,%20Meagher,%20&%20Edwards.pdf

Pierson, M., & Borthwick, A. (2010). Framing the assessment of educational technology professional development in a culture of learning. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 26(4), 126-131.

Polly, D., Mims, C., Shepherd, C. E., & Inan, F. (2010). Evidence of impact: Transforming teacher education with preparing tomorrow’s teachers to teach with technology (PT3) grants. Teaching & Teacher Education, 26(4), 863-870.

Richardson, K. W. (2010). TPACK: Game on. Learning & Leading with Technology, 37(8), 34-35.

Schmidt, D., Harris, J. & Hofer, M. (2010). “Grounded” technology integration using K-6 literacy learning activity types. Learning & Leading With Technology, 37(6). 30-32.

Thompson, A. D., & Schmidt, D. (2010). Second-generation TPACK: Emphasis on research and practice. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 26(4), 125.

Trautmann, N. M., & MaKinster, J. G. (2010). Flexibly adaptive professional development in support of teaching science with geospatial technology. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 21(3), 351-370.

Chapters
Doukakis, S., Chionidou-Moskofoglou, M., Mangina-Phelan, E., & Roussos, P. (2010). Measuring technological and content knowledge of undergraduate primary teachers in mathematics. In M. D. Lytras, (Ed.). Tech-Education 2010: Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol. 73 (pp. 405-410), Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Doukakis, S., Koilias, C., & Chionidou-Moskofoglou, M. (2010). Students’ satisfaction with an undergraduate primary education teaching practicum design on developing technological, pedagogical and mathematical knowledge. In M. D. Lytras, (Ed.). Tech-Education 2010: Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol. 73 (pp. 661-666), Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Harris, J. B., Mishra, P. & Koehler, M. (2010). Teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge and learning activity types: Curriculum-based technology integration reframed. In Schrum, L., (Ed.). Considerations on Technology and Teachers: The Best of JRTE (pp. 181-204), Eugene, OR: ISTE.

Book
“In the recently released Jossey-Bass publication, Because Digital Writing Matters by the National Writing Project, with Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks, these authors discuss the TPACK framework as they describe the complex process of teaching “writing” – a content area that involves many pedagogical decisions about how to teach both process and product. By exploring the ways in which writing is evolving through new technologies such as blogs, wikis, and digital stories, as well as analyzing the physical and virtual spaces in which students collaborate such as computer labs and social networks, Because Digital Writing Matters offers readers vignettes of teacher practice that can help frame their discussions and understanding about what it means to teach writing with technology.”

3. Recent TPACK PresentationsColes, D. (2010, June). An introduction to TPACK. Paper presented at the 2010 Canadian eLearning Conference, Edmonton, Alberta. Retrieved from http://mrcoles.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/celc-2010-an-introduction-to-tpack/

Jamieson-Proctor, R., Finger, G. & Albion, P. (2010, April). Auditing the TPACK capabilities of final year teacher education students: Are they ready for the 21st century? Paper presented at the Australian Computers in Education Conference 2010, Melbourne, Australia. Retrieved from http://acec2010.info/proposal/248/auditing-tpck-capabilities-final-year-teacher-education-students-are-they-ready-21st .pdf of paper

Jimoyiannis, A. (2010, June). Developing a Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework for science education: Implications of a teacher trainers’ preparation program. Paper presented at the Informing Science & IT Education Conference (InSITE) 2010, Cassino, Italy. Retrieved from

http://proceedings.informingscience.org/InSITE2010/InSITE10p597-607Jimoyiannis867.pdf

4. Recent TPACK-Related DissertationsThe following TPACK-based dissertations have come to our attention recently. There may be more… (and if so, you know whom to contact with that information J).

Liaw, H. (2010). Using online primary source resources in fostering historical thinking skills: The pre-service social studies teachers’ understanding. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section A, 71(09), (AAT 3420677).

Abstract: This dissertation entailed a qualitative case study on the confluence of technology and social studies in fostering a constructivist education. Through the examination of pre-service social studies teachers’ understanding of the online primary source resources (OPSR), three themes emerged. The first exposed the fragmented understanding of important pedagogical theories of constructivism and historical thinking among participants; the second suggested that OPSR was mostly valued by pre-service teachers for its provision of primary sources; and the third related to how pre-service teachers viewed the current state of technology and context as problematic for technology integration. Accordingly, four findings were revealed. First, the pre-service teachers in the study demonstrated a limited understanding of the application of foundational theories central to their field of study; second, there were instances of deeper appreciation of the potential of OPSR, indicating that pre-service teachers’ theoretical understanding is nascent and may deepen over time; third, the full potential of technologies such as OPSR was not recognized; and fourth, the pre-service teachers’ perceptions of school and educational system conditions tended to negatively influence their views toward the integration of technology into their teaching practices. Implications indicate that first, foundational pedagogical theories are critical with regard to technology integration in education and as such teacher preparation programs must not assume what is taught is what is learned; second, instances of deeper understanding among pre-service teachers only appeared during the application of their theoretical understandings; third, context is critical in how OPSR would be used in classrooms and such contextual issues must not be ignored by teacher preparation programs; and fourth, teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (PCK/TPCK) is critical in the integration of technology in education.

Lux, N. J. (2010). Assessing Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section A, 71(12), (AAT 3430401).

Abstract: Building on Shulman’s (1986) theory of pedagogical content knowledge that outlines distinct domains of teacher knowledge, technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) has emerged as a framework for examining educational technology training in teacher preparation (Koehler & Mishra, 2008; Neiss, 2008; Shin, Koehler, Mishra, Schmidt, Baran, & Thompson, 2009). The research presented here examines the theoretical basis of TPACK and describes the process of developing the Pre-service Teacher – Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge Survey (PT-TPACK Survey). The PT-TPACK Survey is an instrument constructed to measure self-perceptions of TPACK in pre-service teachers completing a “Foundations of Educational Technology Course”. The research focused on collecting evidence for the validity and reliability of the PT-TPACK survey. A pilot study, understandability study, and expert review were conducted in early stages of the research. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and reliability measures were analyzed after the survey was administered to 120 pre-service teachers. The factor structure suggests a superior model fit, as did the goodness-of-fit indices. The root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) was equal to .013, and both the comparative fit index (CFI) and non-normed fit index (NNFI) were ? .90 (CFI=1.0, NNFI=1.0). Internal consistency between the individual factors was also strong. The resulting coefficient alpha statistics suggest instrument reliability (TPACK, ?=.903; TPK, ?=.844; PK, ?=.771; CK, ?=.774; TK, ?=.747; PCK, ?=.653). Six of the seven widely accepted hypothesized TPACK dimensions emerged in the factor structure. Technological content knowledge (TCK) was the only hypothesized dimension that did not emerge. Finally, this study recommends several reasons for the lack of the TCK dimension, some of which could have an impact on how teachers are trained to use technology.

Plair, S. K. (2010). On becoming technology fluent: Digital classrooms and middle aged teachers. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section A, 72(01), (AAT 3435097).

Abstract: This dissertation, organized in chapter format, is comprised of a collection of case studies designed to explain why some teachers are not prepared to meet the challenges of the National Education Technology Plan despite the pervasive evidence of technology in our personal and professional lives. The first case study is the personal history of one teacher who “battles the machine” and is reluctant to alter what works in her current practice. The next chapter is a multiple case study that examines the issues and challenges experienced teachers faced in their efforts to become more fluent in the use of educational technology. Using an extensive technology related professional development event as an intervention, the study explores teachers’ use of technology before and after the inservice, the role of professional development in building technology skills, and matters related to the sustainability of skills. Teachers stressed the need for ongoing support in the form of a knowledge broker to assure continued efficacy and proficiency while integrating technology into their content and their practice. The fourth chapter, after a five year lapse, revisits two teachers from the previous multiple case study and introduces a new tech savvy teacher who shares her experiences as a new integrator of technology. Self report is used to examine the issues and challenges these experienced teachers faced in their efforts to become more fluent in the use of educational technology. The teachers in this multiple case study participated in a number of technology related professional development interventions over a period of approximately four years. This chapter includes their reflections on the successes and failures as they continue to grapple with the challenges of increasing their technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge or TPACK and create change in their practice. Included is an essay presenting a proposal for a framework of five phases of professional development to support the federal government policies of No Child Left Behind and the National Education Technology Plan. The framework is upheld by five principles of professional development considered crucial for effectively changing teacher practice to incorporate instructional technology into the curriculum. By superimposing these principles: duration, content, active learning, and collaboration, this essay then positions technology related professional development as ongoing with the support of professional learning communities or networks and knowledge brokers as a means of sustaining and expanding the efforts teachers make toward technology fluency. The concluding chapter discusses how education systems constrain teachers’ effort or ability to changes. Recommendations are provided on how relations among teachers and institutions might be reconfigured to promote more and better professional learning and practice in technology.

(The following dissertation may be the first that was based upon Mishra & Koehler’s conceptualization of TPACK. We found it recently.)

Youmans, M. J. (2006). When, where, how, and why Berkshire County high school teachers use the Internet for teaching and learning. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section A, 67(10), (AAT 3238849).

Abstract: This study draws on both quantitative and qualitative data collected from public and private high school teachers in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, to describe their current uses of, beliefs about, and knowledge base surrounding the Internet for teaching and learning. An underlying assumption of this study is that before the outcomes of teachers’ uses of the Internet can be addressed, there must first be a clear understanding of how teachers are actually using it for preparation, instruction, and student-directed work. 142 teachers responded to a survey about their most prevalent uses of the Internet, as well as their perceptions about both its value and the obstacles that prevent its effective deployment. Nine participants were chosen from six of the schools to provide richer detail and further examples of major trends discovered in the survey data. The grounded theory, complementary methods study elicited themes that suggest how and why the preponderance of the participants are currently using the Internet to inform and enrich their professional practice and suggest a new domain of teacher knowledge, namely technological pedagogical content knowledge. Key factors influencing teachers’ decisions about Internet use include their perceptions about its importance for teaching and learning as well as about the obstacles it poses. The study is significant both in adding to the current knowledge of how some teachers are using the Internet to enhance their craft, offering a methodological lens supporting a multiple measures approach to assessing and understanding teachers’ use of technology, and developing a theoretical framework for understanding the particular kind of knowledge Internet-using educators possess. It closes by suggesting a fruitful area for future research and professional development lies in helping teachers build their technological pedagogical content knowledge.

5. Other TPACK Resources
Tae Shin, Punya Mishra, and Matt Koehler at Michigan State University have spent considerable time and effort putting together a TPACK bibliography with about 250 entries – as Matt says, “not by any means complete, but a good start…and the most comprehensive TPACK bibliography out there” – and are hoping that their work might be of use to others.

http://mkoehler.educ.msu.edu/tpack/partial-bibliography-of-tpack-related-works/

http://www.mendeley.com/groups/522011/tpack/papers/

On the recommendation of the members of SITE’s TPACK SIG, we have established four TPACK-related email discussion lists:

• tpack.research
• tpack.teaching
• tpack.grants
• tpack.future

Instructions for how to subscribe to these lists are on the SITE TPACK SIG’s Web page: http://site.aace.org/sigs/tpack-sig.htm. (Please note that we will soon be retiring the TPACK Google Group, also in accordance with the decision made at the 2010 TPACK SIG meeting.)

Matt Koehler has posted an online version of the popular “TPACK Game,” which was created originally for use at the 2007 National Educational Technology Leadership Symposium in Washington, DC (USA). There are multiple versions of the TPACK Game circulating at present, including: Karen Richardson’s version (see new articles, above), Petra Fisser’s version (in Dutch), Michael Porter’s version, and the original version played at NTLS 2007.

Jordy Whitrmer at the Birmington Covington School, in the Birmingham Public Schools in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, USA, created a TPACK WebQuest. Jordy says, “This WebQuest is designed to first familiarize you with the TPaCK framework, then to examine and discuss examples that combine the three bases to different degrees and success, and finally to help you define the areas of interplay in your own words.” http://ignite.wikis.birmingham.k12.mi.us/TPaCK+WebQuest

Students at Michigan State University have written and filmed a clever TPACK Rap: “Jamie has a nightmare involving TPACK chasing her around the campus of Rouen Business School.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEj9eA49dzU

6. TPACK at Upcoming Conferences

We’re happy to report that there will be 51 TPACK-based sessions at the SITE 2011 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, Tuesday, Monday, March 7 through Friday, March 11, 2011. We will be sending a list of each and all of these sessions in a special “TPACK Conference Edition” of the TPACK Newsletter late next week to assist your conference planning.

We’re also happy to report that there will be 12 TPACK-focuses sessions at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, Friday, April 8 through Tuesday, April 12, 2011. We will include specific information about these sessions in the upcoming special conference edition of this newsletter, too.

The Call for Participation in the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)’s annual conference (Sunday, June 26 – Wednesday, June 29, 2011 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA) specifically requested presentations that address educators’ TPACK by saying:

“We are looking for:

• Content that increases both the technical knowledge and the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) of educators and teacher candidates, as well as the leadership skills of students and educators
• Systems, models, promising practices, and strategies for achieving digital-age learning in formal and informal learning environments, face to face and virtual
• Models of how to achieve the NETS and examples of the NETS in action
• Technical content that is appropriate for all levels of expertise, from beginner to advanced”

The next issue of this TPACK Newsletter will provide specific information about the 6 TPACK-based sessions that are scheduled for presentation at the ISTE conference, too.

7. TPACK Work in ProgressAt National-Louis University in Chicago (with additional campuses in Wisconsin and Florida), a TPACK faculty development project is in its third year. Funded by a grant from the Senate Faculty Development Committee (with additional funds from each department, plus the deans of the Colleges of Education and Arts and Sciences), the NLU TPACK project helps small communities of inquiry to identify shared needs, garner resources and training, and develop technology-enhanced lesson plans and units, including projects to enhance the professional development of NLU faculty and adjunct instructors. The TPACK concept serves as the conceptual framework for the project, helping teams to focus on the intersections of technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge. For more information, please contact Craig A. Cunningham, a member of the Technology in Education faculty, at craig.cunningham@nl.edu.

8. Other Types of TPACKOur online searches have surfaced TPCK/TPACK in both pharmacology and business, in addition to education.

TPCK is also an acronym for “Tosyl phenylalanyl chloromethyl ketone:”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tosyl_phenylalanyl_chloromethyl_ketone.PNG

(TPCK diagram)

http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?doi=71466&hl=1&q=tpck (How TPCK protects injured brains in baby rats)

TPACK is also the name of a telecommunications company in Denmark:

“Since 2001, TPACK has been providing some of the world’s largest telecommunication equipment manufacturers with leading edge technology and solutions for efficient packet transport. Specifically, TPACK provides the chip solutions and the supporting software that implement the intelligence in telecom systems. TPACK’s experience and expertise in both data and telecom networks has proven to be decisive in TPACK’s success to date.”

http://www.tpack.com/about-tpack/company-overview.html

The TPACK company was acquired by Applied Micro in summer/fall 2010:

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/preview/phoenix.zhtml?c=78121&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1473624&highlight=tpack

9. Learning and Doing More with TPACK
Interested in learning more about TPACK or getting more involved in the TPACK community? Here are a few ideas:

• Visit and contribute to the TPACK wiki at: http://tpack.org/

• Join the TPACK SIG at: http://site.aace.org/sigs/tpack-sig.htm

• Subscribe to the tpack.research, tpack.teaching, tpack.grants and/or tpack.future discussion lists at: http://site.aace.org/sigs/tpack-sig.htm

• Access the TPACK Learning Activity Types at: http://activitytypes.wmwikis.net/

Feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone who might be interested in its contents.

Even better, have them subscribe to the TPACK newsletter by sending a blank email to sympa@lists.wm.edu, with the following text in the subject line: subscribe tpack.news FirstName LastName (of course, substituting their own first and last names for ‘FirstName’ and ‘LastName’ — unless their name happens to be FirstName LastName, in which case they can just leave it as is).

If you have a news item that you would like to contribute to the newsletter, send it along to: tpack.news.editors@wm.edu

Standard End-Matter If you have questions, suggestions, or comments about the newsletter, please send those to tpack.news.editors@wm.edu. If you are subscribed to the tpack.news email list, and — even after reviewing this impressive publication — you prefer not to continue to receive the fruits of our labors, please send a blank email message to sympa@lists.wm.edu, with the following text in the subject line: unsubscribe tpack.news

- Judi & Mark

…

for the SITE TPACK SIG leadership:

Judi Harris, Co-Chair, College of William & Mary

Mark Hofer, Co-Chair, College of William & Mary

Mario Kelly, Futon, Hunter College

Matt Koehler, Chaise Lounge, Michigan State University Punya Mishra, Recliner, Michigan State University

Scott Graden is Superintendent of Saline Area Schools and a blogger. He recently posted about a study that indicated that texting helps students develop vocabulary skills. Though he was skeptical of the finding, I am not sure I was as surprised. He cited a news story on ReadWriteWeb titled Research Finds Text-Messaging Improves Children’s Spelling Skills. The story says,

… a new study from Coventry University finds no evidence that having access to mobile phones harms children’s literacy skills. In fact, the research suggests that texting abbreviations or “textisms” may actually aid reading, writing and spelling skills.

The story goes on the say that

Based on a series of reading and spelling tests, researchers found a “significant contribution of textism use to the children’s spelling development during the study.” The study made it clear that it wasn’t the access to the phone per se, or even the text-messaging as much as specifically the use of textisms that aided the development. The reason, writes Dr. Clare Wood, one of the authors of the study, “is partly explained by the highly phonetic nature of the textisms that are popular within this age group, as the phonological and alphabetic awareness that is required for the construction and decoding of these textisms also underpin successful reading development.”

Scott, who is far from being a techno-phobe, was not sure if he actually bought into the findings of this study. He was surprised by it and also questioned its validity. He is not alone in espousing this point of view. As I had written earlier, in a post titled, Technology & Literacy, bemoaning the youth of today , technology is not destroying our ability to write, it just changing the way we do so. I don’t want to repeat what I had written earlier, so go there and take a look and let me know what you think?

Is Scott right? Is txt-ing destroying writing as we know it? Let me know.

Kristen Kereluik, Matt Koehler and I just published an article in The California Reader: A publication of the California Reading Association. The complete citation and abstract is as follows:

Kereluik, K., Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2010, Winter). On learning to subvert signs: Literacy, Technology and the TPACK framework. The California Reader, 44, 2, (12-18). [PDF download].

This paper discusses new literacy practices that can be enabled through the creative repurposing of digital technologies. We frame the discussion within the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework. TPACK is a form of knowledge that teachers need to have in order to successfully integrate technology in their teaching.  TPACK argues for the idea of teachers as designers of curriculum, who repurpose existing technical tools for pedagogical purposes. Finally we offer a set of implications of this approach for teacher preparation programs.

We start the paper with two examples that were first reported on this blog. The first is from Michael Hughes, a graduate of our MAET program, who had something he does with his 6th grade students and the second has to do with Sean Nash (of Nashworld fame) and an activity he gave students in his advanced biology class – reported here.

As I have been blogging over the years I am finding more and more examples of this kind of bi-directional influence, academic texts end up on my blog (edited or unedited) and my blogging informs the my academic writing! I had expected the former to happen, in fact the broader dissemination of my academic writing was part of the reason I started this blog in the first place. What I had not expected was to see my blogging contributing to my academic writing.

Dr. Clare Kilbane, Associate Professor at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio recently created an enhanced podcast/vodcast explaining TPACK as a part of an ARRA grant implemented in the state of Ohio last spring. This podcast/vodcast was designed in the style of “podcasts created by Commoncraft (with permission from Lee LeFever of course).”  It now available to view on Vimeo.

TPACK 101 from Clare Kilbane on Vimeo.

Also, students in the Curriculum Design and Educational Innovation program at Twente University have been blogging about their work with TPACK. I was informed of this by my friend Petra Fisser faculty member at Twente University, and the faculty lead on this course. I have had a long relationship with the faculty and students at Twente (see here and here and here). As an extension of this, Petra wanted me to comment on the student blogs – which was difficult given that there were 23(!) of them. What I did instead is read through all of them and send some feedback to the class as a whole. [I have included what I wrote at the end of this posting, just for the record.] I also promised to provide links to their blogs on my site, for other people to read. If you do visit these pages, take a moment to post a comment or a thought. I know it will be greatly appreciated by the students. Here are the links

1. Anand, Gargi
2. Berning, Dorien
3. Birru, Habtamu Haile
4. Donk, van der, Simone
5. Duteweerd, Linda
6. Ebbeler, Johanna
7. Getenet, Seyum
8. Heitink, Maaike
9. Hetjes, Mariëtte
10. Ilsink, Lianne
11. Kemps, Joke
12. Kramer, Marloes
13. Meijer, Nicky
14. Noordink, Marlijne
15. Pattipeilohy, Vascolino
16. Pikaar, Yara
17. Rem, Frank
18. Ruiter, de, Lotte
19. Suhendri, Suhendri
20. Tijhuis, Thomas
21. Veen, van der, Elly
22. Warringa, Gonneke
23. Welsen, van, Jeffrey

Here is the feedback that I sent to the whole class.

Dear friends –

Thank you for inviting me to your class (albeit virtually). When Petra asked me to look over your blogs I said yes enthusiastically, and looked forward to reading and commenting on all of your posts. At that time, however, I did not realize that there were 23 blogs I had promised to look at  and comment on. I have read all the posts but given my busy schedule, I realized it would be impossible to comment on every post and I didn’t want to post on some and not on others, so I decided to write this extended note to all of you.

Reading all your blog posts was great fun. It was good to see all the different yet similar takes on the TPACK framework. Clearly all of you have approached the topic quite thoughtfully and seriously. I was also pleased to see some of the examples you guys provided about examples of TPACK. TPACK has multiple uses, as an analytic framework for researchers (so that they can use it to study actual classrooms and what happens there) but as importantly as a tool for defining a better kind of practice. This is why the examples, the mindmaps, the images, the cartoons, all were great for me to see and read. In fact for most of the blogs I went ahead and read the posts about flexibility and pedagogy as well. So I got a great introduction to the course, though in a backward sequence (TPACK followed by pedagogy followed by Flexibility).

I think this idea of placing flexibility first in the sequence was a great one because it introduced you to what I think is the most crucial aspect of the TPACK framework – the idea that one can start with any of the three knowledge bases and still end up with an integrated curriculum design. And this requires flexibility, since once you include a new pedagogy in your thinking it will necessarily change how you think of how content is to be represented and what technologies can best do that. So what is important here is the end goal – that of integration rather than how you get there.

One misconception that seemed to see had to do with the conceptualization of TCK. TCK is often described/defined as or ability to match the technology to the subject matter content to achieve specific subject matter goals or learning outcomes. Though that is not wrong it is misses an important point regarding how technology (historically speaking) has shaped and changed the representations and cognitions in the disciplines. Be it physics or chemistry, art or music, new technologies have provided new ways of understanding and new ways of representing these understandings. Think of how the advent of fMRI, eye tracker technology, PET have led to flowering of the field we now called neuroscience! Thus TCK is more than the matching it is also understanding how technologies have changed content over time and this is important for teachers to know.

That’s all for now. I have truly enjoyed reading your blogs and I wish I had the time to post comments to each of you individually. I am writing this to you from 30,000 feet above sea level, from an airplane, as I fly from Detroit to Las Vegas for a conference. How awesome can technology be!

Another final piece of advice (or suggestion) is that each of you continue to maintain your blog. I have found writing to be the best way of thinking – often I don’t know what I think about a particular topic till I start writing a blog post about it. Suddenly things that seemed clear become vague and things that I hadn’t given much thought to come to the forefront. The discipline of writing and articulating what you are thinking (for a real audience) on a regular basis is a wonderful cognitive tool to have. I have been blogging for a couple of years now and frankly I blog not for any body else (I mean I love it when people comment on my posts) but that is not the reason I blog.  I sincerely hope that these beginning steps that are taking in this new medium will not stop once the class if over and that your posts will not depend on an assignment given to you by a professor but rather will emerge from your own thinking and experience. And that will be awesome.

Thank you for listening to me and I look forward to future interactions, hopefully in Enschede sometime soon.

sincerely ~ punya

I was recently invited to present a keynote address at the 21st Century Instructional Technology Conference (titled Elements of Technology) at the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Nevada. Clark County is the 5th largest school district in the country with over 300,000 students and it was a great privilege to be invited to present there. I was invited there by the Instructional Technology Department (led by Loretta Asay) and my contact person was Project Facilitator, Sherwood Jones. They are a great group of people and I truly had a wonderful time there.

Apart from the Keynote I also conducted a workshop on Creativity and Teaching with Technology. I had anticipated having around 25 people for the workshop but the room was overflowing (at least 15 more than I had anticipated). That did throw a few kinks into my routine but nothing that was unsurmountable. I am sharing below some of the things that people created during this two hour workshop.

I explained my idea of a creative idea or product as being Novel, Effective and Whole (the so called New NEW)! This led Terra Graves, Thomasina Rose and Kristina Ernest to create this acrostic poem.

New
Organic
Visual
Engaging
Longevity

Educational
Fun
Freedom
Everyone
Creativity
Teachers
Innovative
Variety
Enthusiasm

Winning
Holistic
Outside the Box
Learning
Exciting

Here are a few more from Lisa Widmer, Katie Jones, Brent Mesenburg and Robert Jackson

The first two are limericks that summarize some of the things we had talked about in the first half of the workshop.

Creativity is our goal
Make it Novel Effective and Whole
When in doubt
Turn it about
And satisfy your soul

A second, funnier, version is as follows:

Creativity is our goal
Make it Novel Effective and Whole
When in doubt
Don’t Freak out
It’s quite alright if you stole

The same team wrote another poem, synthesizing some of the ideas we played with in the second half of the workshop.

Being creative is like heaven
Mimic the great Magellan
And fear not missteps
Just use the five steps
And crank that knob to eleven

The “crank the knob to eleven” of course being a response to the (in)famous scene from This is Final Tap.

A couple of other pieces that emerged from this team (can you tell this was a prolific group) was the quote:

“Tweak it to Teach it”

Somewhat along the same lines was Patrick Whitehead who suggested the following two:

Thinking is tweaking your mind

Think better… TWEAK your mind!

Apart from this display of verbal dexterity, the participants also completed a “letter search” task where they looked for letter that spell out the word “Relax, Repose, Reteach.” I had done a similar activity with students in our MAET program a year ago in Plymouth. Essentially what I did was create a somewhat awkward problem scenario the solution to which were the words Relax, Repose, Reteach. So these were the letters students searched for… and this is what they came up with.

Now for the twist! As it turns out one of the themes of the keynote (and the workshop) were the three words “Explore, Create, Share.” Students watched each of the three videos that we had created (see them here) as well as the mashup that had inspired us to begin with (see the original and the mashup here).

What the students didn’t know was that the three words (Relax, Repose, Reteach) could be rearranged to read… (surprise, surprise) the words Create, Explore, Share!! Here is what that looks like…

I must give a shout-out to High School Freshman Bryan Jones who I “volunteered” to help me out. He had a tough job, collecting all the pictures since there were multiple cameras (from regular digital cameras to iPhones), missing cables, a mac that was running Windows (which mean iPhoto wouldn’t cooperate)… and he had to pull everything together in around 25 minutes while the workshop was still going on… And he managed it without fuss and stress. Thanks!

Finally, we all watched the new Steven Johnson video “Where good ideas come from” and created demotivational posters based on what they heard and saw. Below is the video (just in case you haven’t seen it already) and below that the posters the students created.

Choose Wisely Patrick Whitehead Tim Hart	Innovation Karen Decker Terry Ector	Don’t Worry Michael C. Gregory
This is a hunch Thomasina Rose Kristina Ernest Terra Graves	Ideas Brandi Mizner Beth Pearson Holly Marich Laurie Koelliker Gary Eisnor	Creativity? Roger Mayo Matt Keener

As you can imagine this was a hectic workshop for all of us. We covered a lot of ground and the participants also created some interesting artifacts that can have a life beyond the immediate workshop. What fun!

A few weeks ago I had shared a few triplet-ambigrams I had designed. For the uninitiated a triplet ambigram is a 3-d shape that cast different, and interesting, shadows depending on where you shine light on it. For instance here’s a triplet ambigram that casts three different shadows that read A, B & C!

Yesterday I received an email from Alex Ruthman, a self-proclaimed regular reader of this blog who had been inspired to create his own triplet ambigrams. Alex is a music educator and researcher at UMass Lowell with an interest in creativity, music technology, web 2.0 and learner agency (see his home page here). Now, Alex has taken the design of such triplets to their next logical level. He does not just prototype them on paper, he designs them in Google Sketchup and then 3D prints them in plastic! Here is a photo he sent to me…

As you can see this shape casts the shadows of L, P & C (depending on where light shines on it). What is more, Alex does not just do this for fun. He has actually found an use for it in his teaching. As he said in his email:

I use these with my music education methods and research courses illustrating multiple perspectives and three modes of engaging with music: listening, performing and creating.

How cool is that!

I just came across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, 10 tips on How to Write Less Badly [H/T Geekpress]. It is not that I agreed with every point being made there but a couple of them (To become a writer, write!; Find a voice, don’t just get published) really connected with my personal experience. The comments at the end of the article add a few good ideas as well… overall, an article well worth reading, particularly for graduate students who are still working on developing the routine and on finding their own voice.

My friend and colleague Leigh Wolf forwarded me this article on Edward Tufte: The Many Faces (And Sculptures) Of Edward Tufte. I have been a fan of information design guru Edward Tufte’s work for years (decades?). I love his emphasis on clarity and simplicity in presenting information. I love the fact that he designs and publishes his own books (so that he can have full control over each and every aspect of the presentation). What I didn’t know of was his playful artistic side. It turns out that ET (as he is known) is also an artist, crafting giant metal sculptures in his “back yard” (if you can call the hundreds of acres that stretch behind his house a “back yard!”).

Over the past few years I have been thinking quite hard about the idea that creative people are not creative in just one area but rather tend to play within and across multiple disciplines or areas. Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein have in their book Sparks of Genius often talked about how the most creative scientists are polymaths, often having artistic and other interests that go beyond their immediate professional interests. In fact they argue, and I would tend to agree with them, that creativity cannot be forced into one box or domain. Creative individuals are curious about everything and often engage in creative activities in multiple areas, though they may specialize in just one area (usually the domain they are most known for).

This is true for the most creative people I know. For instance, consider Douglas Hofstadter (best known for his book Godel, Escher & Back and is work in Artificial Intelligence) dabbles in everything from mathematics to music, wordplay to art. Similarly Scott Kim (best know as a puzzle game designer) creates ambigrams and composes music, plays the drums and teaches mathematics using dance!

In my own way I have tried to do the same. Everything I do, from creating ambigrams to teaching, from photography to developing keynote presentations, from being a parent to advising students on their research, seems to me to be connected and inter-woven. I think my success as a researcher and scholar (to whatever extent I have been successful) derives from this “dabbling” across disciplines.

What is sad, however, is how much such “dabbling” is frowned upon. Through high-school and college, through graduate school and even as a faculty member, I have been advised, always by by well-meaning people, to focus, to find my niche, to become an expert on one thing. I have resisted it, mainly because knowing just one thing, seems, at least to me, such an impoverished way of being.

And I understand why I have received the advice I have. We live in a specialized world. A world where expertise is valued.  And an expert, after all, is someone who knows more and more about less and less. There is no space for dabbling in this world of.

But I wonder about that. I have a friend who is a successful professor of civil engineering. Turns out, that as he was growing up, what he really wanted to be, was a chef! I haven’t had a chance to talk to him about this but I wonder how his vision of being a chef influences what he does as a researcher and a teacher? Does it contribute (in some subconscious manner) to his work? Or has he suppressed it completely?

Either way I see it as a tragedy, in the first case because we haven’t developed a way of speaking of these influences, and in the second case because a possible, fruitful career was nipped in the bud.

The sad thing is that I am seeing school do the same thing to my kids, in fact to most kids I know. NCLB has not helped either. Don’t get me wrong. This is not an argument for some form of dilletantism (dabbling for the sake of dabbling). Not at all. What I am recommending (thanks to the Roob-Bernstein’s for this term) is polymathy. One of my students, Danah Henriksen, is currently working on a dissertation on looking for polymathy in teachers. As she says:

“Polymathy” may be thought of as an informed enthusiasm for more than one field of knowledge or expertise, or excellence in several realms that might seem distant from each other.  It has been suggested that what makes polymaths so successful and fluidly creative is an ability to cross-pollinate ideas and information.  People who open their minds to, and who learn from, multiple knowledge areas can apply new information and unique ways of thinking from one discipline into another.

This for me is the biggest reason for supporting such playing around in multiple areas. These experiences at the fringes (so to speak) of our professional lives, provide us with newer ways of being in the world. They allow us to see the world in new ways. They allow us to question things the field may have taken for granted. Just as Tufte says at the end of the piece, my goal, is to “make people see a little differently.” Turns out one of the best and easiest ways of doing so is by seeing through different disciplinary eyes.

We need to provide better opportunities for our students to do the same.

I have been tracking the Hitler-Downfall parodies for over two years now and it seems that they keep getting better and better. But over the last few days comes the news that Constantin films, which owns the rights to the original movie asked YouTube to find and take down every video that included a clip from the film. So the parodies have been vanishing from YouTube, which is a tragedy for creative freedom and the the right to create and disseminate parodies. This was one of the funniest Internet memes, capable of delivering pitch-perfect commentary on everything from Hillary Clinton’s loss in the Democratic Primaries, to the fact that the iPad did not have a camera! Farhad Manjoo has a great article about this meme (and links to a couple of awesome parodies), titled: YouTube vs. Der Führer

One of the interesting points he makes about the Content ID technology that YouTube uses to identify copyright infringement. As he says:

At its heart, Content ID is like a souped-up version of the FBI’s fingerprinting database. The entertainment industry keeps sending YouTube new reference files for movies, TV shows, songs, video games, and other content. YouTube scans every new upload and the millions of videos in its database against each of these files. David King, a YouTube product manager, told me that the system can find extremely fuzzy matches. It can spot when a copyrighted video has been transformed in some way by an uploader—for instance, it can finger a basketball game even if you pause, rewind, and then replay a clip from it, and it can identify Eric Cartman if you record a clip of  South Park by holding your camera up to your TV.

How amazing is that! Also Manjoo points out that one of the smartest things that Constantin films could have done is take advantage of this free publicity to run advertisements for the original movie/DVD. As Manjoo says,

Constantin never bothered to exercise its rights to run ads on the Downfall clips… according to YouTube, the vast majority of content owners who take part in Content ID are now recouping revenue from videos rather than pulling them down. Constantin would have earned a lot of money—not to mention avoided a lot of bad publicity—had it done the same thing.

It appears that some of the clips have started coming back, as users complain about their videos being taken down. YouTube policy automatically posts videos back if a copyright infringement claim is contested.

Personally, this has been a video / remix that has already given me hours of entertainment. It is a simple idea but with great potential and a wonderful example of the creative possibilities of giving people the opportunity to appropriate, mix and publish media.

Steven Johnson has a great essay on the future of text title: The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book.

I recommend reading the full thing but here is a quote that sort of captures his vision (though there is more, much more). Here is a great quote:

WHEN TEXT IS free to combine in new, surprising ways, new forms of value are created.

In another section he speaks of the page that results when you do a Google search for the word “journalism.”

Who is the “author” of this page? There are, in all likelihood, thousands of them. It has been constructed, algorithmically, by remixing small snippets of text from diverse sources, with diverse goals, and transformed into something categorically different and genuinely valuable. In the center column, we have short snippets of text written by ten individuals or groups, though of course, Google reports that it has 32 million more snippets to survey if we want to keep clicking. The selection of these initial ten links is itself dependant on millions of other snippets of text that link to these and other journalism-related pages on the Web. Along the right side of the page, we have short snippets of text written by five advertisers, mostly journalism schools as it happens, though they are in a silent competition with other snippets of text created by other advertisers bidding to be on this page. And then we have the text in the search field, created by me, which summons this entire network of text together in a fraction of a second.

What you see on this page is, in a very real sense, textual play: the recombining of words into new forms and associations that their original creators never dreamed of. But what separates it from the textual play that I was earnestly studying twenty years ago is the fact that it has engendered a two hundred billion dollar business.

I rarely if ever blog about politics – though I follow it avidly. I spend large parts of my day reading the news, keeping up with what is going on. Most of my news gathering happens online (the little TV I watch, usually the Daily Show, also happens online). And it is not that I am reticent to talk about my political views, not at all. It is just that I don’t see this blog as being the site for it.

Today, however, I will make an exception to the rule, prompted by a column by NYTimes columnist, David Brooks. As I have written before, I am quite ambivalent in my response to Mr. Brooks. I typically disagree with his political writings but I love his occasional forays into science, psychology and economics. So to read yesterday’s column (which was all about politics) and to agree with almost all of it was surprising. I think that in this column Mr. Brooks has given the best summary of how Obama is (mis)perceived by people on the right and the left, as well as a pretty nice encapsulation of who Obama really is.

This article, Getting Obama Right, is spot on. Here are some key quotes: Read the rest of this entry »

My friend and colleague, Curt Bonk, Professor at Indiana University (also known as Travelin’ Ed Man) recently interviewed me about our new hybrid Ph.D. program. For those interested in the program (and maybe even those who are not) can read it by going to Want an E-Ph.D. in Ed Tech?: An E-nlightening interview with Punya Mishra from Michigan State University. Curt asked some good questions thus providing me an opportunity to talk about this new program within the broader context of how technology is changing higher ed.

Enjoy.

Tom Johnson’s Adventures in Pencil Integration is the smartest, sassiest blog I have come across in a long time. This is how the sidebar describes the blog/author.

The year is 1897 and Tom Johnson works for a small school district. This is the story of the journey to move into the twentieth century with paper and pencil integration initiatives.

Yes, this is entirely fictional and any relation to “real life” is entirely coincidental.

What is amazing about API is not just how funny it is (it can be absolutely hilarious), or how intelligent it is (we’re talking IQ and EQ!), how scathing it can be (Ooh! that must have hurt) but how it manages to still have a strong humanistic core. At the end the teacher’s voice rings true, speaking to us across the decades. The blog is written tongue firmly in cheek, inspired by  current discussions about technology integration.

But API is not a one trick pony. If it would have been just that (replace computer with pencil and repeat) this blog would get boring very fast. But API is much more than a simple one-note satire. What I have come to appreciate and love about this blog is that I often find it difficult to pinpoint the exact position the author will take next. For instance, if you read “Sorry but you need to learn to use the sharpner” I took it to be a biting piece of satire poking fun of non-tech teachers. This is how it starts

Read the rest of this entry »

Just got this from Tom Reeves at the CIMA conference, Twente University.

Allen, K. L., Galvis, D., Katz, R. V. (2006). Evaluation of CDs and chewing gum in teaching dental anatomy. The New York state dental journal. 72(4): pp 30-33.

Read the rest of this entry »

I received an email from Michael Porter of the Littleton Public Schools in Colorado about a version of the TPACK game Michael and his colleagues recently conducted with their K-12 Leadership team (building principals and district administrators). I know that Matt Koehler and I had discussed a TPACK mashup game in our SITE 2008 Keynote but what Michael and his colleagues have done is something different. Essentially they gave their participants a set of scenarios that they then had to evaluate using a TPACK lens. They ended up what  a set of “scatter plots” that reveal the manner in which each of the scenarios integrated technology, pedagogy and content. Read the post (The TPACK game) to see just how this plays out.

Photograph of “scatter plot” generated by the TPACK game,
Image credit Littleton Public Schools & Michael Porter

Read the rest of this entry »

Sean had this wonderful post on his blog (Is this a sluggish strategy?) about this whole scientific and mathematical poetry that is going around. He links to some excellent sci-po’s written by his students (see Pushing Scientific Thought Into Art) and also provides a nice protocol for those who want to apply it in their own classrooms.

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

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A 5th grade science assignment, transformed. A rant about Mother Goose. A math poetry challenge!  How did that come to be? And what does that have to do with loving the Interwebs? Read on…

I had written earlier about how my 10 year-old daughter had been writing poems on science (Scientific Poems or Sci-Po’s for short). It all started with an extra-credit assignment she needed to do for her science class, and a need, I perceived, to keep her blog (Uniquely Mine) up-to-date. She has quite a few written now. For instance here is one about a news item about scientists finding dinosaur eggs (and other dino-stuff) in India (Cluster of dinosaur eggs found in southern India), and here’s the poem:

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I had written previously about a blog started by students in our Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Ph.D. program (ideaplay.org) and had designed a couple of ambigrammatic logos for them. You can see the original post here. Here is one of the original designs I had provided:

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I recently received the following email:

Sir, I was reading the article in Wikipedia on ‘Samarangana Sutradhara’ (King Bhoja’s treatise on Architecture). I was of the impression that there is no translation of the work in English. Though the article says that there is a translation by you of the work, the list of your works and publications on your webpage does not include any such work. Kindly let me know if you have indeed translated the treatise. If so kindly let me know how I can access a copy.

The fact that I had translated this ancient Sanskrit treatise came as a surprise to me.

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Mark Ambinder at the Politics blog at the Atlantic

President Obama plans to name Howard A. Schmidt, a veteran cyber security warrior with experience at senior levels of government and industry, to fill a long-anticipated cyber coordinator position at the National Security Council, administration officials and outside consultants confirmed.

As far as one can see Mr. Schmidt is well qualified for this position, having served both in industry and in the government in the past. However, one fact about his background caught my attention and prompted this note. In describing his qualifications Ambinder wrote

Schmidt has credentials unique to the job: he received his masters in organizational management from the University of Phoenix, a (fully accredited and esteem) mostly online university.

Apart from the typo on esteem, what struck me was this positive mention of the University of Phoenix, something I often do not see or hear. Over where I live and breathe, the good old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar university, the University of Phoenix is not regarded as having much esteem. I have argued here and elsewhere that this will soon change. That most of us at the “traditional” university have underestimated just how powerful the forces of change are. Online learning (and for profit universities) are here to stay and maybe even take over universities as we know them.

Reading about Mr. Schmidt’s credentials just reminded me just how quickly this change is happening.

Students in my CEP 818 (Creativity in Teaching and Learning) have been using digital photography to explore a variety of topics related to trans-disciplinary creativity. I hope to showcase some of their work on this blog once the semester gets over. In the meanwhile, I received an email from Michael Hughes, a former alumnus of this course, and a teacher in Jakarta, Indonesia. In his email he provided some links to some really cool work his students have been doing.

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What do you think this is?

Take a guess…

Well, it is the top half of a lake-reflection ambigram. What this means is that if you reflect what you see along a horizontal line at the bottom of the image, the picture you will then get will spell a word. Can you figure out what it says?

While you think about that, let me tell you about this new group-blog set up by graduate students in our Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Program. The blog is called IdeaPlay and is available at ideaplay.org. So sitting here in India I had a few moments to sketch out some ambigrams for their blog. Here are two…

The first is a rotational ambigram that reads the word “Idea” if you go clockwise and the word “Play” if you go anti-clockwise.

And as for the lake reflection ambigram (half of which you saw up there)… well (no great surprise) it reads IdeaPlay as well, like so..

I hope you liked these new ambigrams, and I hope you will check out the the ideaplay.org blog.

Shreya, my daughter has a blog, Uniquely Mine. An RSS feed from her blog can be found right here (just scroll down and see the right column). Anyway, over the past few weeks she has been doing something for extra credit for the science class. Her fifth-grade teacher has asked all students to find stories related to science in the newspaper, create a short writeup about it to share with the other children. I asked her to add another layer of challenge to that. Once she has her report all typed up, she needs to write a short poem about it and post it to her blog.

I asked her to do this partly because I was concerned that she would not be able to keep up her blog once school started. As most people she was very excited to have a blog and wrote a bunch of stuff for it in the beginning. Then life began to take over and her postings grew few and far in between. What was needed, I figured, was a way to keep her writing regularly. So this idea of piggybacking on something she was already doing. The poems she writes are often short and it didn’t seem like much of an imposition to ask her to write little poems based on the science articles she has been finding for her school report.

Well, so far so good. She has a quite a bit of writing (mostly poems) in a genre we have decided to call Sci-Po a.k.a. Scientific Poems! (It’s a obvious ripp-off on the term Sci-Fi). It has also been a lot of fun.

When we first set up the blog, I advised her to not allow commenting. I was not sure what kinds of comments she would generate and it just seemed as if we were asking for trouble (especially exposing a 10 year old to the kind of junk that is prevalent on the Internet). However, after much consideration we finally decided to open up her site and allow people to comment. So if you read this blog, click over to her site and drop her a note. Please, remember this is a 10 year old so be polite Of course all comments are moderated so I still hope to protect her from some of the nastier aspects of the world (not that I can do that forever but at least I can try).

Anyway, check out her writing. I think you will like it. Here is my favorite. It is a non-sense poem (not a Sci-Po but fun none-the-less) titled, Salt’n Pepa in Santa Fe. Here is is:

Salt’n Pepa in Santa Fe
by Shreya Mishra

Squigles-squagles, pinchley pooh
Slip’n sliding on my shoe
Dimpo-doby dorkly dake
Gently eat the slice of cake
Shickly-bumbly rabbity-red
Back at home, tucked in bed

I just ran across this blog (Color Me Katie) that just blew me away. Katie Sokoler is a freelance photographer and street artist living in Brooklyn – and her blog just throbs with life, and energy and the sheer pleasure of living. That’s her down there blowing bubbles (wait till you see the stop-motion animation version of this).

I think she says it best:

It’s important for me to express myself creatively every day. I have all of these fun ideas in my head and if I don’t get them out I’m pretty sure my mind would explode. Realistically, I’d probably just get frustrated and fall asleep. But explosion or no explosion, doing something creative acts as a form of therapy for me. I feel better after taking photographs, making street art, painting, or making wall sized collages. The messier and more sweatier I get, the better I feel.

How cool is that!

My daughter, whose creative exploits have been featured here before (for instance see her design for a math-music game), now has a blog, titled Uniquely Mine. It features original writing (poems, stories) by her. Do check it out. You can find regular updates on this blog via the beauty of RSS feeds on the right column (just scroll down).

The one piece by Shreya I would like to draw attention to is a story titled Obtuse can be right. She wrote this as a part of a fourth grade assignment, and it is pretty cool, with interesting geometry-related wordplay. Enjoy.

My friend Gaurav Bhatnagar (whose doggerel on ambigrams is featured on my blog as well) gave it high praise in his facebook update, saying, “This is a masterpiece. Highly recommender (sic!). As good as Asimov’s short shorts.” I haven’t had a chance to see Asimov’s short shorts but I guess they are cool!