Back in 2009, Judi Harris, Matt Koehler and I published in a piece in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education. That article has now been included in a book, titled: Considerations on Technology & Teachers: The Best of JRTE, edited by Lynne Schrum, and published by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).

Here’s a link to the table of contents [pdf] as well as to the introduction and the first chapter [pdf].

Our original chapter and abstract is as follows.

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

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

I had previously posted about it here.

Martin Gardner died five days ago. Gardner was an influential writer about mathematics and was one of the greatest influences on me (and my friends) as I was growing up. His recreational mathematics column was the main reason I subscribed to the Scientific American back in high school. A few years ago a couple of my high-school friends wrote a mathematical novel (see my posting about Suri & Bal’s A Mathematical Ambiguity) and the high point for them was the fact that Martin Gardner agreed to write a blurb for the back cover. (My point of pride was that I was thanked in the acknowledgments page, putting me cheek-by-jowl with Martin Gardner!).

More personally, it was through Gardner’s writings that I was introduced to authors like Douglas Hofstadter, Raymond Smullyan, Scott Kim and James Randi — people who in turn ended up becoming immense influences on my thinking and way of looking at the world.

Martin Gardner, through his writing, his sense of humor and playfulness, his emphasis on rationality as a tool for understanding the world, his love of mathematics and learning, will always be with me. I know that in some  powerful, deep and fundamental way, he made me who I am today.

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.

Abstract: The purposes of this pilot study were: 1. to compare two methods of teaching dental anatomy-CD + lab vs. standard lecture + lab; and 2. to determine whether actively chewing gum during lecture, lab and studying would have an effect on learning. Only the written examination average scores for the gum vs. no gum chewing groups showed differences that appear to be educationally meaningful, though not statistically significant because of the limited number of subjects in this pilot study. This pilot study suggests that: 1. the cost-effective method of using a self-study CD is as educationally effective as a standard lecture; 2. gum chewing resulted in higher scores in the written examination; and 3. future, full-sized studies should be conducted to confirm these findings.

Hmmm… Does it inform us more about the impact of chewing gum, technology, or the bias caused by funding agencies (Wrigley’s funded the research). Discuss!

Another reference that Tom made was to a book by John Hattie, titled Visible learning: a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. A quick Google search revealed a following quotes from a blog Leading & Learning by Bruce Hammonds about the book. Hammonds says that Hattie’s book indicates that:

… the top teaching influences are: feedback, instructional quality, direct instruction, remediation feedback, class environment and challenge goals.

‘Expert’ (or ‘creative’) teachers, Hattie found, had real respect for their learners as people with ideas of their own. They are passionate about teaching and learning, able to present challenging learning tasks ensuring ‘deep learning’ ( able to be transferred) and show more emotionality about successes and failures in their work. They are able to make lessons their own, invite students to ‘engage’, integrating and combining new learning with students prior knowledge. Their expertise (‘artistry’) allows them to ‘read’ their classrooms and to be more responsive to learners.

… They are extremely flexible and opportunistic, improvising to take advantage of contingencies and new information as it arises. They are ‘greater seekers and user of feedback’. Interestingly research indicated that such teachers did not have written lesson plans but all could easily describe mental plans for their lessons. They were able to work intuitively and focus their energy on the creative act. Creative teachers indeed!

Interestingly it was pedagogical knowledge ( ‘the art of teaching’) rather than content knowledge that distinguished the ‘expert’ teachers.

Finally one more link to Design Based Resarch (the topic of Tom’s talk): http://projects.coe.uga.edu/dbr/

As readers of the blog know, Matt Koehler and I work together quite a lot. In fact we just rotate author-order in our papers since it is hard to keep track of individual contributions. (I would like to claim that the cool ideas are mine – but again he is bigger and stronger than me so I don’t often do that, at least not any more.) We are also huge fans of Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (which consists of 4 books, something that makes perfect sense if you have ever read Adams). Anyway, a bunch of years ago we decided that we needed to act on our love for this man, and his writings, by citing him in an academic paper. To our great pride, we did it! In fact we started the article with a citation to Adams.

Here is a citation to the article…

Koehler, M. J., Mishra, P., Hershey, K., & Peruski, L. (2004). With a little help from your students: A new model for faculty development and online course design. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 12(1), 25-55.

… and this is how the article began!

The late Douglas Adams (1997), author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, uncovered an important principle relevant to educational technology—The Someone Else’s Problem (SEP) field. The SEP is a fictional technology that can make something “virtually invisible” because we think it is somebody else’s problem. It is not that the object in question really vanishes. It does not. It may in fact even catch you by surprise out of the corner of your eye. The idea of the SEP is that once we consider something as being outside of the arena of our concerns, that something, for all practical purposes, ceases to exist.

Douglas Adams, image credit National Library Board, Singapore

How cool is that! Now, it turns out that our connections with Adams are even deeper than we knew. Recently we wrote another article…

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2009, May). Too Cool for School? No Way! Learning & Leading with Technology, (36)7. 14-18. [PDF download].

… where we wrote the following:

Someone once suggested that technology is all the new stuff that appeared after we were born! The stuff that was around before we arrived on the planet we often take as a given. For instance, to most of us a car is not really a technology, while a website is. To children born in the 1990’s neither cars nor websites are examples of technology, iPods and Wii gaming systems are.

Image credit, from littledan77

Now I remember writing this sentence (or do remember first reading it in Matt’s draft?). The point is that when we wrote “Someone once suggested…” we didn’t really think that someone had suggested it. That was just a rhetorical move, a way of sounding credible and being modest all at the same time. But guess what? Douglas Adams did say something exactly like this – only better. In his last book…

Adams, D. (2002). The salmon of doubt: Hitchhiking the galaxy one last time. New York: Harmony Books.

… which is actually a collection of pieces he had written here and there I came across the following:

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

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).

Isn’t that just perfect! I now have another cool quote to use from Douglas Adams, and I don’t have to go the wimpy “Someone once suggested…” route.

The problem is that, I would still like Matt and me to take credit for this, I mean, so what if Douglas Adams wrote this years ago!, we came up with it independently (our weasel language notwithstanding).  My colleague Patrick Dickson has a phrase he uses that I think may help solve our problem. According to him, we deserve full credit for the idea, because Adams committed “anticipatory plagiarism.” Dickson defines Anticipatory Plagiarism as occuring “when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.”

Somewhat appropriately, and for some strange reason, the Interwebs claim that this definition of “anticipatory plagiarism” was  first written by Robert Merton (for instance see this page). It is any surprise that Dickson is claiming anticipatory plagiarism by Merton!

I haven’t had a chance to read the book as of yet, but from one of the pdfs on the site this is what I could find:

The book introduces you to instructional design for tech-enhanced lessons based on research about teacher knowledge. The knowledge a teacher needs in order to teach has been summarized as the combination of understanding about pedagogy and the content area so that the teacher understands how to use pedagogy in that particular content area (Shulman, 1986). In the last few years, that model has been expanded to include technology, so that a teacher who understands how to teach with technology understands the pedagogy for teaching with the tool and learning with the tool in that content area (Mishra & Koehler, 2006)—called Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK). This book presents the practical applications of what TPACK looks like in daily classroom practice so teachers new to teaching with technology can successfully plan and implement lessons that are tech-enhanced. Therefore, in-depth lesson plans for five models of teaching (Direct Instruction, Direct Instruction using Cooperative Groups in Centers or Concept Mapping, Project-Based Learning, Problem-Based Learning in Collaborative Groups, and DGI) are presented so teachers new to teaching will see exactly how to write up a tech-enhanced lesson. As well, there are a dozen other lesson designs suggested to demonstrate how to sequence activities within these models of teaching.

We had said this before, and maybe it needs to be said again:

The fact that an idea ends up in a textbook means not just that it has been accepted by the field but also that the idea is no longer considered controversial or worthy of debate. A feeling of mustiness comes in the air… A gain in authority goes hand in hand with a rise in sterility and a loss of flexibility. Ideas in textbooks seem to somehow end up as being bullet points, lacking the suppleness and evocative richness of the original ideas. Becoming part of the establishment has its risks.

Maybe it is time for Matt Koehler and me to begin a rebellion against narrow, ivory-tower, academic frameworks that try to contain the complexity of educational technology integration in three overlapping circles

The video I went looking for was based on a delightful book I had picked up at a garage sale a few years ago. “The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics” is a little book (20 pages or so) with an intriguing story-line and its geometrical illustrations. The main character is a straight line who is in love with a dot – but sadly she is more attracted to a wild, unruly squiggle. How the simple line develops his talents and wins the love of the dot is told through whimsical (and mathematically sound) illustrations.

I learned later that the famous animator Chuck Jones had made this into a short film. Here it is (thanks to YouTube).

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is just a wonderful example of how mathematics and art, perception and recognition, creativity and design can come together. This book (and the movie) speak to me at so many different levels. What is most amazing is the ability we humans have to see purpose and meaning in the simplest of lines and curves. So much of art and science depend on this ability to perceive / construct patterns.

Nowhere is this more beautifully (and humorously) illustrated than in this other video I discovered. Written and narrated by Mel Brooks (yes THE Mel Brooks) this animated short film, The Critic, takes a different interpretive stance (crankier and edgier) than the previous narration. That this short animation captures, powerfully how we as humans both seek, and question, the meanings of the patterns we see around us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I just finished reading parts of Sheri Turkle’s latest book, Simulation and its discontents, and the parallels to what she is writing about and Mel Brook’s Critic are quite strong. The cranky one man in the short recognizes or “sees” meaning is some of the abstract images he sees on the screen and yet he questions their value. The scientists and designers quoted in Turkle’s book echo some of the same concerns.

What is amazing is that the Mel Brooks short was made in 1963, the Chuck Jones movie was made in 1965 and Turkle’s book was published just this year, in 2009!

According to Amazon.com the back cover of the book states the following:

The only book on the market to offer specific content area chapters, the fifth edition introduces the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework in Chapter 2 and incorporates it within these content-specific chapters to encourage teachers to reflect on the three domains to develop the knowledge and skills to overcome roadblocks to integration.

This is of course great news… but there is a flip side to this as well. The fact that an idea ends up in a textbook means not just that it has been accepted by the field but also that the idea is no longer considered controversial or worthy of debate. A feeling of mustiness comes in the air… A gain in authority goes hand in hand with a rise in sterility and a loss of flexibility. Ideas in textbooks seem to somehow end up as being bullet points, lacking the suppleness and evocative richness of the original ideas. Becoming part of the establishment has its risks.

Maybe it is time for Matt Koehler and me to begin a rebellion against narrow, ivory-tower, academic frameworks that try to contain the complexity of educational technology integration in three overlapping circles

Ambigrams are words written in such a way that they can be read in multiple ways (by rotation, reflection, and so on). You can find lots of examples on my site by going here, or see the ambigram for Kafka below. The person who got me into ambigrams was Douglas Hofstadter (incidentally the person who coined the term). I remember seeing ambigrams for the first time in his collection of essays Metamagical Themas and marveling at this this form of tightly constrained creativity. Many years later, when a graduate student in Mumbai, I came across Scott Kim’s book Inversions and was reintroduced to them, though I never thought that I could create anything like them.

Ambigram for Kafka

It was a few years after that, when I have moved on to graduate school in Urbana-Champaign, during a statistics class, that I created my first ambigram. And then the flood-gates opened. I would spend hours doodling on anything and everything I could lay my hands on, (many were created on napkins at the Greyhound station at Chicago). My early ambigrams were not very good, but with time I developed my own style, and was soon churning them out by the dozen. A few years later, while working at NCSA (the home of the first browser, Mosaic) I created my first website devoted to ambigrams. The high point was an email from the master Scott Kim himself, which led to a meeting with Doug Hofstadter! But that is a story for another day.

One of the ambigrams I had created was for the word “Oriya” (my mother tongue and the language spoken by people in the Indian state of Orissa). This reflection ambigram is one of my better efforts, if I say so myself. It captures in its symmetry some aspects of the image of the Indian god Jaganath – something I tried to highlight by placing dots in the middle of the two circles. This ambigram sat on my website along with a bunch of others I had created, nothing really drawing attention to it.

Reflection ambigram for “Oriya”

An image of Jaganath
(note the large symmetric eyes that I tried to capture in the ambigram design above)

A couple of years ago, out of the blue, I received an email from someone named J. P. Das. He introduced himself to me, as an Oriya poet who was visiting Chicago and had, during his web-browsings had come across my ambigram for “Oriya.” He was drawn to the design, and recognized the connection to Jaganath, and complimented me on its design. [You can find out more about Mr. Das’ extensive accomplishments here and here.]

Mr. J. P. Das, author

I immediately recognized his name and wrote back to him, telling him about my mother (an Oriya writer herself) and my grandfather Dr. Tripathy a renowned philologist (now no more), wondering if he knew them. To my surprise and pleasure it turned out that, not only did he know them, he had also been to college with my father back in the 1950’s. We exchanged a few emails and the conversation, as it usually happens, essentially petered out. And it stayed that way for a few years… till a couple of weeks ago.

On January 30 (turns out to be an important date, as I shall explain below) of this year I received an note from Mr. Das telling me that he had been reminded of me and my ambigrams, by reading something in a book written by a friend of his. This book was an autobiography of a retired bureaucrat, Mr. V. P. Sawhney, titled, “Legacy to Bureaucracy: Musings of an Indian Civil Servant.” In this book, Mr. Sawhney wrote about someone who had tried to sign his name such that it could be read in English AND in Hindi. Mr. Das knew of my attempts at creating similar ambigrams and suspected (rightly) that I would be interested in seeing more examples of this nature.

And who was this person, who had tried to write his name in this bi-lingual way? The answer blew me away. This is what Mr. Das wrote in his email:

I was pleasantly surprised to come across a reference that at least one person thought of signing his name in such a way that it could be read both in Devnagari and in English. The first letter he wrote looked both like an English M and the Hindi MO; K and Gandhi similarly followed. It was of course typical of Gandhi to be so playful!

I could hardly believe my eyes. Gandhi! The idea that Mahatma Gandhi had tried to create ambigrams, just blew me away. How incredibly cool was that! This I had to see, and Mr. Das obliged. Within a week I had in my inbox a scanned PDF of the two key pages. You can see the complete PDF here (and I really recommend downloading and reading it), and the signature is given below. [The quality is not great but that's the best I have.]

To find out that Gandhi, THE Gandhi, had been spending time trying to think of writing his name bi-lingually was just amazing. I had always had a great respect for Gandhi, though he seems to be somewhat out of favor in today’s India and to find this connection between us touched me. Strongly.

If you read the PDF you realize that the young Mr. Sawhney had met Gandhi sometime around November 1947 – a few months after India’s independence, and the tragedy of partition, and a less than two months before Gandhi’s assassination. And the date of the assassination: January 30, 1948! Note the date… January 30! It was exactly 61 years, to the day, from Gandhi’s assassination that I had received the note from Mr. Das letting me know about this aspect of Gandhi’s life!

This is an amazing story in and of itself but there a couple of interesting aspects to this that I would like to point out. The first has to do with the nature of the web and the second about the nature of creativity.

First, what does this tell us about the web. A few years ago David Weinberger wrote a book titled Small pieces loosely connected: A unified theory of the web. In this book he argued (and I quote from a Salon.com review of the book) that:

That most of what’s on the Web is there because someone is interested in it, cares about it passionately enough to put it in front of the rest of the world…. it’s a social commons on which the interests of a mass of individuals are splayed in universally accessible detail and trumpeted in an effectively infinite array of personal voices.

This idea of people putting things out there, not because they seek to make money but rather because they want to share their knowledge, their skills, their interests, and that what they put out there is immediately and widely accessible is what makes the web so interesting. If I hadn’t put my ambigrams out there I would not have gotten to know Scott Kim or Doug Hofstadter or found out from Mr. Das that Gandhi liked to play with ambigrams as well! None of this would have been possible without the web and the Internet. This is what I have called serendipitous connectabilty), the fact that chance connections can occur, and in fact given the growh of the web, that chance connections MUST occur.

Second, about creativity. Root and Michele Bernstein have argued (most clearly in their book Sparks of Creativity) that creative people are not just creative in one area. They share a playful attitude and world-view as it were that seeks to play with everything. This does not mean that they are excellent in all that they do – but rather that it is this playful nature (across domains) that makes them successful in the area they specialize in.

Think back for a moment about the time Gandhi scribbling his ambigrammatic signature. The historical record shows that Gandhi took no joy from Indian independence. The partition of India had dealt him a body blow. It repudiated everything he had ever stood for. By all accounts he was a shattered man. And yet, despite all that, even while meeting future presidents and politicians, even while thinking of what he could do next to repair some of the fissures and ruptures that that torn the sub-continent apart, he found time (and surely a little pleasure) in trying a different way of signing his name.

[The idea of small pieces loosely connected fits with my relationship with Michele and Root Bernstein as well, since I got to know them, not because we are at the same university, but rather when I found out that their book had been plagiarized extensively by someone called Dr. David Jiles. You can read about that entire saga here.]

So what a long way we have come, from finding ambigrams in MetaMagical Themas to finding out that Mahatma Gandhi was quite possible the first Indian ambigrammist and receiving some wisdom about the nature of the web and creativity.

I recently came across a review of the Goldin and Katz book by Arnold Kling and John Merrifield (you can read the full review here [PDF document]). There was one aspect of the review, about the race between new technologies (or upgraded technologies) and the kinds of education and learning on needs to keep up, that really clicked with me and helped me articulate better some thoughts I have had for a while.

Kling and Merrifield write that

The software spreadsheet program Microsoft excel is upgraded every few years. When an upgrade occurs, some of the functions are reconfigured. Think of excel as a metonym for the edge of technology available for widespread commercial application.

Very often we acquire an upgrade but prefer to use the old version. if skills do not keep up with technology, one might be less productive with the new version. Moreover, even if one’s absolute productivity remains the same, if other users gain the skills suited to the new version, one falls behind relative to other workers.

What this means is that with every change in technology we have a choice – to upgrade (and thus invest time in learning these new functions) or not upgrade (and work with what we have). If we choose the latter, we may maintain our productive for a while, but in the long run, we become less productive, for two reasons. First, we may never find out what these new functions are and how they may help us do what we do in more efficient ways, or second, everybody else around us picks up these new capabilities, thus reducing our relative productivity.

For instance, I can see this happening with the new versions of Word that are out there. I am increasingly receiving files with .docx extensions that my version of Word cannot open – at least not without some significant software calisthenics on my part (open in one program, copy and paste into word or, even more cumbersome, email the author to send me a downward compatible version). At some point in the near future, I know, I will have to give in and upgrade.

Thus, as Kling and Merrifield say in their review, this entire process “is a race between individuals in their levels of capabilities, but it is a race whose terms are affected by technological advancement.” And this race keeps getting faster with a greater number of obstacles. Either you run with the pack or you will be left behind. If you do try to run with the pack you will be spending increasing amounts of time just keeping up with the tools instead of using them.

Clearly this has significant implications for educators (and teachers), and one that Matt Koehler and I have pointed out when discussing our TPACK framework). The rapid rate of technology change puts teachers and teacher educators at a disadvantage. Clearly to expect teachers to know each and every piece of new technology (and their latest versions) is a difficult goal to achieve. In contrast we have argued for a new way of thinking about technology, a way that allows for flexibility of thought, a willingness to tolerate ambiguity, and most important a willingness to experiment. These are the traits we need to be training teachers for, not learning specific tools. This calls for creativity and ingenuity on the part of teachers (and teacher educators).

We have a tiger by the tail!

On a completely different note, one of the authors of the review (Arnold Kling) has a great essay on his experiences trying to set up a dot-com industry. The number of mis-steps and goof ups (that he shares quite graciously and openly) has to be seen to be believed. Enjoy reading, A Series of Miscalculations

Here’s Murakami in the Paris Review:

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

Enjoy.

Abstract: We offer a framework for conducting research on games for learning. Building on a survey of the literature on games, we suggest a categorization scheme (physiological and psychological) of the range of claims made for games. Our survey identifies three critical issues in the current scholarship. They are, a lack of authentic, situated research studies; a lack of sensitivity to the pedagogical affordances of different game genres; and a lack of emphasis on the importance of acquiring disciplinary knowledge (i.e. content). We offer the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework as a way to address these concerns and guide future research in this area. We argue, that assessment on learning from games needs to consider the specific claims of games, as they interact with genre and content knowledge. Finally, we introduce an ongoing study that utilizes this approach.

Link to paper (pdf) here.

I was reading this novel even as the horrific events of the past few days played out in Mumbai (see this, this and this). In some ways the attacks on Mumbai became a lens through which to interpret the novel, making me somewhat less sympathetic to the novel than I would have been otherwise. Hamid has gone on the record indicating that the views of Changez do not reflect his own – and that Changez is a piece of fiction, a writer’s creation. Though I knew this intellectually, it was emotionally difficult for me to separate the author and the character. This was partly because Changez’s story and that of the author roughly parallel each other – though Hamid quite his high-flying job in the corporate world to become an author (not a Islamic fundamentalist) and partly because I could not but notice the connections between the western educated protagonist in the novel (Changez) and the young men (wearing jeans and designer shirts) who attacked Mumbai.

The weakest part of the novel, in my view, was this transition from being someone who realizes how the west truly treats immigrants (particularly those from South-Asia) to becoming a fundamentalist. The first part of the novel really rung true for me – being someone from India who came and settled in the US. However, how this sense of “distance” can lead to becoming a fundamentalist (or maybe even a threat to the state, as is suggested towards the end) was a bridge too far. Hamid, in an interview, suggested that we need to distinguish between Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic nationalism – suggesting that the latter is where he (or at least his character) stands. It appears to me that this is a specious distinction, one that seems to make sense at first blush but falls apart when one probes deeper into how these two ideas have traditionally been related. In some sense my response to the events in Mumbai are an example of nationalism and it is not surprising that this aspect of Hamid’s argument makes sense to me. However, how Islamic nationalism can be separated from Islamic fundamentalism is difficult for me to fathom. This is a tension at the heart of Pakistan (and other Islamic nations) and this is something that, I am not sure Hamid explains well. To find out that the head of the LET (the terrorist organization that appear to have masterminded these attacks) was recently gifted a bullet-proof car by the Pakistani government, is part of the reason why I am skeptical of such distinctions. Changez goes back to Pakistan for reasons that make sense to me (at some level) as an immigrant – but his shift to becoming a fundamentalist are never really explained.

All said and done I was glad to have read this novel – it offered insight into how well-thinking and well-educated men and women can fall prey to fundamentalist thinking. That said, it appeared to me that this novel does not truly engage with the inherent paradoxes and tensions between fundamentalism and nationalism.

You can read about the other two authors and their book here.

As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did.

Read the entire essay…

Abstract: In our Masters program in Educational Technology at Michigan State University, K-12 teachers create “iVideos” — short, two-minute, digital videos designed to evoke powerful experiences about educative ideas. For example, an iVideo might enable viewers to experience the vastness of space, the interconnection between people and their environment, the timeless themes in great literature, and other compelling subject-matter ideas. How might these teacher-made iVideos serve as catalysts for teacher technology education and professional development? We describe the conceptual foundation of iVideos by building on the metaphor of teacher as filmmaker—and idea that highlights how teachers and filmmakers both strive to create powerful experiences for their audiences. In doing so, we argue that teachers are enabled to transform ideas and practice by immersing themselves in deep pedagogical consideration of subject-matter, significance, audience, learning, epistemology, and aesthetics. We also discuss how this approach develops teachers’ competency and efficacy with technology.