Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

Patrick Diemer commented on my previous posting, All you can cheat, the web & learning by saying:

Do you have any words of wisdom or resources on how to create appropriate questions? This sounds great, but easier said than done in my humble opinion.

I started writing a response to his comment, but as I wrote on, I realized that it was better as a post in its own right. So here it is…

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A new ambigram created in memory of Jere Brophy, world renowned scholar on psychology of motivation. The ambigram reads, “motivation” one direction and “Jere Brophy” when rotated by 180 degrees. Click on the image to see a larger version, hosted on Flickr.

Enjoy.

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.

Robin Revette Fowler sent me a message on Facebook regarding my recent posting(s) about moving from incompetence to mastery (see the two previous posts here and here). She took issue with my idea that mastery requires some kind of meta-level, self-awareness. She said

It seems like the issue is with either the meaning of “mastery” or perhaps with the types of skills you’re talking about.

Conscious/unconscious knowledge is especially interesting to me re: linguistics. Most native speakers have only unconscious competence of their language– I used to hear Writing Center tutors telling ESL students, “you need an ‘a’ here; I don’t know why” all the time. Many NNSs, on the other hand, have much stronger conscious competence– they often know “rules” about how to use determiners much better than Native English speakers, for example. At the same time, I’m not sure they would be said to have “mastery.”

And I don’t know that the conscious competence is the important thing here. Would you argue that only linguists who can describe their determiner choices have “mastery” of English grammar?

At first blush Robin seems to be making a good point. Do writers need to know how and why they do what they do they do as long as they get it right? There is a surface plausibility to the argument but I am not sure that it stands muster if we dig deeper.
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Ken Friedman, whose article I had used as the basis of my previous posting, From incompetence to mastery, the stages dropped me an email in response to my critique. To provide some context, (you can read my full post here) I had suggested in my posting that it may be inappropriate to label the the highest level of mastery as being unconscious competence. My concern, of course, was with the “unconscious” part – since I felt that true mastery requires a level of reflection, something denied by the word “unconscious.”

Ken wrote that he actually sees examples of unconscious competence everywhere. He went on to say (quoted with permission) Read the rest of this entry »

In a couple of previous posts I had talked about the idea of postdiction (see the posts here and here). The argument being that good teaching (among a long list of other good things) is postdictable, i.e. it walks the line between predictability and chaos, and most importantly makes sense post hoc. To make my point I had posted a couple of videos that were good examples of being postdictable.

Closely connected to the idea of postdictable is the idea of creating anticipation and suspense. Once again other artists (particularly those working in temporal media such as film, and advertising) seem to have grasped the importance of this earlier than educators. Good film-makers can create suspense out of pretty much the flimsiest of materials. Think of the first scenes from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. The way the scene builds tension out of a disagreement over whether or not to tip is pitch perfect. There is more tension in that scene than in dozens of other “suspense” thrillers.

However making suspense work is difficult. Navigating this line between predictability and tension over the unknown is a fine art. (This is where, of course, the connection with postdictability becomes most clear.)

Check out the two videos below, which highlight just how fine the line is between succeeding at creating suspense and anticipation and failing to do so. Both of these videos are interesting and well made – both have pace and rhythm but one of them builds anticipation while the other just happens. One tells a story, the other doesn’t.
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I chair the committee on Innovation & Technology of the American Association for Innovation & Technology (AACTE). The committee has been working hard with people over at AACTE (Rachel Popham deserves a big shout out) in organizing a webinar series coming up November 17th – 19th. Here’s a description:

This webconference addresses creative teaching and learning in the digital age. Designed within the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework these sessions by top-notch scholars, researchers and practitioners will cover a range of topics: including the educational potential of social networking, the expanding use of GPS, intelligent use of video to teach science, and the role of cloud computing in face to face and online classes. The goal is to help participants think creatively about integrating multiple technologies into varied teaching and learning contexts.

Readers of this blog will find a familiar name, Sean Nash of Nashworld as one of the presenters!! I may be moderating one of the sessions though that is still being worked out. So lock in these dates and you can find out more by going to the AACTE website.

I had written earlier about the idea of “postdictable” which was defined as something that is “surprising initially, but then understandable with a bit of thought.” It lies at the spot between predictability and total chaos. The movie Sixth Sense is postdictable in the best sense of the world. Good teaching I believe needs to be postdictable. That is what keeps us engaged, keeps us waiting for more, the payoff as it were. And best of all, once all the pieces are in, we can’t wait to go back and review everything again, to see just how beautifully the whole thing holds together. There is a strong aesthetic component to this – a sense of wholeness, closure, elegance, and inevitability. Good poems have this quality, as do mathematical theorems. A well crafted lecture or a lesson plan has this quality as well. In my mind these ideas are closely tied to the Dewey’s idea of experience and to the idea of design. Hopefully I will have a chance to explore these connections in a later post but for now, here are a couple of commercials that I think were postdictable in a really cool kind of way.
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As readers of this blog know I love examples of seeing things in new ways. That to me if often the crux of creativity. Anyway here are two examples. The first curtesey of Leigh Wolf is a new advertisement from some credit card company. The ad is actually pretty average but what is really cool are the visuals.
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I had written a couple of days ago about William Kamkwamba, a Malawian high school student who built a windmill by looking at pictures in a book. From Bob Reuter’s website (Keep IT Simple!) I discovered a TED talk that William had given in England, back in July. Incidentally my son pointed out to me that we were actually in England at that time and could have (assuming we would have received tickets) actually heard him speak! How cool would that have been.

Anyway, here’s William Kamkwamba speaking at the TED conference.

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

My friend, Hartosh (I had written previously about his mathematical novel here) and his wife Pam, recently had a baby boy. This ambigram is of his name: Nihal

Enjoy.

The Daily Show featured William Kamkwamba, a Malawian high school student who built a windmill by looking at pictures in a book! I have always been a fan of jugaad, the idea of indigenous creativity using the detritus that seems to be a function of our modern world. And this is just an amazing story.

What is both incongruous and amazing is that we live in a world where there can be a terrible famine that a 14 year old has to drop out of school. And this boy finds a book at a library funded by some Western agencies, and looking at the pictures (he couldn’t read English very well) builds a windmill. The story ends up in the newspaper, and then hits the blogosphere. The kid ends up presenting at the TED conference in Africa!… and here is is on the Daily Show! Incidentally, Jon Stewart has a delicate balancing act as he tries to get this story across even while cracking jokes that his guest may not even understand.

Just how far Kamkwamba has come is best revealed by watching the video till the end… Watch for the discussion about Google.

As he says, “Where was this Google, all this time?”

Scott McLeod over at Dangerously Irrelevant posted a video of a CNN story about the Ron Clark Academy and asked whether something like this was scalable?

Watch the video as you ponder this question.

This is a question often asked of me, when I am conducting creativity workshops or talking about passionate teaching. In fact I was asked this just a couple of days ago when I was at the Dexter Schools talking about 21st Century Learning and Creativity. This issues comes up most when I am in India where the magnitude of the problems is just so large that scalability is always an issue.

My response to this typically has been quite straightforward. I say that I can’t think that big. I have a congenital defect that renders me incapable of thinking of projects on a large scale. I cannot comprehend states and nations. I can barely comprehend a district. What I am most comfortable with is one classroom. What this does is color my way of thinking about innovation, pushing me towards the position that change can be effected one classroom at a time. When I teach my summer courses as a part of the MAET program, I usually have 25 students, a number I can comprehend. My goal is to touch these 25, to connect with them, and to raise within them a passion for using technology to teach subject matter. If I manage to touch even a fifth of them and they go back to their classes inspired to do something new and better, hey I have succeeded.

This is not to say that policies don’t matter that social change can’t happen. Just that I am personally incapable of thinking in grand generalities. I have a feeling that my skepticism regarding large scale efforts comes from my deep suspicion that visions and plans mutate in often detrimental ways when they move out of the local. So I stay in the local, and frankly that is good enough for me.

Now Scott may think that this is a cop-out and not necessarily a response to his question, but sadly that is the best I can give. The Ron Clark Academy works well where it does. Just training a bunch of teachers in the techniques used there and asking them to implement it in their classrooms will not necessarily translate into better student achievement. For instance, I am not sure that the Ron Clark approach would work in India, a country with very different cultural and historical expectations of what teaching and learning could/should be. So I choose to withhold judgment and work harder with the people I know I can influence.

Leigh Wolf, my partner in crime as far as the MAET program goes, recently presented at Ignite Lansing. She talked about her two passions, teaching and food (not sure which order to place these). Specifically she talked about food photography and the connections she sees between what she does there and her other life as an educator. It is a lovely presentation, and the video is now available on YouTube. Take a look.

I am always looking for examples of looking at the world differently – of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. This is of course connected with the veja du assignments I give my students.

I just came across a couple of very interesting video examples of this on the site LikeCOOL. This site has everything from after-office neckties, to inflatable boxing gloves… but in between these crazy things are some cool videos. Here are three (in increasing order of coolness):

Two robots made entirely using Lego Mindstorms NXT Retail-kit that can solve Sudoku problems and the Rubik’s Cube! How totally cool is that. LEGO Mindstorms is a line of Lego sets combining programmable bricks with electric motors, sensors, Lego bricks, and Lego Technic pieces (such as gears, axles, and beams). See Wikipedia article on Lego Mindstorms

See the videos below, and check out the website for the project: Tilted Twister

Sudoku Solver

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Rubik’s Cube Solver

This is truly amazing… What is also great is that the designer also include directions for making these robots. I gotta get myself one of these

H/T Geekpress

A decade into the 21st century, how are we doing with the movement to “position 21st century skills at the center of US K-12 education.” The National Journal Online has been conducting an discussion on this topic… some very interesting views represented there, from both sides of the spectrum. I have some definite opinions on this, which will have to wait for another day (I am swamped with work right now) … but for now here is the link to the discussion: Has The P21 Movement Succeeded?

What do you think? What do we mean by 21st Century skills? How are they different from traditional skills (such as critical thinking) that were the rage some time ago? What is the role of content knowledge in the 21st Century? What about trans-disciplinary, or inter-disciplinary knowledge? … Important questions, worthy of discussion and thought.

I had written earlier about the idea of Jugaad, the quintessential Indian idea of situational creativity. One of the masters at this is Arvind Gupta. Check out his website for tons of wonderful science toys and experiments that can be made from stuff we typically throw away. Very cool and a critical part of the kind of repurposing of artifacts we need for creative teaching.

Throwaway Technology, playful Pedagogy and powerful Content… who says TPACK needs hi-tech!

Via Major Fun (aka Bernie DeKoven) comes Arvind Gupta, winner of the Defender of the Playful Award.

TechTrends is a leading journal for professionals in the educational communication and technology field and is the official publication of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). The current issue has 5 articles devoted to the TPACK framework (including one by yours truly with Matt and Kristen Kereluik). I am providing titles and key quotes from each (with a link to the article written by us).

Mishra, P., Koehler, M. J., & Kereluik, K. (2009). The song remains the same: Looking Back to the Future of Educational Technology. TechTrends, 53, 5. p. 48-53.

The TPACK framework emphasizes the role of teachers as decision makers who design their own educational technology environments as needed, in real time, without fear of those environments becoming outdated or obsolete. Using this approach, teachers do not attend to specific tools, but instead focus on approaches to teaching that endure through change in technologies, content, or pedagogies. Teachers with flexibility of thought, a tolerance for ambiguity, and willingness to experiment can combine traits that perfectly design and tailor their own educational content, pedagogical, and technological environments.

David Passig recently wrote on the topic of melioration, or “the competence to borrow a concept from a field of knowledge supposedly far removed from his or her domain, and adopt it to a pressing challenge in an area of personal knowledge or interest” (2007)… According to Passig, melioration is a skill that affords teachers the flexibility to experiment with a vast array of technologies to meet their specific educational needs. Novel frameworks and concepts like TPACK and Passig’s melioration are starting to look at educational technology in a new way. These new perspectives focus on overarching cognitive skills, competencies, and creativity rather than technical understanding and functional knowledge of specific technologies

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