TPACK involves understanding the capabilities of technology – understanding how we make meaning with it, how we can manipulate it to communicate, engage and teach. I include below an extraordinarily powerful use of media, created with the simplest of tools, one camera, a couple of people and some music. No 3-d aliens, no fancy digital effects – but (and this is important) the designers clearly have a deep understanding of the nuances of meaning that can be generated through subtle yet powerful use of the tools at hand. Zooms and pans, dissolves and wipes, memories and meanings.
Think about this video when people ask of what value are these new digital tools? Tell them we don’t know – but maybe a few years from now someone will surprise us by creating something this touching and breathtaking.
Russ Goerend over at Learning is Life has initiated a fascinating discussion on the TPACK framework on his blog. It all revolves around a blog post he titled The force is strong with the shiny one. I shall not seek to summarize the discussion here (please go read it for yourself) but there are a couple of things he wrote that connected with me and that I would like to comment on. He wrote:
When I think of the TPACK diagram, I picture horseshoe magnets on the outside of each circle, pointed into the middle. Those magnets are what keep the quality teacher balanced in the center, each magnet pulling and building a feeling of equilibrium. This is obviously best-case scenario.
He describes the evolving knowledge of the teacher as (and I love this phrase) Journey to the Center of the Venn. As Matt Koehler and I have written earlier, we see all good teachers as sitting right in the middle of the three intersecting circles. Elsewhere we had written:
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. In actuality these components exist in a state of dynamic equilibrium, or as the philosopher Kuhn (1977) said in a different context, in a state of “essential tension.” (This is in our original TC Record article that introduced the TPACK construct, though it was then called TPCK. I am sure we have written about this elsewhere as well, but I am being a bit lazy here.)
From the Saline Schools, right here in Michigan, comes a video about how teachers and students are using cellphone in the classroom to enhance teaching and learning. Check it out
The math-po (and sci-po) stream keeps flowing. Math Mama Writes, who started the whole math-poetry movement has some more on her blog, and here is Erin Nash with some really beautiful biological poetry. And of course, here’s her husband Sean Nash having his students writing poetry too. Of course let’s not forget my daughter Shreya (who sort of started this whole thing) and her sci-po’s at her blog Uniquely Mine.
Below are some thoughts about math-poetry – but you can ignore all that and scroll right down to the poem: The infinity of primes!
Through all this I have been plugging away at my math poetry. I know the original challenge was to write something to motivate students to learn math (and I did write one along those lines). But more interesting to me has been this theme I have picked up, which is of writing proofs as poetry. I know many people have described mathematics in poetic terms but I am trying something slightly different here. I am trying to explain theorems (as in these couple of instances, see here, here, here and here) and speficially in the poem included below, I am actually trying to construct a mathematical proof in rhyming verse.
The Rethink Scholarship is an scholarship for aspiring art directors and designers to Langara College’s Communication and Ideation Design program. This video is to publicize the program.
Abstract: Based in Shulman’s idea of Pedagogical Content Knowledge, Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) has emerged as a useful frame for describing and understanding the goals for technology use in preservice teacher education. This paper addresses the need for a survey instrument designed to assess TPACK for preservice teachers. The paper describes the survey development process and results from a pilot study on 124 preservice teachers. Data analysis procedures included Cronbach’s alpha statistics on the TPACK knowledge domains and factor analysis for each domain. Results suggest that, with the modification and/or deletion of 18 of the survey items, the survey is a reliable and valid instrument that will help educators design longitudinal studies to assess perservice teachers’ development of TPACK. (Keywords: TPACK, instrument development, preservice teachers)
I stumbled across this little machine that shuts itself off once it has been switched on! How cool is that. I don’t have an clue whom to credit it to and would appreciate a heads up on that. I was reminded of the myth of Sisyphus which led to a great piece of hand-drawn animation on YouTube. So here they are… somewhat apt images for a dull, dreary day in mid-Michigan.
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.
I recently received an email from a teacher in Poland, seeking advice for a curriculum outline for their Design Technology Section. They said, and I quote:
Unfortunately, I have minimal experience with the subject as a teacher or as a student in my younger years, consequently, I have little background as to what a DT class should look like.
As you might guess I’m struggling trying to put together some sort of DT curriculum for our Middle School.
Our small school does not not have any kind of fabrication equipment so our DT class is currently heavy on IT design aspects….(web design, research on a topic and devise a solution, book creation,etc… )
The specific request was for”some useful and practical information that I can implement fairly easily.”
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
The other day, for one reason or another, I did a Google search for the word “recursion.” According to Wikipedia, recursion
… in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition; specifically it is defining an infinite statement using finite components.
This is a screen shot of what Google gave me as a result of my search: (Click on the image for a larger version).
Look carefully at what Google suggests. It says.
Did you mean: recursion
The exact same word that I had searched for… For a moment or two I thought I had found a glitch in Google’s suggestion mechanism… but it suddenly hit me, that this was exactly what recursion meant! If I clicked on that link I would be taking the first step into an endless cycle, an infinite loop, which would end only when I “got it.”
This has been an inside joke amongst programmers for a while. Wikipeda provides one example from a hypothetical dictionary that goes as follows:
Recursion
If you still don’t get it, see: “Recursion”.
So in some sense Google provides a “working definition” of the word – that explains it better than just reading a definition in a dictionary. How cool is that. I think it is little games like this one that make Google so much fun to use.
(I must add that this is not a new discovery. The Wikipedia page about recursion does mention this Google trick – but it was new to me!)
Those who follow this blog know that I love visual wordplay. This is most commonly seen in my ambigram work but another area where I have spent some time is in writing palindromic poetry. I wrote a whole series of poems when I was in graduate school at Illinois and they have been online, moving from server to server, for over 15 years now. I had written about my interest in palindromic poetry a couple of time before (see this and this). Now these were pieces created for fun and I had no real intention or interest in doing anything with them. I wasn’t even sure if anybody ever read them. That is, till a couple of days ago…
Steve Wagenseller, a student in my 817 Learning Technology by Design seminar wrote something so cool in the class forum that I felt that it was worth recording on my blog…
I had written about the EduPunk movement earlier, in fact had even designed a logo for it.
A brief description of Edupunk can be found on Wikipedia (a google search will reveal many more). Wikipedia describes it as follows:
Edupunk is an approach to teaching and learning practices that result from a do it yourself (DIY) attitude.The New York Times defines it as “an approach to teaching that avoids mainstream tools like Powerpoint and Blackboard and instead aims to bring the rebellious attitude and D.I.Y. ethos of ’70s bands like The Clash to the classroom.”
Well, I am no expert on 70’s bands but the EduPunk title does appeal to me. It appeals to me because for the longest tie the main attraction of digital technology, to me, has been this DIY attitude, the fact that I can, over an evening or two, create a stop-motion movie with my kids (here or here), or mashup a commercial, or, in this case, create my own course website. The final product may not have the finish or sheen of a commercial product but it is in some key way “authentic.” It is mine. It embodies me, my sensibility, my approach, my vision in ways that other products can not.
For my entire tenure here at MSU I have constructed my own course-websites, cobbling them together with what I have often jokingly called “duct-tape and magic.” I have even written about this, long before the EduPunk moniker came along (see links at end of post). What I want to describe in this post are my current experiments (for my CEP817 Learning Technology by Design course) using using Wordpress as a learning management system, and boy am I impressed!! [My partner in crime in this is Kristen Kereluik, a graduate student in our program.]
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:
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.
Our family’s stop-motion animation festival continues with our latest offering: Finding Nemo, the sea-quel!! This movie was conceptualized by Shreya and filmed by all of us over a couple of days. What was interesting about this movie was just how many technologies got utilized in creating it (a complete list comes at the end of the movie) – and just how seamlessly these different tools could be integrated together. As we have been making these movies I have seen a greater level of sophistication and thinking from both my kids about the possibilities of stop-motion animation in particular and the visual aspects of telling a story through film. I can pretty much step back and let them do it. That has been fun to watch.
Anyway, before the movie, I need to give a shout out to our family friend, Amol Pavangadkar, who made all this possible by helping us create a really cool animation stand. We were inspired by this design and here it is, in use, by Shreya’s friends, as they made their animation movie.
So using this set up we have already created three movies. You can see the first one here, the new year’s card here and the third one below. Enjoy, Finding Nemo, the sea-quel!
Numbers are seen as being critical to developing our understanding of a subject. As Lord Kelvin, (1824-1907) said:
… when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
More succintly he said, “To measure is to know.” Numbers provide us (particularly academics) with credibility.
Of course this dependence on mathematics and numbers can often be misplaced. I am always impressed how we use numbers mindlessly – sometimes to levels of accuracy that don’t really convey much. I was reminded of this while reading a recent NYTimes article A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing.
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.
Don Norman has a great essay titled Technology First, Needs Last that I strongly recommend. We have been making a similar argument in some of our more recent pieces, see here and here…
What do you think of Norman’s ideas? Read it first and come back here to discuss what it means for teaching with technology. Can innovation in teaching only happen when we put technology first? What about content? and pedagogy?
Ambigram.com is a website about ambigrams and the people who make them. Lots of cool stuff for enthusiasts and novices alike. They often conduct competitions and other fun challenges for readers. One recent one was related to palindromes. In brief, they challenged people to create palindromic ambigrams. This is something I had tried a few time a long time ago – but their challenge pushed me to go back and come up with some solutions.
Well, I ended up with more than I had anticipated. I now have a technique, using which, anybody can create a palindromic ambigram of any length! How cool is that.
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… Read the rest of this entry »
How does technology change what we do? Often when a new technology appears we tend to see it in terms of existing practices and structures. So an e-book is the same as a book, except in digital format. E-books still have “pages” which we “turn” (with a flick or our finger or if you are stuck with the Kindle, by pressing a button), though digitality does not require pages or turning them. Similarly the design of most early online courses attempted to replicate face-to-face modes of teaching (capturing lectures through video, for instance), instead of pushing for exploring the possibilities of this new medium. This is often most obvious in the kinds of iconography that new technologies generate. So the icon for Microsoft Word document looks like a piece of printed paper, an email-box looks like a regular mailbox (think AOL and its “You’ve got mail” message) and so on.
However, new technologies do not just replicate what we could do before – they insidiously and fundamentally change the nature of the tasks we perform. Think of the idea of hyperlinks! Regular texts go hypertextual through developments like the table of contents, indices etc. however, these are weak attempts at best. True hypertext emerges only through digitality.
I was reminded of this when reading a recent NYTimes article on video bingo and the controversies it is causing in Alabama. The article begins by describing traditional bingo:
Everybody knows what this is: dozens of people, mostly retirees, hunched over paper grids in a smoke-filled American Legion hall on a Sunday evening listening eagerly to a woman recite numbers.
Now we have a new player on the block, video bingo! which is described as follows:
But what about this: a dim warehouse of flashing, jingling video terminals with names like Boomtown Bonanza where, early on a weekday morning, people sit on stools pushing buttons and watching cherries and 7s reel by.
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.
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. 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. Read the rest of this entry »
For an interactive card click here ….
Remember to turn your volume way up, and click anywhere in the sky
above the Taj Mahal for some environmentally friendly, fireworks.
[My partner in crime in this is 
