A very wonderful holidays and a very happy new year to all of you,
from Shreya, Soham, Smita & Punya

Just a few comments on the making of these videos. First, all our new-year videos are stop-motion videos. That’s how we made the first one and it has stuck. Second, all these videos are somewhat typographical in nature – playing with words and their representation. Third, these videos rarely feature us either individually or as a family. A hand or a still-frame may show up once in a while but for the most part our videos are made with inanimate objects.

This year I tried to change all three of these, suggesting that we make a live action video, with us as actors – and have some kind of a puzzle that was not related to words. After spending days thinking about this, working with various ideas, this whole line of thought was vetoed down by both Soham and Shreya. It was interesting to me that over time we had not only become a family that makes videos but a family that makes stop motion videos! How cool an identity is that! Of course, this meant that we then had to start over from scratch to come up with something that fit what we had done in the past.

Speaking of videos made in the past, you can see them by following the links below:

• Happy 2011 (last year’s stop motion card)
• Happy 2010 (stop motion card made in 2009)
• Happy 2009 (stop motion card made in 2008)
• Explore | Create | Share (3 short videos with typographical twists at the end)
• Finding Nemo, the sea-quel (a stop motion sequel to Finding Nemo)
• Shreya’s friends animate their names
• A commercial mashup
• or, view the complete collection (including the great Hari Puttar trailer)

What you need for this is a drawing/sketching App that allows you to draw in layers. You place your photo on one layer and draw on the layer above it. This way you don’t mess up the photograph and you can separate your sketch from the photo. Once you are done, all you do is delete the photograph-layer and there it is, a lovely (well that’s subjective) hand-drawn sketch.

As you can see I started with simple line-drawings, and over time have tried branching out a bit, through the use of shading and now, even color.

A typical sketch takes around 20 – 30 minutes (sometimes less) – and I have found it just a fantastic way to relax. Creative relaxation… what else can one wish for.

Enjoy

Sketching on the iPad, a set on Flickr.

The design of our program is very carefully thought through—driven both by powerful theoretical ideas grounded in the pragmatics of teaching and learning. Just this week I found out that a paper we had written about the kinds of activities we do in the MAET program just got published. If you are interested in teacher education and teacher professional development or specifically in the MAET program please check out:

Koehler, M.J., Mishra, P., Bouck, E. C., DeSchryver, M., Kereluik, K., Shin, T.S., Wolf, L.G. (2011). Deep-Play: Developing TPACK for 21st Century Teachers. International Journal of Learning Technology, Vol. 6, No. 2. 146-163. 

Abstract: A key complication facing teachers who seek to integrate technology in their teaching is the fact that most technologies are not designed for educational purposes. Making a tool an educational technology requires creative input from the teacher to re-design, or maybe even subvert the original intentions of the designer. The learning technology by design (LT/D) framework has been proposed as being an effective instructional technique to develop deeper understanding of technological pedagogical content knowledge. In this paper we expand our description of the LT/D technique to develop what we call a deep-play model for teacher professional development. The deep-play model integrates: (a) pedagogy for key 21st century learning skills; (b) content that cuts across disciplines with trans-disciplinary cognitive tools; (c) technology by the creative repurposing of tools for pedagogical purposes.

Please let me know if you would like a copy of the paper.

Steve Jobs retired as CEO of Apple this past week. The Wall Street Journal marked this event by creatingSteve Job’s Best Quotes compendium. There are all worth reading – but a couple stood out for their connection to this course.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something… It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

A large part of my creativity course, CEP818, (announcement here) has this idea of creativity as “connections” at its core. One of the goals of the course is to provide a set of trans-disciplinary tools that can help increase the possibility of making such connections.

And finally, here’s my personal favorite quote from Jobs that speaks to the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the work we do (be it design or teaching).

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through. [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

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!

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).

Recently I got to read an essay by him titled “Why Design Education Must Change.” Essentially he argues that design education, as it is done today, does not prepare designers for the challenges of the present or the future. As he says:

Where once industrial designers focused primarily upon form and function, materials and manufacturing, today’s issues are far more complex and challenging. New skills are required, especially for such areas as interaction, experience, and service design. Classical industrial design is a form of applied art, requiring deep knowledge of forms and materials and skills in sketching, drawing, and rendering. The new areas are more like applied social and behavioral sciences and require understanding of human cognition and emotion, sensory and motor systems, and sufficient knowledge of the scientific method, statistics and experimental design so that designers can perform valid, legitimate tests of their ideas before deploying them.

Many of the things he wrote about resonated with me as an educator with an interest in technology. I have often argued for seeing education through the lens of design and in fact have written extensively about it (too lazy to list/link these publications here).

Over the past few years I have become somewhat disenchanted with the nature of educational technology research and its value to practitioners. The top journals seem to be biased towards specific kinds of research (quantitative, experimental, control group kinds of studies). The research and publication process just takes too long. It can take years from the start of a research study to its final publication (going through the stages of conceptualizing a study to collecting and analyzing data, to writing and submitting it for publication and responding to reviewers comments). This process was ok when the world we lived in was stable. But in a world where technology changes pretty much every day, a publication can be out of date even before it is published. The goals of this process were more to be “scientific” rather than to impact practice. Qualitative approaches have often been offered as a response but they have their own challenges of experimenter bias, generalizability and so on.

To cut a long story short, I have been struggling, in often an inchoate kind of way, with these issues. So it was with great pleasure that I read Don’s article – even though it did not deal directly with educational research. And somewhat towards the end a couple of paragraphs caught my eye – that seemed to offer, very broadly, a way forward. I have cut and pasted these paragraphs below, with one change – replacing the word “designer” with “educator.” Take a look…

Educators are practitioners, which means they are not trying to extend the knowledge base of science but instead, to apply the knowledge. The educator’s goal is to have large, important impact. Scientists are interested in truth, often in the distinction between the predictions of two differing theories. The differences they look for are quite small: often statistically significant but in terms of applied impact, quite unimportant. Experiments that carefully control for numerous possible biases and that use large numbers of experimental observers are inappropriate for educators.

The educator needs results immediately, in hours or at possibly a few days. Quite often tests of 5 to 10 people are quite sufficient. Yes, attention must be paid to the possible biases (such as experimenter biases and the impact of order of presentation of tests), but if one is looking for large effect, it should be possible to do tests that are simpler and faster than are used by the scientific community will suffice. Designs don’t have to be optimal or perfect: results that are not quite optimum or les than perfect are often completely satisfactory for everyday usage. No everyday product is perfect, nor need they be. We need experimental techniques that recognize these pragmatic, applied goals.

Education needs to develop its own experimental methods. They should be simple and quick, looking for large phenomena and conditions that are “good enough.” But they must still be sensitive to statistical variability and experimental biases. These methods do not exist: we need some sympathetic statisticians to work with educators to develop these new, appropriate methods.

What do you think? What would some of these new experimental methods look like? It seems to me that this is a design problem that should really be at the forefront of what we educational technology researchers do.

A wordle of some of the ideas that we touched upon can be found below (thanks Nick Sauers)

You can find a PDF document of my slides as well as a PDF of the demotivational posters created by the participants. (Even if you don’t see my slides, you MUST see the posters… they are funny and worth a moment of your time).

A couple of participant took notes during the day and have kindly made them available:

• Nick Sauer’s Notes | Blog posting
• Matt Townsley’s Notes (Incidentally Matt and I have known each other for a while now but had never met. It was great to finally meet up with one of my online buddies. Matt blogs at MetaMusing)

The participants also created (as a part of the workshop) some poems. I am including them below:

Creativity Haiku
by Karry, Michelle, Kathleen, Beth, Todd, Kathy
technology is
creative innovation
tpack makes us think

Limerick
by Deanne, Ruth, Jason
Administrators, librarians and teachers
Came to learn about “teachnology” features
TPACK is the focus
Dr. Punya is the “mostest”
They came out of there much wiser creatures

Untitled
by Joe, Kay, and Jessica
While spoon feeding our students in class
We focus on the Total PACKage
As we use, integrate, and innovate
To help them Know-Act-Value
We find-Everything is NEW

Deja Who?
by Amy, Christopher, & Mike
There once was a man from MSU.
He Déjà Vu’ed and Veja du’ed.
TPACK was his shared view
of all that was NEW!

Poem
by Melva, Cathy, Jan, Kim, Dianna
Acronyms, acronyms, here’s what we found
TPACK is where teaching hits the ground.
Technology, Pedagogy, Content and Knowledge
Will take teaching beyond the cutting edge.

NEW stands for Novel, Effective and Whole
And if something is meant to roll, it should roll.
We’re learning how in our classrooms to apply
All of this information which is in great supply.

Team TPACK
by Tony, Mary, Kelly, Jodi
There once was a teacher from Marimac
Who wanted to teach with his Mac
His friend said now Jo
Just take it slow.
Remember to think about TPACK

Poem
by Mary, Brad and Jan
Teaching 3 knowledge bases
Providing framework for technology integration
And
Creativity
Keeping learning déjà vu and veja du

Creativity
by Brian, Lisa, Seth, Julie, Stacy
There was a smart man from MSU,
who defined creativity as N-E-W.
He effectively did present
technology, pedagogy and content
and it all started with veja du.

Thanks to Andy and his team for this wonderful opportunity.

The Drexel Learning Games Network is made up of faculty and staff at Drexel University interested in game-based learning initiatives. It was established in the School of Education in Goodwin College with the goal of supporting teaching, researching, and designing of games for learning from K- to infinity.

I had mentioned that though I am not primarily a games and learning researcher, I have done some work in the area, primarily through collaborations with colleagues and students around MSU. I had a lot of fun constructing this talk, attempting to make some connections between my TPACK work and the idea of learning from games.

I see digital games as being an important part of learning – but in a somewhat different way than merely learning by playing games. In fact I have been somewhat skeptical of how one can use games for developing disciplinary knowledge. My experience has been that there is a fundamental tension in designing educational games – where the demands of designing engaging gameplay often conflict with the broader pedagogical goal of respecting the core concepts of the discipline or content to be covered. For instance a recent dissertation on how participants were learning Chinese from playing a massively multiplayer online role playing game (Zon) showed that my concerns were justified. Most participants focused on the gameplay rather than on the tasks that were connected with learning the language. I don’t think that finding this balance between gameplay and learning content is impossible to achieve – but that it is maybe the most important challenge faced by educational game designers.

I tried, in my presentation, to make some connections to learning from games by repurposing games – i.e. seeing their pedagogical potential outside of just playing with them. I of course used the TPACK framework as guiding my talk – but also brought in issues related to trans-disciplinary learning and design.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, the entire talk is now available online as a video. You can see it in its entirety by going here: http://gcpsx.coeps.drexel.edu/videos/dgvls_ep2public/

Enjoy!

Here is the sign cropped close

Here is the complete sign.

It is part of an advertisement for a packing and moving company. The painter droped the “f” in the word “shift!” I love the fact that this service is available through dialing a single phone number, from anywhere in the country and you can use any mode that you like to dial it in!

So I would request you to take a moment to go ahead and vote for her. It’s really easy. You can send an SMS or use Skype-SMS and send “WOLF” (without the quotes) to 07950 080 667 (if you are calling from within UK) or +44 7950 080 667 if from outside UK.

That’s it. Its that easy.

To see all the finalists, check out the Learning Without Frontiers 2011 Award Finalists and here is a link to Leigh’s info on their website.

So what are you waiting for? Vote for Leigh – send WOLF to 07950 080 667 (+44 7950 080 667 NON-UK)

Voting ends midnight UK time on January 4th, so hurry.

Thanks in anticipation

A very wonderful holidays and a very happy new year to all of you,
from Shreya, Soham, Smita & Punya

You can see other videos made by us… just follow the links below:

• Happy 2010 (last year’s stop motion card)
• Happy 2009 (stop motion card made in 2008)
• Explore | Create | Share (3 short videos with typographical twists at the end)
• Finding Nemo, the sea-quel (a stop motion sequel to Finding Nemo)
• Shreya’s friends animate their names
• A commercial mashup
• or, view the complete collection (including the great Hari Puttar trailer)

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.

I am including links to a couple of their models – but I do recommend visiting their site to see more…

• A model of the Creative Process
• How do you design?
• A model of play
• A model of innovation

What is cool is that they have created a whole series of posters that can be downloaded as pdfs.

I haven’t had the time to look at all their work in detail… I but I anticipate going back there multiple times in the future.