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.
The video below has been getting a lot of attention on the blogs lately, and despite that it is pretty good. No kittens riding skateboards or mentos and Coke here. Just a beautifully constructed take down of TV News. A must see for all media literacy courses.
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.
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.”
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!)
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…
A 5th grade science assignment, transformed. A rant about Mother Goose. A math poetry challenge! How did that come to be? And what does that have to do with loving the Interwebs? Read on…
I had written earlier about how my 10 year-old daughter had been writing poems on science (Scientific Poems or Sci-Po’s for short). It all started with an extra-credit assignment she needed to do for her science class, and a need, I perceived, to keep her blog (Uniquely Mine) up-to-date. She has quite a few written now. For instance here is one about a news item about scientists finding dinosaur eggs (and other dino-stuff) in India (Cluster of dinosaur eggs found in southern India), and here’s the poem:
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:
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.
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.
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 »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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 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!
In an age where experts are a dime a dozen, willing to pontificate at the drop of a pin, it is hard to tell whom to believe, and whom NOT to believe. In comes Phillip Tetlock, an academic who has made it his mission to evaluate the prognosticators! This is described in his book:
Tetlock, P.E. (2005). Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know? Princeton: Princeton University Press.
I recently came across a review written by him, titled Reading Tarot on K Street (in the September/October 2009 issue of The National Interest) and I thought it captured his work in this area quite nicely (and would be worth preserving).
When we score the accuracy of thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts across dozens of countries over twenty years, we find the best forecasters tend to be modest about their forecasting skills, eclectic in their ideological and theoretical tastes, and self-critical in their analytical styles.1 Borrowing from philosopher Isaiah Berlin, I call them foxes—experts who know many things and are not finicky about where they get good ideas. Paraphrasing Deng Xiaoping, they do not care if the cat is white or black, only that it catches mice.
Contrast this with what I call hedgehogs—experts who know one big thing from which likely future trends can be more or less directly deduced. The big thing might be any of a variety of theories: Marxist faith in the class struggle as the driver of history or libertarian faith in the self-correcting power of free markets, or a realist faith in balance-of-power politics or an institutionalist faith in the capacity of the international community to make world politics less ruthlessly anarchic, or an eco-doomster faith in the impending apocalypse or a techno-boomster faith in our ability to make cost-effective substitutes for pretty much anything we might run out of.
What experts think—where they fall along the Left-Right spectrum—is a weak predictor of accuracy. But how experts think is a surprisingly consistent predictor. Relative to foxes who are less encumbered by loyalties to an all-encompassing worldview, hedgehogs offer bolder forecasts and, although they hit occasional grand slams, they strike out a lot and wind up with decidedly poorer batting averages.
The implications for people who make projections about technology and schools and learning is quite obvious to me. It is the hedgehogs we need to be careful of, mainly because of the vehemence of their beliefs which can sometimes override our “foxy” nature. I say inherent because I think that educators, for the most part, are pragmatists, sensitive to the limits of arm-chair theorizing and big ideas. A hard nosed approach to reality, that recognizes its complexity, that demands multi-faceted problems solving approaches is what is needed, not being wedded to one, just one overarching idea.
I just ran across this blog (Color Me Katie) that just blew me away. Katie Sokoler is a freelance photographer and street artist living in Brooklyn – and her blog just throbs with life, and energy and the sheer pleasure of living. That’s her down there blowing bubbles (wait till you see the stop-motion animation version of this).
I think she says it best:
It’s important for me to express myself creatively every day. I have all of these fun ideas in my head and if I don’t get them out I’m pretty sure my mind would explode. Realistically, I’d probably just get frustrated and fall asleep. But explosion or no explosion, doing something creative acts as a form of therapy for me. I feel better after taking photographs, making street art, painting, or making wall sized collages. The messier and more sweatier I get, the better I feel.
Anybody who knows me (and/or reads this blog) will know of my love of issues related to representation (see all postings under that category). So I am always looking out for new and interesting representations. An lovely example sent to me by Patrick Dickson is website titled Information is beautiful. This site, and much of the work showcased there is the creation of David McCandless, a free-lance information designer. He describes his interests as being in “how designed information can help us understand the world, cut through BS and reveal hidden connections, patterns and stories underneath.”
For instance check out If Twitter was a community of 100 people
Note: Before someone gets technical on me, I should admit that these are not “proofs” in the rigorous mathematical sense of the term, but they do provide visual evidence / explanation that helps us understand the underlying patterns.
I also recommend the blog (http://www.billthelizard.com/) on which these “proofs” appeared for a bunch of other interesting stuff about mathematics and programming.
Now each of these (the first a detailed breakdown of government spending and the other a verbal mashup of a mastercard commercial) have different goals and different ways of approaching them but they both grapple with the problem of representing large numbers (specifically large sums of money) in ways that connect with us.
I had posted something similar here (from Bic to vase).
There is something deeper here than just cool design ideas though. What this video highlights is improvisation, creativity and a sense of play to repurpose artifacts for purposes other than what they had been designed for. In fact some of these designs find a use for what most of us would regard as trash.
It is this creative repurposing that is critical in this new world of teaching and technology (Technology Integration 2.0 and the TPACK framework). Teachers often look for the perfect technological solution to pedagogical problems they face. The fact is that there is no such perfect solution. In fact I argue that there is nothing like an educational technologies. Most technologies we regard as being educational in nature were not designed for this purpose. And yet, everything from a Excel spreadsheet to a Wiki; a GPS device to Audacity can serve as an educational technology, if appropriately repurposed! The sooner teachers realize that we live in a world where nothing is an educational technology…. and yet, everything has the potential to be. the better if will for all.
Scott McCloud over at Dangerously Irrelevant in his most recent post asks “Are our training efforts helping educators or enabling codependence?” This is a great question and one that all teacher educators with an interest in technology need to confront. I have always struggled with this – and varying levels of success in my own teaching (and in the MAET program I now direct). As he suggests what is needed is to develop a “willingness to probe, investigate, and experiment … [to] learn and master the tools.
It seems to me that videos such as this one highlight exactly the kind of free-form creativity we need to encourage in teachers: the ability to see a side-table in an old magazine, and a vase in a bic pen. It is only through similar creative repurposing that technologies can become educational technologies.
P.S. A key aspect of creative repurposing has to do with looking at the world with new eyes! Check out this movie titled SURFACE or Veja Du assignment on this very site.
As Steve says (you can read his full post here) such remixing can provide interesting opportunities for teachers, particularly given the extremely powerful tools we have access to today. Think for a moment about this video. Constructing it requires, clearly, a knowledge of the technology. This requires some level of effort to acquire but frankly that is not particularly daunting. However this technical knowledge is not enough. To create a piece such as this one, utilizing a variety of narrative devices as well as visual styles and tropes, requires having a sophisticated understanding of visual and cinematic styles, their history and meaning. However, this is not enough either. Most importantly, and possibly hardest to develop, a the soft touch the video show. This is exhibited in the subtle irony and humor and in the fact that the video does not try too hard. This soft touch is the mark of a true artist, a person comfortable in their knowledge, comfortable enough to be willing to play with it, to push it to its limits, and yet, sensitive to not going too far.
Teaching, in my opinion, with our without technology, is similar. One can know the techniques, but that is not enough. One can know their history and how they help make things meaningful. This is valuable but not enough either. It is only when we develop this soft touch, this “feeling for the organism” of teaching that true transformational teaching can occur. This is not easy to achieve – but a goal worthy of aspiring to.
I love how these interconnected pipes called the Intertubes lead to serendipitous discoveries. Here are two videos, the first I went looking for, and the second, fell into my lap, so to speak, due to YouTubes related videos section.
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).
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.
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!
[My partner in crime in this is 
