TPACK newsletter #4, Aug – Sept 09

October 8th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Conference, Housekeeping, Learning, Online Learning, Publications, Research, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading No Comments »

got tpack


Welcome to the fourth edition of the TPACK Newsletter, now with 494 subscribers (representing a 36% increase during the last four months!), and appearing bimonthly between August and April. If you are not sure what TPACK is, please surf over to www.tpack.org  to learn more.

Gratuitous Quote about Technology

"My theme for philanthropy is the same approach I used with technology: to find a need and fill it.”
- An Wang

 

In this Issue:
-2. Introductory blurb
-1. Gratuitous Quote about Technology

0. In this issue (You are here.)
1. Recent TPACK Articles
 
2. TPACK-in-a-text(book)
 3. (Sort of) Recent TPACK Articles

 4. Recent TPACK Presentations

 5. TPACK Podcasts

 6. TPACK Research in Progress

 7 TPACK Professional Development
8. Recently Completed TPACK-based Dissertations & Theses
 9. Learning and Doing More with TPACK
–. Un-numbered miscellaneous stuff at the end

1. Recent TPACK Articles

TPACK was a “Top Story” on August 26, 2009 in both eSchoolNews and eCampusNews! A feature article (“TPACK explores Effective Ed-Tech Integration”) written by senior editor Laura Delaney explained TPACK and its components in considerable detail, plus one way of helping teachers to develop TPACK: using curriculum-based learning activity types. Punya, Matt, Judi, Mark Hofer, and Karen Richardson were interviewed and provided the content for the feature stories.

Hot off the press! Judi Harris & Mark Hofer’s Feature and Learning Connections articles are appearing in the September/October 2009 issue of Learning & Leading with Technology. “’Grounded’ Technology Integration: Planning with Curriculum-Based Learning Activity Types” introduces a TPACK-based approach to technology integration during instructional planning, and “’Grounded’ Technology Integration Using Social Studies Learning Activity Types” illustrates how to do this in the social studies. Watch future 2009-2010 issues of L&L for more Learning Connections articles about math, world languages, science, K-6 literacy, and English language arts activity types, written with collaborators Neal Grandgenett, Marcela van Olphen, Meg Blanchard, Denise Schmidt, and Carl Young.

This summer, Judi, Punya & Matt published an overview of TPACK, emphasizing the roles of content and technological content knowledge, and how to help teachers to develop it, in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education, vol. 41, no. 4, PP. 393-416. The article is entitled, “Teachers’ Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: Curriculum-based Technology Integration Reframed.”

A few months earlier, Hyo-Jeong So (Nanyang Technological University) and Bosung Kim (University of Missouri) published the results of a study that “examined perceived difficulties and concerns that pre-service teachers encountered when applying their knowledge on technology, pedagogy and content to design a technology integrated lesson.” They utilized a collaborative lesson design similar to Matt & Punya’s Learning by Design approach to developing TPACK. The article, “Learning About Problem-based Learning: Student Teachers Integrating Technology, Pedagogy and Content Knowledge,” was published in the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 25(1), PP. 101-116. A .PDF of the article is available for your perusal.

2. TPACK-in-a-text(book)

Candace Figg (Brock University) and Jenny Burson (LeTourneau University) are pleased to announce a new arrival: their TPACK-based preservice text, Designs for UnPacking Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK): A Handy Guide for Teaching with Technology, which will be released on September 5, 2009 by Soleil Publishing. Additional information about the book, including sample pages and a table of contents, is available online.

3. (Sort of) Recent TPACK Articles

Two recent issues of Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE) featured articles on TPACK. In a special issue devoted to TPACK (volume 9, issue 1), six articles appeared:

TPACK:  A Framework for the CITE Journal
G. Bull & L. Bell

Mathematics Teacher TPACK Standards and Development Model
M. L. Niess, R. N. Ronau, K. G. Shafer, S. O. Driskell, S. R. Harper, C. Johnston, C. Browning, S. A. Özgün-Koca, & G. Kersaint

Teaching Science with Technology: Case Studies of Science Teachers’ Development of Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge 
S. S. Guzey & G. H. Roehrig

Strategies for Preparing Preservice Social Studies Teachers to Integrate Technology Effectively: Models and Practices
T. Brush & J. W. Saye

What Is Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge? 
M. J. Koehler & P. Mishra

Examining TPACK Among K-12 Online Distance Educators in the United States
L. Archambault & K. Crippen

In volume 9 issue 2 of CITE, three TPACK-based articles appeared:

Mathematics Teachers’ Development, Exploration, and Advancement of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge in the Teaching and Learning of Algebra 
S. Richardson

Giving, Prompting, Making: Aligning Technology and Pedagogy Within TPACK for Social Studies Instruction
T. C. Hammond & M. M. Manfra

Enhancing TPACK With Assistive Technology: Promoting Inclusive Practices in Preservice Teacher Education
M. T. Marino, P. Sameshima, & C. C. Beecher

 

4. Recent TPACK Presentations

Maggie Niess (Oregon State University) will present a paper entitled “Mathematics Teacher TPACK Standards and Revising Teacher Preparation” at the 10th International Conference of The Mathematics Education Into the 21st Century Project, “Models in Developing Mathematics Education,” which will take place on September 11-17, 2009 in Dresden, Saxony, Germany.

Bill Bauer, the Director of Music Education at Case Western Reserve University, will be presenting “Music Teachers and Technology: The TPACK Framework" at the Society for Music Teacher Education’s 2009 Symposium on Music Teacher Education: Enacting Shared Visions, September 10-12, 2009 at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

There were several TPACK-based sessions at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Washington, DC in late June 2009:

We learned about a fascinating paper about helping teachers to develop TPSK – technological pedagogical statistical (and probability) knowledge – that was presented at the 2009 Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education in February. A .pdf of the paper, “Preparing to Teach Mathematics with Technology: Lesson Planning Decisions for Implementing New Curriculum,” written by Sarah Ives, Hollylynne Lee, and Tina Starling (North Carolina State University) is available online for your perusal.

Last but certainly not least, we discovered presentation slides by Dan Maas, Chief Information Officer for the Littleton Public Schools in Colorado, which interpret TPACK vis-à-vis 21st-century technologies. An entry in Dan’s blog explains that these slides supported a reflective exercise for educators that focused on “inspired writing.”

5. TPACK Podcasts

"Understanding TPCK," one of the "Teaching in the 21st Century" series of weekly podcasts for teachers, was posted recently by the Maine School Administrative District 75. The podcast explains TPACK and provides examples of TPACK in practice, in which 21st technologies were repurposed creatively for educational use. For example, in Bill’s English class students used Twitter to create microblogs to discuss the books that they’re studying.  This podcast was created in response to Matt & Punya’s feature article in the May issue of Learning & Leading with Technology, “Too Cool for School? No Way! Using the TPACK Framework: You Can Have Your Hot Tools and Teach with Them, Too.” All podcasts in the series are produced and edited by students in MSAD 75’s middle and high school.

A thoughtful and thorough podcast prepared by Ruben Puentedura for the Maine Learning Technology Initiative Fall Teacher 2008 Leader Institutes was shared recently by Lydia Leimback in her blog, "Teacher Tech." Dr. Puentedura introduces and explains two conceptual models that can be used together: TPACK and SAMR. SAMR stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition, which focus upon the roles that digital technologies play in changing the nature of students’ learning, when compared to the use of more traditional technologies for the same or similar learning activities. Illustrative examples of higher education courses are provided to show how TPCK and SAMR can work together in designs for students’ learning. A transcribed version of the podcast is also available.

 

6. TPACK Research in Progress

Julie Mueller (Wilfrid Laurier University) is currently examining pre- and post- questionnaire, interview, and observation data generated with teachers, administrators, and students as part of an elementary school-initiated laptop integration project, using TPACK as her theoretical framework.   The preliminary results of this study suggest that teachers do indeed consider all of the components of TPACK when planning and providing instruction, but they are not always integrated.  In addition to identifying behavioral measures of TPACK (which Julie feels are much-needed at present in TPACK research), student outcomes will be used to measure the impact of the laptop integration.  Julie hopes to present the results of this project at SITE 2010

Ghaida Alayyar, a doctoral student at the University of Twente working with her supervisors, Drs. Petra Fisser and Joke Voogt, is studying the use of TPACK as a framework to change the nature of preservice science education in Kuwait. Joke writes, “The current curriculum for prospective student- teachers in Kuwait is characterized by a teacher-centered approach and only has an optional course on basic technology applications. The content of the new course is based on the ideas of TPACK. In the first phase of the study (currently underway) a group of 50 science students is designing elementary science technology applications in small groups (3-4 persons). They are coached by subject matter, pedagogical and technology experts. …In the second phase of the study, a new group of prospective students will be involved, with part of the coaching happening via a Web-based support system. Data about student-teachers’ TPACK competencies will be collected before and after the course with the TPACK survey developed by Schmidt, Baran, Thompson, Koehler, Mishra & Shin.”

Are you researching TPACK? Please consider adding a description of your research methods to the TPACK wiki’s “Researching TPACK” section and/or sending us a brief overview of your ongoing work to share in this newsletter.

 

7. TPACK Professional Development

As mentioned in the first TPACK Newsletter (January 2009), Craig Cunningham reports that the faculty at National-Louis University in Chicago were involved in a Faculty Senate-funded TPACK faculty development project during the 2008-2009 academic year.  In the project, small groups of teacher-education and subject-matter faculty worked with technology “experts” from the faculty to develop ways to integrate technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge.  The various groups worked on topics such as using video to teach interviewing techniques, using Web cameras to conduct live chats with science experts, and ways to better use interactive whiteboards.  Faculty enthusiasm for the project at the end of the year led to the submission of a renewal grant for 2009-2010, which was recently awarded!  The second year of the project will continue the work of the first year, with the addition of a monthly series of TPACK-based seminars designed to increase faculty expertise across the university.   For more information, please contact arlene.borthwick@nl.edu or craig.cunningham@nl.edu.

 

8. Recently Completed TPACK-based Dissertations & Theses

Chauser, J. (2009).  Instruction 2.0: Effective education for the 21st century. Master’s thesis, National University.

In this thesis, Jacqueline describes the design and implementation of a professional development course for teachers. Building on the TPACK framework, the course encourages an integrated approach to using technology for instruction and respects the interconnectedness of the three knowledge bases required for such integration.

Richardson, K. W. (2009). Looking at/looking through: Teachers planning for curriculum-based learning with technology. Doctoral dissertation, College of William & Mary.

The literature related to teacher planning practices is, for the most part, several decades old. As such, it fails to take into consideration both the proliferation of digital technologies in schools, as well as new frameworks for understanding teachers’ knowledge. This interpretivist study drew upon the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) to study teachers’ lesson planning processes. Specifically, it focused upon 12 fifth, sixth and seventh grade content area teachers from three southeastern U.S. School districts as they planned for and used digital technologies during lessons in their classrooms. Participating teachers had a variety of professional experiences and placements and had participated in educational technology professional development. They were interviewed about the processes they used to plan instruction, focusing upon how they determined which technologies might be used. In addition, sample technology-infused lessons were observed to see how the plans were put into action.

Terpstra, M. A. (2009). Developing Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: Preservice teachers’ perceptions of how they learn to use educational technology in their teaching.  Doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University.

This study uses activity theory and current conceptions of knowledge for teaching content with technology to analyze the working knowledge and experience of a group of seven preservice teachers in order to yield insights into how preservice teachers learn to teach with technology. Findings showed that the preservice teachers exhibited more TK than TPK and TPACK. A developmental trajectory of learning to teach with technology is suggested that takes into account knowledge exhibition and breadth.

9. Learning and Doing More with TPACK

Interested in learning more about TPACK or getting more involved in the TPACK community?  Here are a few ideas:

Feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone who might be interested in its contents. Even better, have them subscribe to the TPACK newsletter by sending a blank email to sympa@lists.wm.edu , with the following text in the subject line: 
subscribe tpack.news FirstName LastName 
(of course, substituting their own first and last names for ‘FirstName’ and ‘LastName’ — unless their name happens to be FirstName LastName, in which case they can just leave it as is). 



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Have a great new school year, everyone!  We’ll be back in late October with issue #5 of the TPACK Newsletter.



- Judi, Matt, Mario, and Punya



Judi Harris,                   Chair, College of William & Mary

Matt Koehler,               Vice-Chair, Michigan State University
Mario Kelly,                 Futon, Hunter College

Punya Mishra
,              Recliner, Michigan State University

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Capital City River Run, Half Marathon

September 28th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Fun, Housekeeping, Personal, Photography, Worth Reading No Comments »

This weekend I completed my sixth Capital City River Run. I participated in the half-marathon and completed it at a 10:10 pace, a total time of 2 hours 13 minutes (and 2 seconds, but who is counting). Interestingly this pace was actually better than my pace the last two years, even though I had much less time to train this time around. It was a beautiful day and I had a wonderful time. Here is a photo

Capital City River Run Punya

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Tech Trends, Special Issue on TPACK

September 9th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Creativity, Housekeeping, Learning, News, Publications, Research, Science, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading, Writing 3 Comments »

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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Harris, Mishra & Koehler, 2009

June 11th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Creativity, Design, Housekeeping, Learning, Publications, Research, Science, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading, Writing 6 Comments »

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.

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.

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TPACK Newsletter #3: May09 Edition

May 4th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Blogging, Housekeeping, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading No Comments »

got tpack

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #3: Late April 2009

Welcome to the third edition of the TPACK Newsletter, now with 362 subscribers (representing a 30% increase in the last two months!), and appearing bimonthly between August and April. If you are not sure what TPACK is, please surf over to www.tpack.org to learn more.

Gratuitous Quote about Technology
"Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons."
– Buckminster Fuller

In this Issue:
-2. Introductory blurb

-1. Gratuitous Quote about Technology
0. In this issue (You are here.)
1. TPACK’s Grandfather
2. Measuring TPACK
3. TPACK-in-a-text(book)
4. Recent TPACK Publications
5. Recent TPACK Presentations
6. The TPACK Handbook as Course Text
7. TPACK-based Dissertations
8. TPACK Wiki Work
9. TPACK Video Mashup
10. Display Your TPACK Proudly!

11. Learning and Doing More with TPACK
–. Un-numbered miscellaneous stuff at the end

Read the rest of this entry »

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TPACK @ AERA, 2009

April 17th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Conference, Housekeeping, Learning, Publications, Research, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading No Comments »

I did not go to AERA this year – choosing instead to go to Chicago to Keynote the Engaging Minds: Pedagogy and Personalism, the 2009 DePaul Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference. We did have a paper to be presented there (and I am sure our Iowa State friends must have done a splendid job).

As it turns out there were quite a few presentations/sessions at AERA devoted to TPACK. For the record I am including their titles and abstracts here below: Read the rest of this entry »

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Serendipitous Connectability… a short history of an idea

March 23rd, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Ambigrams, Blogging, Creativity, Evolution, Fun, Housekeeping, Personal, Philosophy, Psychology, Stories, Worth Reading 1 Comment »

A while back I had written about the idea of “serendipitous connectability;” the idea that the web allows us to “to run across things that are stunning in their ability to connect to us in powerful, emotionally touching ways.” I was prompted to do this by clicking on a random link on the We feel fine website that led to someone’s personal blog (one that I, deliberately, didn’t link to and have no real record of).

This idea seems to have been picked up a bit and this is my attempt to sort through and see how it started and how it is developing (note: there already is a mutant version out there). Details below. Read the rest of this entry »

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Milap09

March 16th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Design, Fun, Housekeeping, India, Personal, Photography No Comments »

I took photographs at the Milap 2009, the annual cultural program organized by the Indian Cultural Society of Greater Lansing. Click on the photo below to view the photos (hosted on Flickr).

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Bad poetry time: Clerihews

March 15th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Fun, Housekeeping, Personal, Poetry, Worth Reading No Comments »

Just when you thought I had run through all the bad poetry I can spew (see here for my palindromic poems) here is another set of poems I had all but forgotten about. A few years ago I got hooked into writing Clerihews. For the uninitiated:

The clerihew is a bit of rhyming doggerel invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). Traditionally, it’s a four-line verse made up of two rhyming couplets, with meter intentionally (often ridiculously) irregular. Its purpose is to offer a satiric or absurd biography of a famous person. [from Wordgames in the Atlantic Monthly by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon].

I have written a couple of dozen clerihews that were hosted on the older version of my website – but got lost in the shuffle somewhere. Here are a couple of my favorites (of course you can read them all by going here and here).

Here’s one is about my son who, when he first started speaking, would startle us all by yelling “Ka” every time he saw a car: Read the rest of this entry »

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Palindromes in video and poetry

March 11th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Ambigrams, Art, Creativity, Design, Fun, Good | Bad Design, Housekeeping, Personal, Poetry, Puzzles, Worth Reading No Comments »

Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to this extremely creative YouTube video. The funny thing is that I had seen this a while ago but I didn’t get it. Of course now that Leigh explained it to me, it seems so obvious. Anyway, the narration is crafted in such a way that it reads the same backwards AND forwards. Now this is cool in and of itself, but the kicker is the manner in which the meaning flips when the reading reverses! Very cool.

YouTube Preview Image

Here is another one with the same overall idea though less well designed (and a bit more political)

What is most ironic about my “not getting it till explained” is that many years ago I had gotten bitten by the palindromic poetry bug – and had written a bunch of poems that read the same backwards and forwards. Moreover in these poems I tried hard to create a shift in meaning when you began reading the lines in reverse order. So to not notice this self-same pattern when I saw it in the video seems particularly embarrassing. Read the rest of this entry »

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Multiple representations of the periodic table and learning

February 25th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Ambigrams, Art, Creativity, Design, Housekeeping, Psychology, Publications, Representation, Research, Science, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading 3 Comments »

Mishra & Yadav (2006) was a paper based around my dissertation research. It took a while to get published and I am including it here for the record. My dissertation (Mishra, 1998) was maybe the first place where I made a specific mention of the triad of constructs: Technology, Pedagogy & Content that later developed into the TPACK framework. I must add that I used the word “learning theory” or “theory” in place of “pedagogy” in my dissertation. By the time this paper came out our key TPACK paper (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) was already in press – so this paper refers to our further crystallized thinking about these issues.

Mishra, P., & Yadav, A. (2006). Using hypermedia for learning complex concepts in chemistry: A qualitative study on the relationship between prior knowledge, beliefs and motivation. Education and Information Technologies. 11(1), 33-69. [Click link to download PDF.]

Abstract and an ambigram follow: Read the rest of this entry »

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Blogging has been light

January 9th, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Blogging, Housekeeping, Personal No Comments »

the past few days, primarily due to “beginning semester” blues. I hope to get back to full strength pretty soon… there are bunch of things I would like to blog about just a question of finding the time :-(

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A year of blogging

January 1st, 2009 Punya Mishra Posted in Blogging, Fun, Housekeeping, Learning, Personal, Technology No Comments »

It was exactly a year ago, on the first of January 2008, that I began blogging (see first posting here). When I started I wasn’t sure how well this blogging thing would work out.

Now 12 months and 376 posts later – I have to say that I have truly enjoyed this. I had set a goal for myself of making 30 posts a month, and for the most part (June being the biggest exception, followed by December) I met these goals (actually ending up with more than a post a day on average!).

The design of the site has pretty much stayed the same, some minor tweaking aside.

More importantly I have come to enjoy blogging. I know a couple of people who have been following my writing – and that is great. But the greatest gain has been personal, providing me with a space to put my thoughts into words – sort of half-way between the inchoate thoughts that flit through my mind and more formal academic writing. [I wrote about the three kinds of posts I tend to generate, and how that influenced the design of the site here.]

This is what I would like to expand further in the year to come. So one of my new year’s resolutions is to blog less frequently but more seriously. So fewer links to cool sites that I run across but a greater number of mini-essays on technology, learning, creativity and play.

Here’s to 2009!

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Tweaking the design

November 10th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Blogging, Design, Good | Bad Design, Housekeeping, Personal, Worth Reading No Comments »

I have been blogging pretty seriously now for 10 months now and am quite enjoying it. I have made some changes to the design of the site that may be worth explaining. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tweaking the design

August 29th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Design, Good | Bad Design, Housekeeping, Technology No Comments »

Someone once said that all design is redesign – and it has never been truer than trying to design your website. Read the rest of this entry »

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Back from India…

August 25th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Housekeeping, India, Personal 2 Comments »

Got back yesterday from a short, hectic but sweet trip to India. I had a wonderful time and still have a lot to do to just document all that happened and connect with all the people I met (hopefully over the next few weeks)… but now it is time to get back to fall semester business. I am teaching two courses this semester, CEP917, my doctoral seminar on design and, a new fully-online course, CEP817 CEP818 Creativity in Teaching & Learning. Of course, the online version of TE150 (jointly supervised by Matt Koehler) continues with Andrea and Tae as TA’s, and they seem to be doing a wonderful job.

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Blogging for the iPhone

August 8th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Design, Engineering, Good | Bad Design, Housekeeping, Personal, Representation, Technology 1 Comment »

I have been playing with an iTouch for the past few days and have have been quite impressed. What bothered me somewhat though was that my website (something I have spent hours designing) didn’t morph itself as gracefully as I would have liked into this new interface. But for every technological problem, there exists a technological solution (and vice versa)…
Read the rest of this entry »

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Meeting Sanjaya Mishra

May 28th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Housekeeping, India, Personal, Technology, Travel No Comments »

Yesterday I met with Sanjaya Mishra, a scholar and researcher in the area of distance education. Sanjaya and I first met at the Vidyakash conference a bunch of years ago and we clicked almost immediately. I always enjoy meeting up with him when I am in Delhi, though it has been a couple of years since we last talked face to face.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Mishra, Dirkin & Cavanaugh, 2007

May 7th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Books, Creativity, Design, Housekeeping, Learning, Psychology, Publications, TPACK, Teaching, Technology, Uncategorized No Comments »

I have been teaching summer course in our master’s program for years now and for the most part have found them to be the most enriching teaching experiences I have had. These are intense 8 hours a day, 5 days a week programs that typically go on for a month. [We are currently experimenting with a hybrid version but that's a story for another day.] I haven’t written much about these programs, despite having taught them multiple times, but for one book chapter that was written many years ago (but for one reason or other was published just last year, in 2007). Read the rest of this entry »

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Spring break 2008

April 12th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Fun, Housekeeping, Personal, Photography No Comments »

Our first family vacation in over three years! New Jersey to visit relatives, Delaware to visit friends, and New York city for the big city excitement! Hectic but great fun.

I took over 500 photographs, got back home and deleted around 200 of them – the remaining are now up on Flickr. Enjoy…

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Koehler, Mishra & Yahya 2007

April 10th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Design, Housekeeping, Learning, Publications, Representation, Research, TPACK, Teaching, Technology No Comments »

Koehler, Mishra & Yahya (2007) is an important paper in the TPACK related work for a range of reasons. The research captured in this paper actually predates the TCRecord (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) article, but the vagaries of publishing and journal waiting-lists led to this reversal of time-lines. This paper contains an extended analysis of design talk and presents an innovative representational scheme to capture the evolution of TPACK. Read the rest of this entry »

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Update on SITE08 Keynote

April 2nd, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Conference, Creativity, Design, Housekeeping, Publications, Research, TPACK, Technology, Video No Comments »

A re-edited version of the SITE 2008 Keynote address (by Matt Koehler and me) has been uploaded to the website. You can find the new version here. This presentation depended quite heavily on the exact synching of slide transitions to the audio – and the previous version messed that up here and there. More embarrassing was the fact that we had a typo on the very first screen of the previous version. Oops!

Anyway, all that has been fixed. Here’s the link (once again).

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More sketches

March 15th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Art, Creativity, Design, Fun, Housekeeping, Personal No Comments »

A few weeks ago I had blogged about my experiments with sketching on a Wacom graphics tablet. Here are more sketches I have created in the meanwhile. You can see them here as a webpage or view it as a slide show.

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SITE 2008: A postview

March 8th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Conference, Creativity, Design, Housekeeping, TPACK, Teaching, Technology 2 Comments »

We got back home from SITE 2008 (Las Vegas) last night and there lots of things worth posting but this will have to be brief. The keynote presentation by Matt and myself went of quite well. It was a gamble, an attempt at a creative mashup of presentations styles “borrowed” from Steven Colbert, Larry Lessig and Dick Hardt, to convey our interest in TPACK and creativity. The final result was presentation consisting of 337 slides presented in under 45 minutes! Read the rest of this entry »

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Acts of Translation

February 23rd, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Books, Housekeeping, Personal, Worth Reading No Comments »

I recently finished reading three books: A case of Two Cities by Qiu Xialong, A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami, and Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations by Alexander McCall Smith. These are three very different books. The first two are novels and the third is a collection of short stories. Also, I have read other books by Xialong and Murakami (in fact I have blogged about one of them, the last book I had read by Murakami here) and this is the first book by McCall Smith that I have read (though I have been eying his series on The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency for a while). Despite these differences, both in their content, and in my experience with the authors, all three books, in one way or the another, have to do with the joys and perils of translation – the process of movement from one place to another, of ideas and emotions, across individuals, nations and cultures. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sketches of life

February 17th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Creativity, Design, Fun, Housekeeping, Personal, Photography No Comments »

I have had a Wacom tablet for a while now but haven’t really gotten down to playing with it… till a couple of days ago. I started with rough drawings / sketches of friends and family. Take a look and let me know what you think…. You can click on the images to see larger versions on Flickr.


Soham Jayni Matt Shreya Smita
Soham Jayni Matt Shreya Smita

And just in case you think I drew these from scratch… not at all. All I did was trace over existing photographs.

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Protected: TE150: AT&T award submission

February 15th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Design, Housekeeping, Online Learning, Personal, TPACK, Teaching, Technology Enter your password to view comments

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AACTE Major Forum Presentation

February 10th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Conference, Design, Housekeeping, TPACK, Technology 8 Comments »

I include below a copy of the AACTE Major Forum presentation (announcement here) that I made at New Orleans on Saturday, February 9. There were other things that I participated in (as listed here) and I will post about them later. Matt was supposed to do this talk (as part of our standard exchange program) but he fell sick and I had to end up doing this. I too the draft we had developed jointly and made two fundamental changes. First, was tweaking it to match my style of presentation, and second, I wanted to dedicate this talk to R. K. Joshi, maybe the most influential teacher I have ever had. The latter took a bit more work but I think I managed to pull it off so that this dedication would integrate smoothly with the other issues and look tacked on.

Joel Colbert introduces each of the presenters and we went in the following sequence. Read the rest of this entry »

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RK, calligrapher, designer, teacher

February 8th, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Creativity, Design, Housekeeping, India, Personal, Teaching, Technology, Worth Reading 5 Comments »


R.K. Joshi
1936 – 2008

R. K. Joshi was a calligrapher, typographer, artist, type-designer, and teacher. He has been maybe the greatest influence on me and what I do as a designer and teacher. And I know I am not alone. He influenced a generation or more of designers in India and elsewhere.

I got to know RK (as he was known) when I was a student at the Industrial Design Center, at IIT Mumbai. Read the rest of this entry »

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Alien Games

February 3rd, 2008 Punya Mishra Posted in Design, Games, Housekeeping, Publications, Technology No Comments »

A journal article on games and gender, that has been years in the making is finally going to see the light of day! The complete reference and abstract can be found below. Drop me an email if you would like a copy.

Heeter, C., Egidio, R., Mishra, P., Winn, B., & Winn, J. (accepted). Alien Games: Do girls prefer games designed by girls? Games & Culture Journal. Read the rest of this entry »

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