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
Leigh manages to bring in the MAET program in to the picture (why am I not surprised?) and how we have been using some of these technologies for recruitment and community building. Here is a quote (though you should go read the entire article, right?)
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.
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 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
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…
Welcome to the sixth edition of the TPACK Newsletter, with 642 subscribers (representing a 13% increase during the past 2.5 months), now appearing twice each fall and spring semester. If you are not sure what TPACK is, please surf over to www.tpack.org to learn more.
Gratuitous Quote about Technology
“Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is.” ~Robert M. Pirsig
0. In this Issue: -2. Introductory Blurb
-1. Gratuitous Quote about Technology
0. In This Issue (You are here.)
1. Recent Journal Articles and Conference Papers about TPACK
2. Recent TPACK-Related Dissertations
3. Join a Fireside Chat about TPACK
4. TPACK @ SITE 2010 Conference
5. TPACK Handbook Reviews
6. The Future is Now … So Now What?
7. Learning and Doing More with TPACK
–. Un-numbered miscellaneous stuff at the end
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.]
Jordy Whitmer over at the Birmingham School district forwarded me this link to this really cool video by George Kembel on Awakening Creativity. There is a lot in the video to ponder and discuss but I want to focus on something he said about music learning that really hit home with me. Citing some research on music learning he describes a strong link between speaking a tone language, such as Mandarin, and having perfect pitch. A search on Google led to the following article: Tone Language Translates To Perfect Pitch: Mandarin Speakers More Likely To Acquire Rare Musical Ability. As this article says:
Perfect, or absolute, pitch is the ability to name or produce a musical note of particular pitch without the benefit of a reference note. The visual equivalent is calling a red apple “red.” While most people do this effortlessly, without, for example, having to compare a red to a green apple, perfect pitch is extremely rare in the U.S. and Europe, with an estimated prevalence in the general population of less than one in 10,000.
So think about this for a second. Here is an ability that was once thought to be extremely rare, within the capability of just extremely talented musicians. People born with this talent, as it were. This research, however, shows just how mistaken this view is.
President Obama plans to name Howard A. Schmidt, a veteran cyber security warrior with experience at senior levels of government and industry, to fill a long-anticipated cyber coordinator position at the National Security Council, administration officials and outside consultants confirmed.
As far as one can see Mr. Schmidt is well qualified for this position, having served both in industry and in the government in the past. However, one fact about his background caught my attention and prompted this note. In describing his qualifications Ambinder wrote
Schmidt has credentials unique to the job: he received his masters in organizational management from the University of Phoenix, a (fully accredited and esteem) mostly online university.
Apart from the typo on esteem, what struck me was this positive mention of the University of Phoenix, something I often do not see or hear. Over where I live and breathe, the good old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar university, the University of Phoenix is not regarded as having much esteem. I have argued here and elsewhere that this will soon change. That most of us at the “traditional” university have underestimated just how powerful the forces of change are. Online learning (and for profit universities) are here to stay and maybe even take over universities as we know them.
Reading about Mr. Schmidt’s credentials just reminded me just how quickly this change is happening.
I have been somewhat skeptical of the learning styles literature for a while, not the least for hearing the phrase being bandied about without much thought. I have heard people claim without much evidence, that today’s kids are visual learners. I have heard a teacher say that as a consequence, that visual learners prefer reading text from a Powerpoint slide, rather than read it on a blackboard! (Those who know me that I am rarely at a loss for words, but that statement truly struck me dumb! In Wolfgang Pauli’s words, that statement was not even wrong.) I have also had students claim that they did not do well in a certain course because it did not match their learning style!
Anyway, the study reported in the article
… does not dispute the existence of learning styles. But it asserts that no one has ever proved that any particular style of instruction simultaneously helps students who have one learning style while also harming students who have a different learning style.
What does this non-finding mean for practitioners (teachers and professors)?
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?
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 »
I have always been a believer in allowing students to use any resources they can during examinations. If we care about authentic assessment, what can be more authentic than that. When I have a question that I need an answer to, or some topic I need to learn about, the first thing I do is go to Google. Why should students be denied that resource? Knowledge today is as much in our brains as it is distributed in artifacts (my laptop) and on the web. So it is heartening for me to read the following:
…the Danish government preach [sic] that the Internet is so much a part of daily life, it should be included in the classroom and in examinations.
With that belief, the government have taken the bold step of allowing full Internet access to several high schools during their final year exams. The implications of this are significant, particularly for the kinds of questions we ask in such exams. Clearly these have to change. No longer can we ask simple factual questions the answers to which can be easily found on the web. We have to ask questions that push students to compare and contrast opposing points of view, questions that push them to think critically about information, questions that push them to come to their own conclusions based on the information they can find.
I am not sure the Danish authorities have gone that far, yet. At least the story does not describe how assessment has changed. Their approach seems to be to constrain significantly the amount of time students have. As the story says:
Surprisingly, students themselves admit it’s not easy to cheat using the Internet during an exam. According to the JP news agency, students are given a very short period of time in an exam to sift through the mounds of data they can call up on the Internet to answer a single question.
One can argue that this is somewhat authentic, given that we often have limited time to come up with answers to questions.
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.
My friend, Martin Oliver, over at the London Knowledge Lab sent me the following link about a TPACK related publication that appeared in the International Journal of Education and Development Using Information and Communication Technology, aka IJEDUICT. (Boy, that’s a long name for a journal, and I dare you to pronounce the acronym.) As it turns out, I was not acquainted with this journal. A quick browse showed that it had a strong international authorship and readership. Sadly most of my publications (with a few exceptions) have been in US journals, and doubly sadly, most authors published in US journals are from US universities. This is so parochial and a pity because there is a lot that we can all learn from each other, especially in a field like Ed Tech.
Any a bit of TPACK-searching on the journal website led to three separate mentions (technically there are two since one of the mentions was in an editorial describing an article in that very issue that utilized the TPACK framework). Anyway, for the record here are the citations (and links). Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to the fifth edition of the TPACK Newsletter, now with 568 subscribers (representing a 15% increase during 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Ken Friedman, whose article I had used as the basis of my previous posting, From incompetence to mastery, the stages dropped me an email in response to my critique. To provide some context, (you can read my full post here) I had suggested in my posting that it may be inappropriate to label the the highest level of mastery as being unconscious competence. My concern, of course, was with the “unconscious” part – since I felt that true mastery requires a level of reflection, something denied by the word “unconscious.”
Ken wrote that he actually sees examples of unconscious competence everywhere. He went on to say (quoted with permission) Read the rest of this entry »
One who knows and knows he knows is a wise man, Follow Him
One who knows and knows not he knows is asleep, Awaken him
One who knows not and knows he knows not is a child, Teach him
One who knows not and knows not he knows not is a Fool, Avoid him.
– Attributed variously to Confucius, Socrates and others
I was reminded of this quote while reading an article by Ken Friedman titled, Design Science and Design Education and came across a section that described a view of learning. Friedman describes a framework on going from incompetence in a domain to mastery in the same domain. More specifically, Skoe talks of this process as having four key stages. These four stages are: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence. Here is Friedman: 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 chair the committee on Innovation & Technology of the American Association for Innovation & Technology (AACTE). The committee has been working hard with people over at AACTE (Rachel Popham deserves a big shout out) in organizing a webinar series coming up November 17th – 19th. Here’s a description:
This webconference addresses creative teaching and learning in the digital age. Designed within the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework these sessions by top-notch scholars, researchers and practitioners will cover a range of topics: including the educational potential of social networking, the expanding use of GPS, intelligent use of video to teach science, and the role of cloud computing in face to face and online classes. The goal is to help participants think creatively about integrating multiple technologies into varied teaching and learning contexts.
Readers of this blog will find a familiar name, Sean Nash of Nashworld as one of the presenters!! I may be moderating one of the sessions though that is still being worked out. So lock in these dates and you can find out more by going to the AACTE website.
I had written earlier about the idea of “postdictable” which was defined as something that is “surprising initially, but then understandable with a bit of thought.” It lies at the spot between predictability and total chaos. The movie Sixth Sense is postdictable in the best sense of the world. Good teaching I believe needs to be postdictable. That is what keeps us engaged, keeps us waiting for more, the payoff as it were. And best of all, once all the pieces are in, we can’t wait to go back and review everything again, to see just how beautifully the whole thing holds together. There is a strong aesthetic component to this – a sense of wholeness, closure, elegance, and inevitability. Good poems have this quality, as do mathematical theorems. A well crafted lecture or a lesson plan has this quality as well. In my mind these ideas are closely tied to the Dewey’s idea of experience and to the idea of design. Hopefully I will have a chance to explore these connections in a later post but for now, here are a couple of commercials that I think were postdictable in a really cool kind of way. 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.
[My partner in crime in this is 
