Punya Mishra's Web

I was recently in San Diego for the annual conference of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education. I had served as a chair of the Innovation & Technology Committee for a while, and the committee invited me to participate in two different sessions. The current chairs, Glen Bull and Pamela Redmond (with Rachel Popham of the AACTE) did a super job of organizing the two sessions.

The first was a concurrent session on Integrating Technology into Teaching & Learning: TPACK’s Next Chapter. This session focused on the integration of technology, pedagogy and content knowledge, framed by review of the TPACK Handbook and the upcoming Practitioner’s Guide to TPACK. My task was quite simple really, to provide an introduction to TPACK and context for the handbook. I was preceded by Joel Colbert (former chair of the committee under whose leadership the Handbook of TPACK was published) and followed by Denise Schmidt (current member of the committee) who talked about the research they have been doing on TPACK at Iowa State University. The last speakers were Glen Bull and Pamela Redmond who spoke about the upcoming Practitioner’s Guide to TPACK. It was a pretty full room and I think all the presentations went really well.

Here are the slides of all the presentations, in pdf format.

The next day was a major forum on Preparing Millennial Educator Candidates. The session was moderated by Pam Redmond and included Colleen Kennedy who spoke about 21st Century Education: Impact and Applications of Social Networking, Richard Sterling who talked about Teaching writing in the 21st Century, Denise Schimdt speaking about Are “Our” Teachers Ready for the Millennials? and finally your’s truly who spoke about What does the future hold? I took this opportunity to share some of the work I have been doing with Kristen Kereluik on 21st Century Learning and our transdisciplinary course.

The slides for all the sessions can be found here, in pdf format.

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #8: February 2011

Welcome to a new year and to the eighth edition of the TPACK Newsletter! Please forgive our long delay in getting this “mega-issue” to you. We’ll do a lot of “catching up” with what has been happening with TPACK worldwide in this issue, so please sit back and prepare to be impressed with how quickly and far use of this construct has spread!

If you are not sure what TPACK is, please surf over to http://www.tpack.org/ to find out more.

Gratuitous Quote About Technology

“Social networking on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.”

~Aaron Sorkin

In This Issue

-1. Gratuitous Quote About Technology
0. In This Issue (–> You are here)
1. TPACK Newsletter Update
2. Recent TPACK Publications
3. Recent TPACK Presentations
4. Recent TPACK-Related Dissertations
5. Other TPACK Resources
6. TPACK at Upcoming Conferences
7. TPACK Work in Progress
8. Other Types of TPACK
9. Learning and Doing More with TPACK
–. Un-numbered miscellaneous stuff at the end

1. TPACK Newsletter UpdateThe TPACK newsletter currently has 1072 subscribers! This represents a 67% increase during the past year.

2. Recent TPACK PublicationsBelow are recent TPACK publications that we know about. If you know of others that were published within the past several months, please let us know (tpack.news.editors@wm.edu).

Articles
An, H., & Shin, S. (2010). The impact of urban district field experiences on four elementary preservice teachers’ learning regarding technology integration. Journal of Technology Integration in the Classroom, 2(3), 101-107.

Archambault, L. M., & Barnett, J. H. Revisiting Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: Exploring the TPACK framework Computers & Education, 55(4), 1656-1662.

Archambault, L., Wetzel, K., Foulger, T. S., & Williams, M. K. (2010). Professional development 2.0: Transforming teacher education pedagogy with 21^st century tools. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 27(1), 1-4.

Baker, M. A., & Bunch, J. C. (2010). CTRL + AL T +DELE TE: Rethinking how we use technology in the AGED classroom. Agricultural Education Magazine, 83(3), 9-11.

Chai, C. S., Koh, J. H. L., & Tsai, C-C. (2010). Facilitating preservice teachers’ development of Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge (TPACK). Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 13(4), 63-73.

Erdogan, A., & Sahin, I. (2010). Relationship between math teacher candidates’ Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) and achievement levels. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2(2), 2707-2711.

Finger, G., Jamieson-Proctor, R., & Albion, P. Beyond Pedagogical Content Knowledge: The importance of TPACK for informing preservice teacher education in Australia. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology 2010, 324, 114-125. Doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-15378-5_11

Guerrero, S. (2010). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge in the mathematics classroom. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 26(4), 132-139.

Harris, J. B., & Hofer, M. J. (2011). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) in action: A descriptive study of secondary teachers’ curriculum-based, technology-related instructional planning. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 43(3), 211-229.

Harris, J. B., Hofer, M. J., Blanchard, M. R., Grandgenett, N. F., Schmidt, D. A., van Olphen, M., & Young, C. A. (2010). “Grounded” technology integration: Instructional planning using curriculum-based activity type taxonomies. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 18(4), 573-605.

Hur, J. W., Cullen, T., & Brush, T. (2010). Teaching for application: A model for assisting pre-service teachers with technology integration. Journal of Technology & Teacher Education, 18(1), 161-182.

Jang, S-J. (2010). Integrating the interactive whiteboard and peer coaching to develop the TPACK of secondary science teachers. Computers & Education, 55(4), 1744-1751.

Jimoyiannis, A. (2010). Designing and implementing an integrated technological pedagogical science knowledge framework for science teachers professional development. Computers & Education, 55(3), 1259-1269.

Kereluik, K., Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. (2011). On learning to subvert signs: Literacy, technology and the TPACK framework. California Reader, 44(2), 12-18.

Koh, J. H. L., Chai, C. S., & Tsai, C. C. (2010). Examining the technological pedagogical content knowledge of Singapore pre-service teachers with a large-scale survey. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(6), 557-63.

LaFee, S. (2010). Taking the ‘i21? initiative. Education Digest, 76(3), 47-51.

Miller, C., Doering, A. & Scharber, C. (2010). No such thing as failure, only feedback: Designing innovative opportunities for e-assessment and technology-mediated feedback. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 21(1), 65-92. Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/33184

Niess, M. L., van Zee, E. H., & Gillow-Wiles, H. (2010). Knowledge growth in teaching mathematics/science with spreadsheets: Moving PCK to TPACK through online professional development. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 27(2), 42-52.

Oster-Levinz, A., & Kleiger, A. (2010). Indicator for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) evaluation of online tasks. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education-TOJDE, 11(4). Retrieved from http://tojde.anadolu.edu.tr/tojde40/index.htm

Özgün-Koca, A. A., Meagher, M., & Edwards, M. T. (2009/2010). Preservice teachers’ emerging TPACK in a technology-rich methods class. The Mathematics Educator, 19(2), 10-20. Retrieved from http://math.coe.uga.edu/TME/issues/v19n2/v19n2_OzgunKoca,%20Meagher,%20&%20Edwards.pdf

Pierson, M., & Borthwick, A. (2010). Framing the assessment of educational technology professional development in a culture of learning. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 26(4), 126-131.

Polly, D., Mims, C., Shepherd, C. E., & Inan, F. (2010). Evidence of impact: Transforming teacher education with preparing tomorrow’s teachers to teach with technology (PT3) grants. Teaching & Teacher Education, 26(4), 863-870.

Richardson, K. W. (2010). TPACK: Game on. Learning & Leading with Technology, 37(8), 34-35.

Schmidt, D., Harris, J. & Hofer, M. (2010). “Grounded” technology integration using K-6 literacy learning activity types. Learning & Leading With Technology, 37(6). 30-32.

Thompson, A. D., & Schmidt, D. (2010). Second-generation TPACK: Emphasis on research and practice. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 26(4), 125.

Trautmann, N. M., & MaKinster, J. G. (2010). Flexibly adaptive professional development in support of teaching science with geospatial technology. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 21(3), 351-370.

Chapters
Doukakis, S., Chionidou-Moskofoglou, M., Mangina-Phelan, E., & Roussos, P. (2010). Measuring technological and content knowledge of undergraduate primary teachers in mathematics. In M. D. Lytras, (Ed.). Tech-Education 2010: Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol. 73 (pp. 405-410), Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Doukakis, S., Koilias, C., & Chionidou-Moskofoglou, M. (2010). Students’ satisfaction with an undergraduate primary education teaching practicum design on developing technological, pedagogical and mathematical knowledge. In M. D. Lytras, (Ed.). Tech-Education 2010: Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol. 73 (pp. 661-666), Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Harris, J. B., Mishra, P. & Koehler, M. (2010). Teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge and learning activity types: Curriculum-based technology integration reframed. In Schrum, L., (Ed.). Considerations on Technology and Teachers: The Best of JRTE (pp. 181-204), Eugene, OR: ISTE.

Book
“In the recently released Jossey-Bass publication, Because Digital Writing Matters by the National Writing Project, with Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks, these authors discuss the TPACK framework as they describe the complex process of teaching “writing” – a content area that involves many pedagogical decisions about how to teach both process and product. By exploring the ways in which writing is evolving through new technologies such as blogs, wikis, and digital stories, as well as analyzing the physical and virtual spaces in which students collaborate such as computer labs and social networks, Because Digital Writing Matters offers readers vignettes of teacher practice that can help frame their discussions and understanding about what it means to teach writing with technology.”

3. Recent TPACK PresentationsColes, D. (2010, June). An introduction to TPACK. Paper presented at the 2010 Canadian eLearning Conference, Edmonton, Alberta. Retrieved from http://mrcoles.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/celc-2010-an-introduction-to-tpack/

Jamieson-Proctor, R., Finger, G. & Albion, P. (2010, April). Auditing the TPACK capabilities of final year teacher education students: Are they ready for the 21st century? Paper presented at the Australian Computers in Education Conference 2010, Melbourne, Australia. Retrieved from http://acec2010.info/proposal/248/auditing-tpck-capabilities-final-year-teacher-education-students-are-they-ready-21st .pdf of paper

Jimoyiannis, A. (2010, June). Developing a Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework for science education: Implications of a teacher trainers’ preparation program. Paper presented at the Informing Science & IT Education Conference (InSITE) 2010, Cassino, Italy. Retrieved from

http://proceedings.informingscience.org/InSITE2010/InSITE10p597-607Jimoyiannis867.pdf

4. Recent TPACK-Related DissertationsThe following TPACK-based dissertations have come to our attention recently. There may be more… (and if so, you know whom to contact with that information J).

Liaw, H. (2010). Using online primary source resources in fostering historical thinking skills: The pre-service social studies teachers’ understanding. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section A, 71(09), (AAT 3420677).

Abstract: This dissertation entailed a qualitative case study on the confluence of technology and social studies in fostering a constructivist education. Through the examination of pre-service social studies teachers’ understanding of the online primary source resources (OPSR), three themes emerged. The first exposed the fragmented understanding of important pedagogical theories of constructivism and historical thinking among participants; the second suggested that OPSR was mostly valued by pre-service teachers for its provision of primary sources; and the third related to how pre-service teachers viewed the current state of technology and context as problematic for technology integration. Accordingly, four findings were revealed. First, the pre-service teachers in the study demonstrated a limited understanding of the application of foundational theories central to their field of study; second, there were instances of deeper appreciation of the potential of OPSR, indicating that pre-service teachers’ theoretical understanding is nascent and may deepen over time; third, the full potential of technologies such as OPSR was not recognized; and fourth, the pre-service teachers’ perceptions of school and educational system conditions tended to negatively influence their views toward the integration of technology into their teaching practices. Implications indicate that first, foundational pedagogical theories are critical with regard to technology integration in education and as such teacher preparation programs must not assume what is taught is what is learned; second, instances of deeper understanding among pre-service teachers only appeared during the application of their theoretical understandings; third, context is critical in how OPSR would be used in classrooms and such contextual issues must not be ignored by teacher preparation programs; and fourth, teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (PCK/TPCK) is critical in the integration of technology in education.

Lux, N. J. (2010). Assessing Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section A, 71(12), (AAT 3430401).

Abstract: Building on Shulman’s (1986) theory of pedagogical content knowledge that outlines distinct domains of teacher knowledge, technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) has emerged as a framework for examining educational technology training in teacher preparation (Koehler & Mishra, 2008; Neiss, 2008; Shin, Koehler, Mishra, Schmidt, Baran, & Thompson, 2009). The research presented here examines the theoretical basis of TPACK and describes the process of developing the Pre-service Teacher – Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge Survey (PT-TPACK Survey). The PT-TPACK Survey is an instrument constructed to measure self-perceptions of TPACK in pre-service teachers completing a “Foundations of Educational Technology Course”. The research focused on collecting evidence for the validity and reliability of the PT-TPACK survey. A pilot study, understandability study, and expert review were conducted in early stages of the research. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and reliability measures were analyzed after the survey was administered to 120 pre-service teachers. The factor structure suggests a superior model fit, as did the goodness-of-fit indices. The root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) was equal to .013, and both the comparative fit index (CFI) and non-normed fit index (NNFI) were ? .90 (CFI=1.0, NNFI=1.0). Internal consistency between the individual factors was also strong. The resulting coefficient alpha statistics suggest instrument reliability (TPACK, ?=.903; TPK, ?=.844; PK, ?=.771; CK, ?=.774; TK, ?=.747; PCK, ?=.653). Six of the seven widely accepted hypothesized TPACK dimensions emerged in the factor structure. Technological content knowledge (TCK) was the only hypothesized dimension that did not emerge. Finally, this study recommends several reasons for the lack of the TCK dimension, some of which could have an impact on how teachers are trained to use technology.

Plair, S. K. (2010). On becoming technology fluent: Digital classrooms and middle aged teachers. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section A, 72(01), (AAT 3435097).

Abstract: This dissertation, organized in chapter format, is comprised of a collection of case studies designed to explain why some teachers are not prepared to meet the challenges of the National Education Technology Plan despite the pervasive evidence of technology in our personal and professional lives. The first case study is the personal history of one teacher who “battles the machine” and is reluctant to alter what works in her current practice. The next chapter is a multiple case study that examines the issues and challenges experienced teachers faced in their efforts to become more fluent in the use of educational technology. Using an extensive technology related professional development event as an intervention, the study explores teachers’ use of technology before and after the inservice, the role of professional development in building technology skills, and matters related to the sustainability of skills. Teachers stressed the need for ongoing support in the form of a knowledge broker to assure continued efficacy and proficiency while integrating technology into their content and their practice. The fourth chapter, after a five year lapse, revisits two teachers from the previous multiple case study and introduces a new tech savvy teacher who shares her experiences as a new integrator of technology. Self report is used to examine the issues and challenges these experienced teachers faced in their efforts to become more fluent in the use of educational technology. The teachers in this multiple case study participated in a number of technology related professional development interventions over a period of approximately four years. This chapter includes their reflections on the successes and failures as they continue to grapple with the challenges of increasing their technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge or TPACK and create change in their practice. Included is an essay presenting a proposal for a framework of five phases of professional development to support the federal government policies of No Child Left Behind and the National Education Technology Plan. The framework is upheld by five principles of professional development considered crucial for effectively changing teacher practice to incorporate instructional technology into the curriculum. By superimposing these principles: duration, content, active learning, and collaboration, this essay then positions technology related professional development as ongoing with the support of professional learning communities or networks and knowledge brokers as a means of sustaining and expanding the efforts teachers make toward technology fluency. The concluding chapter discusses how education systems constrain teachers’ effort or ability to changes. Recommendations are provided on how relations among teachers and institutions might be reconfigured to promote more and better professional learning and practice in technology.

(The following dissertation may be the first that was based upon Mishra & Koehler’s conceptualization of TPACK. We found it recently.)

Youmans, M. J. (2006). When, where, how, and why Berkshire County high school teachers use the Internet for teaching and learning. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section A, 67(10), (AAT 3238849).

Abstract: This study draws on both quantitative and qualitative data collected from public and private high school teachers in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, to describe their current uses of, beliefs about, and knowledge base surrounding the Internet for teaching and learning. An underlying assumption of this study is that before the outcomes of teachers’ uses of the Internet can be addressed, there must first be a clear understanding of how teachers are actually using it for preparation, instruction, and student-directed work. 142 teachers responded to a survey about their most prevalent uses of the Internet, as well as their perceptions about both its value and the obstacles that prevent its effective deployment. Nine participants were chosen from six of the schools to provide richer detail and further examples of major trends discovered in the survey data. The grounded theory, complementary methods study elicited themes that suggest how and why the preponderance of the participants are currently using the Internet to inform and enrich their professional practice and suggest a new domain of teacher knowledge, namely technological pedagogical content knowledge. Key factors influencing teachers’ decisions about Internet use include their perceptions about its importance for teaching and learning as well as about the obstacles it poses. The study is significant both in adding to the current knowledge of how some teachers are using the Internet to enhance their craft, offering a methodological lens supporting a multiple measures approach to assessing and understanding teachers’ use of technology, and developing a theoretical framework for understanding the particular kind of knowledge Internet-using educators possess. It closes by suggesting a fruitful area for future research and professional development lies in helping teachers build their technological pedagogical content knowledge.

5. Other TPACK Resources
Tae Shin, Punya Mishra, and Matt Koehler at Michigan State University have spent considerable time and effort putting together a TPACK bibliography with about 250 entries – as Matt says, “not by any means complete, but a good start…and the most comprehensive TPACK bibliography out there” – and are hoping that their work might be of use to others.

http://mkoehler.educ.msu.edu/tpack/partial-bibliography-of-tpack-related-works/

http://www.mendeley.com/groups/522011/tpack/papers/

On the recommendation of the members of SITE’s TPACK SIG, we have established four TPACK-related email discussion lists:

• tpack.research
• tpack.teaching
• tpack.grants
• tpack.future

Instructions for how to subscribe to these lists are on the SITE TPACK SIG’s Web page: http://site.aace.org/sigs/tpack-sig.htm. (Please note that we will soon be retiring the TPACK Google Group, also in accordance with the decision made at the 2010 TPACK SIG meeting.)

Matt Koehler has posted an online version of the popular “TPACK Game,” which was created originally for use at the 2007 National Educational Technology Leadership Symposium in Washington, DC (USA). There are multiple versions of the TPACK Game circulating at present, including: Karen Richardson’s version (see new articles, above), Petra Fisser’s version (in Dutch), Michael Porter’s version, and the original version played at NTLS 2007.

Jordy Whitrmer at the Birmington Covington School, in the Birmingham Public Schools in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, USA, created a TPACK WebQuest. Jordy says, “This WebQuest is designed to first familiarize you with the TPaCK framework, then to examine and discuss examples that combine the three bases to different degrees and success, and finally to help you define the areas of interplay in your own words.” http://ignite.wikis.birmingham.k12.mi.us/TPaCK+WebQuest

Students at Michigan State University have written and filmed a clever TPACK Rap: “Jamie has a nightmare involving TPACK chasing her around the campus of Rouen Business School.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEj9eA49dzU

6. TPACK at Upcoming Conferences

We’re happy to report that there will be 51 TPACK-based sessions at the SITE 2011 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, Tuesday, Monday, March 7 through Friday, March 11, 2011. We will be sending a list of each and all of these sessions in a special “TPACK Conference Edition” of the TPACK Newsletter late next week to assist your conference planning.

We’re also happy to report that there will be 12 TPACK-focuses sessions at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, Friday, April 8 through Tuesday, April 12, 2011. We will include specific information about these sessions in the upcoming special conference edition of this newsletter, too.

The Call for Participation in the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)’s annual conference (Sunday, June 26 – Wednesday, June 29, 2011 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA) specifically requested presentations that address educators’ TPACK by saying:

“We are looking for:

• Content that increases both the technical knowledge and the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) of educators and teacher candidates, as well as the leadership skills of students and educators
• Systems, models, promising practices, and strategies for achieving digital-age learning in formal and informal learning environments, face to face and virtual
• Models of how to achieve the NETS and examples of the NETS in action
• Technical content that is appropriate for all levels of expertise, from beginner to advanced”

The next issue of this TPACK Newsletter will provide specific information about the 6 TPACK-based sessions that are scheduled for presentation at the ISTE conference, too.

7. TPACK Work in ProgressAt National-Louis University in Chicago (with additional campuses in Wisconsin and Florida), a TPACK faculty development project is in its third year. Funded by a grant from the Senate Faculty Development Committee (with additional funds from each department, plus the deans of the Colleges of Education and Arts and Sciences), the NLU TPACK project helps small communities of inquiry to identify shared needs, garner resources and training, and develop technology-enhanced lesson plans and units, including projects to enhance the professional development of NLU faculty and adjunct instructors. The TPACK concept serves as the conceptual framework for the project, helping teams to focus on the intersections of technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge. For more information, please contact Craig A. Cunningham, a member of the Technology in Education faculty, at craig.cunningham@nl.edu.

8. Other Types of TPACKOur online searches have surfaced TPCK/TPACK in both pharmacology and business, in addition to education.

TPCK is also an acronym for “Tosyl phenylalanyl chloromethyl ketone:”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tosyl_phenylalanyl_chloromethyl_ketone.PNG

(TPCK diagram)

http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?doi=71466&hl=1&q=tpck (How TPCK protects injured brains in baby rats)

TPACK is also the name of a telecommunications company in Denmark:

“Since 2001, TPACK has been providing some of the world’s largest telecommunication equipment manufacturers with leading edge technology and solutions for efficient packet transport. Specifically, TPACK provides the chip solutions and the supporting software that implement the intelligence in telecom systems. TPACK’s experience and expertise in both data and telecom networks has proven to be decisive in TPACK’s success to date.”

http://www.tpack.com/about-tpack/company-overview.html

The TPACK company was acquired by Applied Micro in summer/fall 2010:

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/preview/phoenix.zhtml?c=78121&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1473624&highlight=tpack

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:

• Visit and contribute to the TPACK wiki at: http://tpack.org/

• Join the TPACK SIG at: http://site.aace.org/sigs/tpack-sig.htm

• Subscribe to the tpack.research, tpack.teaching, tpack.grants and/or tpack.future discussion lists at: http://site.aace.org/sigs/tpack-sig.htm

• Access the TPACK Learning Activity Types at: http://activitytypes.wmwikis.net/

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).

If you have a news item that you would like to contribute to the newsletter, send it along to: tpack.news.editors@wm.edu

Standard End-Matter If you have questions, suggestions, or comments about the newsletter, please send those to tpack.news.editors@wm.edu. If you are subscribed to the tpack.news email list, and — even after reviewing this impressive publication — you prefer not to continue to receive the fruits of our labors, please send a blank email message to sympa@lists.wm.edu, with the following text in the subject line: unsubscribe tpack.news

- Judi & Mark

…

for the SITE TPACK SIG leadership:

Judi Harris, Co-Chair, College of William & Mary

Mark Hofer, Co-Chair, College of William & Mary

Mario Kelly, Futon, Hunter College

Matt Koehler, Chaise Lounge, Michigan State University Punya Mishra, Recliner, Michigan State University

I am heading off to India tomorrow and will be gone for approximately two weeks. The main reason for this trip is to attend the International Conference on Indian Education: The Positive Turmoil in New Delhi. I am scheduled to present and act as a resource person for a Round Table on Reforms in Teacher Education. I think this will be an extremely interesting conference and I look forward to learning a lot, as well as getting to meet some interesting people.

I will also be going to  Bangalore to meet with people at the Azim Premji Foundation (I had blogged about a recent visit by the CEO’s the Foundation here, and you can find out more about what they do in this news story). We are putting the final touches on a collaboration between the College of Education at Michigan State with the upcoming Azim Premji University. This is an exciting new initiative for the Foundation and I am glad that we (here at MSU) can be a part of it.

I am headed to Drexel University to give a talk at the Drexel Learning Games Network seminar series. The DLGN is the brainchild of  Aroutis Foster, former graduate student, now rising star academic and researcher. As the DLGN website says

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.

The seminar series (titled: Digital Games: Teaching, Learning and Assessment Seminar Series) is a set of four lectures by invited faculty. Others who are speaking through the series (that started back in November 2010 and will continue till May of this year) include such luminaries such as Chris Dede,Harvard University; David Williamson Shaffer, University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Eric Klopfer, MIT. What am amazing group of people to be associated with!

I am not primarily a games and learning scholar, though I have done some work in this area, usually collaboratively with people like Carrie Heeter, Brian Winn over in the college of communication arts and sciences, Ron Rosenberg in engineering, and of course, with Aroutis Foster. In this talk, I am hoping to make some connections between my TPACK work and the idea of learning from games. Let us see…

I have been told that the session will be recorded and made available on the web. I will of course post it here, when I get a chance.

Leigh Wolf pointed me to an fantastic resource for teachers and educators interested in learning more about TPACK. These are a series of online interactive webinars titled TPACK Fridays and are organized by the Powerful Learning Practice (plpnetwork.com). What is great about this series of webinars is that they are presented, not by academics like me, but rather by teachers and educators who are at the forefront of innovative pedagogy and technology integration. These events are called TPACK Fridays and are “a series of action packed sessions that unpack secondary and elementary lesson plans that use TPACK strategies.” These sessions typically take place on Fridays through Elluminate, and best of all are archived online for all to see.

There have been six sessions now, all of which are available for viewing. The next one is scheduled for the 28th of January – you can visit the site or follow on twitter (#plptpack).

Incidentally, if you don’t know about the PLP Network, I recommend clicking on the link (whether or not TPACK is your cup of tea). Founded by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and WIll Richardson the PLP Network (quoting from the website):

… offers a unique opportunity for educators to participate in a long-term, job-embedded professional development program that immerses them in 21st Century learning environments. The PLP model is currently enabling thousands of educators around the country to experience the transformative potential of the social Web to build global learning communities and re-envision their own personal learning practice.

What is not to like!

Back in 2009, Judi Harris, Matt Koehler and I published in a piece in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education. That article has now been included in a book, titled: Considerations on Technology & Teachers: The Best of JRTE, edited by Lynne Schrum, and published by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).

Here’s a link to the table of contents [pdf] as well as to the introduction and the first chapter [pdf].

Our original chapter and abstract is as follows.

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. [pdf]

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.

I had previously posted about it here.

Kristen Kereluik, Matt Koehler and I just published an article in The California Reader: A publication of the California Reading Association. The complete citation and abstract is as follows:

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.

Just before the Thanksgiving break, the College of Education and Michigan State University had the opportunity to host Dilleep Ranjekar and Anurag Behar, Co-CEO’s of the Azim Premji Foundation.  The Azim Premji Foundation is a not-for-profit organization with a vision to “significantly contribute to achieve quality universal education that facilitates a just, equitable and humane society.”  Operational since 2001, the APF employs over 200 professionals and 1000 paid volunteers in realizing this vision for elementary education in India. APF is currently engaged with over 2.5 million children, in 20,000 schools in partnership with 13 Indian States. The work of the foundation has been characterized by a strong emphasis on systemic reform of Indian education at all levels.

Anurag Behar	Dileep Ranjekar

I met Dileep (and other members of the foundation) a couple of years ago, when I was in Bangalore for a conference (see here). Ever since then, I have been working on developing a partnership between MSU and the foundation. There have been visits by people from the foundation to East Lansing, as well as visits by us to the foundation offices in Bangalore. The recent visit by Ranjekar and Behar coincides with an important new initiative started by the foundation.

As a critical component of the Foundation’s strategy, Azim Premji University has emerged as an institution for learning and research in education and relevant development domains. Its focus is to develop education capacity and foster the development of professionals who are committed to social change. Working closely with the Foundation’s other education and development programs, the University seeks to significantly strengthen the connection between theory and practice. Key foci include: (a) Preparing a large number of committed education and development professionals who can significantly contribute to meeting the needs of the country; and (b) Building new knowledge in the areas of education and development through establishing a very strong link between theory and practice.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Dubberly Design Office has created a series of models of innovation, play and design. These are terrific resources and I just found out about them by chance. I see these as being quite significant in the classes I teach, including CEP817: Learning Technology by Design; CEP818: Creativity in Teaching and Learning; and CEP917: Knowledge Media Design.

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.

I spent a two days a couple of weeks ago with the faculty and leadership of Bloomfield Hills School District. The first day was a workshop on teaching, technology and creativity with the faculty of Model High School and Bowers Academy. Leigh and I had been invited there by Bill Boyle, the principal (read his blog). We spent the day exploring ideas of TPACK and creativity and it was great fun (see poems and images below).

Two days later I was back again, this time invited by the district Superintendent, Rob Glass, working with the entire school leadership on issues related to social media and what it means for schools and school districts. The morning was led of by Social Media guru, Shel Holtz, who talked about how social media was transforming the world of work and learning. [You can download his presentation here, though I must say that it is a 175MB download.] Building on Shel’s presentation I facilitated a series of brainstorming activities with all the administrators about specific things they could do in their schools and classrooms to meet these challenges. At the end of the day we had a series of key action items (short term and long term) for a range of different contexts.

All in all it was an extremely productive and fun day.

I am including below some of the stuff that emerged out of that meeting. The first is a slideshow of photographs from these two days.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

And of course whenever I do a workshop on creativity can bad poetry be far behind? So here are some of the poems (and a rap song!) that emerged from the first workshop on creativity.Enjoy.

1.
There once was a professor whose goal

Was to teach that creativity is whole
Effective and new
We’re making a stew
Of technology, content, pedagogy and soul

2
Some teachers on PD
Learned about creativity
They found creative products are new
From our pasts came only a few
for their own students they hope this won’t be

Deanna Vetrnone, Geoffery Parkinson

3.
Whole, roll, jellyroll
Effect, Defect, and reflect
Novel Pavel Datsyuk

Peg Pasternak, Bruce Kezlarian, Cullen Murphy

4.
There once was a girl from Nantucket
Who was so bored she said *@%& it
She developed something N.E.W.
To away her blues
And forever vowed to think outside the bucket

Matt Autha, Rosalie Burnett, Bill Boyle

5. PD Rap

I can’t believe the of change
It makes my brain feel deranged
It has my whole body freakin’
But now I’ll start my creativity tweakin’

Rapping to you in rhyming couplets
Rain my words like drops in a bucket
Like the girl on Nantucket
Who looked around and just said f%$# it

Suffering from deep amnesia
Out of lots of inertia, a little fantasia
While waiting for lunch from La Marsa.
Thinking about the old days
With nostalgia.

When we had pencils and chalk
Things moved slow
Now we start to balk
But it’s go go go
But no we know technology’s just a tool
We’ll keep up, won’t be no fool
And our whole school will rule!

Camille Dempsey, a professional development consultant in instructional technology, education, arts and leadership as well as a doctoral candidate in in the Leadership and Instructional Technology Program at Duquesne University has been ” investigating TPACK in conjunction with IT & visual art” and shared a recent presentation she and her colleague made at the Pennsylvania Art Education Association Conference.

Dempsey, J. C. & Linaberger, M. (2010, October). Art in the digital garden: Cultivating best practices in technology integration and art. Pennsylvania Art Education Association Conference, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The slides are available at http://artseducator20.wikispaces.com/PAEA+2010

(Note, you may have to scroll down a bit to see the slides).

Dr. Clare Kilbane, Associate Professor at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio recently created an enhanced podcast/vodcast explaining TPACK as a part of an ARRA grant implemented in the state of Ohio last spring. This podcast/vodcast was designed in the style of “podcasts created by Commoncraft (with permission from Lee LeFever of course).”  It now available to view on Vimeo.

TPACK 101 from Clare Kilbane on Vimeo.

Also, students in the Curriculum Design and Educational Innovation program at Twente University have been blogging about their work with TPACK. I was informed of this by my friend Petra Fisser faculty member at Twente University, and the faculty lead on this course. I have had a long relationship with the faculty and students at Twente (see here and here and here). As an extension of this, Petra wanted me to comment on the student blogs – which was difficult given that there were 23(!) of them. What I did instead is read through all of them and send some feedback to the class as a whole. [I have included what I wrote at the end of this posting, just for the record.] I also promised to provide links to their blogs on my site, for other people to read. If you do visit these pages, take a moment to post a comment or a thought. I know it will be greatly appreciated by the students. Here are the links

1. Anand, Gargi
2. Berning, Dorien
3. Birru, Habtamu Haile
4. Donk, van der, Simone
5. Duteweerd, Linda
6. Ebbeler, Johanna
7. Getenet, Seyum
8. Heitink, Maaike
9. Hetjes, Mariëtte
10. Ilsink, Lianne
11. Kemps, Joke
12. Kramer, Marloes
13. Meijer, Nicky
14. Noordink, Marlijne
15. Pattipeilohy, Vascolino
16. Pikaar, Yara
17. Rem, Frank
18. Ruiter, de, Lotte
19. Suhendri, Suhendri
20. Tijhuis, Thomas
21. Veen, van der, Elly
22. Warringa, Gonneke
23. Welsen, van, Jeffrey

Here is the feedback that I sent to the whole class.

Dear friends –

Thank you for inviting me to your class (albeit virtually). When Petra asked me to look over your blogs I said yes enthusiastically, and looked forward to reading and commenting on all of your posts. At that time, however, I did not realize that there were 23 blogs I had promised to look at  and comment on. I have read all the posts but given my busy schedule, I realized it would be impossible to comment on every post and I didn’t want to post on some and not on others, so I decided to write this extended note to all of you.

Reading all your blog posts was great fun. It was good to see all the different yet similar takes on the TPACK framework. Clearly all of you have approached the topic quite thoughtfully and seriously. I was also pleased to see some of the examples you guys provided about examples of TPACK. TPACK has multiple uses, as an analytic framework for researchers (so that they can use it to study actual classrooms and what happens there) but as importantly as a tool for defining a better kind of practice. This is why the examples, the mindmaps, the images, the cartoons, all were great for me to see and read. In fact for most of the blogs I went ahead and read the posts about flexibility and pedagogy as well. So I got a great introduction to the course, though in a backward sequence (TPACK followed by pedagogy followed by Flexibility).

I think this idea of placing flexibility first in the sequence was a great one because it introduced you to what I think is the most crucial aspect of the TPACK framework – the idea that one can start with any of the three knowledge bases and still end up with an integrated curriculum design. And this requires flexibility, since once you include a new pedagogy in your thinking it will necessarily change how you think of how content is to be represented and what technologies can best do that. So what is important here is the end goal – that of integration rather than how you get there.

One misconception that seemed to see had to do with the conceptualization of TCK. TCK is often described/defined as or ability to match the technology to the subject matter content to achieve specific subject matter goals or learning outcomes. Though that is not wrong it is misses an important point regarding how technology (historically speaking) has shaped and changed the representations and cognitions in the disciplines. Be it physics or chemistry, art or music, new technologies have provided new ways of understanding and new ways of representing these understandings. Think of how the advent of fMRI, eye tracker technology, PET have led to flowering of the field we now called neuroscience! Thus TCK is more than the matching it is also understanding how technologies have changed content over time and this is important for teachers to know.

That’s all for now. I have truly enjoyed reading your blogs and I wish I had the time to post comments to each of you individually. I am writing this to you from 30,000 feet above sea level, from an airplane, as I fly from Detroit to Las Vegas for a conference. How awesome can technology be!

Another final piece of advice (or suggestion) is that each of you continue to maintain your blog. I have found writing to be the best way of thinking – often I don’t know what I think about a particular topic till I start writing a blog post about it. Suddenly things that seemed clear become vague and things that I hadn’t given much thought to come to the forefront. The discipline of writing and articulating what you are thinking (for a real audience) on a regular basis is a wonderful cognitive tool to have. I have been blogging for a couple of years now and frankly I blog not for any body else (I mean I love it when people comment on my posts) but that is not the reason I blog.  I sincerely hope that these beginning steps that are taking in this new medium will not stop once the class if over and that your posts will not depend on an assignment given to you by a professor but rather will emerge from your own thinking and experience. And that will be awesome.

Thank you for listening to me and I look forward to future interactions, hopefully in Enschede sometime soon.

sincerely ~ punya

I was recently invited to present a keynote address at the 21st Century Instructional Technology Conference (titled Elements of Technology) at the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Nevada. Clark County is the 5th largest school district in the country with over 300,000 students and it was a great privilege to be invited to present there. I was invited there by the Instructional Technology Department (led by Loretta Asay) and my contact person was Project Facilitator, Sherwood Jones. They are a great group of people and I truly had a wonderful time there.

Apart from the Keynote I also conducted a workshop on Creativity and Teaching with Technology. I had anticipated having around 25 people for the workshop but the room was overflowing (at least 15 more than I had anticipated). That did throw a few kinks into my routine but nothing that was unsurmountable. I am sharing below some of the things that people created during this two hour workshop.

I explained my idea of a creative idea or product as being Novel, Effective and Whole (the so called New NEW)! This led Terra Graves, Thomasina Rose and Kristina Ernest to create this acrostic poem.

New
Organic
Visual
Engaging
Longevity

Educational
Fun
Freedom
Everyone
Creativity
Teachers
Innovative
Variety
Enthusiasm

Winning
Holistic
Outside the Box
Learning
Exciting

Here are a few more from Lisa Widmer, Katie Jones, Brent Mesenburg and Robert Jackson

The first two are limericks that summarize some of the things we had talked about in the first half of the workshop.

Creativity is our goal
Make it Novel Effective and Whole
When in doubt
Turn it about
And satisfy your soul

A second, funnier, version is as follows:

Creativity is our goal
Make it Novel Effective and Whole
When in doubt
Don’t Freak out
It’s quite alright if you stole

The same team wrote another poem, synthesizing some of the ideas we played with in the second half of the workshop.

Being creative is like heaven
Mimic the great Magellan
And fear not missteps
Just use the five steps
And crank that knob to eleven

The “crank the knob to eleven” of course being a response to the (in)famous scene from This is Final Tap.

A couple of other pieces that emerged from this team (can you tell this was a prolific group) was the quote:

“Tweak it to Teach it”

Somewhat along the same lines was Patrick Whitehead who suggested the following two:

Thinking is tweaking your mind

Think better… TWEAK your mind!

Apart from this display of verbal dexterity, the participants also completed a “letter search” task where they looked for letter that spell out the word “Relax, Repose, Reteach.” I had done a similar activity with students in our MAET program a year ago in Plymouth. Essentially what I did was create a somewhat awkward problem scenario the solution to which were the words Relax, Repose, Reteach. So these were the letters students searched for… and this is what they came up with.

Now for the twist! As it turns out one of the themes of the keynote (and the workshop) were the three words “Explore, Create, Share.” Students watched each of the three videos that we had created (see them here) as well as the mashup that had inspired us to begin with (see the original and the mashup here).

What the students didn’t know was that the three words (Relax, Repose, Reteach) could be rearranged to read… (surprise, surprise) the words Create, Explore, Share!! Here is what that looks like…

I must give a shout-out to High School Freshman Bryan Jones who I “volunteered” to help me out. He had a tough job, collecting all the pictures since there were multiple cameras (from regular digital cameras to iPhones), missing cables, a mac that was running Windows (which mean iPhoto wouldn’t cooperate)… and he had to pull everything together in around 25 minutes while the workshop was still going on… And he managed it without fuss and stress. Thanks!

Finally, we all watched the new Steven Johnson video “Where good ideas come from” and created demotivational posters based on what they heard and saw. Below is the video (just in case you haven’t seen it already) and below that the posters the students created.

Choose Wisely Patrick Whitehead Tim Hart	Innovation Karen Decker Terry Ector	Don’t Worry Michael C. Gregory
This is a hunch Thomasina Rose Kristina Ernest Terra Graves	Ideas Brandi Mizner Beth Pearson Holly Marich Laurie Koelliker Gary Eisnor	Creativity? Roger Mayo Matt Keener

As you can imagine this was a hectic workshop for all of us. We covered a lot of ground and the participants also created some interesting artifacts that can have a life beyond the immediate workshop. What fun!

The triplet ambigrams keep flying in. This new one came in an email from Chunlei Zhang, a faculty member at East China Normal University, having received his Ph.D. in Curriculum & Teaching from Beijing Normal University. He was inspired after reading my previous blog post (here and here) to make his own design. And being a serious educator he focused on three words that all instructional designers need to keep in mind – Content, Students and Objectives. Which naturally meant that his triplet ambigram was devoted to C, S & O! Check it out below…

A few weeks ago I had shared a few triplet-ambigrams I had designed. For the uninitiated a triplet ambigram is a 3-d shape that cast different, and interesting, shadows depending on where you shine light on it. For instance here’s a triplet ambigram that casts three different shadows that read A, B & C!

Yesterday I received an email from Alex Ruthman, a self-proclaimed regular reader of this blog who had been inspired to create his own triplet ambigrams. Alex is a music educator and researcher at UMass Lowell with an interest in creativity, music technology, web 2.0 and learner agency (see his home page here). Now, Alex has taken the design of such triplets to their next logical level. He does not just prototype them on paper, he designs them in Google Sketchup and then 3D prints them in plastic! Here is a photo he sent to me…

As you can see this shape casts the shadows of L, P & C (depending on where light shines on it). What is more, Alex does not just do this for fun. He has actually found an use for it in his teaching. As he said in his email:

I use these with my music education methods and research courses illustrating multiple perspectives and three modes of engaging with music: listening, performing and creating.

How cool is that!

Back in March of this year, Joel Colbert (friend and former chair of the AACTE Innovation and Technology Committee) spent a few hours working together on a document that AACTE was going to put out. Yesterday, at the meeting of the NTLS meeting in Washington DC, I found out that the report is out. You can find the report titled 21st Century Knowledge and Skills in Educator Preparation. This eschoolnews article will also tell you more: Groups urge updates to teacher preparation programs. As the article says:

The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) are calling on teacher education programs to update their curricula to better prepare future teachers to integrate 21st-century skills into their instruction.

The groups released a paper on Sept. 23 seeking to establish a shared vision for infusing digital-age knowledge and skills into teacher preparation programs and spark a meaningful discussion among higher-education leaders about how to implement this vision.

I have mixed feelings about this report – even though I am thanked at the end (along with other members of the Innovation & Technology Committee). I saw my task as being taking a document that already existed and ensure that some of the key work done by the committee (such as the work around TPACK and the handbook) would be addressed in the report. So it was a task circumscribed and limited in critical ways. As some of my other writing (here on the blog and at other venues) suggests, I have a somewhat different perspective on what we mean by 21st Century Skills (starting even with my dislike of that term) and what it would even mean…  but that is neither here nor there. The report is here, take a look, and let me know what you think.

I have always been interested in what lies at the intersection of science and art. There are of course many different ways of looking at this. There is the idea of scientific creativity being both similar to and different from artistic creativity. And then there is the idea of artistically representing scientific ideas. I have written about this elsewhere in the context of poetry (both scientific poetry / sci-po or mathematical poetry / math-po). I have also argued that this process of “translation” from one medium to another is a very powerful way of both understanding the issues at hand but could also be an interesting teaching tool. For instance see these sci-po’s written by Sean Nash’s students. As I had said before, echoing Sean, in the context of writing a mathematical proof in verse (click here if you are interested), this act of writing a poem about mathematics forces you to truly and deeply understand the idea before you can start playing with it.

Such artistic representations of science can also be a powerful tool for outreach – to communicate often abstruse and complex ideas to a wider audience. One of the best approaches that has received some attention in the past years is Dance your Ph.D. As the Science Mag website says

The dreaded question. “So, what’s your Ph.D. research about?” You could bore them with an explanation. Or you could dance.

That’s the idea behind “Dance Your Ph.D.” Over the past 3 years, scientists from around the world have teamed up to create dance videos based on their graduate research. This year’s contest, launched in June by Science, received 45 brave submissions.

Today, judges—including scientists, choreographers, and past winners—announced the finalists in four categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences. Each receives $500.

Click here to see and vote for the finalists.

Shelly Blake-Plock over at TeachPaperLess has a great post about homework and how it can be structured to act as a “cliffhanger.” As he says:

These days, the homework I give isn’t based on some arbitrary idea of how much work a kid should do ‘at home’ to reinforce something we did in class, but rather it’s a matter of asking the students to do something necessary to prepare themselves for the next class. Homework becomes an act of preparation — and hopefully sparks some anticipation not for seeing what you ‘got right or wrong’, not for seeing if you can jump through that next hoop, but anticipationfor taking part in the next day’s discussion, activities, and learning.

I want homework to be a cliffhanger. I want it to be the device at the end of the chapter of every thriller that won’t let you put the book down until you’ve read the whole thing.

What a cool idea. This makes homework which is often quite predictable into something postdictable (See my previous posts here, here and here). The idea of postdictable is “something that is surprising initially, but then understandable with a bit of thought. I quoted Daniel T. Willingham who said:

… interest is engendered by an appraisal process: that is, a process by which we evaluate the potential interest of something before we delve into it. If we perceive an event to be novel and complex, but also comprehensible, we find it intriguing and worthy of continued thought. Tasks that lack complexity seem too easy. Tasks that lack comprehensibility seem too hard.

It seems to me that this perception of homework by TeachPaperLess is exactly that. It lies at the sweet spot between order and chaos, understandability and incomprehension. Homework then becomes a way to get students to confront new ideas, to prepare the mind to engage with learning. It is forward-looking in the best sense of the word. Again surf over to his site and read the whole article: Homework, from Chills to Thrills.

A véjà du experience is about looking at a familiar situation but with fresh eyes, as if you’ve never seen it before. It forms the basis of an assignment I give in my CEP818, Creativity in Teaching & Learning course. The assignment is described in greater detail here, but the core idea is to take multiple photographs of some everyday object in such a way that the viewer cannot easily determine what the object is! More here.

Today, I spent some time with my kids re-doing the assignment. My son suggested taking pictures of his X-Box 360 but we finally went with an object selected by my daughter. Here are the pictures. What do you think it is?

There have been various descriptions of the TPACK game… some of which I have written about earlier.

• The first instance is something Judi Harris, Matt and I used at the 2007 NTLS meeting at Washington DC. You can find out more about it here.
• Second, is a submission by Karen Richardson from Virginia, written up in the February 09 TPACK newsletter.
• And earlier this year, I had blogged about a game developed by the Littleton School District in Colorado.

Finally, Matt Koehler has mocked up a version of the game online. He created it for the EPET Hybrid PhD program he was teaching this summer. Though he isn’t sure the game is really ready for “prime-time” he does have it available on his website. Check it out: The TPACK Game, Matt Koehler version. The instructions are simple:

In the TPACK Game, you consider how Technology (T), Pedagogy (P), and Content (C) work together by randomly choosing two of the three (C, P, and T), and thinking deeply to find the third that makes them all work together in a pedagogically sound way to teach the content.

Enjoy.

I just discovered (H/T Daily Dish) Matt Might’s website and his writings on graduate school, academia, and the professoriate. Matt is funny, cogent and most importantly insightful. I recommend his writing to anybody who is interested in getting into graduate school, or is currently in a graduate/Ph.D. program. Despite the fact that Matt is in the sciences, what he writes is quite applicable to graduate students in the social sciences and fields such as education. Here are links to some of his more interesting pieces:

• The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
  • This is absolutely a brilliant visual argument. A must read for any serious scholar.
• Recommended reading for grad students.
  • A useful set of resources. My list (or yours) may be different but that’s not the point.
• 3 qualities of successful Ph.D. students
  • Among other things, this piece contains a key survival strategy, one that I often used when I felt my Ph.D. wasn’t moving along.

“Whenever I felt depressed in grad school–when I worried I wasn’t going to finish my Ph.D.–I looked at the people dumber than me finishing theirs, and I would think to myself, if that idiot can get a Ph.D., dammit, so can I.“

• A Ph.D. thesis proposal is a contract
  • Addresses a key misconception most doctoral students have, i.e. Students tend to invert the importance of the proposal and the defense: they see the proposal as the formality and the defense as the challenge.

There are many more such nuggets on his site. Explore at your leisure…

I recently (through the magic of Twitter) found out about an initiative New Literacies Teacher Leader Institute 2010. This institute was organized by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education, the New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut, and the New Literacies Collabortive at the Friday Institute, (part of NC State University’s College of Education). They recently conducted a week long institute in Cambridge, MA from June 20 – 25 for approximately “130 teachers, and 10 Teacher Leaders, from across Massachusetts … to learn from leaders in the field of new literacies and engage in project-based inquiry to create curriculum units based on the MA Curriculum Frameworks.”

As a part of this was a GotTPACK 2010 session organized by Julie Coiro. Of most interest to me, and possibly to others following this blog, is the section titled “Applying TPACK Principles to Learning Projects” where participants are asked to review a selected list of projects. These projects range across content areas (from mathematics to science, from literature to history/language arts) and across grade levels (elementary to high school). Finally, the participants are asked to “work in their groups to apply TPACK guidelines” to answer the following questions:

How well does each represent a project designed by teachers who understand the dynamics of TPACK? How might you improve or adapt these projects to better reflect the TPACK principles?

It seems to me that this is a great way of thinking and learning about TPACK. By grounding it in specific examples the somewhat abstract ideas of the intersecting knowledge bases of TPACK can be specifically connected to actual projects and implementations. Moreover the open-ended task of asking participants to improve or adapt these projects prevents them from seeing these projects in some ways as being perfect or as an examples of best practice. (My concern with the whole idea of  “best practice”, as opposed to Pretty Good Practice, can be found here).

This project seems to me to complement the work being done by Charles Graham and his colleagues over at Brigham Young which I had written about earlier (see here).

A few weeks ago I posted a note about an assignment I gave my students in the on-campus version of the MAET program. They had completed an unit on motivation and had watched the RSA / Daniel Pink video and their task was was to create demotivational posters, (along the lines of those on despair.com) using ideas either from their readings/discussions or from the Pink video.

The posters were a huge success. In fact Daniel Pink tweeted them (Thanks Daniel) and lots of his followers ended up on my website to see the work done by the students, which is all very cool.

Well, I am now in Rouen, France, meeting with the students in the off-campus MAET program. I got a chance to work with each of the groups (representing year 1, 2 & 3) and had them create similar posters as well. So now we have a total of 17(!) posters. It is interesting to see just how different they are, even the ones that tackle the same concept do it differently.

I have included all of the posters below  — the one’s from East Lansing as well as the one’s created here at Rouen. Click on the words to see the posters (the names of the students who created them is provided below each of the posters).

Incentives Scot Acre Patrick Gillespie Marc Compton Shawn Telford	Individuality Kerry Guiliano Aaron Moran Mike Bammer Julie Howe Addy Hamilton	Motivation Barb Bedford Cheryl Schaefer Hope Andres Stacey Schuh	Rewards Grace Bammer Mary Wever Jessica Steffel Sarah Blazo	Curiosity Craig McMichael Chloe Tingley Lial Miller Katie Lorey
Teamwork Melanie Hosbach Fiona Scott Andrew Melmoth	Rewards 2 Sarah Pickles Katie Shefren Joost Guttinger Renee Codsi	Mastery Theresa Hamilton Larissa Lisayo Miguel Herrera	Dreams Cheytoria Hickey Bridget Reed	Grades Kristi Dix Patricia Liff Rugh Gadson Olivia Shillings
Autonomy Frances Snowden, Jessica Maisonnave, Andrea Ouimetto	Mastery2 Paul Blackwell, Brigette Jensen, Candace Marcotte	Collaboration Bill Marland, Christina Popowski, Jillian Johnson, Jamie Perry	Creativity John Hogan Michelle Cox Sean Sweeny Rehb Rajab Alfred McDonnel	Financial Incentives Dean Halverson Ashley Priem Shaza Ahmed Lauren Cortesi Camiella Hudson
	Material Incentives Rawad Bon Hamadan Jason Shulha Eliza Mantyh Patty Kolinski	Motivation 2 Bossel Deiry Susie Dina JP Bennett Kelly Cunningham Kristin Bergeron

The TPACK Radio/Video show that we had created for ISTE is now available on Vimeo. I think this version is easier to embed and view (as opposed to a 21MB download, as it was the previous time around).

TPACK Radio/Video Show ISTE 2010 from Punya Mishra on Vimeo.

A fake radio/video show created for ISTE2010 by Punya Mishra with Matt Koehler (and a bunch of other people who are thanked in the video). We were asked to create a video for ISTE, a conference that neither of us (Punya or Matt) could attend. Our goal was to create an engaging 15 minute video that would convey our ideas about technology integration in teaching, specifically the TPACK framework. The entire thing (including the two Mastercard & UPS commercials) was scripted, shot and edited over 4 days. More details (and credits here)

Here is the second of the two commercials created specially for our ISTE Radio/Video show. The first one (a take-off on the UPS/Whiteboard commercials can be seen here). Enjoy. As always, the director’s commentary is provided below.

The backstory: I have, for many years now, wanted to create a short video along the lines of the Mastercard “Priceless” commercials. I have had many different ideas, but never really got a chance to do so. So when I came up with the idea of the Radio/Video show for ISTE, I decided this was the time to go do it.

The activity shown here (with tennis balls, flip cams, markers and transparencies) is one that I have actually done multiple times, in venues around the world. This is a simple activity that exposes a fundamental misconception people have about how objects fall. The question I ask is where the tennis ball would fall if dropped by someone in three different conditions: standing still, walking or running. Most people say that the ball would fall at the feet in the first case (right answer), and behind the person in the other two cases (wrong answer). It turns out that the ball always falls at the feet of the person – assuming, of course, that the person keeps moving at the same speed after letting go of the ball. Why the ball does so has to do with Newton’s First Law, something many people can recite back to you, even while getting this question wrong.

After I get all the responses (and it is always amazing to me just how many people get it wrong), I ask people to go and create a video of the actual experiment. I typically give them 45 minutes to an hour to do the entire thing. There is something to be said for being able to see what “really” happens, to go frame-by-frame through it. It better than any physics lesson, this activity exposes people to just how wrong their intuitions were.

There are many layers to this assignment. In some cases I have had people tape a transparency sheet to their computer screens and then track the parabolic path of the ball. You can go ahead and measure the height of the person’s hand knowing the frame-rate of the video, actually calculate the value of g, acceleration due to gravity.

Anyway, that assignment became the core idea behind the video. The entire commercial was shot, narrated and edited one Sunday afternoon. I got a group of my daughter’s friends together and we shot the still frames of them dropping the ball and shooting the video. The script was narrated by my son. Despite multiple takes he could not correctly pronounce the word “pedagogy” so tweaked the script to drop that particular word (which of course meant that Technology and Content were out as well!). The tag line “There is some knowledge you are born with, for everything else there’s TPACK” emerged out a conversation with Matt Koehler.

See the Whiteboard/UPS commercial or the entire ISTE10, Radio/Video Show.

Our ISTE Radio/Video show needed a few commercials to break the monotony – so we created a couple. Here is the first one, a take on the UPS / Whiteboard commercials. Watch and enjoy (director’s commentary provided below).

The idea for this video came from my wife, Smita. I was talking with her about possible commercials to spoof, and that we needed something that people would recognize right away. She suggested the UPS-whiteboard commercials and bingo! I knew this was the one. A bit of doodling on paper and watching some of the original commercials on YouTube later, the strong resemblance between the UPS logo and the intersection of the three circles (that make up TPACK) struck me. And, as they say, the rest just fell into place. One of the things nice about the UPS commercials is the manner in which the “long-haired guy” changes the image with little moves here and there. I think our version does the same, at two different levels. The first is the manner in which the seeming UPS logo is shown to really be the crucial meeting point of the three circles, and then, at the very end, how the color of the marker changes from green to red! Tiny touches but they make all the difference, if you ask me.

The star of the commercial is Mete Akcaoglu, a doctoral student in our program, selected for his hair (we needed someone with longer hair to correspond with the star of the actual commercials), his “cool” Turkish accent, and his acting ability. Essentially what happened was that Mete just happened to walk by my office and got immediately “volunteered” to be the star. Not that he had much choice I do think he did a great job.

We checked out a variety of places with whiteboards (meeting rooms etc.) but all of them had some problem or the other (excessive glare, strange reflections, and inadequate lighting). Finally, Leigh Wolf was gracious enough to lend us her office (even though, I am sure, it was a huge distraction). The commercial was filmed with a Flip camera and edited with iMovie. Matt Koehler found us the right music – and 20 minutes later, we had a final version.

You can see the commercial in “context” by going directly to the ISTE10 TPACK radio/video show, but be prepared to spend 15 minutes on the entire program.

My daughter on her blog has a new poem / haiku called Sweat, a haiku with one glich. She is in India right now where the temperatures are easily in the 90′s – which I guess explains the genesis of the poem. What was more interesting, to me however, was the manner in which she, quite instinctively, breaks up a word in the poem. Interestingly, she regards that as a “glich!”

Here is the poem.

Sweat

Sticky, icky, ew!
I wipe it off, and it trick-
les, right back again!

“trick-”

“-les”

down the page. Reminds me of one of my favorite poets, e.e.cummings and how he plays with words. For instance here is a poem by him

l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness

It takes a bit of effort to read but it is worth it. With some thought you will see that in the parenthesis is the phrase “a leaf falls,” broken up so that it runs down the page, rather than across it. So instead of “a leaf falls” you read

(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)

Of course breaking it all up forces you (the reader) to read the lines in slow-motion, with pauses as it were. Also the shape of the letters comes through now as do the alliterative / symmetric “le” “ll” and “af” “fa” sounds. There is a visual and audio pattern here… a verbo-visual pun maybe. Sort of what Shreya did with the word “trickles.”

But there is more…

Outside the parenthesis is the word “loneliness” broken up so that you can see the words “one” sandwiched between two “L’s.” The “L” is written in lower-case, which again makes it look like the number “1″ or capital “I.”

l
one
l
iness

So the repetition of the idea of “one” or “I” (once as “one” and twice as the number or the “I”) emphasizes the solitary nature of this experience. It could be 1 leaf falling, or one person watching one leaf fall… And all the pieces come together to set up a sad mood of one lonely person watching one leaf fall

How clever of mr. cummings. And how cool that Shreya, discovered something similar in breaking up “trickles” into two parts, showing how the sweat actually

“trick -

- les”

down.

To me it is an indication of her increasing comfort with language. It is only when we are comfortable with the rules that we start to break them, and it is there that true creativity and one’s one “writerly” voice emerges. So I would argue, despite Shreya’s thinking that it is a glitch, that it is not. It actually her noticing a pattern, imposed on her by the syllable count required by the Haiku structure itself, and then using that constraint for a creative purpose.

As for the mis-spelling of “glich” – I hope she doesn’t correct it. Because the poem now does have one glitch, the mis-spelling of the word “glitch.” How self-referential!!

All in all, what a wonderful way to begin a Sunday, reflecting on creativity and writing, inspired by a poem written by 11 year old Shreya. How very cool!!

I just spent a day at MICDS in St. Louis talking with a small but select group of teachers about creativity in teaching, the role of big ideas, the meaning of TPACK, the importance of trans-disciplinary learning (among other things). What a wonderful way of spending the day! This visit was organized by Elizabeth Helfant at MICDS. Apart from the workshop, it was also wonderful to finally meet up with Mr. Nashworld, Sean Nash himself. Sean and I have been blogging buddies for a while now and it was great to finally meet up with him.

As a part of our activities today I had all the participants crate i-Images. I have written about i-Images on this blog before (see here and here).

i-Images are the brainchild of David Wong and you can find his page on i-Images here.

Anyway, here are some of the i-Images created today. I do think they are pretty cool and thought provoking, each in its own way. Click on the images below to see what the workshop participants created. Enjoy.

Kristine M Kamper	Lynn Mittler	Chris Rappleye	Stephanie Madlinger
Lisa Huxley	Sean Nash	Sean Nash	Sean Nash

I have never been able to make to the ISTE (formerly NECC) conference since it falls bang in the middle of my summer teaching. This year was no exception. The only problem is that, this year, Matt and I had been invited to a special forum by SIGTE (titled “Considering the “C” in TPACK: Curriculum-based Technology Integration”) neither of us could be there. (Bummer!) So instead, we were asked to make video!

The idea of a 15 minute video of the two of us speaking into a camera was not very appealing… So we did something different. Doing something different was appropriate given our interest in creativity and the fact that our talk was about TPACK! So 4 days and untold hours of work later, here is the video that was presented at ISTE. [Halfway through this I realized that it may have taken less time to have just flown to Denver and made our presentation!]

I should also take moment to thank Sarah McPherson, New York Institute of Technology, for organizing the session and the rest of the panelists (Glen Bull, Judi Harris, Ann Thompson and Denise Schmidt) for their support. Ann Thompson and Denise Schmidt deserve a special thanks for stepping in at the last minute to cover for Matt and me.

Thanks also to Leigh Wolf for narrating and hosting the radio show, and providing her office to shoot the UPS commercial; Mete Akcaoglu for starring in the faux-UPS commercial; Soham Mishra for narrating the faux-Mastercard commercial and Shreya Mishra and her friends for starring in it.

Just a warning, the video is 15 minutes long and a 21 MB download.

I have been a big fan of Despair.com and its quirky, dark humor. I particularly love the demotivational posters, with their beautiful inspiring photographs coupled with some deeply cynical or depressing message.

Today students in my MAET summer program completed a unit on motivation. They read the standard Ed Psych motivational literature (Dweck etc.) and also watched the RSA / Daniel Pink video (that I had linked to here). And then, they created a series of demotivational posters. These posters were created in Google Presentation, with images from Flickr and most importantly they had to use their ideas from either the readings or from the Pink video. [Incidentally the video was not created by Daniel Pink, nor by RSA, but rather by Cognitive Media.]

Here is what they came up with, click on the words to see the posters. The names of the students who created them is provided below the titles.

Incentives Scot Acre Patrick Gillespie Marc Compton Shawn Telford	Individuality Kerry Guiliano Aaron Moran Mike Bammer Julie Howe Addy Hamilton	Motivation Barb Bedford Cheryl Schaefer Hope Andres Stacey Schuh	Rewards Grace Bammer Mary Wever Jessica Steffel Sarah Blazo	Curiosity Craig McMichael Chloe Tingley Lial Miller Katie Lorey