Punya Mishra’s Web

Our very own Leigh Wolf is quoted in a story in today’s State News. Check out, Education unlocked: MSU professors use open courseware to provide class materials for students

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?)

Read the rest of this entry »

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.]

Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Ambinder at the Politics blog at the Atlantic

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.

Patrick Diemer commented on my previous posting, All you can cheat, the web & learning by saying:

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 »

Now here’s an important story coming out of Denmark: Students in Denmark Allowed Full Access to the Internet During Exams

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

How does technology change what we do? Often when a new technology appears we tend to see it in terms of existing practices and structures. So an e-book is the same as a book, except in digital format. E-books still have “pages” which we “turn” (with a flick or our finger or if you are stuck with the Kindle, by pressing a button), though digitality does not require pages or turning them. Similarly the design of most early online courses attempted to replicate face-to-face modes of teaching (capturing lectures through video, for instance), instead of pushing for exploring the possibilities of this new medium. This is often most obvious in the kinds of iconography that new technologies generate. So the icon for Microsoft Word document looks like a piece of printed paper, an email-box looks like a regular mailbox (think AOL and its “You’ve got mail” message) and so on.

However, new technologies do not just replicate what we could do before – they insidiously and fundamentally change the nature of the tasks we perform. Think of the idea of hyperlinks! Regular texts go hypertextual through developments like the table of contents, indices etc. however, these are weak attempts at best. True hypertext emerges only through digitality.

I was reminded of this when reading a recent NYTimes article on video bingo and the controversies it is causing in Alabama. The article begins by describing traditional bingo:

Everybody knows what this is: dozens of people, mostly retirees, hunched over paper grids in a smoke-filled American Legion hall on a Sunday evening listening eagerly to a woman recite numbers.

Now we have a new player on the block, video bingo! which is described as follows:

But what about this: a dim warehouse of flashing, jingling video terminals with names like Boomtown Bonanza where, early on a weekday morning, people sit on stools pushing buttons and watching cherries and 7s reel by.

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.


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


Gratuitous Quote about Technology

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

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

0. In this issue (You are here.)

1. Recent TPACK Articles
 
2. TPACK-in-a-text(book)
 3. (Sort of) Recent TPACK Articles

 4. Recent TPACK Presentations

 5. TPACK Podcasts

 6. TPACK Research in Progress

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

1. Recent TPACK Articles

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. (Sort of) Recent TPACK Articles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Recent TPACK Presentations

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

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

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

• Teresa Foulger and Maureen Gerard (Arizona State University) presented the results of their study, “Making the Ideal Real: Reciprocal Mentoring and Technology in Preservice Education.” A .pdf of their paper is

  available online for your perusal.

• Judi Harris and Mark Hofer presented a Spotlight Session entitled, “Developing TPACK: Teachers’ Technology Integration Knowledge in Action.”
  A video of that presentation is
  available online, as well as the slides that they used (.mov

  file) during the talk.

• A sold-out workshop, “School 2.0 and Understanding by Design,”
  presented by Chris O’Neal and Donna Herold, was co-sponsored by ISTE, ASCD,
  the Central Susquehanna Intermediate School District and the US Department
  of Education. Punya noted in his blog that the talk tied together UbD ideas

  with TPACK (starting at about 14:50) in an interesting way. A recording of the workshop is
  archived for viewing.

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

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

5. TPACK Podcasts

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

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

6. TPACK Research in Progress

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

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

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

7. TPACK Professional Development

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

8. Recently Completed TPACK-based Dissertations & Theses

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Learning and Doing More with TPACK


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

• Visit and contribute to the TPACK wiki
  at: http://tpack.org/
• Join the TPACK SIG at: http://site.aace.org/sigs/tpack-sig.htm
• Join and contribute to the TPACK Google group at: http://groups.google.com/group/tpack/
• Review and provide feedback on 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, please send it to: tpack.news.editors@wm.edu 



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



- Judi, Matt, Mario, and Punya



Judi Harris,                   Chair, College of William & Mary

Matt Koehler,               Vice-Chair, Michigan State University

Mario Kelly,                 Futon, Hunter College

Punya Mishra,              Recliner, Michigan State University

From my end of the university as we know it series, here is another article, this time from The Washington Monthly, titled College for $99 a Month: The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities. Here are some key quotes but the article is worth reading in full. [H/T Daily Dish]

[T]he day is coming—sooner than many people think—when a great deal of money is going to abruptly melt out of the higher education system, just as it has in scores of other industries that traffic in information that is now far cheaper and more easily accessible than it has ever been before. Much of that money will end up in the pockets of students in the form of lower prices, a boon and a necessity in a time when higher education is the key to prosperity. Colleges will specialize where they have comparative advantage, rather than trying to be all things to all people. A lot of silly, too-expensive things—vainglorious building projects, money-sucking sports programs, tenured professors who contribute little in the way of teaching or research—will fade from memory, and won’t be missed.

But other parts of those institutions will be threatened too—vital parts that support local communities and legitimate scholarship, that make the world a more enlightened, richer place to live. Just as the world needs the foreign bureaus that newspapers are rapidly shutting down, it needs quirky small university presses, Mughal textile historians, and people who are paid to think deep, economically unproductive thoughts. Rather than hiding within the conglomerate, each unbundled part of the university will have to find new ways to stand alone. There is an unstable, treacherous future ahead for institutions that have been comfortable for a long time. Like it or not, that’s the higher education world to come.

Zephyr Teachout (supposedly an associate law professor at Fordham University, a writer, and an online entrepreneur) has a great article on bigmoney.com, titled Welcome to Yahoo! U: The Web will dismember universities, just like newspapers.

His essential argument is that under the assault of new technologies, mainly the rise of online learning, the business model that sustained U.S. colleges can’t survive. [He restricts his comments to just private colleges and universities, but given the condition of state funding, I see the points he is making relevant to all universities and colleges, private and public.]

He paints a bleak picture of the future college/university, saying

When this happens—be it in 10 years or 20—we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now. It will mean fewer professors and worse pay; low-paid, untenured faculty will do much of the teaching. Online instructors are already joining freelance reporters in the underpaid, insecure, overeducated work force that works from home. The market will encourage this trend. The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabi and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.

Most of the points he makes are not not new – they have been made in the past by others (I have had a couple of posts about these issues as well). However, there is one new idea that I had not fully thought about, and that has to do with the idea of college aggregators. Making an analogy with news aggregators that are pushing traditional news organizations towards demise, he argues that the future will see the rise of college aggregators.

Taking the newspaper analogy one step further, I would venture that college aggregators will be the hub of the new school experience. In the world of news, the aggregators (Google News, Yahoo News, blogs) have taken over from the physical—and virtual—newspaper as the entry point for news consumption. Already, half of college graduates attend more than one school before graduation. Soon, you’ll see more Web sites that make it easy to take classes from a blend of different universities, mixing and matching parts of a degree and helping to navigate the different institutional requirements. Already you can go to Web sites like http://www.bachelorsdegreeonline.com or www.EducationDegreeSource.com to learn about possible online-only degrees. Or you can go to the University of North Carolina’s Web portal to find classes around the state, some online, some offline. These are crude beginnings—like the news listservs of 1996. Soon, aggregators will combine and repackage not just courses, but the modules inside courses. Hourlong sessions will be remixed for different classes: That one hour on the French Revolution is good for both French History and for the History of Revolutions class.

The age of the educational mashup is here!!

He ends with a plea, that I would strong endorse:

But unless we make a strong commitment to even greater funding of higher education, the institutions that have allowed for academic freedom, communal learning, unpressured research, and intellectual risk-taking are themselves at risk. If the mainstream of “college teaching” becomes a set of atomistic, underpaid adjuncts whose wares are sold by barkers in the subway, we’ll lose a precious academic tradition that is not easily replaced.

Josh Dean writes about his experience with learning from freely available curricula on the Web. What does that mean, How Much Can You Really Learn With a Free Online Education?. The article also has a set of links to such curricula that are available on the web.

I was reading the final papers written by participants in my CEP 817, Learning Technology by Design seminar and came across this quote by Clement Mok in a paper written by Breanne Edmonds. I wanted to record it for future reference:

Design means being good, not just looking good — Clement Mok

One of the many things I have to do as a faculty member is review grant proposals. This is an important service to the field, but truth be told, given how busy I am I do see it as somewhat of a chore. I was recently reviewing some educational research proposals for a grant giving agency – and I was struck by something that led to this post. (I guess, it is less of a chore if it leads to a blog-post!).

I must say, without giving too much away, that these proposals were broadly related to education and not restricted to just the field of educational technology. That said there were two that were directly technology related, one having to do with virtual partners and the other with webbased learning. It is not surprising that these two would focus on technology directly.

What was surprising however was just how infused with technology all the other projects were. In each of these “non-tech” proposals various forms of technology were used for every aspect of the research from the kinds of information being collected, to how the information was collected; from how the informaiton was analyzed to how it would be reported and disseminated. For instance, there were studies on probing athletes cognition using fFMRI technologies, and another on collabrating across continents using webcams. There was one study that handed student-teachers Flip cameras to help them create digital stories, and subscriptions to surveymonkey or specialized statistical analysis packages!

What this shows clearly is just how fundamentally how we conduct research (in the field of education) has changed with these new digital technologies. And it has changed not in some flashy “pay attention to me, I’m so cool!” kind of a way but in a more insidious and sneaky manner (but no less revolutionary for that). These technologies have become transparent to the researchers – and are just seen as being part of what they do. Now I am sure this is not something unique to education. This is happening in each and every discipline from astronomy to zoology. What this means is that our disciplinary relationship to the world is now mediated through these new tools and devices.
Read the rest of this entry »

I am in Chicago to give the Keynote address at the 2009 DePaul University Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference. The conference theme this year is Engaging Minds: Pedagogy and Personalism. I was invited by Sharon Guan (she was part of the AACTE Innovation & Technology Committee that edited the TPACK handbook). The title of my talk is Blurring the Boundaries, The Personal and the Professional in a Webbed World. Here is a brief description of what I will be talking about

Dr. Punya Mishra of Michigan State University asks DePaul faculty to consider the role of the professor’s identity (or persona) in course design. What are the challenges, benefits –and limits — of bringing personal experiences, values and interests into one’s teaching? We want our students to see us as “being knowledgeable yet accessible, wise but funny, cerebral but warm, benevolent and yet firm.” How can we do this in an age where we are increasingly communicating via electronic media that alter, extend and/or challenge the teacher’s identity?

I try to be scrupulous about giving credit where it is due and yet I messed up big time. This happened over a year ago and to my dismay I did not think about it or realize it till this moment.

A year or so ago we received the 2008 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards Competition for our course TE150: Reflections on Learning. In my first blog posting on this I tried to give credit to each and every person who had worked on the design of this course… and guess what I missed one of the most important people who had helped us get started: Ken Dirkin.

If this had been anybody other than Ken I think I would not feel as bad. Ken, you see, is the most amazing guy. Ken is always been available, whether in thinking of TE150, or the design of this website, or any of the classes I have taught. He is way more than the typical technology person. He is a film-maker, designer, and all around smart guy. He has a wonderful sense of the potentials of technology, a keen taste in design and a wicked sense of humor. I have felt comfortable calling him at home, at any odd hour, for any technical problems I face. And he has always stepped up, above and beyond the call of duty (in fact I think that all the help he provides is outside his immediate official responsibilities). Most importantly I consider him a friend. And then to completely forget his contribution… How could I do that!

To say that I feel terrible for this lapse is an understatement.

In the case of TE150, Ken was the guy who helped us make concrete some of our initial thoughts and visions. He was the person who suggested we use Moodle, helped set it up, created the specs for our server and in many, many ways helped make this course a reality. To have forgotten to thank him, official is a terrible lapse on my part. (I take little solace from the fact that Matt Koehler, my partner in crime, seemed to have made the same mistake.)

It is too late now to go back and place his name on the official list, but I have changed our original posting to add his name at the rightful place.

I hope have learned something from this. I know Matt and I have received a great many accolades for the work we do. It is easy for us to forget just how many people have helped make all this possible.

Ken, this is my public apology for having missed your contribution to TE150. I am truly sorry. I know this may be a case of too little, too late… but again better late than never. Thank you and I owe you one (actually a lot). Big time.

Noah Ullman just forwarded me this story in the The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Professor encourages students to pass notes during class via twitter. It is amazing to me that this merited being called news. If you have been following this blog you know that this is something I have been playing with for a while (in fact based on a suggestion made by Noah). For the record, here are some links to what I had written: Microblogging in the classroom & Microblogging in the classroom II. In fact one of my students even tried it out in an undergraduate course he was teaching that semester.

I see this as a way of fruitfully utilizing the fact that all my students bring laptops to the classroom (something I have written about here and here)… seems a better solution than having them just check email or update their Facebook status

It seems to me that the story didn’t speak to one critical aspect of micro-blogging, how is the twitter feed brought back into the classroom discussion. The problem is that the microblogging tends to exist in a separate “space” from what the class is doing – and coming up with strategies for integrating these two spaces (the face to face AND the microblogging) is what is key. Finding the right balance is is something we struggled with in our experiments. One thing we learned, no big surprise here, is that context matters. A tool that works one way in a doctoral seminar with a dozen or so participants works very differently in an undergraduate class with twice that number of students.

Figuring out the parameters within which these new technologies and tools can be used is what we need to pay attention to. More often than not the discussion is restricted to the “tool” not its pedagogic application. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the comments that follow the Chronicle article. Take a look at them, they tend to follow the time honored rules of talking at cross purposes, with some of the silly comments that, sadly, characterize internet discourse.

Sean Nash over at Nashworld asked me to guest blog for this week while he is out with his students doing some really cool stuff.

Here is a link to my posting: A TPACK video mashup!.

I end the post with a couple of videos, one a commercial and the other my mashup response to it. You can see the videos in context on Nashworld or just see them in isolation here. It does make sense to see them in the sequence below.

Here is the original commercial:

And my response:

Enjoy.

Just got the news from Carrie Albin, Outreach Coordinator of our Educational Technology Certificate Program (which is part of our Master’s in Educational Technology program) that our CEP810 (Teaching for Understanding with Computers) course earned first place in the 2009 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards Fully Online Competition. As the initial email said, “The judges were very impressed by the integration of a portfolio system with rubrics.” Congratulations to Carrie and the entire team!

Side note: TE150, Reflections on Learning, a fully online course that Matt Koehler & I have been involved with (along with group of talented graduate students) had received the same award a year ago. Click here for details.

The CITE Journal had a recent special issue devoted to TPACK. You can access the special issue (edited by Judi Harris and Matt Koehler) here or individual articles below.
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I have come across some new TPACK related videos/podcasts (either on youtube or elsewhere) that I feel may be worth sharing.
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I presented yesterday at a conference a Wake Forest University titled: Creativity: Worlds in the Making. I was part of a panel that included Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein and Todd Siler. More details about the panel and links to my presentation can be found below.
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I received an email yesterday from the State News (our local university newspaper) about what I thought of the 60 second lecture—a trend sweeping through online courses. Some of my first thoughts about this are below. Read the rest of this entry »

I am off to Charleston, SC for the SITE 2009 conference. . I can’t believe it has been a year since Matt Koehler and I presented our Keynote. I am sending this note sitting in the Michigan Flyer bus (making good use of their free wi-fi) and am looking forward to a good conference.

I am involved with four different papers at this conference (details below) well as a few other meetings. I will try keep the blog up to date with the happenings. For now here are the titles and abstracts of the four paper accepted for presentation.
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I had written about the EduPunk program and my natural affinity to it here. What I forgot to add in that posting was an EduPunk logo I had created. This logo was made using photos of letterforms from Flickr. There is a handy-dandy tool created by Erik Kastner called Spell with Flickr that I used to create this. Here it is.

Matt Koehler introduce me to the idea of edupunk. As this Chronicle story (Frustrated With Corporate Course-Management Systems, Some Professors Go ‘Edupunk’) says,

Edupunk seems to be a reaction against the rise of course-managements systems, which offer cookie-cutter tools that can make every course Web site look the same.

As with any neologism, there are as many meanings as there are users… here are some links if you want to learn more. First the post that introduced Edupunk to the world, and a couple more that attempt to explain its intricacies, here and here. [Note, this is not a comprehensive or even most important set of links on this topic, just what a few minutes with Google revealed to me.]

Now, the idea behind EduPunk, as Mike Caulfield describes it, “with its implication of technical accessibility, a DIY ethic, quick and dirty over grand design, and a suspicion of corporate appropriation” appeals to me a lot. It is something that Matt and I have been arguing and implementing for a while now, though of course we didn’t call it EduPunk. We often said that our course websites worked through a strange combination of “Duct Tape and Magic”. Read the rest of this entry »

Terri Gustafson has created streaming downloads of the presentation recently made by the TE150 (Reflections on Teaching, Reflections on Learning) Online team (see this for more context). The video can be seen in two parts:
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The entire TE150 team joined together to make a presentation to the College today as a part of the Online Teaching and Learning Colloquia. These sessions are sponsored by the MA-APPC, Center for Teaching and Technology, and the Center for the Scholarship of Teaching. Read the rest of this entry »

Leigh Wolf forwarded me a link to a video commercial with the subject line saying “this is a very intriguing commercial.” Of course I took a look at it right away and it was an ad for Kaplan U (on their website) … and according to Smita it has been receiving TV time as well. The original (whatever that means in a digital world) can be found here or see the Youtube version below:

Now I watched the video and I was impressed. I have thought similar things often, and sometimes have even said them (maybe even on this very blog). Moreover, this is a well made video, impressive production values, a very nice voice, beautiful people set to nice mood music… but by the time I reached the end of the commercial, something just didn’t feel right.
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Matt Koehler and I just completed a talk on TPACK and online learning for the Faculty Seminars in Instructional Technology. The Faculty Seminars are a semi-annual two-day series of short courses for faculty who want to learn about using technology in instruction. There are usually about 25 short courses that cover things like how to use the components of Microsoft Office, a variety of ANGEL courses, creating podcasts, using Camtasia, Dreamweaver, etc., and web site design. The faculty who sign up (about 500 enrollments last time through) are invited to a “free” lunch during which we offer a presentation on some aspect of using technology in instruction.

Since there is no such thing as a free lunch, the participants got to hear us expound our ideas. We did something different this time, with both Matt and I presenting. Typically one of us gets to speak and the other takes questions but in this instance, Matt went first and I followed and we tried to get Byron Brown (the guy who had invited us to this session) to answer questions. Not much luck with that

A pdf of the presentation can be found here.