Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

I have blogged previously about the challenges faced by higher education (here and here), exacerbated (or maybe revealed) by new technologies. Here is an essay by Charles Murray — not a person I thought I would ever cite approvingly
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Just found out about Dimdim (bad name!) from Manas Chakrabarti’s blog, At Any Rate. Dimdim is an opensource, free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees. Hmm… Wonder if I can use this in the creativity course (Mike are you listening?).

During Dr. Jalaluddin’s keynote I took some time to search online for some reports, prompted by what he had been saying. (Yes I was listening not just browsing). Read the rest of this entry »

… or just narrow?

I just discovered Britannica blog, a pretty lively virtual space for intelligent discussion. How I had not come across it earlier is a mystery - but again that is the beauty of the web.

Anyway, there is an ongoing discussion there about how the web influences what we do. A provocative argument (based on data) being put forth by James Evans is regarding the influence of the availability of electronic resources on the research process.
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Patrick Dickson just forwarded me an essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled The Sensuous Classroom: Focusing on the Embodiment of Learning [Subscription required]. In this article Suzanne Kelly, the author, bemoans the absence of the physical body from online classrooms. I beg to differ… Read the rest of this entry »

NYTimes article on how publishers are responding to the advent of peer-to-peer sharing of textbook files. Check out First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.

Just a link to online videos related to design. Check it out by clicking here

Relevant to CEP817 and CEP917 (and maybe even CEP818)

The NYTimes has a story today about how higher prices of gas are driving up the demand for online learning. This is a great example of “synergistic” effects between seemingly disparate events that could not have been easily anticipated - but seem to make perfect sense once they do occur. This is similar to the trend we are seeing at Michigan State as well. Our online master’s program is booming while our face to face, evening classes languish.

What was somewhat bothersome to read in the article were these statements by students that clearly seemed to imply that online was somehow inferior to the “real thing,” face to face. For instance, here’s one: “I don’t feel I get as much out of an online class as a campus course,” Ms. Miller said. “But I couldn’t afford any other decision.” Such sentiments are echoed by a couple of people in the article. Such sentiments are not new. I hear statements like the above quite often. I remember a higher-education delegation from Pakistan I met a few months ago - where the inferiority of online learning was just taken as a matter of fact. Read the rest of this entry »

Reuters story titled Technology reshapes America’s classrooms. Couple of quotes worth noting:

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There have been many requests for the first chapter of the TPACK Handbook (recently published by AACTE & Routledge). Below is the summary and a link to the pdf version.
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A short and sweet trip to Hong Kong, one full day, two nights, fly in fly out. Read the rest of this entry »

Warren Buckleitner, Ph.D., is a graduate of our Ph.D. program. He is editor of Children’s Technology Review, a periodical covering children’s interactive media and founder of Mediatech Foundation, a nonprofit technology center based in New Jersey. He also runs this awesome conference on games and learning called Dust or magic. This much I knew… Read the rest of this entry »

The award ceremony for the 2008 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards was last Friday. I drove back from Purdue in time to be there - mainly because I wanted to hear how people would respond to our faux radio interview Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Koehler and I were asked to create an audio introduction to TE150 for the ATT and MSU award ceremony, and website. It is amazing what three people can do in a couple of hours, given a microphone and Audacity (the open source audio editing software). Read the rest of this entry »

One of the important papers in the TPACK sequence is Koehler & Mishra (2005). In this paper we developed and administered a survey to measure the evolution of TPACK as people engaged in a design task. This research complements our previous empirical work (Koehler, Mishra & Yahya, 2007; Koehler, Mishra, Hersheey & Peruski, 2004) and which was more qualitative in nature. An abstract and link to a pdf version of the paper is given below Read the rest of this entry »

Announcing a new online course for the fall semester 2008:Creativity in teaching and learning Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Koehler and I just arrived in New York, 3 hours late, checked into our hotel, paid 14.95 for internet - and guess what it was all worth it. One of the first emails I had received informed us that we had won the 2008 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards Competition for our course TE150: Reflections on Learning. The award responds “to the growing use of online technologies for instruction” and recognizes “and encourage best practices in the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning.” Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Koehler and I led a session on Technology Integration in Higher Education: Challenges & Opportunities for a day-long symposium titled: Colloquium on the Changing Professoriate. This is how our session was described in the program book/website: Read the rest of this entry »

What happens when an economy “built on selling precious copies” suddenly confronts the world of the Internet - a world based on the “free flow of free copies?” Kevin Kelly confronts this issue in a recent post titled, Better than free. As he says, “how does one make money selling free copies?”

He suggests that we need to look at the issue from the point of view of the user (why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free?) and through this identifies some key qualities that cannot be copied. Read the rest of this entry »