Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

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…

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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. 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.

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Robin Revette Fowler sent me a message on Facebook regarding my recent posting(s) about moving from incompetence to mastery (see the two previous posts here and here). She took issue with my idea that mastery requires some kind of meta-level, self-awareness. She said

It seems like the issue is with either the meaning of “mastery” or perhaps with the types of skills you’re talking about.

Conscious/unconscious knowledge is especially interesting to me re: linguistics. Most native speakers have only unconscious competence of their language– I used to hear Writing Center tutors telling ESL students, “you need an ‘a’ here; I don’t know why” all the time. Many NNSs, on the other hand, have much stronger conscious competence– they often know “rules” about how to use determiners much better than Native English speakers, for example. At the same time, I’m not sure they would be said to have “mastery.”

And I don’t know that the conscious competence is the important thing here. Would you argue that only linguists who can describe their determiner choices have “mastery” of English grammar?

At first blush Robin seems to be making a good point. Do writers need to know how and why they do what they do they do as long as they get it right? There is a surface plausibility to the argument but I am not sure that it stands muster if we dig deeper.
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Ken Friedman, whose article I had used as the basis of my previous posting, From incompetence to mastery, the stages dropped me an email in response to my critique. To provide some context, (you can read my full post here) I had suggested in my posting that it may be inappropriate to label the the highest level of mastery as being unconscious competence. My concern, of course, was with the “unconscious” part – since I felt that true mastery requires a level of reflection, something denied by the word “unconscious.”

Ken wrote that he actually sees examples of unconscious competence everywhere. He went on to say (quoted with permission) Read the rest of this entry »

One who knows and knows he knows is a wise man, Follow Him
One who knows and knows not he knows is asleep, Awaken him
One who knows not and knows he knows not is a child, Teach him
One who knows not and knows not he knows not is a Fool, Avoid him.
– Attributed variously to Confucius, Socrates and others

I was reminded of this quote while reading an article by Ken Friedman titled, Design Science and Design Education and came across a section that described a view of learning. Friedman describes a framework on going from incompetence in a domain to mastery in the same domain. More specifically, Skoe talks of this process as having four key stages. These four stages are: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence. Here is Friedman:
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In a couple of previous posts I had talked about the idea of postdiction (see the posts here and here). The argument being that good teaching (among a long list of other good things) is postdictable, i.e. it walks the line between predictability and chaos, and most importantly makes sense post hoc. To make my point I had posted a couple of videos that were good examples of being postdictable.

Closely connected to the idea of postdictable is the idea of creating anticipation and suspense. Once again other artists (particularly those working in temporal media such as film, and advertising) seem to have grasped the importance of this earlier than educators. Good film-makers can create suspense out of pretty much the flimsiest of materials. Think of the first scenes from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. The way the scene builds tension out of a disagreement over whether or not to tip is pitch perfect. There is more tension in that scene than in dozens of other “suspense” thrillers.

However making suspense work is difficult. Navigating this line between predictability and tension over the unknown is a fine art. (This is where, of course, the connection with postdictability becomes most clear.)

Check out the two videos below, which highlight just how fine the line is between succeeding at creating suspense and anticipation and failing to do so. Both of these videos are interesting and well made – both have pace and rhythm but one of them builds anticipation while the other just happens. One tells a story, the other doesn’t.
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I had written earlier about the idea of “postdictable” which was defined as something that is “surprising initially, but then understandable with a bit of thought.” It lies at the spot between predictability and total chaos. The movie Sixth Sense is postdictable in the best sense of the world. Good teaching I believe needs to be postdictable. That is what keeps us engaged, keeps us waiting for more, the payoff as it were. And best of all, once all the pieces are in, we can’t wait to go back and review everything again, to see just how beautifully the whole thing holds together. There is a strong aesthetic component to this – a sense of wholeness, closure, elegance, and inevitability. Good poems have this quality, as do mathematical theorems. A well crafted lecture or a lesson plan has this quality as well. In my mind these ideas are closely tied to the Dewey’s idea of experience and to the idea of design. Hopefully I will have a chance to explore these connections in a later post but for now, here are a couple of commercials that I think were postdictable in a really cool kind of way.
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Shreya, my daughter has a blog, Uniquely Mine. An RSS feed from her blog can be found right here (just scroll down and see the right column). Anyway, over the past few weeks she has been doing something for extra credit for the science class. Her fifth-grade teacher has asked all students to find stories related to science in the newspaper, create a short writeup about it to share with the other children. I asked her to add another layer of challenge to that. Once she has her report all typed up, she needs to write a short poem about it and post it to her blog.

I asked her to do this partly because I was concerned that she would not be able to keep up her blog once school started. As most people she was very excited to have a blog and wrote a bunch of stuff for it in the beginning. Then life began to take over and her postings grew few and far in between. What was needed, I figured, was a way to keep her writing regularly. So this idea of piggybacking on something she was already doing. The poems she writes are often short and it didn’t seem like much of an imposition to ask her to write little poems based on the science articles she has been finding for her school report.

Well, so far so good. She has a quite a bit of writing (mostly poems) in a genre we have decided to call Sci-Po a.k.a. Scientific Poems! (It’s a obvious ripp-off on the term Sci-Fi). It has also been a lot of fun.

When we first set up the blog, I advised her to not allow commenting. I was not sure what kinds of comments she would generate and it just seemed as if we were asking for trouble (especially exposing a 10 year old to the kind of junk that is prevalent on the Internet). However, after much consideration we finally decided to open up her site and allow people to comment. So if you read this blog, click over to her site and drop her a note. Please, remember this is a 10 year old so be polite Of course all comments are moderated so I still hope to protect her from some of the nastier aspects of the world (not that I can do that forever but at least I can try).

Anyway, check out her writing. I think you will like it. Here is my favorite. It is a non-sense poem (not a Sci-Po but fun none-the-less) titled, Salt’n Pepa in Santa Fe. Here is is:

Salt’n Pepa in Santa Fe
by Shreya Mishra

Squigles-squagles, pinchley pooh
Slip’n sliding on my shoe
Dimpo-doby dorkly dake
Gently eat the slice of cake
Shickly-bumbly rabbity-red
Back at home, tucked in bed

Leigh Wolf, my partner in crime as far as the MAET program goes, recently presented at Ignite Lansing. She talked about her two passions, teaching and food (not sure which order to place these). Specifically she talked about food photography and the connections she sees between what she does there and her other life as an educator. It is a lovely presentation, and the video is now available on YouTube. Take a look.

I had written recently about TPACK being the top story on eSchoolNews (see TPACK is top story on eSchoolNews or go directly to the article: TPACK explores effective ed-tech integration). What I didn’t realize at that time is that there were actually three stories about TPACK, one in August that I had blogged about and two in Septmber. The two that I had missed were actually more interesting to me personally since they dealt with the manner in which the TPACK framework was actually being used in schools. Both these stories deal with the manner in which the San Diego Unified School District is embracing the idea of TPACK as a key piece of their strategy to transform how their students are taught.

These two other articles (also written by Senior Editor Laura Devaney) are titled (a) San Diego explores effective ed-tech integration through TPACK: New professional development model focuses on the intersection of technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge; and (b) Reinventing education: As schools nationwide examine new federal priorities, San Diego unveils a five-year plan to transform the way students are taught

This news makes me extremely happy, for the simple reason that this means that our ideas have moved beyond graduate school curricula, beyond research articles, beyond doctoral dissertations into actual practice. This is every educational researcher’s dream. Here are some key quotes from these articles.

The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) has embraced a concept called Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) in its professional development model, to ensure that the smart use of technology drives every aspect of classroom teaching and learning.

As technology becomes an increasingly important tool for teaching and learning, this relatively new concept, which focuses on how educators can integrate technology effectively into their instructional practices, is making its way into pre-service and in-service teacher education programs.

TPACK is based on the work of Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler, both associate professors of educational technology in the College of Education at Michigan State University.

Here’s another:

“We worked closely with the [district] Educational Technology department to design a professional development program that is all-encompassing,” LaGace said. “When you look at the TPACK model, it gets around to improving the whole classroom experience. … It puts the focus not on teaching teachers how to turn on a Promethean Activboard, but why to turn it on.”

Why turn it on? What a profound question, and one that hopefully will be asked by every teacher in San Diego.

Can you guess why I love my job?

I am always looking for examples of looking at the world differently – of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. This is of course connected with the veja du assignments I give my students.

I just came across a couple of very interesting video examples of this on the site LikeCOOL. This site has everything from after-office neckties, to inflatable boxing gloves… but in between these crazy things are some cool videos. Here are three (in increasing order of coolness):

I had written earlier about the idea of Jugaad, the quintessential Indian idea of situational creativity. One of the masters at this is Arvind Gupta. Check out his website for tons of wonderful science toys and experiments that can be made from stuff we typically throw away. Very cool and a critical part of the kind of repurposing of artifacts we need for creative teaching.

Throwaway Technology, playful Pedagogy and powerful Content… who says TPACK needs hi-tech!

Via Major Fun (aka Bernie DeKoven) comes Arvind Gupta, winner of the Defender of the Playful Award.

One often hears the criticism that students today don’t know how to write… the part of the blame is placed on technology, on the limitations of texting and twittering! For instance, here are two quotes from a book review TXTNG: THE GR8 DB8 by Marcus Merkmann in the New York Post.

[Texters are] vandals doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbors 800 years ago – John Humphrys, British TV presenter.

Texting is bleak, bald, sad shorthand which masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness – John Sutherland, author

Of course all this is presented with no real data! A contrasting perspective is presented by research conducted by the Stanford Study of Writing project conducted by Andrea Lunsford. Describing this research, Clive Thompson writes in an article in Wired:

technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions…. young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

Well, maybe youth today are writing more, but is it any good? Turns out that college students today are not just producing a greater number of words, but these words are of better quality as well.

Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

There is actually one concern that this research has pointed out, however the accusing finger points not at the students but rather at us, the professors. For today’s students:

… writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

Now this is something to think about…

And finally, what about the pernicious influence of texting on student writing… sadly, no evidence of that could be found!

Glad to put that myth to rest!

Finally, just in case something thinks that this “adult” condemnation of what young people do is something recent… well, turns out there are historical antecedents for that as well. The quotes below are not directly related to the issue of technology and writing, but are revealing about our attitudes all the same.

We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self-control — Words inscribed on a 6,000-year-old Egyptian tomb.

What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them? — Plato, 4th Century BC

The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint … As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behaviour and dress — Peter the Hermit, 1274 AD

As they say, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…. The more things change the more they stay the same

Note: I am not sure the Stanford project looked at the different kinds of media use that students engage in today (photos, video, mashups etc.), because that is a huge part of how the very idea of literacy is being redefined today. I don’t necessarily want to get into that issue here in this post, but is clearly a huge part of the kinds of literacy activities students today are engaged in.

In an age where experts are a dime a dozen, willing to pontificate at the drop of a pin, it is hard to tell whom to believe, and whom NOT to believe. In comes Phillip Tetlock, an academic who has made it his mission to evaluate the prognosticators! This is described in his book:

Tetlock, P.E. (2005). Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know? Princeton: Princeton University Press.

I recently came across a review written by him, titled Reading Tarot on K Street (in the September/October 2009 issue of The National Interest) and I thought it captured his work in this area quite nicely (and would be worth preserving).

When we score the accuracy of thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts across dozens of countries over twenty years, we find the best forecasters tend to be modest about their forecasting skills, eclectic in their ideological and theoretical tastes, and self-critical in their analytical styles.1 Borrowing from philosopher Isaiah Berlin, I call them foxes—experts who know many things and are not finicky about where they get good ideas. Paraphrasing Deng Xiaoping, they do not care if the cat is white or black, only that it catches mice.

Contrast this with what I call hedgehogs—experts who know one big thing from which likely future trends can be more or less directly deduced. The big thing might be any of a variety of theories: Marxist faith in the class struggle as the driver of history or libertarian faith in the self-correcting power of free markets, or a realist faith in balance-of-power politics or an institutionalist faith in the capacity of the international community to make world politics less ruthlessly anarchic, or an eco-doomster faith in the impending apocalypse or a techno-boomster faith in our ability to make cost-effective substitutes for pretty much anything we might run out of.

What experts think—where they fall along the Left-Right spectrum—is a weak predictor of accuracy. But how experts think is a surprisingly consistent predictor. Relative to foxes who are less encumbered by loyalties to an all-encompassing worldview, hedgehogs offer bolder forecasts and, although they hit occasional grand slams, they strike out a lot and wind up with decidedly poorer batting averages.

The implications for people who make projections about technology and schools and learning is quite obvious to me. It is the hedgehogs we need to be careful of, mainly because of the vehemence of their beliefs which can sometimes override our “foxy” nature. I say inherent because I think that educators, for the most part, are pragmatists, sensitive to the limits of arm-chair theorizing and big ideas. A hard nosed approach to reality, that recognizes its complexity, that demands multi-faceted problems solving approaches is what is needed, not being wedded to one, just one overarching idea.

I just ran across this blog (Color Me Katie) that just blew me away. Katie Sokoler is a freelance photographer and street artist living in Brooklyn – and her blog just throbs with life, and energy and the sheer pleasure of living. That’s her down there blowing bubbles (wait till you see the stop-motion animation version of this).

I think she says it best:

It’s important for me to express myself creatively every day. I have all of these fun ideas in my head and if I don’t get them out I’m pretty sure my mind would explode. Realistically, I’d probably just get frustrated and fall asleep. But explosion or no explosion, doing something creative acts as a form of therapy for me. I feel better after taking photographs, making street art, painting, or making wall sized collages. The messier and more sweatier I get, the better I feel.

How cool is that!

Imagine controlling machines, typing text or juggling balls using nothing but the power of thought. What sounds like far-fetched science fiction is gradually becoming possible, providing hope for disabled patients — and new gimmicks for the computer gaming industry. Read more in Playing With Your Head: The Dawning Age of Mind-Reading Machines

What implications do these new technologies have for learning and education? I mean even Mattel is getting into the action… As the article says

The new system Mattel is introducing at computer trade shows is called “Mindflex.” According to the company’s fact sheet: “A true mental marathon, Mindflex exercises the brain in an entirely new way as players learn to continuously control their brain activity.”

So, you ask, how does it work? To train the brain, the user puts on a headband with sensors at the temples and a cable connected to something that looks like a mini miniature golf course. Then the user tries to master the first task: balancing a small ball above an air current, causing it to levitate and making it pass through a plastic ring.

At this time these interfaces work only in one direction, from the brain to the computer. But can the reverse, from computer to the brain be far behind? The power being discussed here is truly revolutionary. We have all known that computers are cognitive tools i.e. working with them changes the way we think. However, at some level changes in brain states are mediated via our senses and through movement, a somewhat inefficient process. What these technologies indicate is the future is in a merging of our brains directly with the computer… where the distinction between us and the machine will be increasingly blurred till we won’t be able to tell one from the other. Imagine having access to Google like search engines whenever a question pops up in our heads? How can we tell where the brain ends and the machine begins?

The NYTimes has a op-ed piece today by Max Blumenthal about an obscure letter Eisenhower wrote to “Robert Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran.” Biggs was worried by ambiguity and uncertainty he seemed to observe in president Eisenhower. He wrote that he:

“felt from your recent speeches the feeling of hedging and a little uncertainty… We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth.”

What is amazing is that Ike took time out to write back to this person and something he wrote, struck a chord with me:

I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed.”

At this time, where people compare anybody that disagrees with them to Hitler, where town-hall meetings are disrupted for political and partisan purposes, where the air waves are jammed with birth-certificate controversies, Ike’s sane and pragmatic voice was wonderful to read. You can read the entire letter here.

Awesome retelling of the old tale… (h/t Steve Dembo @ teach42).

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

As Steve says (you can read his full post here) such remixing can provide interesting opportunities for teachers, particularly given the extremely powerful tools we have access to today. Think for a moment about this video. Constructing it requires, clearly, a knowledge of the technology. This requires some level of effort to acquire but frankly that is not particularly daunting. However this technical knowledge is not enough. To create a piece such as this one, utilizing a variety of narrative devices as well as visual styles and tropes, requires having a sophisticated understanding of visual and cinematic styles, their history and meaning. However, this is not enough either. Most importantly, and possibly hardest to develop, a the soft touch the video show. This is exhibited in the subtle irony and humor and in the fact that the video does not try too hard. This soft touch is the mark of a true artist, a person comfortable in their knowledge, comfortable enough to be willing to play with it, to push it to its limits, and yet, sensitive to not going too far.

Teaching, in my opinion, with our without technology, is similar. One can know the techniques, but that is not enough. One can know their history and how they help make things meaningful. This is valuable but not enough either. It is only when we develop this soft touch, this “feeling for the organism” of teaching that true transformational teaching can occur. This is not easy to achieve – but a goal worthy of aspiring to.

I love how these interconnected pipes called the Intertubes lead to serendipitous discoveries. Here are two videos, the first I went looking for, and the second, fell into my lap, so to speak, due to YouTubes related videos section.

The video I went looking for was based on a delightful book I had picked up at a garage sale a few years ago. “The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics” is a little book (20 pages or so) with an intriguing story-line and its geometrical illustrations. The main character is a straight line who is in love with a dot – but sadly she is more attracted to a wild, unruly squiggle. How the simple line develops his talents and wins the love of the dot is told through whimsical (and mathematically sound) illustrations.

I learned later that the famous animator Chuck Jones had made this into a short film. Here it is (thanks to YouTube).

This is just a wonderful example of how mathematics and art, perception and recognition, creativity and design can come together. This book (and the movie) speak to me at so many different levels. What is most amazing is the ability we humans have to see purpose and meaning in the simplest of lines and curves. So much of art and science depend on this ability to perceive / construct patterns.

Nowhere is this more beautifully (and humorously) illustrated than in this other video I discovered. Written and narrated by Mel Brooks (yes THE Mel Brooks) this animated short film, The Critic, takes a different interpretive stance (crankier and edgier) than the previous narration. That this short animation captures, powerfully how we as humans both seek, and question, the meanings of the patterns we see around us.

I just finished reading parts of Sheri Turkle’s latest book, Simulation and its discontents, and the parallels to what she is writing about and Mel Brook’s Critic are quite strong. The cranky one man in the short recognizes or “sees” meaning is some of the abstract images he sees on the screen and yet he questions their value. The scientists and designers quoted in Turkle’s book echo some of the same concerns.

What is amazing is that the Mel Brooks short was made in 1963, the Chuck Jones movie was made in 1965 and Turkle’s book was published just this year, in 2009!