Punya Mishra’s Web

Education is always about leadership and leadership has always been about tensions—navigating through them and seeking to find the right balance between them.  Leaders often feel a tug from individuals with conflicting interests or needs, with ideas that often tug in different directions.  Often these tensions are conceptual and abstract.  Have you ever wondered how could you represent these tensions in a visual way? What would that look like?  We, in the MAET program, set out to find a way to illustrate these conflicting viewpoints.

During the summer MAET courses, students in East Lansing, Michigan and Rouen, France completed a leadership tensions photography activity. Using the cognitive tools of patterning (recognizing, identifying and creating patterns) and embodied thinking (kinesthetic thinking or empathizing), students considered the tensions between seemingly contradictory ideas in education.  Following a small group discussion, the class used patterning to identify common themes and issues, creating a list of tensions that exist in educational leadership.  Each individual then chose one of those tensions and took photographs that visually depicted the tension, using a digital camera and editing software (often freely available software like Pixlr) to combine two or more images into one.  Through the utilization of embodied thinking, students adopted a concept of educational tensions and rendered a physical/kinesthetic illustration of it, using movement, balance, and the body.

Students illustrated a multitude of tensions that leaders in today’s educational world face, including online versus traditional learning, tradition versus innovation, competition versus collaboration, and support versus resistance.  Below are a few examples of student work.

This was an incredibly engaging project, that integrated the key ideas (leadership tensions) that were to be covered, with technology (digital cameras and image editing tools) and the key cognitive tools (of patterning and embodied thinking) in an open-ended and fun way. This is what we call TPACK in action!

If you are interested in exploring more examples of this project, please visit the following links.

• Rouen Leadership Tensions Examples
• East Lansing Leadership Tensions Examples

This morning I was at the doctor’s office and picked up a dated (February, 2011) New Yorker magazine and discovered a great essay by Adam Gopnik: The Information: How the Internet gets inside us. I am not sure how I missed this the first time around but Gopnik does a great job of writing about technology and its influences, under the guise of reviewing a series of recent books about the topic. He is sometimes funny (see his take down of Clay Shirky) and often insightful. I do recommend reading the entire article but here are a couple of quotes, just to give you a sense of his voice. This is how he starts his essay, reminding us just how magical these new technologies are. I am reminded of Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far. Now, having been stuck with the library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. “Why is she doing that?” they whisper. “Why doesn’t she just Google it?

This is how Gopnik describes Clay Shirky:

… the author of “Cognitive Surplus” and many articles and blog posts proclaiming the coming of the digital millennium—is the breeziest and seemingly most self-confident. “Seemingly,” because there is an element of overdone provocation in his stuff (So people aren’t reading Tolstoy? Well, Tolstoy sucks) that suggests something a little nervous going on underneath.

I think this attitude (Tolstoy sucks) is something that has bothered me greatly. Do we have to demean Tolstoy in order to prove the superiority of our new toys? I recently, during a trip to France, re-read (after 30 years or so) Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It took me a while to get used to the rhythms of the language, but once I did, it was a wonderful experience, and brought home to me the beauty of a delicately crafted complex sentence, something I think we may have lost to a certain extent today. Again, just to make it clear, I am not making a Nicholas Carr, “technology is making us shallow” argument here, not the least because I read the book mostly on my iPad / iPhone and I doubt I would have read it otherwise.

Incidentally, Gopnik is as critical of the nay-sayers of today’s technologies. Writers like like Nicholas Carr, William Powers and Sherry Turkle receive their fair share of scorn (though I am not including any more quotes here).

Finally I would like to end with Gopnik’s commentary on how we often see new technologies as both the greatest and the worst things to have happened to us (at least till the next technology comes along).

… at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.

Read the entire essay: The Information: How the Internet gets inside us.

I have, for a long time, been interested in the Droste effect – a “specific kind of recursive picture… [in which] an image exhibiting the Droste effect depicts a smaller version of itself in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. This smaller version then depicts an even smaller version of itself in the same place, and so on” [from Wikipedia]

The effect gets its name from “the image on the tins and boxes of Droste cocoa powder, one of the main Dutch brands, which displayed a nurse carrying a serving tray with a cup of hot chocolate” which in turn repeats the same image (just in small size) and so on… for ever. In fact when I visited the Netherlands a couple of years ago, I made it a point to pick up a box of Droste cocoa power – just so that I could have a box of my own! This is what the box looks like:

Over the years I have tried to play with this but my attempts have been crude at best – more a function of my limited knowledge of Photoshop than anything else. All this changed last Friday, when I found out about the Droste App for the iPhone/iPad. I bought a copy and spent the weekend playing with it. It has been great fun and below are some images I created. Enjoy.

Matt Koehler just created a webpage that tracks the citations of our original TCRecord article, as reported by Google Scholar, in real time. The reference is as follows:

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A new framework for teacher knowledge.Teachers College Record 108 (6), 1017-1054.

You will note that in this paper we call the framework TPCK (not TPACK). That came much later. At this time Google Scholar indicates that there are over 550 citations to this article. Additionally, curve gives no signs of flattening off. It is a cool piece of php programming and makes us feel good too!

I am including a screen shot of chart below, but for the continually updated page you will need to go to Matt’s website.

TPACK is huge in Australia (for instance see this note TPACK underpins Aussie Teacher Ed Restructuring). I am hopeful that one of these days this interest will translate into a trip down-under… It would be great to travel around the continent, giving talks, meeting some cool educators, and maybe even get to see some cricket! How cool would that be.

Now, due to this interest, my TPACK-related Google Alert often provides links to work being done down-under. Recently I was treated to two video mashups based on the SITE2008 Keynote that Matt Koehler and I presented at Las Vegas.

These videos were created by Mike Sisley, at The University of Canberra, as a part of a special focus on TPACK for English, literacy and History. Mike is a TPACK advocate and seeks to create resources for the teachers of the content areas and created these mashups for this purpose. The first has an autotuned version of my voice (!!!) and the second has an original song called the Shulman Shuffle.

For some reason the embed codes don’t seem to work, so you will have to navigate over to Vimeo to watch them. Check out

• TPACK – Refrain: wicked problem
• TPACK: Adaptation of the Shulman Shuffle

What fun!

Pauline Kael is regarded to be one of the best film reviewers to have ever lived. Sam Sacks has a piece on Kael in which he describes her style of film review, one based less on academic nitpicking and the presence (or absence) of directorial flourishes than on her personal aesthetic response to cinema. She is quoted as saying that there is only one rule in filmmaking:

There is only one rule: Astonish us! In all art we look and listen for what we have not experienced quite that way before. We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond in a new way.

I read this quote and immediately realized that this rule applies to teaching as well. I have often described teaching as doing two things – making the strange familiar (an eclipse of the sun is caused by the moon falling into the earth’s shadow) or making the familiar strange (all matter is essentially empty space). What is common is the sense of surprise we experience in both cases.

It appears to me that very often we forget the value of astonishment and awe in teaching and learning. This is where the quote above really connects with my idea of teaching. Repeating the quote but by changing just one word—replacing “art” with “teaching.”

There is only one rule: Astonish us! In all teaching we look and listen for what we have not experienced quite that way before. We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond in a new way.

How do we as educators meet this goal of “astonishing us all.”

Many years ago I got bitten by the Ambigram bug and before I knew it I had created hundreds! This was of course long before Dan Brown and Angels and Demons made ambigrams wildly popular. It has been fun to see what was once a fringe activity take on a wider popularity. There was a time that I could actually count the number of ambigram artists on the fingers of my hand, and, in fact, most of us knew each other, either formally or informally. Things are very different today as a Google search will easily reveal, but this also means that keeping track of all that is going on in the ambigram field is extremely difficult.

Over the past few months I have been talking with Mark Hunter a gentleman who is trying to make high quality ambigrams accessible to more people, and to raise awareness of ambigrams worldwide.  He is doing this through two different web sites.

He is also the owner of Ambigram.com, which seeks to be an almost one stop site for all you need to know about ambigrams. He told me about how he spent a considerable sum to purchase the Ambigram.com domain name and has worked hard to grow its membership. He has been quite successful in this and in fact they they recently announced their new Ambigrammy Awards! (How cool is that.) He also maintains a list of artists practicing this craft (your’s truly being one of them).

He also runs FlipScript.com, a site dedicated to creating high quality ambigrams on demand. The results are actually quite good, far better than previous attempts to accomplish this task.  Don’t miss his demonstration short story made up of more than 30 ambigrams.

If you are interested in visual wordplay these sites may be excellent time-sinks!

As I go around the country talking about the TPACK framework, one of the questions that is always put to me is, about which comes first when planning a lesson, content, pedagogy or technology. The standard answer is that content comes first since it is only after we decide what it is that we want our students to learn (the content)  that we can speak of how we are to teach it (the pedagogy) and what tools to use (the technology).

For instance consider the excellent work being done by Judi Harris and her colleagues on activity structures and the TPACK framework. This work is one of the best, research and data driven approaches to applying the TPACK framework to the the actual work teachers do. The activity structures approach focuses on traditional practice i.e. the kinds of activity structures for specific content areas that are important for teachers engage in and it is only after these have been figured out that we think of selecting the appropriate technology. Clearly, in this approach technology comes in only after content and pedagogy have been specified. This is an excellent way to think about teachers and technology integration, and in many cases the most appropriate way of going forward.

Matters, however, I believe, are not that straightforward.

I say this because I am acutely sensitive to the fact that new technologies can often engender new activity structures, structures that may not have been possible without the advent of some new tool that we had not thought of before. The fact that technology may be the first piece of the puzzle is entirely consistent with the TPACK framework, which is not as much about process as it is about the end result i.e. that technology, pedagogy and content should all work together.

For instance, one example where this happens, and one that Matt Koeheler and I have often talked about, has to do with the advent of the web and the rise of online learning. Now, Tim Berners-Lee and the Mark Andreessen were not thinking of K12 learning when they developed the HTTP protocols and the HTML language, the foundation of the web as we know it. They were after different game. Tim Berners-Lee was out to develop ways for nuclear scientists develop betters ways of sharing information and it is not exactly clear to me what Mark Andreessen was initially interested in when he worked on developing the Mosaic browser. The point being though that once this tool was in the world, and freely available, educators recognized its potential and began thinking of ways of using this new technology for educational purposes. All of a sudden professors and K12 teachers were having to think about how to best use this new tool in their everyday work – that of teaching. Pedagogical processes and techniques that had worked before, for face to face contexts, needed to change, to fit this new medium. The manner in which content was represented had to shift and change as well.

So in this case technology came first and pedagogy and content (at least the manner in which it was represented) came afterwards.

I have made similar arguments about the use of micro-blogging in the classroom (see posts here and here).

Recently I came across another profound example of how new technologies change pedagogy in profound kinds of ways. Most of us have now heard of Khan Academy and about how it came to be. Essentially, Salman Khan a hedge fund manager took time to develop a series of video tutorials (essentially screen captures of him talking about math and science concepts and procedures) that he made freely available on the web. Though this began as a personal project for his cousins the videos soon began receiving positive attention from learners and teachers who stumbled upon his work. At this time the Khan Academy website has over 2000+ videos on a range of topics, arithmetic, physics, finance and history.

Salman Khan was recently asked to come and speak at TED and in his talk he talked about how the availability of these videos changed (at least in some cases) what teachers do in their classrooms. The fact that these lectures are freely available 24/7 frees teachers up to focus on other, maybe more important, aspects of teaching and learning than lecturing to their students. As Khan says, and I am paraphrasing here, technology can actually humanize classrooms! Khan calls this “flipping the classroom” by which he means that lectures can be moved online and outside of the classroom while class-time is used to work on problem solving and other engaging individual and collaborative work.  while focusing on problem solving and collaborative work during class time.

This is not a new idea. Karl Fisch, for instance, has described this eloquently (though he doesn’t claim credit for the idea and in fact provides credit to other precursors of the idea) in his blog post. As Karl writes:

My plan is to deliver the traditional lecture portion of an Algebra class as the homework, thus freeing up class time to explore the mathematics and pursue some interesting problems, as well as provide time for guided practice and collaborative work.

[Incidentally Dan Pink blogged about this idea as well, see here].

The fact that technology allows us to create and share, or freely access video based resources such as lectures fundamentally changes the game for teachers. Taking advantage of these tools, and to use them to their fullest potential, requires changing one’s pedagogical practices in fundamental ways, maybe “flipping” them almost totally around. Karl Fisch can still be the “sage on the stage” delivering his “knowledge” to the class but he can shift that part away into the “homework” arena and more effectively use his class time to customize his teaching to meet individual strengths and weaknesses.

I cannot imagine how this “flipping the classroom” could have happened prior to the advent of easy to use, cross-platform, always available, essentially free, web based resources such as Youtube!

Now could one have predicted something like this 20, or even 10 years ago? But given these tools (and resources) would it be right to keep doing things the same old way? I don’t think so.

I guess this is now my favorite example of how technology can fundamentally change pedagogy and content, and allow for the development of new activity structures, the idea at the heart of the TPACK framework.

Back in January I was invited to speak at the Drexel Learning Games Network (DGLN) seminar series. As I had written in my original post (TPACK & Games @ Drexel), 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.

I had mentioned that though I am not primarily a games and learning researcher, I have done some work in the area, primarily through collaborations with colleagues and students around MSU. I had a lot of fun constructing this talk, attempting to make some connections between my TPACK work and the idea of learning from games.

I see digital games as being an important part of learning – but in a somewhat different way than merely learning by playing games. In fact I have been somewhat skeptical of how one can use games for developing disciplinary knowledge. My experience has been that there is a fundamental tension in designing educational games – where the demands of designing engaging gameplay often conflict with the broader pedagogical goal of respecting the core concepts of the discipline or content to be covered. For instance a recent dissertation on how participants were learning Chinese from playing a massively multiplayer online role playing game (Zon) showed that my concerns were justified. Most participants focused on the gameplay rather than on the tasks that were connected with learning the language. I don’t think that finding this balance between gameplay and learning content is impossible to achieve – but that it is maybe the most important challenge faced by educational game designers.

I tried, in my presentation, to make some connections to learning from games by repurposing games – i.e. seeing their pedagogical potential outside of just playing with them. I of course used the TPACK framework as guiding my talk – but also brought in issues related to trans-disciplinary learning and design.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, the entire talk is now available online as a video. You can see it in its entirety by going here: http://gcpsx.coeps.drexel.edu/videos/dgvls_ep2public/

Enjoy!

Last June I had posted a note (Teacher as filmmaker: An update from down under) about the iVideos created by students from the University of Technology, Sydney (under the guidance of Dr. Matthew Kearney). iVideos or “idea videos” are short films often 2 minutes (or less) in duration in which a student explores an important issue in K-12 education.

The idea of iVideos connects with a couple of strands of work that I have been involved in. These include, the TPACK framework, and the learning by design approach. We have written about this in a variety of articles but the specific one that Dr. Kearney points to is:

Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Siebenthal, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. In M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press.

In this article we argue that there is great value in having teachers engage in such creative, design tasks since it allows them to “transform ideas and practice by immersing themselves in deep pedagogical consideration of subject-matter, significance, audience, learning, epistemology, and aesthetics.” Some evidence of this comes from a blog post by Dr. Kearney, based on his experience of having his students create their own iVideos. He says that,

We noted a high degree of emotional investment, motivation and interest in these tasks amongst our student teachers and postulate that these outcomes were a catalyst in their TPACK development. [You can read the entire blog post here.]

As in the previous year, Dr. Kearney’s students have been busy working on working on a new set of videos for 2011. In this years edition students created iVideos in three main areas related to the use of ICT in education. These topics include, Teacher professional learning; Curriculum; and Social, Ethical, Legal and Equity issues around ICT. There are over 2 dozen videos on the site and you can access them by going to

http://sites.google.com/site/teacherivideos/

Incidentally, you can see last year’s videos by following this link

http://sites.google.com/site/teacherivideos/2010-ivideos

Click the links above to see the these iVideos and, if possible, take a moment to write a comment or response to the videos. It will take you just a few minutes of your time but I know this will be greatly appreciated by the students.

Over the past few years my scholarly focus has shifted into areas related to teacher creativity and transdisciplinary learning. I see this as being the next step in my research work. Though I have been thinking quite a bit about this, have applied to to my teaching (particularly my course on Creativity in Teaching and Learning), and there have been occasional blog posts about this as well, it has not had much of an impact on my academic writing. A large part of it has to do with the fact that academic writing (writing for journals and edited books) has, by necessity, a longer time-frame than teaching or blogging. Writing and submitting, taking care of changes suggested by editors and reviewers, and then waiting for the actual publication to emerge, all take time.

To cut a long story short, the first article about this new line of work has finally been published. It is a special issue of the journal Educational Technology devoted to Emerging Technologies and Transformative Learning. This special issue was edited by George Veletsianos and Brendan Calandra (thanks for giving us the opportunity) and was co-authored with Matt Koehler (no surprise there) and Danah Henriksen.

Educational Technology had quite stringent word-limits and length requirements, so the final published article is much shorter than what we had originally submitted. And since I had already felt that the original article was shorter than it needed to be… the final version seems more than a bit truncated. For this reason I am providing links below to both the published piece and a longer unpublished version. If I had to choose, I would read the longer version but that need not be your choice.

Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Henriksen, D. (2011). The Seven Trans-Disciplinary Habits of Mind: Extending the TPACK Framework Towards 21 st Century learning. Educational Technology, 51(2) 22-28.

Abstract: In this article we examine the need for fostering transformative learning, emphasizing the roles that trans-disciplinary thinking and recent technologies can play in creating the transformative teaching and learning of the 21st century. We introduce the Technological, Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework as a starting point for discussing the special kinds of knowledge, skills, and understanding that teachers require in order to become effective classroom mediators of transformative learning experiences. Within this framework, we propose seven cognitive tools needed for success in the new millennium, and describe examples of how teachers can repurpose digital technologies to use these cognitive tools. We explore the implications for research and practice.

Here is a link to the longer (draft) version.

Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Henriksen, D. (draft). The Seven Trans-Disciplinary Habits of Mind: Extending the TPACK Framework Towards 21 st Century learning (full version).

The International Conference on Indian Education: The Positive Turmoil. is being held at the India Habitat Center in New Delhi. This Habitat center is a rather cool building and, apart from academic conferences (I saw two different conferences going on at the same time), it also hosts open-air sculpture and art galleries. One of the galleries right near where the IEPT conference was being held was a photography exhibit by Sanjay Nanda. Sanjay is a graphic designer by profession and a passionate photographer in his spare time. He also runs IndiPix Gallery, what he described as “a space for contemporary art photography.” I can’t find an easy way to embed any of his photos here, so you will have to visit their website to check out Sanjay’s work. Trust me, it is will be worth your time.

May years ago I wrote an essay titled On becoming a website. It was about my experience on teaching online and I suggested somewhat facetiously that in order to be a good teacher online I needed to actually “become” the course website! I started the essay by describing the idea of a cyborg:

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism — a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. It has been argued that we are all cyborgs now (Haraway, 1991). Be it a pacemaker installed in our hearts or a pair of contact lenses in our eyes, technologies are now an integral part of our bodies and our consciousness. … Of course these socially (and increasingly biologically) embedded technologies often become transparent and, in some sense, so deeply intertwined with our existence that we don’t even realize they exist (Brooks, 2002).

Now this idea of a cyborg was somewhat of a rhetorical move, to generate interest in the topic I was writing about. So imagine my surprise when I read the following paragraph.

They gave her The Device when she was only 2 years old. It sent signals along the optic nerve that swiftly transported her brain to an alternate universe—a captivating other world. By the time she was 7 she would smuggle it into school and engage it secretly under her desk. By 15 the visions of The Device—a girl entering a ballroom, a man dying on the battlefield—seemed more real than her actual adolescent life. She would sit with it, motionless, oblivious to everything around her, for hours on end. Its addictive grip was so great that she often stayed up half the night, unable to put it down.

When she grew up, The Device dominated her house: no room was free from it, no activity, not even eating or defecating, was carried on without its aid. Even when she made love it was the images of The Device that filled her mind. Psychologists showed that she literally could not disengage from it—if The Device could reach the optic nerve, she would automatically and inescapably be in its grip. Neuroscientists demonstrated that large portions of her brain, parts that had once been devoted to understanding the real world, had been co-opted by The Device.

What a terrible terrible story. How and why did the parents give the device to a 2 year old! Is this kind of brain damage reversible?

So what IS this device? Well turns out it is a book!

Go back and read the passage again, making that switch! How does that feel?

I had written earlier about Douglas Adams’ rules about technology

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.  (p. 95).

It seems to me that this quote, which incidentally is taken from an article in Slate Magazine, reviewing Sherry Turkle’s latest book, captures the manner in which new technologies are often seen to go against “the natural order of things.”

Whether we like it or not, we are all cyborgs now.

I just came across this sign on a wall in Bhubaneswar. Check it out, nothing less than “Tension free shiting!” All you have to do is dial a number!

Here is the sign cropped close

Here is the complete sign.

It is part of an advertisement for a packing and moving company. The painter droped the “f” in the word “shift!” I love the fact that this service is available through dialing a single phone number, from anywhere in the country and you can use any mode that you like to dial it in!

Scott Graden is Superintendent of Saline Area Schools and a blogger. He recently posted about a study that indicated that texting helps students develop vocabulary skills. Though he was skeptical of the finding, I am not sure I was as surprised. He cited a news story on ReadWriteWeb titled Research Finds Text-Messaging Improves Children’s Spelling Skills. The story says,

… a new study from Coventry University finds no evidence that having access to mobile phones harms children’s literacy skills. In fact, the research suggests that texting abbreviations or “textisms” may actually aid reading, writing and spelling skills.

The story goes on the say that

Based on a series of reading and spelling tests, researchers found a “significant contribution of textism use to the children’s spelling development during the study.” The study made it clear that it wasn’t the access to the phone per se, or even the text-messaging as much as specifically the use of textisms that aided the development. The reason, writes Dr. Clare Wood, one of the authors of the study, “is partly explained by the highly phonetic nature of the textisms that are popular within this age group, as the phonological and alphabetic awareness that is required for the construction and decoding of these textisms also underpin successful reading development.”

Scott, who is far from being a techno-phobe, was not sure if he actually bought into the findings of this study. He was surprised by it and also questioned its validity. He is not alone in espousing this point of view. As I had written earlier, in a post titled, Technology & Literacy, bemoaning the youth of today , technology is not destroying our ability to write, it just changing the way we do so. I don’t want to repeat what I had written earlier, so go there and take a look and let me know what you think?

Is Scott right? Is txt-ing destroying writing as we know it? Let me know.

For the past couple of years now, our family has been creating new year’s greetings using stop-motion video. This year was no exception. Here it is (on Vimeo)

A very wonderful holidays and a very happy new year to all of you,
from Shreya, Soham, Smita & Punya

You can see other videos made by us… just follow the links below:

• Happy 2010 (last year’s stop motion card)
• Happy 2009 (stop motion card made in 2008)
• Explore | Create | Share (3 short videos with typographical twists at the end)
• Finding Nemo, the sea-quel (a stop motion sequel to Finding Nemo)
• Shreya’s friends animate their names
• A commercial mashup
• or, view the complete collection (including the great Hari Puttar trailer)

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!

There are interesting patterns all around us. Here is one I found the other day. We were boiling lentils in a shallow bowl… and then, out of nowhere emerged an almost perfect pentagon!

The almost perfect pentagon that showed up on the surface
of the boiling lentils!

How cool is that. And does it mean something that five is a magical number (see this, this and this). As this page on numerology says

Five is the symbol of human microcosm. The number of the human being. Human forms—the pentagon when arms and legs are out stretched. The pentagon is endless —sharing the symbolism of perfection and power of the circle. Five is a circular number as it produces itself in its last digit when raised to its own power. The pentacle, like the circle symbolizes whole, the quincunx being the number of its center and the meeting point of heaven, earth, and the four cardinal points plus the center point.

Five is also representative of the Godhead – Central Creator of the four fours plus itself equalling five. Five is the marriage of the hieros gamos as combination of feminine and the masculine. Feminine being even, as 2, in frequency and masculine being odd as 3 in frequency = 5.

The number five symbolizes meditation; religion; versatility. It represents the five senses (taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing) everywhere except in the East. In the East there are six—the extra being Mind. We find meanings to five in the five petaled flower, five pointed leaves–especially the ROSE. The Rose has much symbolism, but also the lily, vine, all of which represent the microcosm.

The five pointed star depicts individuality and spiritual aspiration, and education when it points upward. The five pointed star pointing downward represents witchcraft, and it is used in black magic. Noted: There is a very broad difference between witchcraft and black magic.

The number five formed the first counting process from which all else came.

Hmm… so what does this magical appearance of the pentagon mean?

If we believe that every pattern has some underlying explanation, can there be a more mundane explanation? I have a possible hypothesis of what lies behind this phenomena… but what do you think? Where did this pattern come from?

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!

Here’s a new ambigram I designed at the kick-off for the MSU Creativity Initiative. I will have more information on that in a later post but for now… enjoy.

Creativity, any which way you look at it.

Slate Magazine is running a series on Creative Pairs, or why Two is the Magic Number! Written by Joshua Wolf Shenk the series seeks to understand:

What makes creative relationships work? How do two people—who may be perfectly capable and talented on their own—explode into innovation, discovery, and brilliance when working together? These may seem to be obvious questions. Collaboration yields so much of what is novel, useful, and beautiful that it’s natural to try to understand it.

The series is an excellent introduction to the research on creative collaboration has most interestingly has a series of case studies of creative pairs. The first pair studied were John Lennon & Paul McCartney and followed their careers over time and how the “push-pull” between these two creative personalities led to some of the greatest music of the 20th Century.

The next set of profiles focuses on Matthew Swanson & Robbi Behr, the couple behind Idiot’s Books. Joshua Shenk inflicts on them “a series of experiments, stunts, and adventures” with the goal of shedding “light on the nature of their collaboration—and on the broader questions of relationships, psychology, and creativity.” So far the couple has been given a battery of psychological tests, tolerated a tour of their home and studio, sat on a couch for a psychoanalytic session, and finally, created a verbal/visual map of their creative process. As Shenk says, “What they came up with turned out to both nicely illustrate how they work and to perfectly embody their Idiocy.” I completely and totally recommend anybody interested in creativity to take a look at this somewhat interactive feature: Idiot Books, Creative Process Diagram.

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.

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?

I am currently teaching a course on Creativity in Teaching & Learning and as a part of that I was searching for an interesting image to highlight a note I was posting to the class. I wanted an image that represented, in some cool manner, the multi-dimensionality of perception, how the “position” we take, defines what we see. Not satisfied with what I was coming up with (via Google or Flickr) I started doodling and pretty soon I had a new triplet ambigram.

Triplet ambigrams are 3-d shapes that cast different shadows depending on where you shine light on it. Now every shape (or most shapes) cast different shadows when light falls on them from different direction – the issue is to make these shadows interesting. In the case of triplet ambigrams, the challenge is constructing the simplest object that can make interesting and different shadows.

Here is what I came up with. This three-d shape casts three different shadows – each of which is a letter-form, in this case the letters A, B & C. How cool is that.

ABC Triplet Ambigram (See large size on Flickr)

I also took a picture of my doodles as I came up with this shape. Here is a small version of that sketch (a larger version is available on Flickr).

(see larger version on Flickr)

I have created a few more of these things before. Here is one for CFT (Cognitive Flexibility Theory). I had posted this triplet earlier in the context of the periodic table of elements here.

And another for Cognitive Technology Society. This logo was selected for use by the organization and then they changed their mind, or the organization vanished (one or the other).