Punya Mishra's Web

A few months ago I was invited (by the Educational Technology & Management Academy, an Indian educational organization) to write a series of short practitioner-oriented articles for a new educational e-magazine they were starting. The idea was to introduce to a wider audience of educators current research findings in the fields of educational psychology and educational technology research as well as their relevance to practice. Read the rest of this entry »

As I go around presenting my work around 21st century learning I get requests for some of the visuals I show. In particular, I have been receiving requests for

• Synthesis of 21st Century Knowledge
• 7 trans-disciplinary skills for creativity in the 21st century

If you choose to use these diagrams in your work please credit it as follows: © Punya Mishra | punyamishra.com 2013

So for future convenience, here they are…

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Chris Fahnoe, just sent me a link to a piece on KQED on measuring creativity. Nothing particularly new here but reading it sent me down a rabbit-hole of some quotes and ideas I had been wanting to blog about for a while. So here goes. All this started when I read a quote in the article by Dr. James Catterall, a psychologist and director of the Centers for Research on Creativity in Los Angeles. He describes an interesting finding that emerged from as they were testing their new survey on measuring creativity:

Elementary school kids scored better on it than high school kids did. “I think the expression that many people use is that the schools have a tendency to suck the creativity out of kids over time,” he says.

As Ken Robinson said, in his TED talk:

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Tara Brabazon, professor of media studies at the University of Brighton, has an essay in the Times Higher Education, titled How not to write a PhD thesis, providing her top ten tips for doctoral failure. Though the essay is geared towards dissertations in media studies (as indicated by the mention deconstruction, poststructuralism, Derrida, Baudrillard and more…) there are broader lessons that makes sense for doctoral candidates in education (and I am sure other social sciences) as well. Go ahead and read the article in full. Below I include some quotes from the article that stayed with me, but I repeat, the entire article is worth reading…

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Chris Fahnoe’s award winning paper was presented at SITE a couple of days ago. Here is the final reference as well as the slides and paper.

Fahnoe, C., & Mishra, P. (2013). Do 21st Century Learning Environments Support Self-Directed Learning? Middle School Students’ Response to an Intentionally Designed Learning Environment. Paper to be presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Society of Information Technology in Teacher Education, New Orleans.

Paper: FahnoeMishra-SITE2013-paper (PDF)

Slides: FahnoeMishra-SITE2013-slides (PDF)

Slides embedded via Issu:  Read the rest of this entry »

We finished our second symposium yesterday. Titled the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Hybrid and Online Doctoral Programs the symposium included presentations by faculty members from Michigan State University and University of North Texas. Ann Thompson was our discussant. From the abstract:

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I just presented a paper based on a dissertation completed by Gokce Kurt currently at Marmara University, Dept. of English Language Teaching, Istanbul, Turkey. Gokce got in touch with me a few years ago as she was preparing for her dissertation. We “met” through email and skype as she designed her research study. Fast forward a few years, and I was proud to be invited to serve on her dissertation committee. Below is a photo of her skype based dissertation meeting – a first for me!

Gokce could not make it to New Orleans and so it was my privilege to present her dissertation research here at SITE. An abstract, copy of her slides, and her paper are archived below.  Read the rest of this entry »

We just completed our symposium at SITE titled: Breaking Disciplinary Boundaries in 21st Century Learning: Creative Teaching with Digital Technologies. The symposium consisted of 7 presentations followed a summary by Teresa Foulger (of Arizona State University). In brief, we argued the following:

The past few decades have seen a tremendous burst of creativity and innovation fueled by digital technologies.  From Google to YouTube, from cloud computing to mobile devices, new technologies have had an immense impact on how we live, work, play, and thereby how we teach and learn (Florida, 2002).  Given the relationship between creativity and technology, it is not surprising that educators have argued that teaching and learning in the 21^st century must emphasize both the issues of technology and creativity (Mishra & The Deep-Play Research Group, 2012).  This symposium suggests that a new framework for creativity – trans-disciplinary thinking – provides an invaluable set of meta-level cognitive skills for flexible use in creatively teaching with technology (Mishra, Koehler & Henriksen).  Presentations will describe the framework, present a broader context for 21^st century skills such as technology and creative thinking, and discuss a range of examples of ways this framework has been used by skillful, creative K-12 teachers.  The symposium will conclude by describing new directions for research relating to trans-disciplinary thinking among teachers learning to use the framework.

The complete set of slides that went with the presentations can be found below, as well as brief descriptions of each of the presentations.   Read the rest of this entry »

SITE2013 (the annual conference of the Society of Information Technology in Teacher Education) is being held in New Orleans starting next week. The Educational Psychology and Educational Technology program at MSU has a significant presence at the conference. This includes presentations and symposia organized by faculty, graduate students and graduates of our program. Thanks to Josh Rosenberg, we now have a list of all the various events EPET people are involved in. Here it is, arranged chronologically:

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Chris Fahnoe is a doctoral student in our hybrid PhD program. As a part of his practicum research he conducted a study investigating whether students embedded in technology-rich, self-directed, open-ended learning environments develop self-regulation skills? We submitted his paper to the 2013 SITE conference at New Orleans, and will be presenting it there next week. Here is the reference (slides and paper coming soon).

Fahnoe, C., & Mishra, P. (2013). Do 21st Century Learning Environments Support Self-Directed Learning? Middle School Students’ Response to an Intentionally Designed Learning Environment. Paper to be presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Society of Information Technology in Teacher Education, New Orleans.

We recently found out that this paper will be receiving two different awards at the SITE conference. Read the rest of this entry »

The current issue of TechTrends (Volume 57, Issue 3, March 2013) is a special spotlight issue, and the spotlight this time around is on the Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Programs at Michigan State University! This special spotlight issue was edited by myself with help from Laura Terry and Danah Henriksen. A special thanks to Abbie Brown (former editor of the journal for starting the process) and Dan Surry and Chuck Hodges for all their help and hand-holding to bring it to fruition. Thanks also to all the authors for being thoughtful and prompt and dealing with our idiosyncratic editorial demands.

Most importantly thanks to all our faculty, staff and students without whose hard work and creativity we would have no programs, assignments, or achievements to write about.

Here are the articles: Read the rest of this entry »

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #15: March 2013

Special Spring 2013 Conference Issue

Below please find a listing of TPACK-related papers/sessions that will be presented at the SITE conference in March in New Orleans, Louisiana; at the AERA annual meeting in April in San Francisco, California; and at the ISTE conference in June in San Antonio, Texas. (That’s 61 TPACK-related conference sessions in just 3 months!) Read the rest of this entry »

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #14:February 2013

Welcome to the fourteenth edition of the (approximately quarterly) TPACK Newsletter! TPACK work is continuing worldwide, and is appearing in an increasing diversity of publication, conference, and professional development venues. This document contains recent updates to that work that we hope will be interesting and useful to you, our subscribers. If you are not sure what TPACK is, please surf over to http://www.tpack.org/ to find out more.

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My friend Carl Young of NCState recently released an edited volume (co-editor, Sara Kajder a the University of Pittsburgh) titled Research on Technology in English Education. It is a volume in the series: Research Methods for Educational Technology, edited by Walt Heinecke, University of Virginia.

Just as an aside, I edited a book in this series as well (with Matt Koehler & Yong Zhao) many years ago. You can find out more about our book Faculty development by design: Integrating technology in higher education by going here. 

Coming back to Carl and Kajder’s book… the description and table of contents is given below: Read the rest of this entry »

My friend Teresa Foulger at Arizona State University  informed me about the fact that the journal LEARNing Landscapes has a special issue on creativity.  I had not heard of the journal before and I was pleasantly surprised by the articles in this special issue. LEARNing Landscapes is:

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Educational Leadership is the flagship publication of ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development). It has a circulation of over 160,000 and is regarded as “an authoritative source of information about teaching and learning, new ideas and practices relevant to practicing educators, and the latest trends and issues affecting prekindergarten through higher education.”

Their February 2013 issue is titled “Creativity Now!” and has a series of articles from some of the top scholars and researchers in the area of creativity and education, including Robert & Michele Root-Bernstein, Ronald A. Beghetto and James C. Kaufman, Yong Zhao and Alene Starko (among others). More selfishly, the online version of the journal has an article by Danah Henriksen and yours truly.

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This is a paper that had come out a while ago, and I just didn’t get a chance to post it (actually I just forgot). Anyway, here it is:

Mishra, P., Koehler, M. J., Zellner, A., & Kereluik, K. (2012). Thematic considerations in integrating TPACK in a graduate program. In D. Polly, C. Mims, & K. Persichitte (Eds.),Developing Technology-Rich Teacher Education Programs: Key Issues (pp. 1-12). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.

ABSTRACT

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In a couple of previous blog post (Student engagement in school, the tale of 2 graphs and Understanding student engagement) I wrote about  the findings of a recent Gallup Poll on student engagement. The first post was concerned with how the data were represented and the second focused on the actual items to measure student engagement.

@ewilliams65 (Eric Williams, a friend and a Superintendent in Virginia and one of the more innovative and forward-looking administrators I know) wrote a blog post (Gallup’s five questions regarding student engagement) in which he takes me to task (mildly, I must add) for questioning whether “the five items that Gallup used were the best measure of student engagement.” Now I respect Eric a great deal and when he questions me, I look inward, since I know he comes at his conclusions extremely thoughtfully — and also because his blog is titled Promoting Student Engagement, which makes him an expert on the topic, more than what I can say about myself .

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I had posted recently about a Gallup poll on student engagement. Essentially the poll showed that student engagement dropped precipitously (though as I wrote, not as starkly as their graph indicated) as students moved from elementary to high school. My friend, Gaurav responded with a comment, as follows:

Engaged for how much percentage of the school day? Most of the day may be boring, but some parts may be engaging for many students. I haven’t seen the original poll that you highlight, but the data that you picked doesn’t say anything, and as you said, the graph is misleading there too.

This got me to thinking as to how engagement was measured in the first place. A bit of digging around led me to a couple of pieces by Dr. Shane Lopez. Read the rest of this entry »

Gallup recently released a poll on student engagement – and the main finding is that “the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become.” As the post says:

The Gallup Student Poll surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than 1,700 public schools in 37 states in 2012. We found that nearly eight in 10 elementary students who participated in the poll are engaged with school. By middle school that falls to about six in 10 students. And by high school, only four in 10 students qualify as engaged.

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Our latest article on the series Technology and Creativity is now available (link and the complete reference given below). Co-authored with Chris Fahnoe, Dr. Danah Henriksen, and the Deep-Play Research group, this paper builds on Chris’ practicum research study and investigates whether students embedded in technology-rich, self-directed, open-ended learning environments develop self-regulation skills? This is an important question because:

Creativity and in-disciplined learning requires balancing the forces of order and chaos. Learning environments need to provide students a flexible structure within which students can experiment, collaborate, and problem solve. These are contexts that allow students to learn from both success and failure. Such open-ended environments, however, can be challenging to learners as well. They can appear chaotic and offer little guidance to students on how to navigate them.

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TPACK Newsletter, Issue 13, December 2012

I have been a great fan of Baskerville, the font for a long time. I love the manner it looks on a page and most importantly I love its italic ampersand! Check it out below… isn’t that beautiful.

I remember setting my doctoral dissertation in Baskerville and receiving grief from the University of Illinois dissertation formatting police because it was not in the listed list of fonts. I believed in this strongly enough that I fought it – and won! My dissertation remained in Baskerville.

Anyway, I had always assumed that my preference for Baskerville was a matter of personal taste (of course my taste was better than that of others… but still). But now there is scientific evidence of how Baskerville is better than other fonts. Read the rest of this entry »

TCRecord has an interesting essay on the role of games and learning, by Alexander, Eaton & Egan, titled: Cracking the code of electronic games: Some lessons for educators. As they say, “This is an analytic article that provides a description of an array of attempts to derive educational principles from the perceived success of students’ learning while they are engaged in electronic games.” They identify three key ways that games have been used in educational contexts. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I had been invited to the Birmingham School District to speak to the administrators, teachers and broader community about their recent initiatives on 21st Century Learning. I had a wonderful visit – which I was reminded of by this article (On the Front Lines of the Future) in the  Highlander, the Seaholm High School’s Student Voice. This is an extremely well written and honest article about the vision, implementation and challenges faced by schools seek to change how they do business. It incorporates thoughts from teachers and students both pro- and con and is really worth a read. Read the rest of this entry »

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #11:October 2011

Welcome to the eleventh edition of the (approximately quarterly) TPACK Newsletter! TPACK work is continuing worldwide, and is appearing in an increasing diversity of publication, conference, and professional development venues. This document contains recent updates to that work that we hope will be interesting and useful to you, our subscribers.

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

Gratuitous Quote About Technology
Is it a fact – or have I dreamt it – that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?—Nathaniel Hawthorne

In This Issue Read the rest of this entry »