Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

The last session of the day was led by Dr. Nancy Law, Director, Centre for Information Technology in Education, University of Hong Kong. Her session was titled Using ICT to support learning: lessons learnt from international studies
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I am trying to live blog the conference: Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity [Full agenda here]. Let us see how far I can keep this up.
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I leave for India tomorrow to participate in a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity being held in Bangalore from the 20th to the 22nd of August. The meeting is organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International Youth Foundation and “is designed to bring together education and education technology practitioners, scholars and experts, academicians and students for an exchange of ideas aimed towards creative approaches and solutions for technology use in teaching and learning.”

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… or just narrow?

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

Anyway, there is an ongoing discussion there about how the web influences what we do. A provocative argument (based on data) being put forth by James Evans is regarding the influence of the availability of electronic resources on the research process.
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Imagine you are standing in front of a bathroom mirror; how big do you think the image of your face is on the surface? And what would happen to the size of that image if you were to step steadily backward, away from the glass?

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Today’s NYTimes story about an economist ranking art by the numbers (see A Textbook Example of Ranking Artworks) bothered me a bit. As the article says, David Galenson’s method is based not on the aesthetic qualities of the artwork but rather on “how frequently an illustration of a work appears in textbooks.” His method is simplicity itself, and I quote: He tallied the number of illustrations of each piece in the 33 textbooks he found that were published between 1990 and 2005, on the assumption that the most important works merited the most illustrations.” By this method he argues that Picasso’s, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as being ranked as number 1. There are two main concerns I have about this methodology. Read the rest of this entry »

I just came across a rather different kind of news aggregator, at least compared to Google. The brainchild of Guy Kawasaki (ex-Apple evangelist and tech guru) you have to check out AllTop. This may actually become a regular destination for me.

My research and scholarship has mostly been in the area of educational technology - i.e. how to improve / facilitate learning through the use of technologies. David Brooks in his latest op-ed (The biggest issue) in the NYTimes flips this around somewhat. Citing research by Goldin and Katz he argues that over the past century there has been a “race between technology and education.”
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In the context of my previous posting, here is an article that provides “a brief historical summary of the research into forms of coercive persuasion, primarily sensory deprivation, conducted 35 to 50 years ago, in which psychologists, psychoanalysts, and psychiatrists worked for the CIA and the Pentagon to understand these techniques.” See pdf of Psychology and Research into Coercive Interrogation by Dr. Jeffrey Kaye.

I just created a personalDNA map for myself. Turns out I am a Benevolent Inventor… beats being a benevolent dictator I say! However, this posting is concerned not with what the survey found out about me but rather about what I learned about the survey. Read the rest of this entry »

In my summer classes I have the participants complete a video assignment on understanding. This year as always my students worked in groups over a week-and-a-half to select their topics, develop interview protocols, video tape people as they answered their questions, and then edit the footage into a tight 4-5 minute documentary. Here are the projects they created (I am still waiting on one): Read the rest of this entry »

I received an email out of the blue from Nikita Prokhorov, a freelance graphic designer and assistant professor of graphic design from Connecticut. Nikita runs a blog devoted ambigrams, but in a different kind of way. As the email said, the blog is “devoted to the art and process behind ambigrams. It’s not meant just to showcase ambigram work, but rather explore each artist’s individual process & approach to ambigrams.” What a great idea. Read the rest of this entry »

Teachers College Record chooses a couple of articles each week to offer freely to visitors to its website. These are featured in their email newsletter (TCRecord this week), and goes out to thousands of people. Imagine my surprise when I opened my newsletter a few minutes ago. Turns out that the article chosen this week is none other than the 2006 piece written by Matt Koehler and myself, Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge! That’s pretty cool.

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

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

A few months ago I had posted a note about Harvard faculty considering and passing a resolution to freely publishing all their scholarship online (see this and this). Now it turns out that faculty at the Stanford University, School of Education have gone the same route (see this note). Bravo.

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

I woke up this morning, feeling maybe for the first time in this entire trip, tired and a little homesick. I ascribe the first to the rather hectic schedule I have had the past 10 days so, continually on the move, presentation after presentation, meeting after meeting, never in a place for more than a day. The homesickness I ascribe to hanging out with Hsueh-Hua, Han-Chin, and (the one most to blame) their 8 year old son Matthew. I guess I was suddenly reminded, in a very forceful way, of the three people back home in Okemos, whom I haven’t seen or talked to in a while Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Koehler and I had been asked to provide the plenary address at the Annual Meeting of Global Chinese Conference on Computers in Education (GCCCE) at East Lansing. As Jack Schwille said in an email to the College: Read the rest of this entry »

I leave tomorrow (actually today, given that it is past midnight as I write this) on a multi-national TPACK tour. I touch 4 countries in around 2 weeks!! Read the rest of this entry »