Punya Mishra's Web

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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I just read this wonderful essay by UCLA professor Peter Nonacs titled: Why I Let My Students Cheat On Their Game Theory Exam. In this essay he describes an experiment he recently conducted in his game theory class. This is what he told his students a week before the final exam for the class:

… I told my class that the Game Theory exam would be insanely hard—far harder than any that had established my rep as a hard prof. But as recompense, for this one time only, students could cheat. They could bring and use anything or anyone they liked, including animal behavior experts. (Richard Dawkins in town? Bring him!) They could surf the Web. They could talk to each other or call friends who’d taken the course before. They could offer me bribes. (I wouldn’t take them, but neither would I report it to the dean.) Only violations of state or federal criminal law such as kidnapping my dog, blackmail, or threats of violence were out of bounds.

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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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I had written before, CEP917: Knowledge Media Design, a course taught by Dr. Danah Henriksen and myself, in the Fall semester of 2012, received First Place (in the Blended Course category) in the2013 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards Competition. The awards ceremony was a couple of days ago, and sadly I had to miss it because I was/am out of the country (busy doing this). 917 was well represented at the awards ceremony by Danah as well as William Cain and John Bell (representing the CEPSE/COE Design Studio). Here, for the record, are a couple of links if you want to find out more about the course and the award: Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by Simon Shuster, journalist at the State News. A couple of quotes made it into the article. Here, for the record, is the link: Wired up, ready to go.

Interestingly enough, this was the second story that Simon has written about me. Back in January 2012 he had written a story for his high school newspaper, which had mentioned my work as well. I had blogged about it here.

The latest in our series Rethinking Technology and Creativity in the 21st Century is now available. The article was co-authored with Aman Yadav of Purdue University (and the Deep-Play Research Group) and focuses on the art and science of computational thinking. We offer a slightly broader frame for thinking about computational thinking, a frame that includes artistic creativity.

Here is a link to the full article

Mishra, P., Yadav, A., & the Deep-Play Research Group (2013). Of Art and Algorithms. Tech Trends, (57) 3. p. 10-14.

This article continues the series of papers that the group has been writing. Here is a complete list 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 »

It is difficult, in a world buffeted by change, to know what to hold on to. I often wonder about this when thinking of teaching and learning, when thinking of the speed at which technology is changing the world we live in… What do we hold on to? What do we let go? How do we know that we are not throwing the baby out with the bathwater? (Some earlier writing that allude to some of these issues can be found here, and here.)

I was thinking of these questions in the context of the series on creativity and trans-disciplinary learning I am writing for TechTrends (see the latest article, with links to previous pieces, here). And yesterday, while speaking with my partner-in-crime, Danah Henriksen, I was reminded of an insight I had many years ago… and one that I had somewhat forgotten. Which led to some searches on google, a few steps back memory-lane, and this blog post. Bear with me here…

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Jamie Smith at Ohio University has created a Prezi presentation on TPACK in Science Education. I think it is a pretty good introduction to the topic. Enjoy

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Danah Henriksen and I taught CEP917 (Knowledge Media Design) last semester. This was a somewhat unique class, with half the students being present here on campus and the other half online. We met synchronously once every two weeks and the rest of the class happened through the course website. We recently created a video introducing our experience in designing and teaching this class.

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As I had written earlier, the EPET Program received the 2013 Best Practice Award for the Innovative Use of Technology, awarded by the  American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education  (AACTE).  This is an incredible honor and makes all of us (faculty, staff, and students) proud.

The award was presented to us during the 65th AACTE annual meeting in Orlando, Florida on Feb. 28, 2013. Leigh Graves Wolf (co-director of the MAET program) and our Dean (Dr. Don Heller) were both on hand to receive the award and a bunch of us gathered here at the college to watch the live-stream of the ceremony. Leigh did an wonderful job in her acceptance speech – which you can watch in its entirety below:

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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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Our latest article on the series Technology, Creativity & 21st Century Learning  is now available (link and the complete reference given below).

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The Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Program at Michigan State University is the recipient of the  2013 Best Practice Award for the Innovative Use of Technology awarded by the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE). This award honors both our Master’s Program as well as our doctoral (face to face and hybrid) programs for  incorporating “innovation beyond meeting national or state standards for program-wide educational technology integration.”

In its citation the AACTE committee on Innovation and Technology which reviews submissions for the award cited our program

… for its demonstration of exceptional implementation and research of the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework on a program level. The program engages candidates in the rich problems and interrelationships of pedagogy, technology and content to produce graduates who develop innovative pedagogical solutions. The Committee found technological competency woven throughout the program and seamlessly integrated with pedagogy and content knowledge.

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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 »

There was a recent query on the PhD-Design-List regarding sources for designers on how to make good info-graphics and data-visualizations. I am collating the options being put forward by people here, just for the record. 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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From Chris Sloan, teacher at Judge Memorial Catholic High School and a student in our hybrid PhD program, comes a link to a TED talk. The description is as follows:

Creative genius Drew Davies and forward-thinking educator Jaime McGrath propose a new approach to classroom teaching: Turn curricula into design challenges, classrooms into workshops and teach students to think like designers.

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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