Punya,
Here is the palindromic poem that I wrote recently, but I made it so that the words are reversed instead of just the lines. It adds another layer of difficulty to creating it, and I recommend trying it if you get the chance.

Falling Snow

snow falling gently
on stomping feet
cold stinging
the teasing and laughing children
sculpted beautifully – crystals form
flakes dancing gracefully
tumble and spin
spin and tumble
gracefully dancing flakes
form crystals – beautifully sculpted
children laughing and teasing the
stinging cold
feet stomping on
gently falling snow

How awesomely cool is that! I wrote back to him right away saying

Jake. This is awesome!!!! I just shared it with my family and we were unanimous in our appreciation and praise for your achievement. Not only is it a doubly palindromic poem, an achievement in and of itself, it is a wonderful poem in it’s own right….

Thank you so much for sharing this with me. It completely made my day.

Don’t you just love the open-architecture of the web (and why I resist the closed worlds of Facebook).

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 For this reason I am providing links below to both the published piece and a longer unpublished version.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).

Schmidt, D. A., Baran, E., Thompson, A. D.,  Mishra, P.,  Koehler, M.J. & Shin, T. S. (2010). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK): The development and validation of an assessment instrument for preservice teachers. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 42(2), 123 – 149.

Abstract: Based in Shulman’s idea of Pedagogical Content Knowledge, Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) has emerged as a useful frame for describing and understanding the goals for technology use in preservice teacher education. This paper addresses the need for a survey instrument designed to assess TPACK for preservice teachers. The paper describes the survey development process and results from a pilot study on 124 preservice teachers. Data analysis procedures included Cronbach’s alpha statistics on the TPACK knowledge domains and factor analysis for each domain. Results suggest that, with the modification and/or deletion of 18 of the survey items, the survey is a reliable and valid instrument that will help educators design longitudinal studies to assess perservice teachers’ development of TPACK. (Keywords: TPACK, instrument development, preservice teachers)

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

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

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

At first blush Robin seems to be making a good point. Do writers need to know how and why they do what they do they do as long as they get it right? There is a surface plausibility to the argument but I am not sure that it stands muster if we dig deeper.

I think we may need to distinguish mastery over grammar from mastery over language. One is not essential for the other. Second, native speakers who do not explain the rules of grammar they so effortlessly apply in their everyday speech are not necessarily masters of the domain either. Most people have a difficult time articulating precisely what it is that they want to say. This explains the need for remedial writing classes at schools and high schools.

For me mastery is about more than knowing the rules. It is about knowing when the rules apply and when they don’t. It is about being creative – and knowing when not to be. And to me this demands a “stepping out of the box” so to speak. Douglas Hofstadter had a special word for it “Joots” (which was an acronym for “Jumping Out Of The System”). So a master writer may not know the rules of grammar but will know (and will be able to explain) why in certain contexts one more is more appropriate than another. The reasons given will have to do the mood being established, the context within which the word appears, the character saying it, the nature of the sound etc. etc. Grammar may be one of the reasons but I can bet that a good author can and does have lots of nuanced thoughts about this – and can articulate them. Similar comments can be made about other artists – such as film makers and musicians as well. For instance see an earlier posting about A different language, where a musician describes his goal was to achieve a “mossy, woody, decaying kind of sound”

One of the best places to see this articulation is in the director’s commentary that comes with most DVD’s these days. I remember Sam Mendes talking about the kinds of compositional choices made for the movie American Beauty, whenever the Kevin Spacey character came on screen, particularly during the early scenes. The intention was to externalize his internal feelings of being “trapped” though this was never verbally articulated on screen. So the first scene shows Kevin Spacey staring out through the bars of window, and so on. The most interesting use of this effect was where they show his face reflected onto a computer screen. Mendes mentions how they deliberately designed the “stuff” on the screen to look like bars as well. Now can Mendes talk about the technicalities of film editing, how lighting can be managed, how the stedicams work. Sure he can. But the commentary is not about these technicalities (the “grammar” so to speak). The commentary is about the real stuff, the important stuff, how meaning is constructed through images, time, sound and rhythm. That is mastery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now this is something to think about…

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

Glad to put that myth to rest!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mishra, P., Koehler, M. J., & Kereluik, K. (2009). The song remains the same: Looking Back to the Future of Educational Technology. TechTrends, 53, 5. p. 48-53.

The TPACK framework emphasizes the role of teachers as decision makers who design their own educational technology environments as needed, in real time, without fear of those environments becoming outdated or obsolete. Using this approach, teachers do not attend to specific tools, but instead focus on approaches to teaching that endure through change in technologies, content, or pedagogies. Teachers with flexibility of thought, a tolerance for ambiguity, and willingness to experiment can combine traits that perfectly design and tailor their own educational content, pedagogical, and technological environments.

David Passig recently wrote on the topic of melioration, or “the competence to borrow a concept from a field of knowledge supposedly far removed from his or her domain, and adopt it to a pressing challenge in an area of personal knowledge or interest” (2007)… According to Passig, melioration is a skill that affords teachers the flexibility to experiment with a vast array of technologies to meet their specific educational needs. Novel frameworks and concepts like TPACK and Passig’s melioration are starting to look at educational technology in a new way. These new perspectives focus on overarching cognitive skills, competencies, and creativity rather than technical understanding and functional knowledge of specific technologies

Polly, D., & Brantley-Dias, L. (2009). TPACK: Where do we go now? TechTrends, 53, 5. p. 46-47.

TPACK gives a holistic perspective of the knowledge associated with effectively integrating technology into learning environments, accounting for what teachers know and what teachers do… TPACK provides a robust framework for thinking about teachers’ knowledge related to integrating technology effectively into learning environments. Articles in this special issue have raised questions related to our design of teacher education and professional development programs to develop the TPACK of K-12 teachers, and ways to research or examine teachers’ TPACK. innovation adoption.

Barbour, M., Rieber, L. P., Thomas, G., & Rauscher, D. (2009). Homemade PowerPoint Games:
A Constructionist Alternative to WebQuests. TechTrends, 53, 5. p. 54-59.

Students are required to use PowerPoint to construct home made content-based games. To construct these games, students write a game narrative or story (i.e., a short overview or context for the game that must fit on a single PowerPoint slide) and develop questions to provide the appropriate level of challenge to their games. These three pedagogical skills are required of students as they use a technology-based tool to construct games in a specific content area, and form the intersection envisioned by Mishra and Koehler with their TPCK framework. This combination of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge provides a scalable example of good teaching with technology.

Cox, S., & Graham, C. R. (2009). Diagramming TPACK in Practice: Using an Elaborated Model of the TPACK Framework to Analyze and Depict Teacher Knowledge. TechTrends, 53, 5. p. 60-69.

The introduction of the TPACK model by Mishra and Koehler (2006) has had a profound impact on the field of educational technology. It has inspired teachers, teacher educators, and educational technologists to reevaluate their knowledge and use of technology in the classroom… Thus far, the explanations of technological pedagogical content knowledge and its associated constructs that have been provided are not clear enough for researchers to agree on what is and is not an example of each construct. Mishra and Koehler and others have provided definitions of TCK, TPK, and TPACK that articulate to some degree the centers of these constructs, however the boundaries between them are still quite fuzzy, thus making it difficult to categorize borderline cases. In order to help clarify these boundaries and facilitate study of TPACK in practice, this paper presents the key findings from a conceptual analysis of the TPACK framework.

Graham, C. R., Burgoyne, N., Cantrell, P., Smith, L., St. Clair, L., & Harris, R. (2009). TPACK Development in Science Teaching: Measuring the TPACK Confidence of Inservice Science Teachers. TechTrends, 53, 5. p. 70-79.

In this study we piloted an instrument for measuring confidence levels in four of the seven TPACK knowledge constructs: TPACK, TPK, TCK, and TK. The instrument was useful in helping SciencePlus program coordinators to see significant increase in the TPACK confidence of participants over the eight-month duration of the program. Analysis of the data also helped program coordinators recognize that more could be done to help classroom teachers develop TCK confidence by doing more to help them learn about content-specific technologies
that are used in doing science.

Nelson, J., Christopher, A., & Mims, C. (2009). TPACK and Web 2.0: Transformation of
Teaching and Learning. TechTrends, 53, 5. p. 80 – 86.

Web 2.0 technologies provide possibilities for sharing and building knowledge. Teachers who facilitate collaborative and interdisciplinary projects build on the unique strengths of individual students and encourage the sharing of ideas. In essence, they are teaching students to be life-long learners. The Internet and Web 2.0 technologies afford teachers ready access to collaborative, authentic opportunities for students to engage in meaningful experiences related to the curriculum. TPACK-competent teachers exhibit best practices in pedagogy, content, and technology.

A video of the ceremony can be seen below. I, as representing the College of Ed and the MAET program, was asked to give a small welcome speech and you can see that in the video as well. I am including below, for the record, the text of what I said…

Text of welcome speech by Punya Mishra, Director MAET program
July 24, 2009

Good Afternoon and welcome.

I am Punya Mishra, faculty member at the College of Education at Michigan State University. It gives me great pleasure to be here in Plymouth England, today, as a representative of the College.

We are gathered here today to celebrate and recognize the students and graduates of the Master of Arts in Educational Technology Program. We celebrate and recognize their achievements, and applaud their success.

The College of Education at MSU is one of the leading institutions in the world. The US News and World Report in its Annual rankings of graduate programs has consistently ranked the College of Education as one of the top programs in the United States. In the College there are many degree programs. The program closest to my heart is the one we are celebrating today. The Master of Arts in Educational Technology is a unique and special program, seeking to connect the eternal values of learning and education with the technologies and techniques of the 21st century.

I call this program unique for a range of reasons. First, is the manner in which this program is structured. The MAET program offers students an intensive immersive experience where they work individually and in groups to tackle some of the most important issues related to education and technology. This happens in an atmosphere of camradarie and sharing, where lifelong friendships are developed and nurtured. I cannot think of any other graduate level program that offers a similar, powerful and compelling educational experience.

The second aspect that makes the MAET program special are the dedicated faculty and staff that make everything happen. Running a program of this scope and complexity is no mean feat, particularly when it has to be done at an off-campus location.

To start are the people here at the University of Plymouth who have facilitated our stay in ways big and small. They have made us feel welcome and have helped create the institutional structure that makes our program run smoothly. I would particularly like to thank Nicola Griffin, Event Manager at the University and Geoff Bouch head of information and communication technology and their staff for all their help. On behalf of MSU, thank you.

The next person I would like to mention is Jean Pierre Heussaff or JP as he is better known. His official title is Student Life Director but as you all know he is so much more. From weekend trips to visits to the doctor, there is no detail too small for him to pay attention to and this program would not be even half as successful without his effort. Thank you JP.

Now onto the team from East Lansing. Let me begin by thanking someone who is not here but someone who knows and has interacted with each and every one of you here. Emily Fink is a secretary to the MAET program and does everything from helping with recruitment, to course assignment, to making sure things get mailed on time. Please give a round of applause in appreciation of her work.

Now onto the Plymouth faculty. These are people who have dedicated the last month (and if you count course preparation, more than a month) to this program. Developing assignments, designing course experiences, working with individuals and groups, providing feedback, this team of instructors are the ones who make the learning happen. The success of these students is testimony to their creativity, dedication and hard work. Please give a super round of applause to Brandon Blinkenberg, Emily Bouck, Kathryn Dirkin, Ken Dirkin and Aman Yadav.

If you notice, there was one name I did not mention: Leigh Graves Wolf. This is because she deserves a special thanks of her own. Leigh is one of the instructors for year 3 but she also coordinates the entire MA program. She combines her amazing organizational skills with a deep concern for each and every student. I don’t know how we could do all this without her effort. I know that all the students appreciate that. Thank you.

The third and maybe most important factor that sets our program apart are the students. Our students are educators who come to us from around the world and bring with them a wealth of knowledge and experience. These are educators who understand that in this dramatically changing world, keeping still is not an option. They take on the challenges the faculty offer them with good cheer (well, most of the time), seeking opportunities to learn and develop, during their stay here. They do not let tight deadlines (and there are many), frustration with technology (and there are many of these as well) get in the way. Most importantly, they are willing to share their learning and experience with each other. This sense of community (within and across cohorts) is what truly makes this program special. Finally, lest you think that these guys are all work and no play… let us be clear, these guys know that deep learning of fundamental ideas requires having fun. This group, truly, puts the fun in fundamental.

Our students are special, no doubt about it. But they did not get here just by themselves. Behind each and every one of them are their friends and family, who have supported them in their journey. Some of these friends and family are here today to witness this celebration. I would like all the graduates to please stand, face your family and friends, and give them a round of applause.

As you know, we at Michigan State University are proud of our land grant tradition. A tradition that rejects the typical dichotomies that have plagued higher education. You know what I speak of, these are the divides between research and practice, between service and scholarship, or as we would say, between talking the talk and walking the walk.

Each of you here today, completing the requirements of the Master of Arts Degree in Educational Technology is now a part of Michigan State’s long and rich tradition. You have made us proud already through your achievements and successes. We also know that there is more to come. We wish you all the best in the future.

Congratulations and do keep in touch.

In this paper we critically analyze extant approaches to technology integration in teaching, arguing that many current methods are technocentric, often omitting sufficient consideration of the dynamic and complex relationships among content, technology, pedagogy, and context. We recommend using the technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge (TPACK) framework as a way to think about effective technology integration, recognizing technology, pedagogy, content and context as interdependent aspects of teachers’ knowledge necessary to teach content-based curricula effectively with educational technologies. We offer TPACK-based “activity types,” rooted in previous research about content-specific activity structures, as an alternative to existing professional development approaches and explain how this new way of thinking may authentically and successfully assist teachers’ and teacher educators’ technology integration efforts.

The complete citation is as follows:
Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2009, May). Too Cool for School? No Way! Learning & Leading with Technology, (36)7. 14-18. [PDF download].

This article includes a few examples of work done by my students as a part of a doctoral seminar. I had given them an assignment titled, How can a technology become an educational technology? and the work of three of them made it to the paper. I had written previously about Noah’s idea for using microblogging in the classroom (see here, here & most recently here). I haven’t blogged about the other two (though I have discussed them in presentations I have made) so it is good to have them represented here. Paul’s idea was to use specialized search engines (particularly visual search engines) to help students understand the idea of inter-textuality (the idea that texts often refer to each other in complex and intricate ways to create webs of meaning). Erik Byker, on the other hand, looked at how freely available DJ software can be used to teach mathematical concepts such as ratios, fractions, and percentages. Cool stuff!

Niess, M. L., Ronau, R. N., Shafer, K. G., Driskell, S. O., Harper S. R., Johnston, C., Browning, C., Özgün-Koca, S. A., & Kersaint, G. (2009). Mathematics teacher TPACK standards and development model. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education [Online serial], 9(1). Retrieved from http://www.citejournal.org/vol9/iss1/mathematics/article1.cfm

Guzey, S. S., & Roehrig, G. H. (2009). Teaching science with technology: Case studies of science teachers’ development of technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 9(1). Retrieved from http://www.citejournal.org/vol9/iss1/science/article1.cfm

Brush, T., & Saye, J. W. (2009). Strategies for Preparing Preservice Social Studies Teachers to Integrate Technology Effectively: Models and Practices. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education [Online serial], 9(1). Retrieved from http://www.citejournal.org/vol9/iss1/socialstudies/article1.cfm

Koehler, M. J., & Mishra, P. (2009). What is technological pedagogical content knowledge? Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 9(1). Retrieved from http://www.citejournal.org/vol9/iss1/general/article1.cfm

Archambault, L., & Crippen, K. (2009). Examining TPACK among K-12 online distance educators in the United States Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 9(1). Retrieved from http://www.citejournal.org/vol9/iss1/general/article2.cfm

That said, I find this representation fundamentally flawed.

Now this is not the only “periodic table” there is. We have all seen posters and images of similar attempts. Everything from vegetables to fruits and nuts; from rejected elements (which is actually quite funny) to condiments that go bad. There is a serious food theme going on here!

The problems I have with the visualization table applies to all of these tables too – however, these few examples I have listed in the previous paragraph have one redeeming feature. They are meant to be funny. This visualization table is a part of a site on visual-literacy, which makes their lapses all the more ironic.

In essence I have two key problems with this representation:

First, I have a fundamental issue with force-fitting these visualization techniques into a structure that was developed for something else altogether (in this case chemistry). I am not sure what the structure of the visualization techniques table should be – but it is clear to me that this periodic table version is not it. These tables attempt to shoe-horn a list of items into a “shape” that was supposed to show something else altogether.

The main point of the periodic table in chemistry is – surprise, surprise – that it is periodic. This periodicity is what gives us insight into chemical ideas such as valence, reactivity and deeper down into the actual structure of the atom. It provides a structure to the field of chemistry that it did not have before. The periodic system is a crucial “conceptual tool” that organizes the entire field of chemistry and helps chemists and students develop an integrated framework for further learning and exploration. There is a reason why there are just two columns in the first row, 8 in the next two rows, 16 in the three that follow (with a complication of two rows being placed outside the table entirely). This visual structure was not imposed by Mendeleev but rather is an emergent property based on the laws that rule the interactions between neutrons and protons in the nucleus and the electrons outside. The periodic table in chemistry allows us to see these patterns, these periodicities and make predictions about the properties of elements based on what we know about other elements.

Just check out Mendeleev’s predictions on wikipedia if you want to see just how powerful an organizational scheme the chemical periodic table is.

In contrast the visualization table has no deeper organizational scheme. It just co-opts a canonical one from chemistry, but what worked in that domain has no relevance in this one. Just ask yourself, if a cell were blank, could you, in any seriousness predict (based on its neighbors) what would go in it? If not, then why use this representation? Just because it works for chemistry? The funny thing is that even that may not be entirely true… which brings me to my second problem.

A close look at chemistry reveals that the standard table is not the only game in town. As it turns out that the relationship between the elements is multi-dimensional, context-sensitive and fexible which makes the periodic system a rich, complex and ill-structured domain—dependent on the interplay of a multitude of concepts and allowing for multiple representational formats. As a chemist said:

One of the fascinations of inorganic chemistry is the existence of a wide variety of relationships among the elements and their properties—relationships that show an encouraging degree of order, but a tantalizing variability and novelty. These qualities make the “family of elements” an apt metaphor: while members of a family have much in common, each member also has his [sic] own individual personality. The quality of relatedness among elements makes periodic tables possible. But the diversity of their interrelationships bars any one table from a monopoly on the advantages (Rich, 1963; p. xx).

Think about this for a minute – even chemists don’t think that this standard representation is the best one. In fact they have been coming up with alternative representations for years and years. Mazurs (1974) lists over 400 of them in his book, Graphical Representations of the Periodic System During One Hundred Years.

In fact my doctoral dissertation was about these different representations of the table (see Mishra & Yadav, 2006 for details). There is nothing special or unique about the standard version. For instance it is not the case that this is a “correct” representation and all the others are wrong. Not at all. All these representations are right in their own way – again more details can be found in Mishra & Yadav, 2006. Here are are couple of interesting representations from my collection (and a quick Google search revealed more and more and more…).

To conclude, this attempt to create a periodic table of visualizations is a failure by forcing it to be something it cannot be, AND turns out that the domain being co-opted is not necessarily bound to this canonical representation either. Double Fail.

Sean, the person who initiated this blog posting (rant?) in response to my reply to his original email said this best

I too cringe at the hijacking of shape and form for a totally unrelated purpose. Years back, someone gave me a “periodic table of fruits and nuts” poster. Wow. Much like this…it is beautifully executed. It contains a wealth of information. And it too… hasn’t a single periodic notion to it. (for if it did, it would certainly be of a different shape, eh?)

I was reminded of this on hearing this NPR story (Andrew Bird: Words As Instruments) about singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird. This is how he describes the goal of his latest album:

Bird says that his main focus while working on Noble Beast was to represent texture in his music.
“I think of like, when I was a kid, and I would get my Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass and throw myself down in a pile of mulch or something and go in there and pretend that I was microscopic,” Bird says. “I wanted to capture that kind of woody, mossy, decaying kind of sound.”

Think about this for a moment. A “woody, mossy, decaying kind of sound.” What does that even mean? But I guess it made sense to Bird and if you listen to his music, you can sense what he was talking about. Here is he talking about how his latest work compared with his previous music.

“I’ve always been obsessed with moss and moose’s horns. The number eight, the sort of roundness of the number eight,” he says. “The last record I made is a much more, like, pointy, toothy, jagged record. This one I wanted to make a more warm, bubbly, steamy record.”

[You can listen to the entire story, and more, by going here.]

BTW, If this seems utterly abstract to you, here is a simple quiz that should help you grasp the general idea. Look at the images below and answer to yourself, which of these images represents the sound “oompha” and which represents the sound “kakatua.” Is there any doubt in your mind about this?

The issue is not as much about whether one can develop of science of such cross-sensation representation (images for music or vice versa) but rather that such representations are even possible. The goal is to develop reasonably coherent representational schemes that allow us to develop consistent mappings between two disparate domains.

My particular interest of course is in education and teaching. I believe that teaching involves a range of experiences that defy verbal description – in the simple iconic sense of description. I believe that teaching and learning for too long has been described in brutally cognitive or instrumental terms. Clearly these approaches are important, but as important may be ways of expressing ideas and experiences that often do not receive much attention. What we need to do is develop a language that allow us to somewhat consistently express and represent the intangibles of teaching, somewhat like what Bird does in explaining his music (or wine connoisseurs do when describing wine). The lack of such a language essentially prevents us from recognizing that classrooms are far more than 4 walls, a teacher and a bunch of students… and that aesthetics play a great role in the act of teaching and learning.

Come to think of it, even before we think about what language to use to capture these ideas, we may want to focus on getting people to acknowledge that aesthetics and affect has a role to play in learning. Most educational psychology discourse does not include such vague and hard-to-measure ideas.

Welcome to the first edition of the TPACK Newsletter. If you are interested in technology, teaching and learning, this newsletter is for you. If you have no interest in these matters, please accept our apologies. If you are even mildly interested, feel free to surf over to www.tpck.org to find out more.

Toward the end of this document we provide information on how to subscribe (or, heaven forbid, unsubscribe) to this newsletter, how to contribute and other important stuff.

Gratuitous Quote about Technology

“We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do. We notice computers, we don’t notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don’t notice books”— Douglas Adams in Salomon of Doubt, p. 110.

In this Issue:
-2. Announcing the TPACK Newsletter
-1. Gratuitous quote about technology
0. In this issue ( ß You are here)
1. Special Issue of CITE Journal on TPACK: The Teaser
2. Recent TPACK Publications
3. TPACK goes International
4. Upcoming TPACK Events
5. New Wiki – Activity Types for Developing TPACK
6. TPACK at National-Louis
7. Learning and Doing More with TPACK
–. Un-numbered miscellaneous stuff at the end

1. Special Issue of CITE Journal on TPACK: The Teaser

Early in March (anticipated publication date of March 1, 2009), CITE Journal will publish a special issue focused upon TPACK. There will be more details in the upcoming February newsletter, including titles and authors of the articles in that special issue, so stay tuned! (Yes, we are being a bit secretive about this authors and article names, mainly to raise anticipation for the February newsletter…)

2. Recent TPACK Publications & Presentations

Here are a few recent TPACK publications that we know about. If you know of others published within the past several months, please let us know (tpack.news.editors@wm.edu)

Dissertation
Cox, S. (2008). A conceptual analysis of technological pedagogical content knowledge. Doctoral Dissertation, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT.

Papers
Ronau, R. N., Niess, M. L., Browning, C., Pugalee, D., Driskell, S. O., & Harrington, R. (2009). Framing the research on digital technologies and student learning in mathematics. In L. Bell, L. Schrum, & E. A. Thompson (Eds.), Framing research on technology and student learning in the content areas. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Hofer, M., Swan, K.O., (2009). Technological pedagogical content knowledge in action: A case study of a middle school digital documentary project. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 41(2), 179-200.

Foster, A. N., & Mishra, P. (2008). Games, claims, genres & learning. In R. E. Ferdig (Ed.), Handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education. Information Science Reference; Hershey, PA (1759 pages; 3 volumes). pp. 33-50. [TPACK framework applied to games and learning.]

Lee, H., & Hollebrands, K. (2008). Preparing to teach mathematics with technology: An integrated approach to developing technological pedagogical content knowledge. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education [Online serial], 8(4).

Niess, M. L. (2008). Knowledge needed for teaching with technologies – call it TPACK, AMTE Connections, 17(2), 9-10.

Presentations
Mishra, P., & Koehler, M.J. (2008, November). Technology integration in teaching: The TPACK framework. Webinar sponsored by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), November 20, 2008.

Harris, J., & Hofer, M. (2008, September). Truly technologically integrated planning for teaching & learning (Spotlight Session). Paper presented at the National Educational Computing Conference, San Antonio, TX, June 30, 2008.

Harris, J. (2008, October). Knowledge for effective teaching with technology. Innovative Learning Conference, San Jose, CA: October 15, 2008. (Sponsored by SMART Technologies) [presentation viewable online].

3. TPACK Goes International

The CDC has received reports regarding the spread of the TPACK virus to multiple countries. Here are details of a few outbreaks.

(a) North-North American Connections:
On December 15, 2008, Judi Harris taught a day-long workshop on helping teachers to develop TPACK using curriculum-based learning activity types taxonomies, to all of the regional educational directors and their social studies and mathematics curriculum coordinators in the province of Alberta, Canada – the Alberta Regional Professional Development Consortia. They have incorporated the TPACK framework and the activity types approach to TPACK development into the professional development plan for the province that they have recently submitted to the Ministry of Education.

(b) East is East
Punya Mishra traveled this summer across Southeast Asia, delivering slight variations on the TPACK talk to different audiences (little did they know that they could have just downloaded the SITE keynote for free — and so can you!). He spoke at the University Sains Malaysia, Penang (in Malaysia); Chiayi University, Chung Cheng University and the National Sun Yat-Sen University (in Taiwan); University of Hong Kong (in the PRC); and at the Symposium on Education & Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity, Bangalore (in India).

Not to be outdone, Matt Koehler spread the TPACK message to Chinese educators by presenting a keynote address at the Global Chinese Conference on Computers in Education, right here in East Lansing, Michigan.

(c) Eeew! Did you ignore the EU?
Punya recently returned from a symposium organized by the Faculty of Behavioral Sciences, University of Twente (in the Netherlands). He both presented a special session on the TPACK framework and conducted a workshop on TPACK and Creativity with master’s students in the Department of Curriculum Design and Educational Innovation.

Details on Matt’s and Punya’s talks can be found on their respective Web sites.

4. Upcoming TPACK Events

A selective (OK, pretty arbitrarily chosen) list of upcoming TPACK-related events.

Niess, M., Driskell, S., Ronau, R., Pugalee, D. , Harper, S. , Shafter, K., Johnston, C.. Browning, C., Kosheleva, O., Weinhold, M. (AMTE Technology Committee members and volunteers). Using Technology Standards for Mathematics Teacher to Design Learning Environments and Experiences for Methods Courses. 3-hour workshop to be presented at the 13th annual conference of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) Conference in Orlando, FL, February 5, 2009

31 TPACK presentations at SITE 2009, plus the TPACK SIG meeting, in Charleston SC. Also TPACK at AERA, San Diego, CA. More information in upcoming newsletters.

Coming up: Webinar conference on TPACK-related issues organized by the Committee on Innovation and Technology of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education. (No, we don’t know when this will be.)

5. New TPACK-related Online Resources

Wiki – Activity Types for Developing TPACK
Mark Hofer and Judi Harris have put a Learning Activity Types Wiki online at http://activitytypes.wmwikis.net/. It serves as the online center for information about the learning activity types approach to teachers’ development of TPACK. Along with 5 other collaborators (Meg Blanchard, Neal Grandgenett, Denise Schmidt, Marcela van Olphen, and Carl Young) Mark & Judi are developing and posting 6 activity types taxonomies (for science, math, K-6 literacy, world languages, secondary English, and social studies). Right now, the new wiki includes social studies and mathematics taxonomies, plus online surveys (1 per taxonomy) that we invite folks to complete to help us to vet, evaluate, refine, and revise the taxonomies. By March 1, 2009, all six new taxonomies and feedback forms will be available via this wiki.

6. TPACK and Faculty Development

Craig Cunningham and Arlene Borthwick have been using the TPACK framework for faculty development at National-Louis University. Funded by a Senate Faculty Development Grant, they have brought together faculty from the National College of Education and the College of Arts and Sciences to form small groups to apply the TPACK model to integrating technology into teacher preservice courses. They plan to present their results at a Center for Practitioner Research-sponsored symposium — which of course we will report on in future issues of this newsletter.

7. Learning and Doing More with TPACK

Interested in learning more about TPACK or getting more involved in the TPACK community? Here are a few ideas:

- Visit and contribute to the TPACK wiki at: http://tpck.org/
- Join the TPACK SIG at: http://site.aace.org/sigs/tpack-sig.htm
- Join and contribute to the TPACK Google group at: http://groups.google.com/group/tpack/
- Review and provide feedback on the TPACK Learning Activity Types at: http://activitytypes.wmwikis.net/

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Hope to see you at the TPACK SIG meeting at SITE 2009 (on Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 12:15 pm) in Charleston, SC!

- Judi, Matt, Mario, and Punya

Judi Harris, Chair, College of William & Mary
Matt Koehler, Vice-Chair, Michigan State University
Mario Kelly, Futon, Hunter College
Punya Mishra, Recliner, Michigan State University

Abstract: Abstract: In this paper we describe a framework for teacher knowledge for technology integration called Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (originally TPCK, now TPACK: Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge). This framework builds on Shulman’s construct of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) to include technology knowledge. We argue that the development of TPACK by teachers is critical to effective teaching with technology. We begin with a brief introduction to the complex, ill- structured nature of teaching. We consider the nature of technologies (both analog and digital), and how the inclusion of technology in pedagogy further complicates teaching. We describe the TPACK framework for teacher knowledge in detail, as a complex interaction among three bodies of knowledge: Content, Pedagogy, and Technology. We explain how these bodies of knowledge interact, both theoretically and in practice, to produce the types of flexible knowledge needed to successfully integrate technology use into teaching.