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.

Given my schedule, there was no way I could have taken on this additional task, but after talking with Matt Koehler, I went back to the editors with a counter suggestion. We suggested that Matt and I would take on the task of series editors while the articles would be written by an advanced graduate student. We thought this would be a good experience for the student (writing for a popular audience is not something we teach well, or at all for that matter) and would be relatively easy for us. The editors agreed and over the past few months Matt and I have been working with a couple of student volunteers in preparing our articles.

The first issue of the magazine is now available and so is the first article in the series. The first article is written by Autumn Dodge and is on the important topic of Self-Regulation. I was the primary editor (Matt being the primary editor for the next article coming up) and it was truly a pleasure working with Autumn on this. I do think the article has turned out well.

You can acces the first issue of Education Matters @ ETMA by going to the following link: http://www.youblisher.com/p/627218-ETMA-e-Magazine/ (or alternatively you can download the complete pdf from Education Matters: ETMA e-Magazine Issue 1).

• 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…

Kristen Kereluik and I worked on synthesizing 15 different 21st century frameworks and approaches, a couple of years ago. Till now I have been hesitant to share the diagram we created, mainly because I have, till recently, considered it a work in progress. Now, however, that the paper has been accepted for publication I am ready to share it with the world, since it will now be in print.

If you want more information on this diagram and the work that led to to it, below is a previous version of the work that was presented at the SITE conference back in 2011 (minus the latest diagram).

Mishra, P., & Kereluik, K. (2011). What 21st Century Learning? A review and a synthesis. Paper presented at SITE2011, Nashville TN.

Abstract: The discussion of 21st century skills has become increasingly prevalent in educational discourse and several organizations have developed 21st century frameworks. This papers seeks to compare prominent 21st century frameworks to both provide clarity on what it actually means to teach and learn in the 21st century and to find common themes across frameworks.

• Download a PDF of the publication here

This version of the diagram was inspired by a version created by Ruben R. Puentedura, with additional input from Chris Fahnoe. Click to download larger version.

The other diagram that has been receiving some attention is one on 7 trans-disciplinary skills for 21st Century Learning. This diagram builds on the list of skills laid out by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein in their book Sparks of Genius. Our paper that describes these skills can be found here

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 the diagram (Click to download larger version):

Photographs from the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2013 at San Francisco. It was great meeting up with friends and colleagues, present two talks and take in some of the sights. Enjoy.

The first is a spiral of the word Thanks. The letter “s” does double duty here, switching its affiliation depending on whether you are reading it right side up or upside down.

The next design is for the word Ignite – the reason for creating it is self-explanatory, I think.

The final and most interesting design is the third one. It reads “Art” and “Science” one way and Education when rotated 180 degrees.   I think this one is still a bit of work in progress.

… 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.

Gasps filled the room. The students sputtered. They fretted. This must be a joke. I couldn’t possibly mean it. What, they asked, is the catch?

“None,” I replied. “You are UCLA students. The brightest of the bright. Let’s see what you can accomplish when you have no restrictions and the only thing that matters is getting the best answer possible.”

So what happened? You should read the entire essay. But in brief, the shared grade for the group of students who chose to turn in one collective answer was 20% higher than the averages on his previous midterms. (Three students chose not to participate in this shared work and turned in their work individually.) Here’s the key quote, as to why this worked:  

Although by conventional test-taking rules, the students were cheating, they actually weren’t in this case. Instead, they were changing their goal in the Education Game from “Get a higher grade than my classmates” to “Get to the best answer.” This also required them to make new rules for test-taking. Obviously, when you make the rules there is no reason to cheat.

What a great story!

STEM

STEAM

Research

Gandhi

I was invited to speak at the Michigan Creative Educators Summit organized by The DeWitt Creativity Group at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. It was an amazing morning (sadly I could not stay for the entire day). What was most amazing and exciting was listening to local school students who presented the creative work they have been doing. Here are my slides from my presentation, for the record.

A new ambigram for Robert Sternberg, psychologist.

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:

I believe this passionately: that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.

Even more ominously, there is now research that shows that that there has been a continuous and persistent decline in creativity in US school-going children over the past 30 years or so. Researcher Kyung Hee Kim argues that since the mid-1980?s…

…children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.

You can read a blog post about this work here (Dr. Peter Gray: As children’s freedom has declined so has their creativity) or visit the researcher’s website (Dr. Kim’s World of Creativity).

As to why it this happening? The blog post (by Dr. Gray) suggests that, this is because

Creativity is nurtured by freedom and stifled by the continuous monitoring, evaluation, adult-direction, and pressure to conform that restrict children’s lives today.  In the real world few questions have one right answer, few problems have one right solution; that’s why creativity is crucial to success in the real world.  But more and more we are subjecting children to an educational system that assumes one right answer to every question and one correct solution to every problem, a system that punishes children (and their teachers too) for daring to try different routes.  We are also … increasingly depriving children of free time outside of school to play, explore, be bored, overcome boredom, fail, overcome failure—that is, to do all that they must do in order to develop their full creative potential.

My poem on imaginary numbers (The Mathematical “i”) was published in the March 2013 issue of At Right Angles, a school mathematics journal.   You can download the entire issue here (it is a large download) or view the magazine in sections here with a link to the poem as a googledoc.

Helen Hazen, is the author of 1983 book, Endless Rapture: Rape, Romance, and the Female Imagination. In a recent article in The American Scholar titled “Endless Rewriting” she recounts the way the book came to be and in particular the role that her editor (Jacques Barzun) played in getting the book started and more importantly finished.

I found the essay absolutely fascinating—a great encapsulation of what the kind of intellectual growth and development that happens (or at least ought to happen) in graduate school and the crucial role played by the advisor in guiding this process. And finally, this article, in pointing out an ideal advisor, just brought home to me how far I still have to go. The article is worth reading in full but here are some thoughts, on mentorship, graduate school, the process of writing and what it all means.  

On graduate school and mentoring

Sometimes in the mid-70′s (the story wasn’t very clear about this date) Ms. Hazen had written an article that caught Mr. Brazun’s attention. So he wrote to her wondering if she would be willing to expand that article (or any related ideas she may have) into a book. And thus began the story, or the multi-year saga of revisions and rewrites; of line edits that most probably never ended up in the final book; of cajoling and nudging; of frustration and breakthroughs. And in all this, steady at her side, as a mentor and friend was Barzun, attempting to make sense her “telescopic style” that essentially slammed together “six ideas with their heads and tails obscured by horrendous anatomical overlapping.” Hazen speaks honestly of how she was even unaware that “one idea might actually be three or four, or six, and I had to look hard to discover where all this overlapping occurred.”

As I was reading this, I was reminded of many dissertation proposals I have read, or sadly sometimes, even final dissertations that have a similar “horrendous anatomical overlapping” and the sinking feeling that the student has not yet realized that an important part of going to graduate school is learning to realize that “one idea might actually be three or four, or six” and that sometimes, one has to “look hard to discover where all this overlapping occurs.” Hazen started, as many doctoral students in the social science and humanities do, with certain feelings, “I love … I hate … that is so sad … that is so confusing … ” and it took a while for her to realize (as it does some graduate students), that at some level, writing a book (or going to graduate school) is about learning to ”make intelligent sentences out of such gooey snarls.”

There is much to be learned here—about writing, the role of mentorship, and complex transactional relationship between writing and thinking (one guiding / scaffolding the other, a double helix of understanding and instantiation).

But this article stuck with me for the manner in which Mr. Barzun guides and instructs Ms. Hazen through this entire process. This was easily the best description of what an ideal doctoral advisor should be. As Hazen says, “I began with simple ideas that he kept pushing at until they became less than simple. They often became so complicated that they confused even me, and then he pushed more until they became clear.”

And as for the crucial question, how much of the final work was Hazen’s and how much that of Barzun. Hazen ask’s that question and answers it as follows:

Did he change or create ideas? Time and again he assured me that he didn’t know what I was thinking:

My substituted words and phrases are only indications of possible lines of thought: I may have misunderstood your intent, so do not hesitate to put in something else. But each of my marks means ‘Trouble here—something to fix.’

But I do know that he made me develop ideas that I would not have arrived at without his coercion.

What a wonderful goal for an advisor—that you helped someone develop their ideas that they would not have emerged without your input.

This article just pointed to me, just how difficult being a good advisor is and just how much I still have to learn.

*********

On writing

One of the most fascinating parts of the article is a listing of seven annotated “admonitions” Barzun offers Hazen about her writing. I am including a couple of them here – but they are worth reading in full.

First, you must decide what your subject is.

I did not have a subject? Surely he was wrong! My subject was quite plainly men and women. And yet, bit by bit, I began to understand what he was saying.

Second, your chapters keep the reader wondering what indeed (what in hell) you are up to. … There is a staggering amount of repetition about what women do and men do. And your best original ideas, which should be the strong current by which the rest is carried, are stuck away in corners as mere asides, as trailing comments. In one sense, none of your chapters visibly does anything different from the previous one.

Third. The cure is obviously to assign each chapter A Point to Make—a big point with little ones clustering around. The successive points should be so ordered that they form an argument, a course of reasoning, which can be quickly summed up at the end. To find the points and their order, you need a half sheet of paper, headed “I believe that …” with brief propositions below. Fiddle with the sequence until it seems to you smooth and natural, by which is meant convenient to follow.

Thank you, Mr. Barzun, but I do not remember that any of this process was smooth and natural. A rough journey up a steep slope full of brambles, crawling and whimpering much of the way is what I remember.

Fourth. When you have this menu for your guest’s dinner, stick to the contents of each course as you serve it—no strawberries in the soup. … You must treat every topic once and be done with it—so you can build on top of it and not have to re-lay the foundation already set.

Strawberries in the soup indeed, an image that has stuck with me these many years.

Fifth. There are too many quotations and they are too long. The result is that the point of each is lost within the general tenor of the passage. Go over them and select the best bits for every different point—whip, kiss, rough words, whatever. … In short, remember that your authors merely illustrate the points of your thesis; your voice must be the one steadily heard, even when you recite the extracts relevant to the point you have just made.

This last bit was difficult: you establish your own voice and then let your quoted authors do the work for you. To take the lurid flourishes of Barbara Cartland and her like, or even those of the Brontës and George Eliot, and to put them into a sophisticated and convincing whole, wasn’t working. Just as he ordered, I had to learn to stand far back and speak for myself.

His sixth enjoinder had to do with nomenclature: romance, romanticism, romanticize. Easy stuff, compared with

Seventh. Most difficult of all your tasks will be to balance the kinds of material relevant to your doctrine… It is by the accumulation of varied bits of fact that skepticism is overcome.

So I sat down anew, looking at the murk in front of me and with a blank page began to write down my Points to Make. I pored over his commentary and slowly, slowly began to understand. It felt like I was growing new brain cells so that I could figure it out. It felt like I was growing smarter. The next stage was hellish.

*********

Un-twisting the tale

Finally, after reading the article, I went looking for the book, the artifact that emerged after so much time and effort by these two people. Turns out it is available on Amazon for apprimately $300 for a new copy and around $100 for a used version. One of the reviewers on Amazon (in fact the only reviewer) wrote the following:

It’s been several years since I read this slim volume (for a second time), but it’s one of those which I find myself looking for in bibliographies in order to rate an author’s expertise and depth of research. Surprisingly, and disappointingly, it seems to have been all but forgotten. This is a shame because it’s quite a fine book and well worth the attention of anyone interested in these difficult topics.

I remember it as being almost in the form of an extended, musing essay, full of interesting surprises and insights — the kind of book which makes you think about things differently than you did before without really being able to put words to it. Whenever I think of the book, I wonder why apparently nothing more was ever written by the author.

And that quote, takes the analogy of graduate school and the writing of this book to its logical culmination. “Surprisingly, and disappointingly, it seems to have been all but forgotten. This is a shame because it’s quite a fine book and well worth the attention of anyone interested in these difficult topics.” That, my friends, is the graduate school equivalent of the last scene in Raider’s of the Lost Ark!

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:

• The MSU AT&T awards website (and the page devoted to our course)
• My original posting about the award
• Announcement page on the College of Education website
• Link to the video we created (on vimeo)

Incidentally, CEP817/ED870, Proseminar in Educational Technology taught by my friend and colleague, Matthew Koehler also received an honorable mention for a fully online course. More information about that here.

At the bottom right of the doodle above you can see an equation, famously called Euler’s identity. It is usually represented as follows:

It is famous because it combines into one simple equation the following elements:

• The number 0, the additive identity
• The number 1, the multiplicative identity
• The number pi, the ration of a circle’s circumference to its diameter
• The number e, the base of the natural logarithms
• The number i, the imaginary number that equals the square root of -1 

Moreover, these constants are joined together by three basic arithmetic operations (addition, multiplication and exponentiation), each of which appears just once!

Can you pack more into one equation! It is no wonder that this equation has often been called the “gold standard for mathematical beauty!”

Anyway, Euler’s identity has appeared on this blog a couple of years ago – most specifically in a mathematical poem (titled The Imaginary i). Euler himself has appeared in these poems a couple of times as well. If you haven’t read these poems before, here they are again, in celebration of Euler’s birthday. Enjoy…

• Goldbach’s Conjecture: In which Goldbach makes a conjecture in a letter to Euler
• Goldbach’s Variations: A followup to the previous poem that explores why Goldbach got the credit for the conjecture that was actually made by Euler
• The mathematical “i”: An attempt to understand the value of the imaginary in mathematics (and in life)