Wicked problems, Design & Horst Rittel

by | Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Matt Koehler and I have often talked about the wicked problems of design and teaching with technology (most specifically in our handbook chapter on TPACK). We take the idea of wicked problems from a classic paper written by Rittel and Weber back in 1973. As Wikipedia says, Rittel was “a pioneering theorist of design and planning, and late professor at the University of California, Berkeley.” Rittel’s writings are often hard to get hold of since he published in a range of journals across multiple domains. Professor Ellen Do at Georgia Tech has created a webpage with links and downloadable PDFs of many of Rittel’s works. Check it out here.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

stealth assessment

Just heard this of stealth assessment idea (from Michael Spector at NTLS) that struck a chord. More here, [word document].

River run photos

Here are some photographs from the Capital City River Run half-marathon I completed this past Sunday (as reported here: Hurting but Happy). Here's one More here, here, here, here, here & here. Apologies for the copyright marks.

Shulman on learning

Shulman on learning

One of my favorite quotes about learning. From this article, Taking Learning Seriously the entirety of which is worth reading. But for now here is the quote, and a visual (just because): Learning is least useful when it is private and hidden; it is most powerful when...

Trans-disciplinary creativity takes root (slowly)

I wanted to bring attention to two articles that came across my desk today. The first was in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled Creativity: a Cure for the Common Curriculum on efforts at range of universities seeking "to train students in how innovative thinkers...

Generative AI is WEIRD!

Generative AI is WEIRD!

Note: This blog post was almost entirely written by ChagGPT based on an analysis of a set of images I had uploaded onto it. The image above (Weird AI) is an original typographic design created by me. The background sky was created by Adobe Firefly. To give some...

Bad poetry time: Clerihews

Just when you thought I had run through all the bad poetry I can spew (see here for my palindromic poems) here is another set of poems I had all but forgotten about. A few years ago I got hooked into writing Clerihews. For the uninitiated: The clerihew is a bit of...

Multiple representations of the periodic table and learning

Mishra & Yadav (2006) was a paper based around my dissertation research. It took a while to get published and I am including it here for the record. My dissertation (Mishra, 1998) was maybe the first place where I made a specific mention of the triad of...

Bringing sensory richness to bleak scientific texts

A while ago I had written about how we use language to capture intangible ideas - and the risks associated with not paying attention to these intangibles. I had said (though you can read the complete post A different language): For instance wine connoisseurs have...

Happy Thanksgiving, 2 new ambigrams

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I wake up every day just feeling incredibly lucky for what I have - and to have a special day devoted to celebrating that idea... how very cool. So here are two new and unique ambigram designs to celebrate this wonderful day. The...

1 Comment

  1. Cherice Montgomery

    Thanks, Punya! This was very helpful to one of my students who is doing some research on critical thinking!

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *