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…

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #15, March (Special Conference Issue) 2013

  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...

Bringing Design to Education: IDC Talks

Bringing Design to Education: IDC Talks

I was recently invited to speak at a series organized by alumni of the IDC School of Design, IIT Powai. As an alum of the same institution it was a great honor to be invited. You can see the entire series here (and I must say there are some awesome speakers there). My...

A New Chapter

A New Chapter

I came to ASU 8 years ago, joining the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College as Associate Dean for Scholarship and Innovation. The primary goal was to support our faculty and doctoral students in their research related activities. That said, my role has shifted over the...

Speaking of leadership

Matt and I were invited to Sydney, Australia a year ago as a part of the Teaching Teachers for the Future (TTF) project. You can see a report in the New Educator: TPACK takes hold in Australia. As a part of this visit we were interviewed to speak a bit about...

Slumdog night (and Rahman)

Slumdog rolled into the Oscars tonight. More important to me were the two Oscars for A. R. Rahman for original score and song. It is time that the world recognized his genius. Here is a cartoon by Kaladhar Bapu from his site Point Blank A.R. Rahman by Kaladhar Bapu

Education & the Rise of AI Influencers

Education & the Rise of AI Influencers

I have been thinking hard about the nature of generative AI, what sets it apart from other technologies that have come in the past. It seems to me there are two key factors. The first is its ability to engage in dialogue, in natural language and the second are its...

Of play and games

Some thoughts on play and games inspired by a recent article in the NYTimes Magazine titled "Taking Play Seriously". Based on the article I argue that play is essential for learning... I also throw in some thoughts about the distinction between play and games, and why...

Facilitating collaborative design: New publication

Facilitating collaborative design: New publication

Essential tensions in design. Image designed by Punya Mishra Design facilitators play an important role in the open-ended collaborative design process. This becomes even more important as design based approaches expand to groups and teams that may not be as familiar...

Creativity in mathematics and beyond

Creativity in mathematics and beyond

Our series of articles related to the broad topic of Rethinking technology and creativity for the 21st century in the journal TechTrends continues with a new article on creativity in mathematics. This article focuses on the 4 winners of the 2014...

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

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