Interesting TPACK related discussion

by | Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Russ Goerend over at Learning is Life has initiated a fascinating discussion on the TPACK framework on his blog. It all revolves around a blog post he titled The force is strong with the shiny one. I shall not seek to summarize the discussion here (please go read it for yourself) but there are a couple of things he wrote that connected with me and that I would like to comment on. He wrote:

When I think of the TPACK diagram, I picture horseshoe magnets on the outside of each circle, pointed into the middle. Those magnets are what keep the quality teacher balanced in the center, each magnet pulling and building a feeling of equilibrium. This is obviously best-case scenario.

He describes the evolving knowledge of the teacher as (and I love this phrase) Journey to the Center of the Venn. As Matt Koehler and I have written earlier, we see all good teachers as sitting right in the middle of the three intersecting circles. Elsewhere we had written:

Clearly, separating the three components (content, pedagogy and technology) in our model is an analytic act and one that is difficult to tease out in practice. In actuality these components exist in a state of dynamic equilibrium, or as the philosopher Kuhn (1977) said in a different context, in a state of “essential tension.” (This is in our original TC Record article that introduced the TPACK construct, though it was then called TPCK. I am sure we have written about this elsewhere as well, but I am being a bit lazy here.)

It seems to me that this idea of “essential tension” is exactly the point that Russ is making with his magnet analogy (which actually may be more user-friendly, so I might actually steal it for future use). Every teacher, we would argue, is pulled in different directions by the imperatives of the technology, of the content, and the pedagogy. The trick (and this where design comes in, this is where creativity comes in) is finding the right balance between the three.

The other question that Russ raises is how do teachers get to the Center of the Venn. He describes that most people get there through the technology – and that can be problematic since “that magnet” is extremely powerful. Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to present the TPACK framework to many different audiences and I have always found their responses extremely interesting.

To the technologists, the lack of emphasis on the transformative possibilities of technology is troublesome. Other audiences, say traditional educational psychologists, take us to task for giving Technology too much prominence. For them it is all about the Pedagogy (or instructional design)! Technology is in essence a pipe (or a dump-truck) and Content is irrelevant, since with the “right” pedagogical strategies one can teach anything. Content experts, on the other hand, are concerned by the fact that we are emphasizing P and (or) T over Content, or, at the very least, giving these three knowledge areas equal value. In their frame, disciplinary knowledge is all there is – the rest is just methods for getting information from one location (my head, a textbook) to another (students head). Teacher educators often get the PCK part (Shulman’s work has been around a while), they are, however, somewhat suspicious of these new technologies, it all seems too new and untested. Interactions with these different perspectives leaves me with a deeper understanding of how our professions or training frame our worldviews as well as a richer conceptualization of the framework as well.

The larger point I am trying to make here (in response to Russ’ question) is that it doesn’t really matter where we come from, content, technology or pedagogy – at the end of the day we have to end up at the Center of the Venn Diagram. So in some sense everybody’s Journey to the Center will be somewhat different.

Just a side note: Some of my posting above is cribbed from a discussion I participated in on Classroom 2.0. Incidentally this discussion was initiated by Matt Townsley (who turns out to be Russ’ brother-in-law!). What a small world we live in 🙂

Topics related to this post: Creativity | Design | Learning | Philosophy | Teaching | Technology | TPACK | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Tweaking the design

Someone once said that all design is redesign - and it has never been truer than trying to design your website. A few weeks ago I found out that my site looked terrible on the iTouch and the iPhone. I made a quick fix (adding a template and plugin) that would allow...

Principled Innovation meets Design: 1 new model and 2 videos

Principled Innovation meets Design: 1 new model and 2 videos

Our college has embraced the idea of Principled Innovation as being a core value that informs everything we do. (More on this in this post by Cristy Guleserian and in the PI framework document). Defining Principled Innovation: Design by Punya Mishra At the heart of...

Why I love the web…

I don't know if anyone has been following the back and forth following my posting about the Periodic Table of Typefaces (see Yet another periodic table...). In brief, I was quite critical of the design of this table and made that point in no uncertain terms. Imagine...

Learning Games & TPACK @ Drexel: Video now online

Back in January I was invited to speak at the Drexel Learning Games Network (DGLN) seminar series. As I had written in my original post (TPACK & Games @ Drexel), DLGN is the brainchild of  Aroutis Foster, former graduate student, now rising star academic and...

Ganesh, new ambigram, & old video

Ganesh, new ambigram, & old video

One of the big parts of my life over the past decade or more, has been the Ganesh Festival celebrations in Lansing with friends and family—Good food and good times. Of course this year I have to miss all the fun - being here in Phoenix. I have kept up with all...

Unpacking TPACK

Suzy Cox is a lecturer in educational technology and educational psychology at Utah Valley State College and also a doctoral candidate at Brigham Young University (working with Dr. Charles Graham). She is currently working on her dissertation which seeks to develop a...

Dances for Cause, photographs

This past Saturday the Okemos High School auditorium hosted Dances for Cause, a fund-raiser for Habitat for Humanity. My daughter, Shreya, performed a dance with her dance group (the same dance they had performed for Milap 2008). Also on the program were dances from...

The Three Oddest Words

A poem by Wislawa Szymborska Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. When I pronounce the word Nothing, I make something no non-being...

Value in an age of free…

What happens when an economy "built on selling precious copies" suddenly confronts the world of the Internet - a world based on the "free flow of free copies?" Kevin Kelly confronts this issue in a recent post titled, Better than free. As he says, "how does one make...

0 Comments

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. TPACK – “Journey to the Center” « James Jones' SLE Program Blog - [...] http://punyamishra.com/2010/02/03/interesting-tpack-related-discussion/ [...]

Submit a Comment

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