Bridging the theory/practice gap: A visual exploration

by | Wednesday, May 25, 2016

theory-practice.001

Theoretically there should a reciprocal relationship between Theory and Practice – but it is the gap that every academic bemoans. This posting is prompted not by any particular insight into these matters but rather to share a set of visuals (ambigrams, memes, whatever…) that I created over the past day or so. This was prompted by a conversation about this with Danah Henriksen – so some blame / credit should go to her. (I prefer her getting the blame and all the credit coming to me, but she, and you, may disagree.)

To start with up on top is the standard image – the arrows representing how practice ought to inform theory and vice versa. As Immanuel Kant never said (but should have), “Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.” So to celebrate this reciprocal, transactional relationship here is an ambigram for these two words, reading “research” one way and “practice” when rotated 180 degrees!practice-theorytheory-practice

This of course allows me to recreate the two-arrow diagram up above with a new image that can be read even when rotated 180 degrees!!

theory-practice.002

As Danah and I were discussing these ideas, we were also looking on the Internet for interesting quotes related to the Theory-Practice divide, and we found some good ones. That prompted me to start creating some posters/memes (I have no idea what to call them) to represent these ideas visually. (Please note, all the photographs used in the designs below have been taken by me, over the years. And you can click on the images to see higher resolution version of the designs.) So here we go!

theory-practice.003

To start out
Theory and Reality are only theoretically related.

• • •

theory-practice.005

For all the graduate students out there:
I really need to graduate. I’ve lost the ability
to discern theory from practice

• • •

theory-practice.007

Two unique designs from one Yogi Berra quote:
In theory there is no difference between theory and 
practice. In practice there is. 

• • • 

theory-practice.008

Maybe my favorite quote, from Frank Westphal (similar to the Berra quote above):
The difference between theory and practice is, in theory, somewhat smaller than in practice  

• • • 

theory-practice.004

And of course the last word, always goes to the pessimist!
Theory v.s. Practice
Theory: Everything is clear, but nothing works
Practice: Everything works, but nothing is clear
Sometimes theory meets practice… Nothing works and nothing is clear

• • •

 


A few randomly selected blog posts…

Stuff Indian’s Like

After the success of Stuff white people like, can Stuff Indians like be far behind. Check it out... it has the occasional nugget that nails Indians and their behavior.

Teaching an old dog new tricks

Teaching an old dog new tricks

I have been playing with Photoshop Beta, a version of Photoshop with a range of AI-powered tools that let you add, extend, or remove content from your images using simple text prompts. This is similar to Adobe Firefly, a web-based image manipulation / generation tool,...

YouTube & Research

In a previous post I mentioned a new study on children and the internet recently completed by Warren Buckleitner for Consumer Reports Web Watch. Anyway, towards the end of the post I mentioned how the final report includes links to YouTube videos of the actual data...

Palindromic Poetry

A few years ago I got bitten by the bug of Palindromic Poetry - poems that double back on themselves, that can be read this way, or that. This is consistent with my love for ambigrams and other kinds of symmetrical wordplay. Take a look...

Day 2 Morning session, Mishra & Light

I just completed my presentation Education Technology and Teacher Education, the TPACK framework. I think it went well, though you have to talk to ask the audience what they "really" think. I had been allocated 60 minutes for my talk - but Radha and I discussed...

EPET at SITE, 2014

SITE2014 (the annual conference of the Society of Information Technology in Teacher Education) is being held in Jacksonville, Florida starting the 17th of March. As always, the Educational Psychology and Educational Technology program at MSU has a significant presence...

Harvard Open Access update

An update to my previous posting regarding Harvard adopting a open access requirement to all it faculty. It seems that the proposal has been approved. See this news story on the Chronicle.com website. Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard who...

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...

3 Comments

  1. OllyGames

    Hi Punya, awesome read! I love the quote you had here: “in theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”

    Reply
  2. KristyBernales

    An insightful post… appreciate your creative style to define things.

    Reply
  3. Gaurish

    Nice photos and ambigram.

    Reply

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