Happy Thanksgiving

Praise-blame ambigram in 3D

Sep 17, 2014

Jon Good has been playing around with some new 3D printers we just bought and this is what he printed for me - a 3-D version of the "praise-blame" ambigram (click here for the 2-D version). How cool is that! So what you are seeing in the top half is the printed...

Principled innovation in hiring

Oct 8, 2019

We, in the Office of Scholarship and Innovation (OofSI), have never been big fans of the typical interview and hiring process. We are not sure that the process helps us identify the right people, and more importantly, we find the process to be unnecessarily opaque and...

Reimagining conteXt in TPACK: New article

Apr 17, 2019

Back in September I wrote a long-ish blog post about something that had bothered me for years and years about the canonical TPACK diagram. It had to do with how contextual knowledge was represented in the diagram, or rather how it was not represented in the diagram....

On surviving a Ph.D.

Aug 10, 2010

I just discovered (H/T Daily Dish) Matt Might's website and his writings on graduate school, academia, and the professoriate. Matt is funny, cogent and most importantly insightful. I recommend his writing to anybody who is interested in getting into graduate school,...

Wicked problems, Design & Horst Rittel

Oct 7, 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...

MSU college of Ed leads US News rankings!

Mar 15, 2011

The 2012 U.S. News rankings of graduate programs in education have been released and there is good news for our college and department. Overall, the College of Education at Michigan State is ranked 17th which is where we were last year. It appears that our reputation...

What do they know? Video projects on understanding

Jul 16, 2008

In my summer classes I have the participants complete a video assignment on understanding. This year as always my students worked in groups over a week-and-a-half to select their topics, develop interview protocols, video tape people as they answered their questions,...

Visual wit

Dec 12, 2008

I just stumbled upon this website of witty and original t-shirt designs. Two of my favorites are "Experimental music" (included below) and "Puzzled Putter." You can see all the designs here.

Dreams of our futures

Aug 29, 2008

I started this blog on the 1st of January 2008. Barely 4 days later I a posted a video and asked the question, Is this a defining moment of our time? See it here Almost exactly six months later my question was partially answered, and I blogged about it here. Today,...