Matt Koehler and I just published an article in Learning & Leading with Technology, the membership magazine of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). The complete citation is as follows: Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2009, May). Too Cool for...
Exploring visual space with mathematics
Stacy Clause just sent me this very cool link to an article titled Exploring logo designs with Mathematica. In this article, Chris Carlson, of the User Design Group at Mathematia shows how one can mathematically develop variations on commercial logo designs by the...
Of tools and disciplines (OR the TPK in TPACK)
One of the many things I have to do as a faculty member is review grant proposals. This is an important service to the field, but truth be told, given how busy I am I do see it as somewhat of a chore. I was recently reviewing some educational research proposals for a...
TPACK @ AERA, 2009
I did not go to AERA this year - choosing instead to go to Chicago to Keynote the Engaging Minds: Pedagogy and Personalism, the 2009 DePaul Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference. We did have a paper to be presented there (and I am sure our Iowa State friends must...
Profesor 2.0, blurring the boundaries
I am in Chicago to give the Keynote address at the 2009 DePaul University Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference. The conference theme this year is Engaging Minds: Pedagogy and Personalism. I was invited by Sharon Guan (she was part of the AACTE Innovation &...
Twittering in class, what’s the big deal?
Noah Ullman just forwarded me this story in the The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Professor encourages students to pass notes during class via twitter. It is amazing to me that this merited being called news. If you have been following this blog you know that...
Guest blogging for Nashworld: TPACK video
Sean Nash over at Nashworld asked me to guest blog for this week while he is out with his students doing some really cool stuff. Here is a link to my posting: A TPACK video mashup!. I end the post with a couple of videos, one a commercial and the other my mashup...
Hobnob with MSU faculty
Paul Morsink & Bakar Razali, two graduate students in our college have been doing this interesting variant of the 60 second lecture. They record short videos of individual faculty members talking about anything that interests them and through that allow viewers to...
Tech as tool, medium & network
I just discovered (through the serendipitous connectibility of Google Alerts) about Teaching Thursdays a blog from the University of North Dakota. It is a collaborative venture between Anne Kelsh (Office of Instructional Development) and Bill Caraher (Department of...
Master’s course wins ATT Award
Just got the news from Carrie Albin, Outreach Coordinator of our Educational Technology Certificate Program (which is part of our Master's in Educational Technology program) that our CEP810 (Teaching for Understanding with Computers) course earned first place in the...
Special CITE issue on TPACK
The CITE Journal had a recent special issue devoted to TPACK. You can access the special issue (edited by Judi Harris and Matt Koehler) here or individual articles below. Bull, G., & Bell, L. (2009). TPACK: A framework for the CITE Journal. Contemporary Issues in...
TPACK & the moon OR why I love the web
I recently blogged (here and here) about the experiment conducted by students in Italy that allowed them to use publicly available NASA audio recordings from the moon landings to determine the distance between the earth and the moon. I bit more online research led to...
Following up on lunar distance
A followup to my previous posting about the Italian kids calculating the distance to the moon using recordings from the Apollo Space program. As I read the story on the technology Review website, I came to the comments made by readers. One stuck out. This is what...
From Tech to Ed Tech: Distance to the moon
For one reason or another, I have three consecutive posts regarding the earth and sun and moon - i.e. the local area in the solar system. I had just completed my previous postings (on on seeing through eclipses and measuring the radius of the earth) when I came across...
The beauty of the web: Shape of the earth
While searching for information for my previous posting on using eclipses to see, I came across an interesting paper that provided yet another way of figuring out the shape of the Earth. Lynch, D.K. (2005). Turbulent ship wakes: further evidence that the Earth is...
Using eclipses to see
Let me start with two questions: First, what is the shape of the Earth? And two, what shapes does the sun cast on the ground when filtered through the leaves of a tree? Of course we know the answer to the first question. The pictures from space show clearly this...
TPACK videos: A few new ones
I have come across some new TPACK related videos/podcasts (either on youtube or elsewhere) that I feel may be worth sharing. The first of them came as an email from Matt Townsley. He pointed me to these two videos by Janet Bowers of San Diego State University. In...
Creativity at Wake Forest
I presented yesterday at a conference a Wake Forest University titled: Creativity: Worlds in the Making. I was part of a panel that included Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein and Todd Siler. More details about the panel and links to my presentation can be found below....
University courses using TPACK
Matt Koehler and I rarely (if ever) explicitly mention the TPACK framework in our teaching. Of course the framework guides all that we do in class - but we have never really felt the need to throw another acronym (or series of acronyms such as TK, CK, TPK and so on)...
Teaching TPACK @ BYU
I just found out about IPT287: Instructional Technology for ElEd and ECE a course taught at Brigham Young by Charles Graham (an active TPACK researcher and the adviser of Suzy Cox about whose dissertation I had written about here). Of particular interest to me was a...
SITE08 Keynote YouTubed!
I just found out (via These Apples are Delicious blog, and more specifically this posting: Creative Teachers) that the keynote that Matt and I presented at SITE08 is now available on YouTube! Somebody went through the effort of breaking up the video into 5 parts and...
Representing DNA as code
What does it mean to represent something? Sean Nash (of Nashworld) and I have been having some fun at the expense of periodic representations (my post and his response) and even children's books. I had been wanting to write about this for the past few days but travel,...
The 60 second lecture
I received an email yesterday from the State News (our local university newspaper) about what I thought of the 60 second lecture—a trend sweeping through online courses. Some of my first thoughts about this are below. If you don't know what they are, check out this...
Bits to Atoms, A Fab lab
I had heard of Neil Gershenfeld's work on the Bits to Atoms Project at MIT but thought of these Fabrication Labs as being too expensive ($500,000+) or esoteric for everyday or classroom use. But one fine day I got an email from Glen Bull from Virginia informing me of...
TPACK Survey(s), now available
As the TPACK framework has developed and received greater research and scholarly attention there has been an increasing demand for a survey instrument that can help us measure TPACK. There are now two such measures available. We, here at Michigan State, in close...
Charleston, SC for SITE 09
I am off to Charleston, SC for the SITE 2009 conference. . I can't believe it has been a year since Matt Koehler and I presented our Keynote. I am sending this note sitting in the Michigan Flyer bus (making good use of their free wi-fi) and am looking forward to a...
TPACK Newsletter #2: Feb09 Edition
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #2: Special SITE conference issueLate February 2009 Welcome to the second edition of the TPACK Newsletter. If you are not sure what TPACK is, please feel free to surf over to www.tpack.org to find out more. Gratuitous Quote about Technology...
Bangalore symposium, now on YouTube
This past August I was in India for a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity. The meeting was organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International Youth Foundation and was "designed to bring together education and...
Visualizing periodic tables (What not to do)
Sean Nash (of Nashworld) sent me a link to A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods of Management. This is a very cool looking representation developed by Ralph Lengler & Martin Eppler at the Institute of Corporate Communication at the University of Lugano,...
MSU Technology Showcase: The Usual Suspects
I have been invited by Patrick Dickson, Byron Brown and Jon Sticklen to offer a lowkeynote address (note emphasis on lowkey!) for MSU's Second Annual Faculty Technology Showcase (more details here). I have created a small presentation to go with my lowkeynote, slides...