Elizabeth Helfant over at Digital Learning Environments Blog has an interesting posting titled The Pancake principle. She makes a connection between technology integration and making pancakes, and offers three tenets of the Pancake principle. This posting is inspired...
Posts related to: Stories
Too cool for school: Using the TPACK framework
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...
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...
Mea maxima culpa
I try to be scrupulous about giving credit where it is due and yet I messed up big time. This happened over a year ago and to my dismay I did not think about it or realize it till this moment. A year or so ago we received the 2008 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology...
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...
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...
Serendipitous Connectability… a short history of an idea
A while back I had written about the idea of "serendipitous connectability;" the idea that the web allows us to "to run across things that are stunning in their ability to connect to us in powerful, emotionally touching ways." I was prompted to do this by clicking on...
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...
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,...
Gandhi, ambigrams, creativity & the power of small pieces loosely joined
This is an extended piece on the manner in which the web, small pieces loosely joined, can lead to “serendipitous connectabilty” (something I had written about earlier here). All this is situated in a story that connects cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader, Oriya...
Responding to my reading…
I had written a response to Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist a while ago (read it here). Yesterday, I received a note from Irfan critiquing my take on the novel. This is what he wrote: Punya, I read the novel and it does not seem to me, as you interpret,...
Appreciating Joel Colbert at AACTE
I just spent a couple of days in Chicago at the Annual meeting of the American Association for the Colleges of Teacher Education. On Friday evening was meeting of the Innovation and Technology Committee the highlight of which was a gift of appreciation that we gave...
Tiger by the tail
A while ago I blogged about a column by David Brooks in the NYTimes (Flipping the Tech & Ed equation). Brooks described research by Goldin and Katz indicating a "race between technology and education" based on the idea that technology is (by its very nature) skill...
Of hernias and hiccups, the evolutionary story
Interesting article in Scientific American about how flaws in our biology reveal our evolutionary history. Steven Gould talked about it in his famous essay on The Panda's Thumb. This is a wonderful argument for Darwinian evolution since it points not to perfection...
Harold Pinter, RIP
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness — Harold Pinter (1930 - 2008).
Brevity is the soul
I had posted earlier (see Twittering a tale) about short, short fiction that is suddenly the rage. Matt Koehler just introduced me to another example of this new emerging genre: Six Word Memoirs. Check it out.
Daily routines of creative people
A while ago I had blogged about a webpage that chronicles how "artists work" (see my posting here). Now I discovered a whole website devoted to it. Check out Daily Routines. They are all interesting to read and the common theme that jumps out, for the most part, is...
We feel fine about ambient findability (really?)
Most of us live our lives with the assumption of practical obscurity - i.e. the idea that what we do, even in public places, is essentially private. There are just too many people and just too few ways of tracking us individually. So we were for the most part,...
We feel fine
We Feel Fine is a web-installation, "a self-organizing particle system," art project that is powerful and touching - building as it does on people's emotions, harvested from blog postings from around the world. As the designers say, "We hope it makes the world seem a...
Microblogging in the classroom
I have written quite a bit about how a technology can become an educational technology (see this, this, this and this). This is a non-trivial task that all educators face, and requires situational creativity in re-purposing / re-designing the existing tool to meet...
Nerdview or being stuck in our worldview
I recently received a note from a graduate student as an unnamed university. This student wrote to me after having assigned the TPACK handbook chapter (co-authored with Matt Koehler) to a bunch of pre-service teachers, and suggested that the chapter was hard to read,...
Why blog
Andrew Sullivan is one of my favorite bloggers, not because I agree with all that he says there is a certain sensibility that emerges as you follow his blog for a while that appeals to me. He has a great piece in The Atlantic Monthly titled Why I blog?. Speaking of...
The greatness of teachers
I discovered Hulu TV a few weeks ago and have been using it to catch up on previous episodes of The Daily Show. I decided today, as I was working on a presentation to watch Crawford. It is a documentary about "a small town thrust into big politics when George W. Bush...
Why I like naps
... because scientific research shows that sleep enhances creativity 🙂
Wong, Mishra, Koehler & Adams (2007)
Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Adams, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. To appear in M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press. Abstract:...
Mishra & Girod (2006/2007)
Mishra, P., & Girod, M. (2006/2007). Designing learning through learning to design. The High School Journal. 90(1). 44 – 51. Reprinted in K. M. Cauley, & G. Pannozzo, (Eds.), Annual Edition: Educational Psychology 07/08. McGraw-Hill: NY. Abstract: This paper...