Students in my EDT180 class spent some time yesterday writing short stories. Super short stories, trying to tell a complete story in just 55 words! As it turns this (55 Fiction) is actually a thing – as a simple google search will reveal. Seeing my students engage in...
A visit to Israel
I just got back from a trip to Israel. I was invited by the MEITAL 2019 conference and the Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts. MEITAL is an organization of higher education institutions in Israel focusing on understanding and responding to local...
Creativity in Teaching & Learning @ Mizzou
I was recently invited to conduct a workshop for the Celebration of Teaching Conference at the University of Missouri around Creativity in Teaching and Learning. This was my first time at Columbia, MO and the conference organizers were wonderful. I did two versions of...
TPACK Newsletter #41, May 2019
Here is the latest pdf version of the TPACK Newsletter (#41, May 2019), as curated and shared by Judi Harris and her team. (Previous issues are archived here.) This issue includes 59 articles, 4 book chapters, and 20 dissertations that have not appeared...
The Theater of Creativity
Dr. Tatiana Chemi is assistant professor and researcher at Aalborg University, Denmark. She has a background in theater that gives her an unique perspective on creativity, the creative processes and the contexts that allow creativity to flower. In her research she...
The School Design Game v 1.0
The journey of design is complicated, filled with conundrums —some expected, others not so much. There are many possible strategies to address them as we iterate our way to the finish line. The School Design Game seeks to explore some of these complexities...
Reimagining conteXt in TPACK: New article
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....
Revealed by what we do not scrutinize: Book review on mobile Learning
Rohit Mehta (shy artist, polite scientist & stealthy educator) and I just published a review of the book Mobile Learning: Perspectives on Practice and Policy edited by Danielle Herro, Sousan Arafeh, Richard Ling, and Chris Holden. You can read the review,...
TPACK Newsletter #40, March 2019
Here is the Special Spring 2019 Conference Issue of the TPACK Newsletter (#40, March 2019), as curated and shared by Judi Harris and her team. (Previous issues are archived here.) This special issue include all the TPACK-related papers/sessions that...
David Zola, Educator Extraordinaire
A teacher affects eternity—Henry Adams I remember the first time I saw David Zola teach. He was on stage in front of 200+ undergraduate students with a plastic cup of wine in his hand. The wine had been poured for him by a teaching assistant from a bottle hidden in a...
TPACK as one solution
The Consortium of School Networking (COSN) is one of the leading associations for school system technology leaders. COSN recently released the first of three publications in their series on Driving K-12 Innovation: Hurdles 2019. The goal of this series is to...
TPACK Newsletter #39, February 2019
Here is the latest pdf version of the TPACK Newsletter (#39, February 2019), as curated and shared by Judi Harris and her team. (Previous issues are archived here.) This issue includes 31 articles, 2 books, 39 chapters, and 14 dissertations that have not appeared...
Technology & Education: A provocation
Jill Castek, at the University of Arizona, invited me to participate in an NSF funded workshop on developing "Principles for the equitable design of STEM learning environments." The event was being held at Bioshpere 2, which is this awesome place near Tucson. Because,...
Keynote at MITE 2019, Sydney (video)
I was recently invited to present a Keynote at the Mobile Technology in Teacher Education (MITE) 2019 Conference hosted by The University of Technology, Sydney. This was the fifth edition of the conference, and as it turns out, I had given a keynote at the first...
Aesthetics & STEM education: A new framework
I have always been intrigued by the nature and role of the aesthetic experience in learning. A few members of the Deep-Play research group have been exploring this issue for a while (for instance we have written on, why science teachers should care about beauty in...
Arts, wellness & creativity: New article
Dr. Paula Thomson and Dr. Vicki Jaque are professors at California State University, Northridge, where they co-direct the exercise and psychophysiology laboratory. They each have their own individual research interests but together they work on researching connections...
Defense against the dark arts in the Sydney Morning Herald
I was in Sydney recently to present a keynote at the MITE conference. I spoke there about some issues that have been concerning me for a while—what I like to call the "dark arts" of digital technologies. After the conference I had a wide-ranging interview with Jordan...
Educators as Designers
How might we? Three words, and a question mark. At one level it is a simple question—leaving open what it is that we might do. But at another level its openness is its strength. Because inherent within it is a call to action, a discomfort with the way things are, and...
Posthumanizing creativity
Dr. Kerry Chappell is a professor at the University of Exeter’s Graduate School of Education. She merges her training in dance, her doctorate in experimental psychology and interest in education to develop a transdisciplinary research program on better understanding...
OofSI: The year that was
Every December the Office of Scholarship & Innovation (OofSI) team looks back at the year that was, to document and reflect on all that we have done, as well as to plan for the future. This information is then put together in a report that captures our successes...
Creativity and the urban STEM teacher
I have written previously about the MSUrbanSTEM project and what it has meant to me. Over the past couple of years we have also published about this line of work (most prominently in a special issue of The Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching)....
Peer review in the science classroom
Fig. 1: Header image. Credits: Illustration by Punya Mishra. License CC-BY-NC. The scientific method is a myth. In more ways than one. Typically in school you are taught that the scientific method consists of making observations, developing hypotheses, testing them by...
The future of work & learning: An interview
I had posted earlier about my visit to Bangalore back in summer to participate in the Quest 2 Learn Annual Summit organized by the Quest Alliance. The two day conference focused on The future of work and learning. During my visit I was interviewed by Aakash Sethi, the...
Learner autonomy and creative reflective practice: New journal article
Herbert Simon, famously wrote: Everyone designs who devises courses of actions aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The first two words in this quote are now the title of a recently published journal article (with Danah Henriksen and William...
Technology, Design & OofSI at E-Learn 2018
Most of the work that we do at the Office of Scholarship and Innovation at the Teachers College is practical and pragmatic—working with school districts through our community design model, reimagining what university technology labs can be, supporting faculty in their...
Miami / Globe Video Update
I had posted earlier about the work our design initiatives team is involved with at Miami Junior-Senior High School. Essentially the entire faculty and leadership at the school have taken on the challenge of re-imagining the 7/8 curriculum through an integrated...
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #38: September 2018
New (tongue-in-cheek) TPACK diagram Judi Harris and her team just shared the latest version of the TPACK newsletter #38. You can find the latest issue here (pdf) and all previous issues are archived here. The growth of work around TPACK never ceases to...
Douglas Adams & Computational Thinking
Illustration by Punya Mishra.See sketch of Douglas Adams at the end of this post. I have always been a huge fan of Douglas Adams, trying to sneak in his ideas into my academic writing whenever I can. I had written about my previous attempts in a blog post...
On taking beautiful risks
Dr. Ronald Beghetto, Professor of Educational Psychology in the Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut, is an internationally recognized expert on creative thought and action in educational settings. He is a Fellow of the American...
The TPACK diagram gets an upgrade
The evolution of the TPACK image (1999 - 2017) Note: Apologies in advance for the long post. This has been festering / brewing for a while and I wanted to get it right. In essence this post offers a tweak to the canonical TPACK image, explained in greater detail...