How did TPACK come to be? There are three accounts of it, and they do not entirely agree with one another. That turns out to be the interesting part.
My version
I gave this talk at a Doctoral Research Forum at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, about why theory matters in educational research, using the history of TPACK as the case.
Why theory, or the TPACK story, December 2016.
Matt’s version
A few months later Matt Koehler made his own video covering much the same ground. It is not the same story. There are sections in his telling that are sharper than mine.
Blurred visions: another history of TPACK, March 2017.
Judi’s corrections
Nine days after I posted my version, Judi Harris wrote to tell me what I had got wrong. She was right on all counts.
Angeli and Valanides (2005) was missing from the family tree I drew.
The name did not come from a grants book, which was a joke of mine that compressed a longer history into a thirty minute talk. It came out of a friendly competition that Glen Bull organized at the 2007 National Technology Leadership Summit. Someone from the corporate sector won it by proposing that TPACK stood for the Total PACKage.
And my citation counts were out of date. Hers, as of December 2016, were 1,069 works citing the framework: 665 articles, 199 chapters, 23 books and 182 dissertations.
Update on the TPACK story, or oops, December 2016, with my response.
A framework now taught in teacher preparation programs around the world got its name from a competition at a summit. That is worth knowing, and it is the kind of thing that drops out of a history unless somebody who was there writes in to correct it. What became of it is here.