Tech Trends, Special Issue on TPACK

by | Wednesday, September 09, 2009

TechTrends is a leading journal for professionals in the educational communication and technology field and is the official publication of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). The current issue has 5 articles devoted to the TPACK framework (including one by yours truly with Matt and Kristen Kereluik). I am providing titles and key quotes from each (with a link to the article written by us).

Mishra, P., Koehler, M. J., & Kereluik, K. (2009). The song remains the same: Looking Back to the Future of Educational Technology. TechTrends, 53, 5. p. 48-53.

The TPACK framework emphasizes the role of teachers as decision makers who design their own educational technology environments as needed, in real time, without fear of those environments becoming outdated or obsolete. Using this approach, teachers do not attend to specific tools, but instead focus on approaches to teaching that endure through change in technologies, content, or pedagogies. Teachers with flexibility of thought, a tolerance for ambiguity, and willingness to experiment can combine traits that perfectly design and tailor their own educational content, pedagogical, and technological environments.

David Passig recently wrote on the topic of melioration, or “the competence to borrow a concept from a field of knowledge supposedly far removed from his or her domain, and adopt it to a pressing challenge in an area of personal knowledge or interest” (2007)… According to Passig, melioration is a skill that affords teachers the flexibility to experiment with a vast array of technologies to meet their specific educational needs. Novel frameworks and concepts like TPACK and Passig’s melioration are starting to look at educational technology in a new way. These new perspectives focus on overarching cognitive skills, competencies, and creativity rather than technical understanding and functional knowledge of specific technologies


Polly, D., & Brantley-Dias, L. (2009). TPACK: Where do we go now? TechTrends, 53, 5. p. 46-47.

TPACK gives a holistic perspective of the knowledge associated with effectively integrating technology into learning environments, accounting for what teachers know and what teachers do… TPACK provides a robust framework for thinking about teachers’ knowledge related to integrating technology effectively into learning environments. Articles in this special issue have raised questions related to our design of teacher education and professional development programs to develop the TPACK of K-12 teachers, and ways to research or examine teachers’ TPACK. innovation adoption.

Barbour, M., Rieber, L. P., Thomas, G., & Rauscher, D. (2009). Homemade PowerPoint Games:
A Constructionist Alternative to WebQuests. TechTrends, 53, 5. p. 54-59.

Students are required to use PowerPoint to construct home made content-based games. To construct these games, students write a game narrative or story (i.e., a short overview or context for the game that must fit on a single PowerPoint slide) and develop questions to provide the appropriate level of challenge to their games. These three pedagogical skills are required of students as they use a technology-based tool to construct games in a specific content area, and form the intersection envisioned by Mishra and Koehler with their TPCK framework. This combination of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge provides a scalable example of good teaching with technology.

Cox, S., & Graham, C. R. (2009). Diagramming TPACK in Practice: Using an Elaborated Model of the TPACK Framework to Analyze and Depict Teacher Knowledge. TechTrends, 53, 5. p. 60-69.

The introduction of the TPACK model by Mishra and Koehler (2006) has had a profound impact on the field of educational technology. It has inspired teachers, teacher educators, and educational technologists to reevaluate their knowledge and use of technology in the classroom… Thus far, the explanations of technological pedagogical content knowledge and its associated constructs that have been provided are not clear enough for researchers to agree on what is and is not an example of each construct. Mishra and Koehler and others have provided definitions of TCK, TPK, and TPACK that articulate to some degree the centers of these constructs, however the boundaries between them are still quite fuzzy, thus making it difficult to categorize borderline cases. In order to help clarify these boundaries and facilitate study of TPACK in practice, this paper presents the key findings from a conceptual analysis of the TPACK framework.

Graham, C. R., Burgoyne, N., Cantrell, P., Smith, L., St. Clair, L., & Harris, R. (2009). TPACK Development in Science Teaching: Measuring the TPACK Confidence of Inservice Science Teachers. TechTrends, 53, 5. p. 70-79.

In this study we piloted an instrument for measuring confidence levels in four of the seven TPACK knowledge constructs: TPACK, TPK, TCK, and TK. The instrument was useful in helping SciencePlus program coordinators to see significant increase in the TPACK confidence of participants over the eight-month duration of the program. Analysis of the data also helped program coordinators recognize that more could be done to help classroom teachers develop TCK confidence by doing more to help them learn about content-specific technologies
that are used in doing science.

Nelson, J., Christopher, A., & Mims, C. (2009). TPACK and Web 2.0: Transformation of
Teaching and Learning. TechTrends, 53, 5. p. 80 – 86.

Web 2.0 technologies provide possibilities for sharing and building knowledge. Teachers who facilitate collaborative and interdisciplinary projects build on the unique strengths of individual students and encourage the sharing of ideas. In essence, they are teaching students to be life-long learners. The Internet and Web 2.0 technologies afford teachers ready access to collaborative, authentic opportunities for students to engage in meaningful experiences related to the curriculum. TPACK-competent teachers exhibit best practices in pedagogy, content, and technology.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Multiple representations of the periodic table and learning

Mishra & Yadav (2006) was a paper based around my dissertation research. It took a while to get published and I am including it here for the record. My dissertation (Mishra, 1998) was maybe the first place where I made a specific mention of the triad of...

TPCK book signing

One of the important events at the New Orleans AACTE meeting was the release of the TPCK Handbook for Educators and the book signing. This was the first time I had ever participated in a book signing and it was great fun. Here are some photographs from the event......

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...

Forget MMORPG, its time for MMLSG

NYTimes article titled, Storming the Campuses on the next big thing on college campuses: GoCrossCampus! This new kind of a game (and game genre) has been described as Multiplayer Locally Social Gaming and the way it is spreading, it may soon need to add "Massively" to...

My favorite Internet meme (and how it almost died)

I have been tracking the Hitler-Downfall parodies for over two years now and it seems that they keep getting better and better. But over the last few days comes the news that Constantin films, which owns the rights to the original movie asked YouTube to find and take...

Creating Palindrograms, aka palindromic ambigrams

Ambigram.com is a website about ambigrams and the people who make them. Lots of cool stuff for enthusiasts and novices alike. They often conduct competitions and other fun challenges for readers. One recent one was related to palindromes. In brief, they challenged...

Ideas are cool

My colleague and friend David Wong has this cool idea, about making ideas cool. Actually, he has been espousing these ideas for a while now (check out his scholarly publications, in particular The Rebirth of Cool [Word doc]). But now this academic has stepped out of...

21st century learning article receives ISTE award

Back in July 2013, the Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education (JDLTE) published our paper on 21st Century Learning. This paper written with Kristen Kereluik, Chris Fahnoe and Laura Terry looked at over a dozen different 21st century learning frameworks and...

The more things change…

I had posted earlier about a recent commercial that, though arguing at one level that technology can fundamentally change education, seemed to stick to the standard-lecture (albeit in different and cooler modes of transmission). Just how little the discourse around...

3 Comments

  1. Matt Townsley

    Shouldn’t have jumped the gun! Patience is a virtue….

    Reply
  2. Punya Mishra

    Matt, I just posted a blog post with that info… anyway, duplication isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

    Reply

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