Postdictable, the commercials

by | Thursday, October 15, 2009

I had written earlier about the idea of “postdictable” which was defined as something that is “surprising initially, but then understandable with a bit of thought.” It lies at the spot between predictability and total chaos. The movie Sixth Sense is postdictable in the best sense of the world. Good teaching I believe needs to be postdictable. That is what keeps us engaged, keeps us waiting for more, the payoff as it were. And best of all, once all the pieces are in, we can’t wait to go back and review everything again, to see just how beautifully the whole thing holds together. There is a strong aesthetic component to this – a sense of wholeness, closure, elegance, and inevitability. Good poems have this quality, as do mathematical theorems. A well crafted lecture or a lesson plan has this quality as well. In my mind these ideas are closely tied to the Dewey’s idea of experience and to the idea of design. Hopefully I will have a chance to explore these connections in a later post but for now, here are a couple of commercials that I think were postdictable in a really cool kind of way.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7MVtgXMclI[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mTLO2F_ERY[/youtube]

Incidentally the Explore, Create & Share series of videos I made with my kids attempt to capture some of these same qualities!

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Self-similarity in math & ambigrams 3/3

Self-similarity in geometry is the idea of repeating a similar shape (often at a different scale) over and over again. In other words, a self-similar image contains copies of itself at smaller and smaller scales, such as the image below of the word "zoom."...

Creativity, Technology & Teacher Education

Danah Henriksen and I recently edited a special issue of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education (Volume 23, Number 3, July 2015) devoted to Creativity, Technology and Teacher Education.  This special issue is organized thematically around eight articles...

Beware of science envy in designing learning

Beware of science envy in designing learning

Mike Crowley has a guest post on the silverlingingforlearning.org site titled: If we need to be right before we move. (If you haven’t read it, I recommend it strongly. Go ahead follow the link above. I’ll be waiting). [Pause] Welcome back. I think Mike makes some...

6 Videos (on the 5 spaces for design in Education)

6 Videos (on the 5 spaces for design in Education)

Learning Sparks is a new initiative at ASU that feature short, 5-minute, videos showcasing the expertise of a range of ASU faculty members. These videos are carefully crafted, with high-production values seeking to capture big ideas in bite-sized chunks. A few months...

Research to practice : 3 articles

Matt Koehler and I are co-editors for an ongoing series of articles "From Research to Practice" for Education Matters, an educational magazine published by Educational Technology & Management Academy (ETMA). ETMA is non-profit organization based in New Delhi...

Koehler, Mishra & Yahya 2007

Koehler, Mishra & Yahya (2007) is an important paper in the TPACK related work for a range of reasons. The research captured in this paper actually predates the TCRecord (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) article, but the vagaries of publishing and journal waiting-lists...

Designing learning futures through reflective practice: 1 of 2

Designing learning futures through reflective practice: 1 of 2

This is the first of two posts on the topic of bringing principled innovation practices to designing learning futures. The first post (co-authored by Punya Mishra & Cristy Guleserian) focuses on the need for designing learning futures, and how the PI practices...

Handbook of TPCK

Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) for Educators, Edited by The AACTE Committee on Innovation and Technology
A Co-Publication of Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group and the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education

Buy it at Amazon.com (Now available!)

This handbook addresses the concept and implementation of technological pedagogical content knowledge — the knowledge and skills that teachers need in order to meaningfully integrate technology into instruction in specific content areas.

2 Comments

  1. Patrick Diemer

    Those videos were great but your explanation of how it relates to teaching was better. Please keep on posting!

    Reply
    • Punya Mishra

      Thanks Patrick. You know you are an educator when you tend to see everything (and I mean everything) through the lens of teaching and/or learning.

      Reply

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