Putting technology first

by | Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Don Norman has a great essay titled Technology First, Needs Last that I strongly recommend. We have been making a similar argument in some of our more recent pieces, see here and here

What do you think of Norman’s ideas? Read it first and come back here to discuss what it means for teaching with technology. Can innovation in teaching only happen when we put technology first? What about content? and pedagogy?

A few randomly selected blog posts…

The degradation of Matt

A rumination on goofy sketches, the perils of reproduction as it plays out in a children's game, a B-list Hollywood movie, and botany textbooks I read when in high school, all leading up to some thoughts on the history of scientific illustration. If this sounds even...

Quick Design Video: Are you ready for the future?

Leigh Wolf and Ken Dirkin, instructors in the year III of the MAET program in Plymouth have been assigning, what they call, Quick Design assignments. These are quickfire challenges for students to showcase their talents under pretty severe constraints (of time,...

Technology Integration 2.0 — was TPACK 😉

The recently concluded NECC conference had quite a bit of TPACK related presentations. Sadly neither Matt nor I could make it to NECC... maybe next year! One I discovered just today (h/t @mhines on twitter) was one titled School 2.0 & Understanding by Design....

Election 2.0

An op-ed in today's NYTimes by William Poundstone about how the web can be used during an election to prevent election fraud. As the article describes a computer scientist and a mathematician "have proposed an ingenious method that would combine paper ballots and a...

A cosmologist worries (about infinity)

A cosmologist worries (about infinity)

A cosmologist worries (about infinity)December 2019 They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars--on stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places.~ Robert Frost, Desert Places A cosmologist,...

Milap 2008

The Indian Cultural Society of greater Lansing (ICS) held its annual cultural program Milap 2008 this past Saturday. It was a great program with traditional and Bollywood dances, songs, and other performances. My daughter Shreya's dance troup, performed a Kathak dance...

Common sense in science class

Common sense in science class

Students can sometimes perceive scientific ideas to be in conflict with their common sense. How do we approach such conflicts in the classroom? Do we see these commonsense ideas as being wrong or, at best, misconceived? Alternatively, do we see them as resources and...

Explore, Create, Share… the videos

Note: This post was updated on March 21, 2024 since some of videos were not showing up for some reason. Over the past few months I have been working with my kids on creating short thematic videos. The themes we chose were the three words, Explore, Create & Share....

The TPACK diagram gets an upgrade

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...

1 Comment

  1. bombaimer

    technology is one of the most important debates our days. last night I read an article about “what are the 10 things you’d like to have” and everyone had a top 10 technological things.

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *