Why Theory: Or the TPACK story

by | Wednesday, December 07, 2016

Note: There are two key updates / correction to this post

  • The first has to do with a couple of things that I either got wrong, or rushed over. More about that at Update on “The TPACK story” or “Oops!
  • The second has to do with an update to the diagram itself that came in 2018, prompted by identifying a semantic inconsistency in the diagram (particularly around the idea of context). More about that at The TPACK Diagram gets an upgrade.

I was recently invited to speak at the fall Doctoral Research Forum for the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College on the ASU West campus. (A bit more context about the event, from a couple of years ago, can be found in a blog post by my colleague Sherman Dorn titled “Observations from a Doctoral Research Forum“). In speaking with Craig Mertler, who directs the EdD program here, I thought it best to speak about the role of theory in research. This is something that troubles graduate students a lot as they move through the program (and I have posted about it earlier here and here). I contextualized the discussion within the history of the work that Matt Koehler and I did in developing the TPACK framework. This was a fun talk to create and share. I created a narrated video of the slides of the talk, embedded below:

Note: There is an update / correction to this post which
can be found here: Update on “The TPACK story” or “Oops!

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Computerized aesthetics… what’s right with that idea?

I just came across this... Online System Rates Images by Aesthetic Quality Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has launched the Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine (ACQUINE), an online system for determining the aesthetic quality of an image. The online photo-rating...

EPET in the Spotlight!

The current issue of TechTrends (Volume 57, Issue 3, March 2013) is a special spotlight issue, and the spotlight this time around is on the Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Programs at Michigan State University! This special spotlight issue was edited...

Chinese-English Ambigrams

During my travel through Taiwan and Hong Kong, I usually opened my presentations with some bilingual ambigrams - words that can be read in Chinese AND English. These ambigrams were created by David Moser, someone I got to know, virtually, through Doug Hofstadter's...

Neuroscience & Creativity: New article

Neuroscience & Creativity: New article

The next article in our series Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century for the journal TechTrends was just published.This article features an interview with Dr. Arne Dietrich, professor of neuroscience at the American University...

The value of school: Part 1

The value of school: Part 1

Note: This is the first of two posts on the value of school by Punya Mishra & Kevin Close. Read the second post: Revisiting Accountability. What value do schools bring? The accepted assumption is that schools are sites for learning and the role of educators to...

Students video premiere on aftered.tv

This just in. Leigh Wolf just informed me that a video created by three of her students this past summer accepted by AfterEd - a web-based video channel produced by EdLab at Teachers College, Columbia University. New content is published weekly, including news,...

Only one recipe…

I have been catching up on my reading of Slate and came across this gem of an article by Judith Shulevitz titled, The care and feeding of fiction. Shulevitz has written a quasi-review of James Wood's new book How fiction works and makes we want to read the book...

1 Comment

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Designing Theory: New article | Talking About Design - […] in memory. I have also given talks about why theories are important (such as this one titled Why Theory?)…
  2. Designing Theory: New article – Punya Mishra's Web - […] in memory. I have also given talks about why theories are important (such as this one titled Why Theory?)…
  3. Theoretical Frameworks: A walk through the forest with my friends - […] Why Theory: Or the TPACK story […]
  4. The TPACK diagram gets an upgrade – Punya Mishra's Web - […] story, full of blind alleys and external factors that guided its evolution. (See this video “Why Theory: The TPACK…
  5. Blurred visions: Another history of TPACK – Punya Mishra's Web - […] I had posted recently a video based on a talk I had given at ASU. In that video I…
  6. Update on “The TPACK story” Or “Oops!” – Punya Mishra's Web - […] had recently posted a video of my talk fall Doctoral Research Forum for the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College on…
  7. Diigo links 12/08/2016 – DrAlb - […] Why Theory: Or the TPACK story […]

Submit a Comment

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