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...
Designing shared spaces, one example
Design is about engineering. It is about art. And most importantly it is about the psychology of individuals and groups and their interactions with artifacts. I am always on the lookout for examples of good (or bad) design. Sadly I too often come across the latter...
Of garbage cans and psychological media
This has been a day of sad news from Stanford University. I blogged about the passing away of Dr. Nalini Ambady (see blog post here). I will digress a bit before I describe the second piece of news because the connection to me (and my work) is much more salient. Back...
The search for pattern, beauty & intelligent life…
Connecting birds nests to "crop circles under the ocean" leading to some thoughts on perception, beauty and finding intelligent life in the universe (or maybe even on this planet). The other day I found a bird's nest on my front lawn. Most probably it had fallen down...
Why don’t students like school… In 30 mins!
One of the challenges faced by all instructors is ensuring that students actually read the textbook. This summer we came up with a innovative assignment to address this issue. The book in question was Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School? A cognitive...
Design thinking, some resources
I teaching CEP817, Learning Technology by Design in the spring semester. This is a course I love but it also one that needs to be redesigned. So I am always on the look-out for new resources that can help me rethink the class. I just came across the following website:...
New edited series on Research to Practice
A few months ago I was invited (by the Educational Technology & Management Academy, an Indian educational organization) to write a series of short practitioner-oriented articles for a new educational e-magazine they were starting. The idea was to introduce to a...
Sternberg: New ambigram
A new ambigram for Robert Sternberg, psychologist.
Measuring creativity, the sad news!
Chris Fahnoe, just sent me a link to a piece on KQED on measuring creativity. Nothing particularly new here but reading it sent me down a rabbit-hole of some quotes and ideas I had been wanting to blog about for a while. So here goes. All this started when I read a...
Creativity Symposium at SITE2013
We just completed our symposium at SITE titled: Breaking Disciplinary Boundaries in 21st Century Learning: Creative Teaching with Digital Technologies. The symposium consisted of 7 presentations followed a summary by Teresa Foulger (of Arizona State University). In...
EPET at SITE 2013
SITE2013 (the annual conference of the Society of Information Technology in Teacher Education) is being held in New Orleans starting next week. The Educational Psychology and Educational Technology program at MSU has a significant presence at the conference. This...
Of Art and algorithms: New article
The latest in our series Rethinking Technology and Creativity in the 21st Century is now available. The article was co-authored with Aman Yadav of Purdue University (and the Deep-Play Research Group) and focuses on the art and science of computational thinking. We...
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #15, March (Special Conference Issue) 2013
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #15: March 2013 Special Spring 2013 Conference Issue Below please find a listing of TPACK-related papers/sessions that will be presented at the SITE conference in March in New Orleans, Louisiana; at the AERA annual meeting in April in...
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #14, February 2013
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #14:February 2013 Welcome to the fourteenth edition of the (approximately quarterly) TPACK Newsletter! TPACK work is continuing worldwide, and is appearing in an increasing diversity of publication, conference, and professional development...
New TPACK themed book on English Education
My friend Carl Young of NCState recently released an edited volume (co-editor, Sara Kajder a the University of Pittsburgh) titled Research on Technology in English Education. It is a volume in the series: Research Methods for Educational Technology, edited by Walt...
Learning landscapes, special issue on creativity
My friend Teresa Foulger at Arizona State University informed me about the fact that the journal LEARNing Landscapes has a special issue on creativity. I had not heard of the journal before and I was pleasantly surprised by the articles in this special issue....
The civilizing effects of technology
Martin Amis was recently interviewed in Guernica (Amis Unfiltered, Santiago Wills interviews Martin Amis). The interview covered a wide range of topics, literature, Obama, and a fascinating digression on the relationship between food and national character! What...
Creativity Now!: Learning from Creative Teachers
Educational Leadership is the flagship publication of ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development). It has a circulation of over 160,000 and is regarded as "an authoritative source of information about teaching and learning, new ideas and...
TPACK goes to graduate school
This is a paper that had come out a while ago, and I just didn't get a chance to post it (actually I just forgot). Anyway, here it is: Mishra, P., Koehler, M. J., Zellner, A., & Kereluik, K. (2012). Thematic considerations in integrating TPACK in a graduate...
Student engagement, a response to @ewilliams65
In a couple of previous blog post (Student engagement in school, the tale of 2 graphs and Understanding student engagement) I wrote about the findings of a recent Gallup Poll on student engagement. The first post was concerned with how the data were represented and...
Understanding student engagement
I had posted recently about a Gallup poll on student engagement. Essentially the poll showed that student engagement dropped precipitously (though as I wrote, not as starkly as their graph indicated) as students moved from elementary to high school. My friend, Gaurav...
Student engagement in school, the tale of 2 graphs
Gallup recently released a poll on student engagement - and the main finding is that "the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become." As the post says: The Gallup Student Poll surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than...
Creativity, 21st Century Learning & Self-Regulation
Our latest article on the series Technology and Creativity is now available (link and the complete reference given below). Co-authored with Chris Fahnoe, Dr. Danah Henriksen, and the Deep-Play Research group, this paper builds on Chris' practicum research study and...
Representing tensions through photography
Education is always about leadership and leadership has always been about tensions—navigating through them and seeking to find the right balance between them. Leaders often feel a tug from individuals with conflicting interests or needs, with ideas that often tug in...
The intangibles of teaching
Jim Garrison and A. G. Rud have a wonderful article on TCRecord on Reverence in Classroom Teaching. Though, reverence may be "too exalted a word to associate with the practical and often mundane activities of teaching," it appears to me that ignoring these deeper...
This is your brain on technology!
May years ago I wrote an essay titled On becoming a website. It was about my experience on teaching online and I suggested somewhat facetiously that in order to be a good teacher online I needed to actually "become" the course website! I started the essay by...
Models of design, creativity and more…
The Dubberly Design Office has created a series of models of innovation, play and design. These are terrific resources and I just found out about them by chance. I see these as being quite significant in the classes I teach, including CEP817: Learning Technology by...
Creative Idiots share their process
Slate Magazine is running a series on Creative Pairs, or why Two is the Magic Number! Written by Joshua Wolf Shenk the series seeks to understand: What makes creative relationships work? How do two people—who may be perfectly capable and talented on their own—explode...
Demotivational Posters II
A few weeks ago I posted a note about an assignment I gave my students in the on-campus version of the MAET program. They had completed an unit on motivation and had watched the RSA / Daniel Pink video and their task was was to create demotivational posters, (along...
TPACK survey, new journal article
Hot off the press: Schmidt, D. A., Baran, E., Thompson, A. D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J. & Shin, T. S. (2010). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK): The development and validation of an assessment instrument for preservice teachers. Journal of...