Thinking Creatively: Teachers as Designers of Technology, Pedagogy, and Content (TPACK)
Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler, Michigan State University
- Three points to the refrain
- Teaching with technology is a wicked problem
- Wicked problems need creative solutions
- Teachers want to create solutions
- Teaching
- It is messy: Teaching is always “about something” — the content
- Yet every discipline is messy, too — the canon, phonics vs whole language
- PCK from Shulman — content and teaching need to be transformed together
- Learning to Think by Janet Donald
- But, where is technology? — Too much for teachers to keep up with rapid change
- Instead, we argue for developing a thoughtful and playful attitude towards dealing with the new media ecology
- Take, for instance, the iPhone
- Lots of software, highly unstable, opaque
- Yet, information technology changes everything
- Technology and content — the move from orality to writing (Plato “writing will implant forgetfulness)
- Victor Hugo — the book will destroy the cathedral because people don’t have to go to a place to get knowledge
- Technology changes practice and societies
- Pedagogy and technology
- Combine Google with open courseware and one laptop per child, and we are looking at a fundamental shift in learning and human culture
- We teach using Moodle, but we worry about the “I agree” phenomenon where students do not put in their own ideas
- Moodle prevents you from seeing other postings before you post your own
- Teaching two sections of the same course — one in Moodle, one in Facebook — studying how this changes the social and educational discourse
- Context: pedagogy, technology, and content work in a context
- One laptop per child compared to a computer lab children visit once a week
- Firewalls
- To sum up — it is complicated with different contexts and no stopping rule
- Solutions are not right or wrong, but good or bad that are unique and context dependent (and generate new problems)
- Teaching with technology is wicked and typical solutions don’t work
- Creative solutions
- How do we survive in a context of change?
- Trindadian guppy — flexible reproductive strategy with fewer babies in good times, lots of babies in bad times
- In a world characterized by change, the best idea is to have lots of creative ideas for the new media ecology
- What is creative?
- I know it when I see it; easy to recognize, hard to define
- Fantastic social innovation with educational payoff in the future — microcredit loans
- Getting my son interested in reading by doing the March Madness brackets — he reads the newspaper every morning
- What is creative?
- What is creative
- It is novel and unique in a useful way
- It is effective
- It is whole — complete and elegant
- When you think about wicked problems, you need to have a “new” (novel, effective, and whole) idea
- What does creativity have to do with it? A variation on a theme
- Rubik’s Cube examples; tweaked to “Double Maze” by Scott Kim
- We live in a new media ecology where standard approaches do not work
- What does creativity have to do with it? A variation on a theme
- What are teachers and teacher educators to do?
- Teachers are designers of the total PACKage
- We have technology, pedagogy, and content with overlaps
- It is at the center of these three that we have technological pedagogical content knowledge
- TPACK (also stands for “total package”)
- What does it do?
- Opens new possibilities (such as Moodle and the “I agree” problem)
- Is it NEW (novel, effective, and whole)
- 3rd graders understanding maps
- Mapquest, KidPix, Satellite, Virtual Trips
- A possibility — sand creatures (the walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds)
- The walls between technology and content only exist in our mind, if we are willing to play
- What does it do?
- Typically, pedagogy, content, and technology are separate (or, at least, technology is separate)
- Like learning to play jazz one note as a time
- Need an integrated, interdisciplinary, creative approach
- Glenn Gould ‘- Implicit in electronic culture is the idea that multiple layers are a part of the creative process
- Play a game where you mashup different ideas of content, pedagogy, and technology
- Outro
- Where do educators live? In a box, or in the middle of technology, content, and knowledge
Reflections
Punya and Matt continue to push me to think about how I think and talk about technology. Next week, when I return to teach ENG 315, we are talking about multiliteracies in the classroom, and I think that I will use TPACK to frame the discussion. Thinking about pedagogy (the writing workshop model), content (the expectations for K-8 writers), and technology (based on the Michigan content standards for technology). I need to come up with some ideas for scenarios, I think, to really prompt my students’ thinking about technology use. For now, I will keep mulling this over as I prepare yo deliver my presentation on Project WRITE.