Sunday, July 20, 2008

Tying Teaching Together

I'd like to share two things that have lately been of
great interest to me.

First is Twine, which I think of as professional social networking
2.0. I say I think because Twine seems to me to be so beyond anything
currently existing in this space as to be something maybe really new.
Certainly it is a big step beyond Diigo. And I've surely still got a
lot of learning to do about Twine and its functionalities.

Anyway, I had to wait about 3-4 weeks to get an invite to Twine's
closed beta, but now that I have it, I've got invites of my own to
give out. After you go to their website and nose around a little bit,
if you'd like an invitation, please let me know.

Second, my Twine group led me to something called TPACK today that I
find absolutely compelling. The individual ideas in TPACK are not
necessarily novel, but their synthesis in this package is
electrifying, at least to me.

The acronym stands for Technological, Pedagogical, and Content
Knowledge. The concept deals with the necessary intersection and
convergence of these 3 elements in the teaching learning process.
There is a dynamite presentation by the 2 chief evangelists for TPACK
(Matthew J. Koehler and Punya Mishra at Michigan Sstate) at
http://mkoehler.educ.msu.edu/blog/?p=78. It's dynamite not only for
what it has to say (which is scintillating), but for the way it says
it. This is one of the most outstanding uses of powerpoint-type media
in a conference presentation that I've seen.

I am consumed these days with thinking about why it is so difficult to
integrate technology into current day schooling and what we can do
about it. I'm developing a conference presentation on this that I hope
to start making soon. I guess that's at least one reason why the
notion of TPACK struck me as so meaningful.

If the preso interests you, there is a website at
http://www.tpck.org/tpck/index.php?title=TPCK_-_Technological_Pedagog...
and a terrific resources list at http://tpck.org/tpck/index.php?title=Reference_Library#Key_Articles