In yesterday's post I mentioned meeting up with 700958421 on the very first day of the conference (Tuesday, before the actual sessions started) and we had a great conversation about all the work he's been doing, including a fantastic course that provides an introduction to teaching that is grounded in empathy and presence:
EME 6613: Development of Technology-Based Instruction
Based on how Mathieu described the class and then looking at the syllabus, I know I would enjoy that class so much as a student!
Another great takeaway from our conversation was TPACK, which I made the title of this post. Mathieu introduced me to TPACK.org (new to me), which stands for Technology-Pedagogy-and-Content-Knowlege. I am happily at the center of their Venn diagram:
They have a lot of resources there at the website and, hey, it's a hashtag on Twitter: #TPACK. I am going to have to start using #TPACK when I write about my approach to teaching, since it is very much grounded in building my skills in all three of those areas and figuring out how to coordinate those skills in ways that will benefit my students. Just speaking for myself, I like the idea of pushing myself in all three dimensions: it means I may not have the depth across all three areas that an expert would have, but it allows me to look at my strengths and weaknesses across those three dimensions to see what I need to focus on as I move forward (like this year, where my focus is pedagogical, thinking about feedback processes in my classes).
And here's a blast from the past: If any of you were swept up in the MOOC-pocalypse of some years ago, Mathieu got his 15 minutes of Internet fame thanks to this graphic that went viral: xMOOC, cMOOC, or just MOOC... all the letters are negotiable. 🙂
You can see it proudly situated here in the Wikipedia article on MOOCs:
Given a choice of acronyms, I'll take TPACK over MOOC any day. Thanks for turning me on to TPACK, Mathieu!
