TPACK, not to be confused with Z PAK

In reading about TPACK, I was struck by the common sense of it all. It isn't enough to understand technology, or to know your content area, or to understand the basics of pedagogy. Instead, an effective teaching must have command of the intersection of the three, and understand how to use technology as an effective tool to aid in learning. Instruction without TPACK is the equivalent of the bare statement "A computer for every child in class." OK. This sounds like a worthwhile goal, but to what end? What are the kinds doing with the computers? Does having a computer in every class make sense or just some? Are the computers meant to aid instruction? Learning? Both? If you think of a teacher as a medical doctor, and technology as medicine, the doctor has to know which medicine (if any) to prescribe, how much of it, if it should be in pill or liquid form, what time of day the patient is to take the medicine and for how long. Doctors could be quite dangerous if they didn't understand the full application of the medicines at their disposal.

As I tend to do when I am exploring a topic, I turned to the Internetzes. In this case, YouTube. I watched a fair amount of videos related to teaching / education / learning / technology / TPACK. The gist of what I watched only reinforced what I've thought for years: technology isn't THE answer. It's a tool and in order to be used successfully, we need to understand technological tools and understand their application and how it can help or hinder learning. I can give you an example which may sound odd but makes sense to me. Several years ago, my office had finally decided to roll out company email. We had gotten by for years with voice mail, but now with so many field reps, administration thought email might help communication. I walk into the copy room and see my boss standing at the fax machine. She was obviously having an issue so I walked over to see if I could help. In the end, the fax machine just wasn't pulling the paper correctly. But what I noticed was much more interesting. My boss had received an email from a sales rep. The information in that email needed to go to someone else. My boss had printed the email, taken it to the fax machine, and was faxing the email to another sales rep - another sales rep who had email. Because this 'email technology' was new to her, she didn't completely understand that she could hit "Forward", type in her comments and hit "Send" without even getting out of her chair. Not understanding a technological tool can cost you time, at the very least.

But back to TPACKs. I can think of a couple of examples of lack of TPACK in education. MOOC's, I think, are a good example (at least initially) of educational systems with a noticeable lack of TPACK. Similarly, I work in a full only master's program. When I began working there, many instructors had started before the program became online. Some instructors found the transition a bit difficult. For example, an instructor had had someone video tape his lectures for an entire year. He would make the lectures available in our offices so if a student had missed a face to face class, she could check out the corresponding video, watch the lecture at home, and return the video. When the class converted to online, the instructor had all the VCR tapes converted to digital format. These were uploaded to his course shell and became his online 'class'.

And let's hope not too many school districts have suffered the fate of Los Angeles, needing to return thousands of iPads because they didn't understand the technology would not work with existing infrastructure. Beyond TPACK, technology must be understood in terms of systems and integration so that school districts can consider only those technology solutions that will successfully talk to existing databases and information systems.

Michael Bodekaer, however, gives a much more promising talk. A new software package he and his partners have developed, allows students to work in virtual labs, completing experiments using 'facilities' far too expensive for most colleges to afford let alone high school. Lab experiments virtual world. In this case, some amount of pedagogy is built into the software solution, i.e., the student will best learn by doing.

A lot of problems have been laid at technologies feet - make us better teachers, make them better learners, make them learn faster, help us because we increased class size from 15 to 25, help us education any time/where. In many cases it has held up - for example, there would be no way, currently, for someone working at a library in West Virginia to receive a master's in library science without fully online programs and stay local (there are no accredited library science programs in West Virginia or in neighboring Virginia). 

As well as technology has fared (even acknowledging issues that need addressing like TPACK), there are always new traps for us and tech. Like a teacher for every student thanks to technology! Blending learning holds a lot of promise I believe, but as the second video states, it's still in its infancy. We need to take our time and pay attention to make sure we make the best decisions possible.