Wicked Problem Project: PART B: TPACK!

image courtesy of http://www.edu.org.au/whatisit/pedagogy

Part B of the Wicked Problem project bids me to apply the TPACK framework to my proposed solution.

Brief:  My wicked problem is the students' lack of more than a superficial understanding of the science, mathematical, and engineering concepts  underpinning robotics due to a lack of class time for students to reflect on their work, and collaboratively process, synthesize, and present their findings.  The proposed solution is two-fold: students will write in individual blogs for reflective journaling, comment on each others blogs, and set up a collaborative site with which they can create a multimedia presentation for their findings and other artifacts.

TP - Technological Pedagogical Knowledge.

Understanding how the technology used affects (and supports) the teaching strategies...  Using online blogs and collaborative spaces (like Sites or Wikis) supports reflective thinking and collaboration by the students.  It gives them a space to think about the work they've done and process the results in their own language and creative style.  Commenting across individual blogs creates a dialogue outside of the classroom that can give otherwise quiet students the freedom to express themselves more naturally without the pressures of immediacy and peer judgement.  On the flip side, this dialogue and collaboration outside of the classroom may constrain certain types of learners who don't type as well, or who have less access to technology outside of school.  Some of the unique knowledge that I will have to develop and apply will be moderating and guiding online discussion, which I believe will be substantially different from a traditional class discussion.  I will also have to have a general grasp on how blogs and collaborative spaces function in order to field student questions with various software/web tools.

TC - Technological Content Knowledge.

Understanding how the content can be represented through the technologies used...  Utilizing online blogging tools and collaborative spaces will allow students to represent their work in new ways.  Firstly, they're more easily able to diagram results using either drawing tools or charting tools built into most spreadsheets and can quickly parse data and churn out slick-looking graphics.  Second, they can capture their work with digital still or digital video cameras and post (or embed) these media to  show how their builds and programs performed.  The digital tools open up new forms of recording and expressing results, interpretations, and preponderances thereof.  

PC - Pedagogical Content Knowledge.

Understanding how the teaching strategies make the content accessible... The contrast in pedagogical content knowledge might be the most stark between Robotics and any of the core academic subjects.  Robotics must be taught with a heavy leaning toward experiential learning: challenges or tasks with a lot of room for trial and error.  This is a very kinesthetic and charged type of classroom, one in which many traditional teaching strategies aren't useful.  Once students are in the process of building, programming, and doing challenges, it is very difficult to hold a traditional class discussion.  The online mode of discussion puts dialogue firmly within the same realm that their work with the robots exists: through the computer in a digital medium.  Beyond just the novelty of online dialogue, the students will be using a computer with more diverse software tools to communicate, document, process, and synthesize their findings into a presentable form to share with each other, and possibly the public.