Punya Mishra is Director of Innovative Learning Futures at the Learning Engineering Institute (LEI) and Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching & Learning Innovation at Arizona State University (with an affiliate appointment in the Design School).

He is internationally recognized for his work in educational technology; the role of creativity and aesthetics in learning; and the application of collaborative, design-based approaches to educational innovation. He has received over $11 million in grants; published over 200 articles and edited 5 books. A recipient of AECT’s David H. Jonassen Excellence in Research Award, with over 67,000 citations of his research, he is ranked among the top 2% of scientists worldwide (#91 in social science) and ranked #62 (#11 in psychology) among educational scholars with the biggest influence on educational practice and policy.

Punya has extensive leadership experience in higher education, having previously served as Associate Dean of Scholarship & Innovation (at MLFTC), where he led a range of initiatives that provided a future-forward, equity driven, approach to inter/trans-disciplinary educational research. He has also served as director of doctoral programs (at MLFTC) and the award-winning Master of Arts in Educational Technology program (at Michigan State). He currently is a member of the steering committee of ASU’s Leadership Academy, AACTE’s Technology and Innovation Committee, and editor-in-residence for the Journal of Teacher Education.

An AERA Fellow (2024), TED-Ed educator (2023), he co-hosts the award-winning Silver Lining for Learning webinar as well as the Learning Futures podcast. He is an award-winning instructor, an engaging public speaker, and an accomplished visual artist and poet.

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Popular Topics: Gen AI <Posts & Pubs> | 5 Spaces for Design <Posts & Pubs>| TPACK | Design |Creativity | Ambigrams

Blog Posts

The Attribution Problem: Why we can’t stop seeing ourselves in AI

The Attribution Problem: Why we can’t stop seeing ourselves in AI

Note: For over 20 years I have been taking photographs of everyday objects that appear to have faces, a phenomenon known as pareidolia, for a series I call 'Faces in the Wild.” The above image was captured during a family trip to Mexico in 2012. I have “cleaned up”...

Creativity class goes to Bollywood

Creativity class goes to Bollywood

The third blog post from students in my class on Human Creativity x AI in Education. Links to previous posts below. These posts are an ongoing record of what we are up to each week – and are not edited by me in any way (minor stylistic changes apart). Here we go....

GenAI and the Education Doctorate: New Article

GenAI and the Education Doctorate: New Article

I am pleased to share this special issue of Impacting Education focusing on "The Role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Doctoral Research and Writing." When my good friend and lead editor Jim Dunnigan approached Danah Henriksen and I about contributing to...

Code, Kathak, and Confusion: A Story of Learning with GenAI

Code, Kathak, and Confusion: A Story of Learning with GenAI

One of the students in my Human Creativity x AI in Education class is an accomplished Kathak dancer and last week we got into a discussion of how she could bring this personal interest into projects we were exploring in the class. How could GenAI help? So yesterday,...

Creativity x GenAI: Week 3

Creativity x GenAI: Week 3

The second blog post from students in my class on Human Creativity x AI in Education. (You can see the first post here). Just in case you are wondering why this is week 3 and not week 2, we lost one class due to MLK Day. These posts are an ongoing record of what we...

Sine Language: Circling Pythagoras Through Sound and Color

Sine Language: Circling Pythagoras Through Sound and Color

This semester I am teaching a course on Human Creativity X AI in Education. (More about our first week here.) A key focus of the class is on the idea of transdisciplinary creativity – that of bringing different lenses and senses to the process of learning and...

Human Creativity & AI in Education: Week 1

Human Creativity & AI in Education: Week 1

This semester I am teaching a course titled Human Creativity x AI in Education. We have 19 students in the class, split into 5 groups. (And yes though I love prime numbers, having one more participant would have been better). Each week one of the groups will document...

Double Vision: A Creative Dance of Typography & AI

Double Vision: A Creative Dance of Typography & AI

I love playing with type and words. Recently I got obsessed with creating a particular kind of typographic design—layouts where letters in words do double duty. A simple example is given below: “THINK INFINITY” where the shared letters "IN" span both the words....

… or check out some random blog posts

Photo triplets

Christopher Bowhuis (a student in our summer on-campus MAET program) provided me a two minute tutorial on cloning myself, or anybody else for that matter. I had to go home and try it out with my kids (and a few of their friends who just happened to show up). Below are...

Technology integration, looking forward to the past

Tom Johnson's Adventures in Pencil Integration is the smartest, sassiest blog I have come across in a long time. This is how the sidebar describes the blog/author. The year is 1897 and Tom Johnson works for a small school district. This is the story of the journey to...

Academic novels

I have been reading Moo by Jane Smiley, off and on for a while now. It is a satire of academia set in a fictional Mid-western university called Moo U. It has been suggested that Moo U is a stand in for Iowa State, an university I know well since Smita went to school...

Deep-Play on Michigan Radio Stateside with Cynthia Canty

I am a huge fan of Stateside with Cynthia Canty, a radio show on Michigan Radio. So imagine my excitement when I was interviewed by her about my ongoing exhibition (Deep-Play: Creativity in Math & Art through Visual Wordplay) at the MSU Museum. The interview was...

Designing shared spaces, one example

Design is about engineering. It is about art. And most importantly it is about the psychology of individuals and groups and their interactions with artifacts. I am always on the lookout for examples of good (or bad) design. Sadly I too often come across the latter...

Poetry, Daisies And Cobras: A Class With Manjul Bhargava

An amazing presentation by Manjul Bhargava (Fields medal winner in Mathematics) to school children in India. See how he effortlessly combines poetry, nature, music and mathematics. Watch an excerpt on YouTube below or the complete video here....

Creativity, AI & Education: A Reflection & an Example

Creativity, AI & Education: A Reflection & an Example

Update (added March 17, 2024): There are a few more instances of using GenAI in creative ways that I would like to add to the list below, in particular 2 posts about using the the image analysis capabilities for ChatGPT: When AI can see and Total eclipse of the sun...

It Takes Two: A (personal) exploration

It Takes Two: A (personal) exploration

I had written earlier about a contest organized by Dark ‘n’ Light (an e-zine) around the theme of "IT TAKES TWO" and had shared some of my experiments, exploring this theme, using Generative AI. You can see my experiments at: It takes two: A scientific romp using AI...

Of raindrops and dying flowers

Of raindrops and dying flowers

The rainfall in June –the poems I’ve pasted to wallspeel off, but leave traces.~ Basho All photos taken with my iPhone8©punyamishra