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 75,000 citations of his research, he is ranked among the top 2% of scientists worldwide (#91 in social science) and ranked #44 (#5 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.
Must reads
Webinars & Podcasts:
Value Laden (archived)
Apple | Spotify | Simplecast
Blog Posts
27 Windows on the Universe (03): The Spark
This is the third in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. The first post told the story of the transcripts. The second described the method. This one is about where science begins: in wonder. And what happens when...
Why Sal Khan’t: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling
Two pieces crossed my feed recently, both about Sal Khan and the AI tutoring revolution that wasn’t. The first was Matt Barnum’s reported piece in Chalkbeat, where Khan himself acknowledged that Khanmigo, the AI chatbot tutor he launched three years ago with...
The Paragraph is the Interface: AI Metaphors Meet the Talmud
Danah Henriksen and I recently wrote a paper, currently in press, titled "The Mirror and the Black Box: AI Metaphors and What They Mean for Learning." It's about how the metaphors we choose for AI shape what we can and can't think about it. The paper traces a...
Speculative Fiction & Learning Futures: The Sequel
Sometimes you do a project and think it’s done. You archive it, link to it from your blog, and move on. And then, years later, it finds a second life you never anticipated. A few years ago, during the pandemic, I was part of one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve...
27 Windows on the Universe (02): The Artifacts in the Machine
This is the second in a series of posts about the human side of science, based on interviews with 27 leading cosmologists. The first post told the story of how these transcripts came to exist. This one describes how they were analyzed. How the analysis was done I...
Of Three Minds
I was of three minds,Like a treeIn which there are three blackbirds.—Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" I thought of Stevens's three minds earlier today when I looked at my calendar for the upcoming week. That’s what I usually do on Sundays,...
SITE 2026: There in Spirit
SITE is my conference. It has been for years now, and not being able to attend this year’s meeting in Philadelphia was bittersweet, to say the least. But even though I couldn’t be there in person, our team had a strong presence, and that’s what matters. A huge...
27 Windows on the Universe (01): The Fan Letter
This is the first in a series of posts about the human side of science, based on interviews with 27 leading cosmologists. The series explores what drew these scientists to the universe, how they think, what drives them, and what shaped their paths. 01: How this series...
AI in Education: Digital Education Dialogues Podcast
In this episode of Digital Education Dialogues, the discussion centers on the intersection of AI, teacher training, and the future of educational innovation. It was fun to be a guest on a show run by Chris Dede, since we are usually co-hosts on Silver Lining for...
… or check out some random blog posts
Manoranjan ka baap
The Indian Premier League, Twenty20 cricket championship was a great success. I had a chance to watch a few games (including the finals and semi-finals) when I was in india and it was a blast. This posting however is about an extremely creative commercial for the IPL...
TPACK and new literacies
Over 150 years ago Herbert Spencer wrote an essay titled What Knowledge is of Most Worth in which he bemoaned the fact that most of the discussion around what is worth knowing in his day and age was based not on any rational discussion of the issues and the benefits...
On picturing words, tech-mix an old school idea
Students in my CEP 818 (Creativity in Teaching and Learning) have been using digital photography to explore a variety of topics related to trans-disciplinary creativity. I hope to showcase some of their work on this blog once the semester gets over. In the meanwhile,...
Creativity and the urban STEM teacher
I have written previously about the MSUrbanSTEM project and what it has meant to me. Over the past couple of years we have also published about this line of work (most prominently in a special issue of The Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching)....
Of hernias and hiccups, the evolutionary story
Interesting article in Scientific American about how flaws in our biology reveal our evolutionary history. Steven Gould talked about it in his famous essay on The Panda's Thumb. This is a wonderful argument for Darwinian evolution since it points not to perfection...
Twittering in class, what’s the big deal?
Noah Ullman just forwarded me this story in the The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Professor encourages students to pass notes during class via twitter. It is amazing to me that this merited being called news. If you have been following this blog you know that...
Cats on the moon: How OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft & Apple are Dealing with Hallucinations
Note: Warr, Oster, and Mishra are at it again with a shared blog post. First (really terrible) draft by Punya, which was cleaned up by ChatGPT and then went through cycles of editing by all of us. Note: An addendum written after Apple's announcement of its own...
Partial to PartiallyClips
I Stumbled Upon PartiallyClips, a web-based comic strip based on clip art. The rules are simple, "No changes to the art from frame to frame ... Never use the same clip in two strips. No repeating characters." It it amazing just how well this works, despite these...
Obama at MSU
Soham and Shreya make it to the Lansing State Journal's website photo gallery... Smita and I pulled the kids out of school today to go see Obama at Michigan State. Leigh Wolf joined us... and frankly it was a long and tiring day: reaching campus at 9:30, standing in...