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
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...
The Autocomplete That Didn’t: Three More Reads on Dampuni
I recently wrote a post about my son Soham, aged two, replacing words in the Humpty Dumpty poem with a nonsense sound (“Dampuni”) and what that small act of linguistic mischief reveals about play, evolution, and how children learn. I thought I was done with it. I was...
Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Dampuni: Play, Evolution, and Futures Thinking
This is the first of two posts. You can find the second post here. When my son was about two, we used to play a complete-the-nursery-rhyme game. It was a simple game: I would recite the first few words of a poem and he would complete it. The point was that he knew the...
… or check out some random blog posts
Dr. Karin Forssell, New TPACK dissertation
I met Karin Forssell back in 2008 at the Las Vegas SITE conference when she was a doctoral student at Stanford University. She came and asked me if I was working with anybody at Stanford and I said, something along the lines of "not yet, but send me an email,...
Arriving in Malaysia
I am currently in Kuala Lumpur, arrived here last night, after spending a night at Delhi. I stayed with my old high-school buddy (Hartosh) and his wife, Paminder. We spent a nice evening chatting and catching up – since a lot had happened since we had last met, not...
Math Concepts by Gaurav Bhatnagar
Gaurav Bhatnagar is one of my oldest friends - going back to 8th grade in Modern School, Barakhamba Road. He recently published his first book on Mathematics for kids, titled, Get Smart: Maths Concepts, published by Penguin India. The book also has an associated blog...
Of math and ambigrams: Exploring Symmetry
Ambigram for Symmetry displaying rotational symmetry I have been writing a series of articles for At Right Angles (a mathematics education magazine) with my friend Gaurav Bhatnagar on the art and mathematics of ambigrams. The first article in the series (Of Art and...
GenAI and the Education Doctorate: New Article
Note (added March 6, 2025): The article described below made it to the College's newsletter in a story titled: Integrating GenAI at the doctoral level, with a special focus on all the faculty from MLFC who had articles in the special issue. I am pleased to share this...
You’re invited! MAET Showcase July 26th 10am, Room 252 Erickson
Dear MAET graduates, current students, and other friends of the program: You are cordially invited to our current MAET Summer 2013 students’ final project showcase, on July 26th, at 10am, in room 252 Erickson Hall. As you may know from your own past experiences with...
Slipping into uncanny valley
MindHacks has a great post related to some of my previous postings about anthropomorphizing interactive artifacts (see here and here) - just that this time these artifacts under discussion are robots. As it turns out, sometime too much similarity between humans and...
When Ghalib meets AI: One student’s experiment
In my previous post about rediscovering Ghalib through metal and rap, I mentioned sharing his work in my creativity class. What I didn't share was the remarkable ripple effect this had. Every week, students take turns writing reflections on our class discussions and...
Street Use
In blogging Kevin Kelly's piece on "Better than free" (read that post here), I came across another site that he maintains, titled "Street Use," self-described as follows: This site features the ways in which people modify and re-create technology. Herein a collection...