Punya Mishra is Director of Innovative Learning Futures at the Learning Engineering Institute (LEI) and Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College 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 66,000 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.
Must reads
Webinars & Podcasts:
Value Laden (archived)
Apple | Spotify | Simplecast
Blog Posts
Welcoming 2025: A Final Reflection (& Calling an End to a 16-year Tradition)
Since 2008, our family has been creating short videos to celebrate the start of a new year. Each video is crafted from household items and usually includes some form of typographical optical illusion. Today, we share our sixteenth, and final video—a deceptively simple...
Call for Papers (Special Issue) on GenAI, Games & Learning
I'm excited to announce a special issue of Education Sciences that I'm co-editing with Dr. Ashish Amresh, Lindsey McCaleb and Nicole Oster, focusing on the intersection of generative AI and game-based learning in learning. As generative AI reshapes education and...
Oops! Double Trouble with Double Dactyls OR Learning from AI’s Creative Mistakes
As headlines swirl about AI chatbots misrepresenting Anne Frank (Schools Using AI Emulation of Anne Frank That Urges Kids Not to Blame Anyone for Holocaust) and Apple canceling its AI news summaries due to accuracy concerns (Apple pulls error-prone AI-generated news...
The Dance of Entropy: A Transdisciplinary Exploration
One of the ideas we have been exploring in my transdisciplinary creativity class this semester, is that of how generative AI can serve as a bridge between seemingly disparate fields. In this post, I want to share the results of an ongoing experiment demonstrating the...
Hardwired for Connection: Why We Fall for AI Companions (And What To Do About It)
There was a recent article in the NYTimes about AI chatbots serving as virtual companion. Titled, She Is in Love With ChatGPT it was a story about a 28-year-old woman who spends hours on end talking to her A.I. boyfriend for advice and consolation. And yes, they do...
Shattered: Myth, Metaphor & Gen AI
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott" and its resonance with our AI age (The Mirror Cracked: AI, Poetry, and the Illusion of Depth). In that post I explored how our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by technology, AI...
Corporations as Paperclip Maximizers: AI, Data, and the Future of Learning
Once in a while, you come across a piece of writing that doesn’t just make you think—it makes you rethink. It rearranges the furniture in your head, putting things together in ways you hadn’t considered but now can’t unsee. Charles Stross’s essay, “Dude, You Broke the...
What Arizona’s New AI School Gets Wrong (Hint: Everything)
Two pieces of news caught my attention this week. The first was the passing of Lee Shulman, a giant in educational research, whose profound understanding of teaching and learning shaped generations of educators - including myself. The second was the approval of a new...
Lee Shulman (1938 – 2024)
The news of Lee Shulman's passing has led me to reflect on the profound impact he has had on my career and worldview, despite our paths crossing in person just once. While we never formally collaborated, our academic journeys shared a fascinating connection through...
Mairéad Pratschke On GenAI, Creativity, Culture and the Future of Learning
Over the years, our column series in TechTrends has explored the evolving relationship between technology, creativity, and education. Recently, we've been particularly focused on understanding how generative AI is reshaping teaching and learning through conversations...
… or check out some random blog posts
TPCK, in the news
The TPCK work by Matt Koehler & myself is featured in the Winter 2008 issue of the New Educator, the magazine published by the College of Education at Michigan State University. You can download the full issue here [pdf], or just the article here [pdf]. Glen Bull,...
Vinit Masram (1988 – 2023)
I found out about Vinit Masram's passing a week or so go. I did not know Vinit personally, having met him just once, at IDC's Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2020. But the news of his death hit me hard. I had been a fan of his work for a long time - having stumbled on...
Educational Technology @ MSU
The Educational Psychology and Educational Technology program at the College of Education at Michigan State University offers a variety of programs in educational technology. The College of Education is one of highest ranked colleges of education in the country (see...
Hobnob with MSU faculty
Paul Morsink & Bakar Razali, two graduate students in our college have been doing this interesting variant of the 60 second lecture. They record short videos of individual faculty members talking about anything that interests them and through that allow viewers to...
TPACK Newsletter #40, March 2019
Here is the Special Spring 2019 Conference Issue of the TPACK Newsletter (#40, March 2019), as curated and shared by Judi Harris and her team. (Previous issues are archived here.) This special issue include all the TPACK-related papers/sessions that...
TPACK & Activity Types
Judi Harris, Matt Koehler and I just submitted an article on Activity Types and TPACK. We had presented this at AERA last year and it took a while getting it ready to submit as a journal article. In this paper we combine the work that Judi (and her colleagues) have...
Of Art and algorithms: New article
The latest in our series Rethinking Technology and Creativity in the 21st Century is now available. The article was co-authored with Aman Yadav of Purdue University (and the Deep-Play Research Group) and focuses on the art and science of computational thinking. We...
Games & Learning, an analysis
TCRecord has an interesting essay on the role of games and learning, by Alexander, Eaton & Egan, titled: Cracking the code of electronic games: Some lessons for educators. As they say, "This is an analytic article that provides a description of an array of...
Following up on lunar distance
A followup to my previous posting about the Italian kids calculating the distance to the moon using recordings from the Apollo Space program. As I read the story on the technology Review website, I came to the comments made by readers. One stuck out. This is what...