Punya Mishra is a Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching & Learning Innovation (MLFC) at Arizona State University (with an affiliate appointment in the Design School). He is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education; and AI Innovation Fellow at the Learning Engineering Institute (LEI).
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 (most recently a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship); published over 200 articles and edited 5 books. A recipient of AECT’s David H. Jonassen Excellence in Research Award, with over 82,000 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. He currently heads the AI in Education, Learning Futures Collaborative; serves on ASU’s AI Advisory Committee; and leads the AI and Technology working group of AACTE’s EdPrepLab. An AERA Fellow (2024), TED-Ed educator (2023), he co-hosts the award-winning Silver Lining for Learning webinar as well as AIR|GPT 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
Of Pride & Prejudice (and a Smart Drunk Intern)
How many students feel pride in the work they are made to do for school? My guess is very few. Pride if anything comes from the final grade not the work itself. The work too often is just meant to be seen by the teacher. I have been thinking about this idea of pride...
27 Windows on the Universe (09): Metaphors as Windows
I thought I was done with this series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. Earlier posts explored, how this project started, the method, the role of wonder and beauty, the craft, how scientists think, what keeps them going and...
27 Windows on the Universe (08): The Last Window
This is the last post in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. Earlier posts explored, how this project started, the method, the role of wonder and beauty, the craft, how scientists think, what keeps them going and how...
Paths Crossing at the Digital Maidan: Keynotes, Forewords, and Futures
This post is long overdue. I was in Bangalore, back in December 2025, for the Quest 2 Learn Summit organized by the Quest Alliance. Quest and I go back to 2008, when I first attended one of their conferences. Our paths have kept crossing since: the Quest to Learning...
The Mirror and the Black Box: AI Metaphors and What They Mean for Learning
The latest installment of the Rethinking Technology & Creativity column in TechTrends is published. This one, co-authored with Danah Henriksen, is called "The Mirror and the Black Box: AI Metaphors and What They Mean for Learning." (Full citation and link below.)...
The Classroom and Beyond: Teacher Education in a GenAI World
Danah Henriksen and I have a chapter in the Third International Handbook of Educational Change (2026), edited by A. Lin Goodwin, Andy Hargreaves, Victoria Showunmi, Corrie Stone-Johnson, and Jennie Weiner. In our chapter, "The Classroom and Beyond: Teacher Education...
27 Windows on the Universe (07): The Ecosystem
This is the seventh in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. T Earlier posts explored, how this project started, the method, the role of wonder and beauty, the craft, how scientists think, and what keeps them going and...
27 Windows on the Universe (06): The Drive
This is the sixth in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. Earlier posts explored, how this project started, the method, the role of wonder and beauty, the craft and how scientists think. This one is about what keeps...
Look What You Made Me Do: The Dawkins Saga, Part II
A week or so ago I wrote a letter to Richard Dawkins — part tribute, part diagnosis — about his now-famous two-day conversation with Claude (or rather, "Claudia"), in which one of our most celebrated skeptics concluded that the chatbot might well be conscious. The...
… or check out some random blog posts
Slumdog night (and Rahman)
Slumdog rolled into the Oscars tonight. More important to me were the two Oscars for A. R. Rahman for original score and song. It is time that the world recognized his genius. Here is a cartoon by Kaladhar Bapu from his site Point Blank A.R. Rahman by Kaladhar Bapu
Creativity as Resistance: New article
Image credit: tshirtgifter.com The next article in our series (Rethinking technology and creativity for the 21st century) for the journal Tech Trends is now available online. This article has an interview with Dr. Shakuntala Banaji, currently Associate Professor and...
CR8IVTY: New License Plate
My new year's gift to myself!
Appreciating Joel Colbert at AACTE
I just spent a couple of days in Chicago at the Annual meeting of the American Association for the Colleges of Teacher Education. On Friday evening was meeting of the Innovation and Technology Committee the highlight of which was a gift of appreciation that we gave...
Generative AI is WEIRD!
Note: This blog post was almost entirely written by ChagGPT based on an analysis of a set of images I had uploaded onto it. The image above (Weird AI) is an original typographic design created by me. The background sky was created by Adobe Firefly. To give some...
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...
Beyond the Algorithm: The Mysterious Variability of Responses from GenAI
Note: The shared blogging with Melissa Warr and Nicole Oster continues and this time we also have Margarita Pivovarova joining the team. I (Punya) wrote the first draft which was then edited and polished by the rest of the team. Do I contradict myself?Very well...
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)....
Silver Lining for Learning, a side conversation
We have had a few regulars on the Silver Lining for Learning show. And one of them is Priyank Sharma who consistently joins us despite it being around 2 or 3 AM in in New Delhi when the show runs here in the US. Priyank and I spoke on the 22nd of June about a range of...