What do they know? Video projects on understanding

The Edge Cases Are Endless: Google’s Digital Plastic and other Curriculum-Shaped Objects

Jul 14, 2025

Summary: In which I explore three sticky metaphors—digital plastic, curriculum-shaped objects, and the endlessness of edge cases—and how they illuminate the risks of AI-powered education tools that look like learning but fail to teach. In a previous blog post (The...

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

Feb 11, 2025

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”...

Mind(ful) Wandering & Creativity: New article

Jun 22, 2022

Illustration by Punya Mishra We have covered a wide range of issues related to creativity, technology and learning in our almost decade-long series that we write for the journal TechTrends. Over the past few years we have conducted almost 30+ interviews with some of...

Undo this

Mar 18, 2008

Wouldn't it be great if life came with an undo key-stroke-combination? Just a thought I threw out today during a meeting which led to a discussion of how this could be a great movie idea. Seems intriguing...

Bilingual Tomfoolery: Phonetic Visual Puns & Puzzles

Aug 23, 2025

Four copper pots. A fountain pen on a bus. A bull with a crow. A peacock in a bucket. What cities do these represent? And here's a bonus round: a swimming pool with a tiny lawn island floating in it—what fruit is this? Finally, glass of tea, a banana, and someone...

Bad poetry time: Clerihews

Mar 15, 2009

Just when you thought I had run through all the bad poetry I can spew (see here for my palindromic poems) here is another set of poems I had all but forgotten about. A few years ago I got hooked into writing Clerihews. For the uninitiated: The clerihew is a bit of...

Hello Hong Kong, goodbye Hong Kong

May 19, 2008

A short and sweet trip to Hong Kong, one full day, two nights, fly in fly out. I was a guest of the University of Hong Kong and gave a talk there yesterday, the last in my series of TPACK talks. I had a good audience, the talk went well, though I did not manage my...

The TPACK game: ChatGPT version

Sep 23, 2023

Back in the day, Matt Koehler and I had come up with a game to help teachers creatively explore the TPACK framework. There are some traces of this on this website (see here and here) but many of these links are dead. One that still exists is this YouTube video by Lisa...

When Ghalib meets AI: One student’s experiment

Feb 23, 2025

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...