Talk at Fulton School of Engineering

Improv here, there, everywhere…

Jul 10, 2008

A few months ago I wrote about Professor R. K. Joshi (here and here). He was, as I said in the piece, maybe the single greatest influence on my role as a teacher. I had mentioned that R.K. loved absurdity and play. I was reminded of this when I read about this group...

The end of practical obscurity

Aug 5, 2008

There is a somewhat troubling story in NYTimes a couple of days ago: (If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?) about CriminalSearches.com, a free service that lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United...

Palindromic Poetry

Jan 13, 2008

A few years ago I got bitten by the bug of Palindromic Poetry - poems that double back on themselves, that can be read this way, or that. This is consistent with my love for ambigrams and other kinds of symmetrical wordplay.Take a look...

The Hammer Shapes the Mind: GenAI and the Rise of the Intention Economy

May 11, 2025

Camera crews search for clues amid the detritusAnd entertainment shapes the landThe way the hammer shapes the hand. Jackson Browne, in Casino Nation In this post, I examine how AI systems have evolved from capturing attention to manipulating intentions, creating an...

Learning futures: Designing the horizon

Jan 12, 2021

I was recently invited (along with Sean Leahy and Jodie Donner) to present at the Winter Games, Digital Immersive Experience organized by ShapingEDU at Arizona State University. Our talk was titled Learning Futures: Designing the Horizon. We described our session as...

When Truth Doesn’t Matter: AI Falls for Illusory Optical Illusions

Nov 30, 2024

I've been exploring ChatGPT's ability to analyze images, and the results have been impressive. From interpreting complex refugee statistics to conducting semiotic analyses of street art, the AI has shown a remarkable ability to extract meaning from visual information....

Mishra & Hershey, 2004

Apr 30, 2008

A few years ago I was invited to be a part of a symposium on etiquette and the design of interactive media (organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). I hosted all the papers and presentations from the symposium (links to which I...

The TPACK game, Littleton version

Jan 24, 2010

I received an email from Michael Porter of the Littleton Public Schools in Colorado about a version of the TPACK game Michael and his colleagues recently conducted with their K-12 Leadership team (building principals and district administrators). I know that Matt...

The Loss of Nuance in discussions of AI in Education

Aug 29, 2025

In which I respond thoughtfully to a journalist's question about AI in schools, watch my nuanced argument get reduced to a single quote, and reflect on how complexity gets flattened at multiple levels—from educational policy to media coverage. I recently wrote a post...