Should we tip machines for the work they do for us? Does that question even make sense? What follows is a reflection on metaphors, technology, deceptive design, AI and more... Read on. Metaphors and more In her book God, Human, Animal, Machine, Meghan O’Gieblyn...
AI is WEIRD: Part II
Note: The image above is an original design - showing "AI" embedded in the word "WEIRD" Generative AI is weird... as I had written in my previous blog post, identifying some key characteristics I had described in a recent Keynote presentation. In the process of...
Me & We in AI
What does generative AI mean to me? And to us? These key questions were part of a special exhibit curated by students in the DCI 691: Education by Design course I taught this fall. Education by Design is my favorite class to teach. It is a course about design—design...
Contemplating Design: Remixing the 5 spaces framework
The Five Spaces for Design in Education framework argues that design in education happens in 5 interrelated spaces: artifacts, processes, experiences, systems and culture. We have typically represented this as follows. We, however, are also very aware that any...
AI writes book reviews
Here is the title and abstract for a book review that was just published in the Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning Preparing Ourselves for Artificial Intelligence: A Review of The Alignment Problem and God, Human, Animal, Machine Abstract: In this article,...
Questioning Assumptions: Podcast episode
I was recently invited as a guest on the Better Learning Podcast. I had a great conversation with the host, Kevin Stoller (and boy does he have a voice designed for audio!). Turns out that we both went to Miami University, though our paths didn't overlap or intersect....
Vikram OR Vetaal, A Halloween Story (co-authored with AI)
A few weeks back, Sean Leahy – friend, tech aficionado, futurist, and the co-host of the Learning Futures Podcast – reached out to me via email with an intriguing proposal. He was playing with the concept of harnessing generative AI to craft Halloween stories. The aim...
The new convergence
I recently received an email from dean recommending this post titled Thoughts on Now and Then by Andrew Hickey. In this extended essay Hickey provides his thoughts on the new Beatles remake, Now and Then. The essay is a thoughtful and loving analysis of human...
Amusings & other creations (from the early web)
I have been blogging for 15 years now, but I have had a website for much longer than that. I built my first website back in 1998 just as I was graduating from UIUC and entering the academic job market. I still remember the URL (www.uiuc.edu/~pmishra). I designed a...
A-EYE: When AI can see
AI can now see! And talk to you about what it sees! ChatGPT released its latest upgrade - the ability to not just create images but also to interpret them. I had been waiting for a while now to get access to these new vision features - and just this morning it popped...
Literacy as a Technology: A Conversation with Kyle Jensen about AI, Writing & More
Welcome back to our column series, exploring the nexus of technology, creativity, and education. We've spoken with experts like Chris Dede from Harvard and Ethan Mollick from Wharton, focusing on how AI is reshaping creativity and education. We're in a pivotal era of...
Learning to see complexity: Teachers designing amidst indeterminacy
Note: The image above was generated by Adobe Firefly and edited using Photoshop beta. Teaching is a profession steeped in complexity. This complexity manifests in various ways: the diverse skill sets, interests, and backgrounds students bring to the table; the...
You have been terminated: A case for humane design
Good design cares about details. Good design is humane. Bad design is neither. Designers must bring this attention to detail and humanity to every aspect of their work. And this applies even the invisible parts. This, caring for the "invisible" details, is captured in...
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...
Artificial Intelligence, Math / Truth & other ambigrams
Lovers of mathematics relish challenges, enjoying the manipulation of numbers and geometrical figures, seeking and creating patterns. Their fascination sometimes extends into language and other seemingly unrelated domains. An intriguing example of visual wordplay,...
Creativity, AI & Education: A Reflection & an Example
Update (added March 17, 2024): There are a few more instances of using GenAI in creative ways that I would like to add to the list below, in particular 2 posts about using the the image analysis capabilities for ChatGPT: When AI can see and Total eclipse of the sun...
Wine + GPT4 + Code Interpreter: WOW!!
OpenAI just released Code Interpreter. It allows you to execute Python code within a live working environment. One of the things that it allows us to do is take data files and conduct data analysis and create graphs and charts. Not knowing what that meant I decided to...
The joy of learning: A reflection
What is this thing called learning? What does it mean to learn something? What makes us want to learn? Why is it fun? Why do we want to know? Even as educators, we often don't take the time to ask ourselves these foundational questions. So it is rewarding when we get...
It Takes Two: A (personal) exploration
I had written earlier about a contest organized by Dark ‘n’ Light (an e-zine) around the theme of "IT TAKES TWO" and had shared some of my experiments, exploring this theme, using Generative AI. You can see my experiments at: It takes two: A scientific romp using AI...
It Takes Two: A scientific romp using AI
Dark 'n' Light is an e-zine that "explores science, nature, social justice and culture, through the arts and humanities." It is a labor of love by a small, dedicated team led by Susan Matthews, former legal and policy wonk, turned editor and podcaster. I came to know...
6 Videos (on the 5 spaces for design in Education)
Learning Sparks is a new initiative at ASU that feature short, 5-minute, videos showcasing the expertise of a range of ASU faculty members. These videos are carefully crafted, with high-production values seeking to capture big ideas in bite-sized chunks. A few months...
Talk at Fulton School of Engineering
Last August I was invited to speak at an event organized by the Ira Fulton School of Engineering's Learning and Teaching Hub. For some reason I had not posted about it — so better late than never... here it is, a 30 min talk followed by QnA....
On designing aesthetic educational experiences in science
What is the role of beauty (and aesthetics) in science in science education? This is something that I have been interested in for a long time, going back to highschool. Over the years I have built a small body of scholarship around this topic. Sadly, this work does...
Coding with ChatGPT3: On gaining a superpower
I had heard that ChatGPT3 could help with writing code and just hadn't much time to play with it. Part of the reason is that I haven't really coded in almost 2 decades (maybe more) so was somewhat hesitant to jump in. But again I kept reading of people doing amazing...
Scaling up the SCALE Instrument
Back in 2017, Carmen Richardson and I wrote an article (Richardson & Mishra, 2017) in which we proposed an instrument (Support of Creativity in Learning Environment: SCALE) designed to assess the ways in which a learning environment supports student...
Krishnamurti & Dewey in the Metaverse
I am writing a paper with Marina Basu about how John Dewey's and Jiddu Krishnamurti's philosophies of education and their implications for learning in increasingly mediated environments. While working on the paper, it struck me that it may be fun to see what Bing Chat...
Bringing Design to Education: Benjamin Cluff Jr. Lecture at BYU McKay School of Education
I was recently invited to present the Benjamin Cluff Jr. Lecture by the dean and faculty at the Brigham Young University, McKay School of Education. I had a short but lovely visit, meeting old friends, and making new ones. We had some wonderful conversations, over...
A chat about GPT3 (and other forms of alien intelligence)
We recently celebrated the 10-year anniversary of writing a regular column series on Rethinking Technology & Creativity in Education for the journal TechTrends. Over the next few articles in this series, we are going to dive deeper into Artificial Intelligence...
Tell me a story: Delightful design in an airport
“Design doesn’t need to be delightful for it to work, but that’s like saying food doesn’t need to be tasty to keep us alive” — Frank Chimero I am always looking for examples of good and bad design in the world around me. Good design is rare, functional and at the same...
Learning styles in the classroom? What BS! (But Bing Chat doesn’t care.)
One of the most enduring myths in education is that of learning styles. I had written about it back in 2009 in a blog post titled: Teaching to learning styles: What hogwash. But it a myth that does not seem to go away, maybe because it seems to have some kind of...