As part of my class on Human Creativity x AI in Education, students were randomly assigned to Teams A through E. One of their first tasks? Create team names starting with their assigned letter. So we ended up with with teams AI, Brainstormers, Catalyst, Dreamers and...
If last week we had Bollywood, could Hollywood be far behind? Here is the fourth blog post from students in my class on Human Creativity x AI in Education, documenting what we do each week. The only edit I made to their post was including the image and description of...
One of the students in my Human Creativity x AI in Education class is an accomplished Kathak dancer and last week we got into a discussion of how she could bring this personal interest into projects we were exploring in the class. How could GenAI help? So yesterday,...
The second blog post from students in my class on Human Creativity x AI in Education. (You can see the first post here). Just in case you are wondering why this is week 3 and not week 2, we lost one class due to MLK Day. These posts are an ongoing record of what we...
This semester I am teaching a course titled Human Creativity x AI in Education. We have 19 students in the class, split into 5 groups. (And yes though I love prime numbers, having one more participant would have been better). Each week one of the groups will document...
I love playing with type and words. Recently I got obsessed with creating a particular kind of typographic design—layouts where letters in words do double duty. A simple example is given below: “THINK INFINITY” where the shared letters "IN" span both the words....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
For almost 12 years now we have been writing a column series for the journal TechTrends, exploring the intersection of technology, creativity, and learning. Recently, my colleagues and I have been diving deep into generative AI through conversations with scholars like...
DCI 691 (Spring 2025)Human Creativity x AI in Education: A Transdisciplinary Exploration by DesignInstructor Dr. Punya Mishra (punya[AT]asu.edu)Mondays 9 – 11:45 Tempe Short description This graduate-level course examines the dynamic interplay between human creativity...
My friend Leigh Wolf sent me the Journal of Imaginary Research's 2024 call for abstracts (note, abstracts not papers) on the theme of "Flourishing." Do check out the journal. It IS a hoot! I do plan to submit something to the journal. I mean how cool would that be......
In this post, I share a conversation with Claude.AI (my words in purple, Claude's in blue) that began as a playful exploration of visual wordplay. What emerged was something unexpected - not about AI's lack of consciousness, which was never in doubt, but about the...
In music, polyphony describes a texture where multiple independent melodic voices interweave to create something greater than the sum of its parts. The philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin expanded this idea to human discourse, seeing it as a way for multiple voices and...
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." These words from Martin Luther King Jr. speak to something fundamentally human – the belief that...
As someone who enjoys playing with images, words, and typography, I'm always seeking new ways to generate ideas. I recently tried an experiment: collaborating with an AI language model (Claude) on a series of typographical designs. It all started after I had created...
In my previous post (From Shortcuts to Simulations: Two Contrasting Uses of AI in Higher Education), I shared how my colleague Jim ingeniously used AI to prepare for a difficult conversation about academic integrity. Today, I want to explore another fascinating...
A classic tale of early cinema recounts the 1896 Paris screening of the Lumière brothers' "L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat" (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station). According to popular accounts, some viewers reportedly reacted with panic to the realistic...
Google's recent release of NotebookLM has stirred up quite a buzz, particularly its podcast feature. At first glance, it might not seem revolutionary—after all, we've had AI tools that can engage with uploaded documents for a while now. And it does not require...
This past week I was in Durban, South Africa presenting at the Innovations in the Science of the Teaching and Learning (ISOTL) Conference 2024: Bridging Ethics, Equity, and Innovation in Higher Education, organized by the University of KwaZulu-Natal. It was a pretty...
The advent, adoption and rapid evolution of generative AI has raised many questions about how we think about creativity (human and machine), and its impact on learning. As part of our ongoing series in TechTrends, my colleagues and I have been exploring these issues...
Imagine a world where tape recorders fool beavers, triangles tell stories, and AI convinces us it's sentient. Welcome to reality—where our cognitive biases are colliding with technology in ways we're only beginning to understand. In this post, I focus on our tendency...
I have been thinking of pencils lately. Pencils in the context of AI. What if pencils were the latest technological change to hit our world? How would we as educators respond? Would we worry about children using them ethically? What about cheating: erasing answers and...
A few years ago I wrote a poem titled “A cosmologist worries (about infinity)” inspired by a conversation with my friend and cosmologist, Tanmay Vachaspati. I remembered this poem recently when I was playing with Suno the generative AI song generator. So I wondered...
Technologies give and they take away. This was poignantly highlighted in a recent article by Lisa Lieberman in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "AI and the Death of Student Writing." The subtitle says it all: "The move away from true hands-on scholarship seems...
Teaching is an inherently creative act, requiring educators to navigate constraints and find innovative ways to engage students. In our recently published chapter, Danah Henriksen, Lauren Woo and I explore the notion of "repurposing" as a vital skill for fostering...
Note: Image above created using Adobe Firefly, Photoshop and composed in Keynote. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of connecting with author Dr. Phoebe Wagner through the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. We discussed her...
As part of our ongoing series for the journal TechTrends exploring the intersections of technology, education, and creativity, we have recently turned our focus to the potential impacts of generative AI (GenAI) on these domains. Our latest article features a...