One question that all doctoral students dread (and rightfully so) is "What is your theoretical framework?" Why, they wonder (silently), why do we need a framework? This question popped up recently in, of all places, Facebook. Pilar Quezzaire, a graduate of our MAET...
Website problems
My website has been facing all kinds of problems over the past few weeks. We have been working on figuring out what went wrong and trying to ensure that it doesn't recur - but it has taken a while and it's not clear to us whether we have it all figured out. So the...
SITE2013 New Orleans
All my photos from the recently concluded SITE2013 conference at New Orleans. These include photographs from multiple sessions (chronicled here, here, and here) as well as from all the fun we had (at the MSU dinner, just hanging around in Burbon St., as we as other...
My Illusions on the web
There are a couple of websites that feature work done by me. I had written earlier about Brad Honeycutt's website An Optical Illusion at (http://www.anopticalillusion.com/). He now features four different ambigrams created by me: You can find them on this page on his...
New ambigrams, Mert-Demir and one more…
I recently received an email with the following request: I am an engineer living in Turkey and I am going to have my second son hopefully in April and I would love to have their names as a tattoo. However having such a special work that will remain with me for my...
Good Evil Ambigram
Brad Honeycutt, a fellow Spartan (he graduated 1996 a couple of years before I started here at Michigan State) is fascinated by optical illusions. He has completed a couple of books on optical illusions the first of which will be coming out in July. Scott Kim, one of...
Is TPACK fundamentally flawed? A quick response
Richard Olsen over in his blog has an extended posting titled The TPACK Framework is fundamentally flawed. It is a long and thoughtful post and I recommend everyone to read it. I have posted a short response to his posting (it is under moderation but should show up in...
Ambigrams on the web
Many years ago I got bitten by the Ambigram bug and before I knew it I had created hundreds! This was of course long before Dan Brown and Angels and Demons made ambigrams wildly popular. It has been fun to see what was once a fringe activity take on a wider...
Palindromic poetry: Falling Snow
A few weeks ago I had written about an email that I received from an eighth grader in Colorado. Jake, a budding poet, was interested in learning more about me in the context of some palindromic poetry I had written many years ago. I wrote back to Jake (you can see the...
The gift that keeps on giving, or Why I love the web
I recently received this email: Dear Mr. Mishra, I am currently working on a poetry research project for school, and one of the requirements is researching five different poets. While looking for people who wrote palindromic poetry, I found your website and decided to...
SITE 2011, the fun stuff
I had posted earlier about the paper presentations I was involved with during the recently concluded SITE conference at Nashville. Matt Koehler and I were co-Program Chairs for the conference, and sadly Matt was sick and had to miss the trip. In the photo below the...
TPACK Newsletter 8 (Feb 2011)
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #8: February 2011 Welcome to a new year and to the eighth edition of the TPACK Newsletter! Please forgive our long delay in getting this “mega-issue” to you. We’ll do a lot of “catching up” with what has been happening with TPACK worldwide in...
Txting develops spelling skills, how gr8
Scott Graden is Superintendent of Saline Area Schools and a blogger. He recently posted about a study that indicated that texting helps students develop vocabulary skills. Though he was skeptical of the finding, I am not sure I was as surprised. He cited a news story...
Subversion, literacy & TPACK, new article
Kristen Kereluik, Matt Koehler and I just published an article in The California Reader: A publication of the California Reading Association. The complete citation and abstract is as follows: Kereluik, K., Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2010, Winter). On learning...
TPACK on Vimeo & in the Netherlands
Dr. Clare Kilbane, Associate Professor at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio recently created an enhanced podcast/vodcast explaining TPACK as a part of an ARRA grant implemented in the state of Ohio last spring. This podcast/vodcast was designed in the style of...
Creativity in Las Vegas
I was recently invited to present a keynote address at the 21st Century Instructional Technology Conference (titled Elements of Technology) at the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Nevada. Clark County is the 5th largest school district in the country with...
New triplet Ambigram (Now in 3D)!
A few weeks ago I had shared a few triplet-ambigrams I had designed. For the uninitiated a triplet ambigram is a 3-d shape that cast different, and interesting, shadows depending on where you shine light on it. For instance here's a triplet ambigram that casts three...
On writing less badly
I just came across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, 10 tips on How to Write Less Badly [H/T Geekpress]. It is not that I agreed with every point being made there but a couple of them (To become a writer, write!; Find a voice, don't just get...
Dabbling to see: A rant
My friend and colleague Leigh Wolf forwarded me this article on Edward Tufte: The Many Faces (And Sculptures) Of Edward Tufte. I have been a fan of information design guru Edward Tufte's work for years (decades?). I love his emphasis on clarity and simplicity in...
My favorite Internet meme (and how it almost died)
I have been tracking the Hitler-Downfall parodies for over two years now and it seems that they keep getting better and better. But over the last few days comes the news that Constantin films, which owns the rights to the original movie asked YouTube to find and take...
What is this thing called text?
Steven Johnson has a great essay on the future of text title: The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book. I recommend reading the full thing but here is a quote that sort of captures his vision (though there is more, much more). Here is a great quote: WHEN TEXT IS free to...
Reading Obama, and getting it right!
I rarely if ever blog about politics - though I follow it avidly. I spend large parts of my day reading the news, keeping up with what is going on. Most of my news gathering happens online (the little TV I watch, usually the Daily Show, also happens online). And it is...
Interview with Curt Bonk
My friend and colleague, Curt Bonk, Professor at Indiana University (also known as Travelin' Ed Man) recently interviewed me about our new hybrid Ph.D. program. For those interested in the program (and maybe even those who are not) can read it by going to Want an...
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...
Impact of technology v.s. chewing gum on learning
Just got this from Tom Reeves at the CIMA conference, Twente University. Allen, K. L., Galvis, D., Katz, R. V. (2006). Evaluation of CDs and chewing gum in teaching dental anatomy. The New York state dental journal. 72(4): pp 30-33. Abstract: The purposes of this...
The TPACK game, Littleton version
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...
For Sean & his students
Sean had this wonderful post on his blog (Is this a sluggish strategy?) about this whole scientific and mathematical poetry that is going around. He links to some excellent sci-po's written by his students (see Pushing Scientific Thought Into Art) and also provides a...
Poetry, Science & Math, OR why I love the web
A 5th grade science assignment, transformed. A rant about Mother Goose. A math poetry challenge! How did that come to be? And what does that have to do with loving the Interwebs? Read on... I had written earlier about how my 10 year-old daughter had been writing...
New ambigram logo for ideaplay.org
I had written previously about a blog started by students in our Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Ph.D. program (ideaplay.org) and had designed a couple of ambigrammatic logos for them. You can see the original post here. Here is one of the original...
Wikipedia minor fail
I recently received the following email: Sir, I was reading the article in Wikipedia on 'Samarangana Sutradhara' (King Bhoja's treatise on Architecture). I was of the impression that there is no translation of the work in English. Though the article says that there is...