“The environment is where we all meet, where we all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share. It is not only a mirror of ourselves, but a focusing lens...” ~ Lady Bird Johnson “A system is never the sum of its parts; it’s the product of their...
“When I see equations, I see the letters in colors — I don’t know why. As I’m talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Ernde’s book, with light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell...
This past spring semester, I taught (with Nicole Oster and Lindsey McCaleb) a masters/doctoral seminar on Human Creativity × AI in Education. When we set out to design the class, we knew we were venturing into relatively uncharted territory, committed to examining...
A few months ago I sat down with my friend Bhawna Parmar as a guest on the Quest for Better Futures podcast. Readers of this blog will remember Bhawna from her insightful article in The Caravan that had inspired a previous blog post: While we weren't looking: The real...
I was recently invited to speak at the Universel Conference 2025: Empowering Humane Technology. You can find the abstract, and an embedded video of my talk below. The Promise and Paradox of creative AI What happens when an AI can write a mathematically perfect poem,...
At our most recent AIR|GPT podcast meetup (our regular monthly "airport" gathering), Ruben Puentedura introduced us to the concept of "pedagogical debt," inspired by comment by Ian Bogost (in a recent Atlantic article titled AI Has Broken High School and College)....
A little less than a year ago, my friends and colleagues, Marie Heath and Stephanie Smith Budhai reached out to me asking me if I would be willing to write a foreword to their book Critical AI in K-12 Classrooms: A Practical Guide for Cultivating Justice and Joy. I...
Note: I wrote the following a day or so after I heard of David Berliner's passing. I have links to some other resources at the end, along with some other reminisences from some of my colleagues at ASU, collected here (with their permission). I first encountered David...
I had three conversations this week. One with a colleague, one with a furniture repairer, and one with a physicist who’s been dead for decades. They fit together somehow… and this blog post is the result. Story 1 Lydia Cao is a friend, and colleague (faculty at the...
It's been 1000 days since ChatGPT launched. Not that anybody was clamoring for a hallucinating ChatBot but here we are. A friend once told me about a Gujarati business principle: give any new venture 1000 days, roughly three years, before deciding whether to continue...
Note to readers: This is the story of how I came to write an essay called "Why Gödel and Escher But Not Bach" for a book about the future of orchestras. I should add that I know almost nothing about orchestras and feel deeply uncomfortable in public classical music...
I recently had the pleasure of returning to the Modem Futura podcast for a second conversation with hosts Andrew Maynard and Sean Leahy, and guess what, it was even more fun than the first time around. What started as a discussion about the latest AI developments in...
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...
Scott Carlson's recent article (On the Dangers of 'Simplification') in The Chronicle of Higher Education explores James C. Scott's influential book Seeing Like a State. Reading it, something clicked into place—a recognition of why I've spent decades swimming against...
It is rare that one comes across an original journal article title that one HAS to click on and read. For instance, my favorite title of all time has been Alison Gopnik's article titled "Explanation as Orgasm." Not only is this a catchy title, it also make a profound...
In which I examine OpenAI's much-hyped "Study Mode" and contrast it with a couple of real research-based approaches. The differences are telling. Read on… OpenAI recently announced “Study Mode” for ChatGPT with considerable fanfare, claiming it was built “in...
Everyone seems to be clamoring for AI literacy these days—how to prompt effectively, how to spot AI-generated content, how to integrate these tools into workflows. I have been critical of this phenomena, see my post on pencil literacy and a new definition of literacy...
Over the years, our column series in TechTrends has explored the intersections of creativity, education, and emerging technologies. Over the past year, we’ve explored a wide range of perspectives on GenAI through interviews with leading thinkers like Ethan Mollick,...
I was recently invited to the 17th annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (EDULEARN25) in Palma, Spain. Getting to visit beautiful Palma, Mallorca, speaking with 800+ educators from across the world... what could be more awesome? At...
Education by Design: Synthesizing Learning Experiences with AIDCI 691: Fall 2025 | Thursdays 9 - 11:45, Tempe CampusInstructor: Punya Mishra Calling all creative risk-takers! This graduate-level course explores how design, as both a way of thinking and as a...
Summary: In which I explore why tinkering—messy, creative, often undervalued and overlooked—is not only a valid way to approach teaching, but perhaps one of the most honest. My friend Josh Brake recently wrote a Substack post (Don't tinker with AI in the classroom)...
Intro: I am not entirely sure of the point of this post: a somewhat random associative rumination that brings together a German philosopher, a blind Argentinian author, a lovely though not well known, Bollywood movie, and large language models. All I can say is that...
In my presentations I sometimes talk about my four years in engineering school as being something of a disaster. The way I present this fact is through this image, and the math/science types get the pun - Four Year / Fourier Transformation! A slide I typically use in...
A few months ago, the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation at Arizona State University hosted the 2025 Yidan Prize Conference. This conference was both a celebration of my colleague Micky Chi’s receipt of the 2023 Yidan Prize for Education...
I've been experimenting with AI-assisted coding for a while now—in fact my first attempt was back in early 2023. Since then I have engaged in multiple explorations using AI to transform concepts and intuitions directly into functional code. This approach bypasses...
One of blogging's greatest pleasures, often unspoken, are the truly serendipitous connections one makes. Not networking in the conventional sense, but unexpected encounters with people who find something on my website that connects with them and they reach out. These...
This past spring semester I taught (with Nicole Oster and Lindsey McCaleb) a masters/doctoral seminar on Human Creativity x AI in Education. I had wanted to write this post after our last class meeting over a month and a half ago—but travel and life kept getting in...
Bill Atkinson was someone I had never met. But he changed my life. I learned of Bill's passing a couple of days ago. It was not that I had thought about Bill a lot but the news of his death brought back memories and a recognition of the critical role he had played in...
I continue to co-host AIR | GPT, a podcast that brings together Caroline Fell Kurban, Liz Kolb, Ruben Puentedura, Helen Crompton, and myself for monthly conversations about AI and education. Our discussions are orchestrated by Emmy Award-winning executive producer...
In a previous post I had described my recent visit to Turkey and the wonderful time I had at Istanbul with my friend Gokce Kurt. However wonderful that visit was, it was not the main reason I was in Turkey. I was there to speak at the Sixth International Forum on...