A couple of weeks ago I was invited to give a keynote at the Frances Willson Thompson Critical Issues Conference on Generative AI in Education. It was great to go back to Michigan even if for a super short trip. One of the pleasures of the visit was catching up with...
Generative AI, Teacher Knowledge and Educational Research: Bridging Short- and Long-Term Perspectives.
I am pleased to share our latest article in our ongoing column series for TechTrends on the topics of technology creativity and education. Over the past few months we have focused on generative AI, through conversations with thought leaders such as Chris Dede...
It HAS to hallucinate: The true nature of LLM’s
Though Generative AI is receiving a great deal of attention lately, I am not entirely sure that the discussions of these technologies and their impact on education and society at large genuinely engage with the true nature of these technologies. In fact I have argued...
Reflection: Welcome 2024
Since December 2008 we have been creating a video to welcome the new year. When we made our first video we had no idea that we would still be doing it 16 years later, and, frankly who knows how long we can keep it up. These videos are usually typographical in nature,...
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...
GenAI 2023: Year in Review
A week or so ago I was joined by friends Sean Leahy, Rachna Mathur and Kellie Kreiser on the Learning Futures Podcast. The topic: looking back on a crazy, dynamic, transformative year of generative AI. As is to be expected, we covered a lot of ground in the...
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...
Keynote Presentation: AI in Education Summit
Note: The image above is the result of a two-stage creative process—done in collaboration with AI. Dall-E was tasked, over multiple iterations, to craft a woodcut-style image, to abstractly capture the idea of AI and education, with dark and light motifs, aiming to...
Andrew Maynard on AI, Responsible Innovation & The Future of Humanity
Welcome once again to our ongoing column series where we delve into the intersection of technology, creativity, and education. Our conversations with authorities such as Chris Dede (Harvard), Ethan Mollick (Wharton), and Kyle Jensen (ASU) have centered around the...
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,...
OECD Global Forum on the Future of Education: Bucharest, Romania
I have been in Bucharest for the past few days participating in the OECD Global Forum on the Future of Education. It has been great fun, meeting lots of new people, developing frameworks around AI and education and more. A few resources and photographs from the...
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....
The Desk, the Test, the LMS: The 5 Spaces for (re)Design in Education
What do a teacher's desk, the PISA test and Learning Management Systems (LMS) have in common. Apart from being educational technologies, they are also the heart of a book chapter that Melissa Warr, Kevin Close and I just published in a book titled Formative Design in...
Design\Ethics\AI
Technologies like remote proctoring software and advanced language models are no longer futuristic concepts. They're here, and they're reshaping how we learn and how we teach. But with these advancements come critical ethical considerations. The deployment of these...
Designing for Creative Learning Environments: New chapter
In 2017, Carmen Richardson and I co-authored a paper (Richardson & Mishra, 2017) introducing SCALE: Support of Creativity in Learning Environment: SCALE, a tool created to evaluate how well educational settings foster student creativity. Unlike formal evaluation...
Can we please slow it all down? School leaders take on ChatGPT (new article)
We have, over the past months, explored a range of issues related to generative AI, education, and creativity in our column series, for TechTrends, with the goal of fostering dialogue among stakeholders—students, parents, educators, and policymakers—to ensure these...
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...
The TPACK game: ChatGPT version
Back in the day, Matt Koehler and I had come up with a game to help teachers creatively explore the TPACK framework. There are some traces of this on this website (see here and here) but many of these links are dead. One that still exists is this YouTube video by Lisa...
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...
Designing learning in a transformed world: Keynote
I was recently invited to present virtually at The Heart of Innovation Summer Summit, organized by the Heartland Area Education Agency in Iowa. The video of my talk can be seen below. Maybe my first serious keynote talk about generative AI and education. Enjoy...
Teacher Knowledge in the age of ChatGPT and Generative AI
Update March 2024: This paper received the JDLTE Outstanding Research Paper Award recognizing "the single article from the prior volume year with the highest possibility to advance the field of teacher education, based on the criteria of potential impact and...
ChatGPT is a smart, drunk intern: 3 examples
Harry Frankfurt the philosopher passed away, this past Sunday. He was 94. As the NYTimes obituary said, he was... ... a philosopher whose fresh ideas about the human will were overshadowed in the broader culture by his analysis of a kind of dishonesty that he found...
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...