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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
One of the most fun projects I have been part of was working with authors of speculative fiction around the futures of learning. This was the result of a collaboration with the Center for Science and the Imagination, Slate magazine and New America (supported by the...
Title image created using Dall E 2, with input by Punya Mishra My colleague Jill Koyama shared an essay published in the Refugee Research Online journal, titled "It's all in the bag: Refugees and Materiality."...
This is the fourth of what was supposed to be a three post-series about how media influence our thinking. The first post, uses the invention of writing and print to unpack the meaning of McLuhan’s statement, “The medium is the message.” The second post, focuses on a...
This is the second of three blog posts about how media influence our thinking. The first post, uses the invention of writing and print to unpack the meaning of McLuhan’s statement, “The medium is the message.” The second post, focuses on a story by Ted Chiang that...
The Center for Science and the Imagination at ASU runs a series of short stories and virtual gatherings that explore issues related to transformative change. Essentially they solicit and publish a (super-short) short story that explores “themes of community,...
The fictions we create (& how they create us) This is a story about a multi-year quest and its resolution (thought not necessarily in the way I was expecting). It is also a story about stories: stories in books and stories that we make up. And how these stories,...
The Center for Science and the Imagination at ASU has a new series called Us in Flux. Every two weeks they publish a (super-short) short story that explores "themes of community, collaboration, and collective imagination in response to transformative events." They...
Kij Johnson, an award- winning author, editor, and Associate Professor in the University of Kansas’s MFA in Creative Writing program. In her teaching Kij brings some serious credibility as an artist, scholar, and all-around “uber-geek.” Kij has published three novels,...
One of the most exciting parts of my job are the cool people I get to meet. Glen Lineberry is one of them. Glen is Principal at Miami Junior-Senior High School. He describes his school as a “small rural school on the move.” The first thing that strikes you when you...
I have always been intrigued by the idea of how truly random our lives really are. Seemingly minor events can trigger effects, rippling through our lives, effects becoming causes, leading to profound changes and transformations. Ray Bradbury's short...
The 5th floor of Erickson Hall is a fun place to be. Typically a bunch of graduate students hang out there, working on their readings, talking shop and in general having a good time. For some reason, last week, I promised Josh Rosenberg that I would write a poem for...
Note: If you are not interested in the backstory but just want to read the story you can find a cleaned PDF version here. Mishra, P., & Narasimhan, A. (1987, August). And we all fall down. Science Today. Back in 1986, Anand Narasimhan and I wrote a short story...
I have been haunted the past week or so with the scandal enveloping Penn State. Much as been written about it already - and I really have nothing fundamentally new to offer to this discussion. What I did want to share was a parallel that struck me recently about these...
This morning I was at the doctor's office and picked up a dated (February, 2011) New Yorker magazine and discovered a great essay by Adam Gopnik: The Information: How the Internet gets inside us. I am not sure how I missed this the first time around but Gopnik does a...
From Ken Friedman & the PhD Design listserv: The current issue of The Scientist has a story on an interactive film that helps research students and early career researchers to understand and navigate the perils of research misconduct. Highlights: "The Lab is a...
May years ago I wrote an essay titled On becoming a website. It was about my experience on teaching online and I suggested somewhat facetiously that in order to be a good teacher online I needed to actually "become" the course website! I started the essay by...
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...
Our family's stop-motion animation festival continues with our latest offering: Finding Nemo, the sea-quel!! This movie was conceptualized by Shreya and filmed by all of us over a couple of days. What was interesting about this movie was just how many...
Numbers are a gas! (Image credit: Phillie Casablanca) Numbers are seen as being critical to developing our understanding of a subject. As Lord Kelvin, (1824-1907) said: ... when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something...
In a couple of previous posts I had talked about the idea of postdiction (see the posts here and here). The argument being that good teaching (among a long list of other good things) is postdictable, i.e. it walks the line between predictability and chaos, and most...
One often hears the criticism that students today don't know how to write... the part of the blame is placed on technology, on the limitations of texting and twittering! For instance, here are two quotes from a book review TXTNG: THE GR8 DB8 by Marcus Merkmann in the...
My daughter, whose creative exploits have been featured here before (for instance see her design for a math-music game), now has a blog, titled Uniquely Mine. It features original writing (poems, stories) by her. Do check it out. You can find regular updates on this...
David Wong is a colleague of mine at the College of Education and an avid John Dewey scholar. He also loves to fish. You can learn more about his work by going to his web site here. (I had earlier blogged about his work around visually representing ideas here and...
Awesome retelling of the old tale... (h/t Steve Dembo @ teach42). Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo. As Steve says (you can read his full post here) such remixing can provide interesting opportunities for teachers, particularly given...