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,...
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...
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...
In a previous post I explored some of the visual capabilities of ChatGPT. This is a continuation of those experiments, where ChatGPT helped me identify the date and time of a solar eclipse based on a photo I took decades ago, as a graduate student at the University of...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
I had written earlier about a contest organized by Dark ‘n’ Light (an e-zine) around the theme of "IT TAKES TWO" and had shared some of my experiments, exploring this theme, using Generative AI. You can see my experiments at: It takes two: A scientific romp using AI...
Dark 'n' Light is an e-zine that "explores science, nature, social justice and culture, through the arts and humanities." It is a labor of love by a small, dedicated team led by Susan Matthews, former legal and policy wonk, turned editor and podcaster. I came to know...
My TED talk, titled How to design a school for the future just went live this morning. Sadly, I was traveling in India when the recordings were scheduled so I missed the whole "standing on the red-dot" looking like a thought leader who will give a talk that will...
I think I solved the biggest educational challenge of our time, namely: How do we recognize AI generated text from human-created ones? Just to provide some context, the advent of large language models and generative AI have made it essential that we, as educators,...
ChatGPT does not cease to surprise. As I had described in my previous post (Plugin' into superpowers), I have been playing with some of the plugins that are now available to use with ChatGPT4, In this post I describe my experience in playing with a plugin titled Video...
FYI, this is a somewhat pointless blog post around a somewhat funny coincidence that popped into my life the other day. I was reading a recent article in the NYTimes with the provocative title: Microsoft Says New A.I. Shows Signs of Human Reasoning, clearly a topic of...
I have been playing with couple of the newly released ChatGPT plugins (you have to have the paid version to use them) and want to share some of my early experiments. The two I am going to talk about are the ChatWithPDF and the Wolfram plugins. Short answer, they are...
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...
“Design doesn’t need to be delightful for it to work, but that’s like saying food doesn’t need to be tasty to keep us alive” — Frank Chimero I am always looking for examples of good and bad design in the world around me. Good design is rare, functional and at the same...
Note: The photo-manipulated image of me holding my own head was created almost 20 years ago by Paul Kurf, a student in my learning by design, class! Image design & layout, Punya Ethan Mollick is a professor at Wharton and he has been doing some of the most...
The Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education conference has been an important part of my professional life for over two decades. My first presentation at a SITE conference was back in 2001 at Orlando, Florida, with none other than Matt Koehler. For the...
Ten years ago, we, The Deep Play Research Group, were invited to write a regular series of articles for this journal exploring the relationship between technology, creativity and learning. To celebrate this anniversary, we decided to write two summary/ synthesis...
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...
Many years ago I got interested in writing poetry about mathematics (all archived on my Math-Poetry page). Just to be clear, I am not a good poet (far from it) and I am even less of a mathematician—but it was a fun exercise to engage in. That said, a couple of my...
I was recently invited to speak at a series organized by alumni of the IDC School of Design, IIT Powai. As an alum of the same institution it was a great honor to be invited. You can see the entire series here (and I must say there are some awesome speakers there). My...
Beauty at Work is a podcast that "explores how beauty shapes our lives and the work that we do" hosted by Brandon Vaidyanathan, Associate Professor of Sociology at The Catholic University of America. In its first season the focus is on beauty in science. As part of...
January 1, 2008. 15 years ago, almost to the day - I posted my first note to this website (screenshot below). My first blog post, dated Jan 1, 2008 I have had a web presence since 1998 - hand coded, HTML pages, traces of which are still available on the Wayback...
Since 2008 our family has been creating short videos to celebrate the end of one year and the beginning of another. Our videos are always typographical in nature with some kind of an AHA! moment or optical illusion built in. This year’s video is no different. Check it...
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...
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,...