I'm excited to share my recent work with colleagues Richard West, Jason McDonald, and Melissa Warr exploring how instructional designers can intentionally foster creativity through Gl?veanu's 5A Framework. It was published in the prestigious Oxford Handbook of...
In a previous blog post (Supernormal Stimuli: From Birds to Bots) I had written about the idea of super normal stimuli – a term was first introduced by the Nobel prize winning ethologist Nico Tinbergen. His research showed that animals often responded more strongly to...
Picture this: a small bird desperately trying to balance atop an egg so enormous it keeps sliding off, while its own perfectly good eggs lie abandoned nearby. This absurd image has stayed with me since childhood, when I first encountered it in a popular science book...
A while back, I wrote about an email that made my heart stop—an auto-generated message declaring that an employee had been "terminated." That impersonal, poorly designed communication spoke volumes about the organization's attitude towards its people. And the fact...
I'm excited to announce my upcoming presentation at the Second International Seminar on 'Design Education in the Post-AI World' taking place tomorrow (Saturday) at the Centre for Design Studies in Indore, India. This seminar holds special significance for me as it's...
In my previous blog post on the Microsoft Research study about GenAI and expertise I ended with a troubling realization that GenAI may not be the best options for learners. As I wrote "This analysis raises particularly thorny issues about AI use in education. If...
As part of my class on Human Creativity x AI in Education, students were randomly assigned to Teams A through E. One of their first tasks? Create team names starting with their assigned letter. So we ended up with with teams AI, Brainstormers, Catalyst, Dreamers and...
Tesla recently quietly granted me temporary access to their Full Self Driving system (something I had written about in another context). It was interesting, to say the least, to give up control, in a relatively high-risk context and just let the machine navigate...
As headlines swirl about AI chatbots misrepresenting Anne Frank (Schools Using AI Emulation of Anne Frank That Urges Kids Not to Blame Anyone for Holocaust) and Apple canceling its AI news summaries due to accuracy concerns (Apple pulls error-prone AI-generated news...
There was a recent article in the NYTimes about AI chatbots serving as virtual companion. Titled, She Is in Love With ChatGPT it was a story about a 28-year-old woman who spends hours on end talking to her A.I. boyfriend for advice and consolation. And yes, they do...
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott" and its resonance with our AI age (The Mirror Cracked: AI, Poetry, and the Illusion of Depth). In that post I explored how our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by technology, AI...
Once in a while, you come across a piece of writing that doesn’t just make you think—it makes you rethink. It rearranges the furniture in your head, putting things together in ways you hadn’t considered but now can’t unsee. Charles Stross’s essay, “Dude, You Broke the...
Two pieces of news caught my attention this week. The first was the passing of Lee Shulman, a giant in educational research, whose profound understanding of teaching and learning shaped generations of educators - including myself. The second was the approval of a new...
Since 2008, our family has been creating short videos to celebrate the start of a new year. Each video is crafted from household items and usually includes some form of typographical optical illusion. Today, we share our sixteenth, and final video—a deceptively simple...
I recently sat down with Ryan Gray and Robin Bryce of Yavapai College for Win Coalition's What's Next Speaker Series. Regular readers of this blog will know exactly what I must have talked about - no surprises here! We dove into AI, education, and where all this is...
In music, polyphony describes a texture where multiple independent melodic voices interweave to create something greater than the sum of its parts. The philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin expanded this idea to human discourse, seeing it as a way for multiple voices and...
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." These words from Martin Luther King Jr. speak to something fundamentally human – the belief that...
Note: The image above is inspired by the cover of Time Magazine's 1983 Person of the Year issue - at the dawn of the personal computer age. Created using Adobe Photoshop and composed in Keynote Angela Gunder reached out to me recently about a project that she is...
As someone who enjoys playing with images, words, and typography, I'm always seeking new ways to generate ideas. I recently tried an experiment: collaborating with an AI language model (Claude) on a series of typographical designs. It all started after I had created...
It is almost a cliché to say that generative AI can be both a challenge and an opportunity in education. Here's a story that captures this duality perfectly, showcasing two different approaches to how generative AI can be used in educational contexts, one ethically...
Arizona State University continues to push boundaries. I'm excited to share two recent developments that intersect with my collaborative work at ASU over the past few years. These initiatives showcase our institution's commitment to leveraging AI responsibly while...
In a recent article in The Atlantic (Shh, ChatGPT. That’s a Secret), Lila Shroff delves into the surprising willingness of people to share intimate details with AI chatbots. To be clear, this did not come as a surprise. Readers of this blog will know this is something...
As we continue to grapple with the hype and transformative potential of generative AI in education, I find myself revisiting a point I've made before: the most significant impacts of this technology may not be within the classroom walls, but in the world that...
Note: This post originates from collaboration and discussions between Melissa, Punya, and Nicole. However, it is written from Nicole’s point of view as a current student, reflecting our efforts to explore student perspectives when considering the integration of AI in...
Note: This is a continuation of the shared blogging of Warr, Mishra, and Oster. In this post, Melissa wrote the first draft to which Punya and Nicole added substantial revisions and edits. “Science” is social. We build on each other’s ideas. We critique each other’s...
Note: Warr, Oster, and Mishra are at it again with a shared blog post. First (really terrible) draft by Punya, which was cleaned up by ChatGPT and then went through cycles of editing by all of us. Note: An addendum written after Apple's announcement of its own...
Note: The shared blogging with Melissa Warr and Nicole Oster continues. I crafted the student essay, Melissa generated the data using her magical GPT skills. I wrote the first draft which was then edited by Melissa and Nicole. Imagine you are a...
How can we ensure that education keeps pace and remains relevant In a world where technology evolves at lightning speed and global challenges seem more daunting than ever? In a recently published article, Danah Henriksen, Rachel Stern and I propose a framework that...
By Punya Mishra, Melissa Warr & Nicole Oster Note: This is the first post in an experiment at shared blogging by Melissa Warr, Nicole Oster and myself. Over the past months we have found ourselves engaged in some fascinating conversations around genAI, education,...
Should we tip machines for the work they do for us? Does that question even make sense? What follows is a reflection on metaphors, technology, deceptive design, AI and more... Read on. Metaphors and more In her book God, Human, Animal, Machine, Meghan O’Gieblyn...