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 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...
What is the role of technology in learning? I have devoted a large part of my professional life to this question, though I have increasingly started to wonder whether we, personally, and as a field, have been asking the wrong question. We have focused our attention on...
I've had the pleasure of co-hosting the AIR|GPT podcast, where I've gotten to know Errol St. Clair Smith as one of the most thoughtful curators of education-related news and information I've encountered. Errol has this uncanny knack for bringing diverse voices...
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...
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...
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...
About a month ago, I woke up to an unexpected email from Dr. Ravi Gudi, Dean of Alumni and Corporate Relations at IIT Bombay. He informed me that I had been selected to receive the Distinguished Alumnus Award (DAA) in recognition of what he described as my...
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 post about rediscovering Ghalib through metal and rap, I mentioned sharing his work in my creativity class. What I didn't share was the remarkable ripple effect this had. Every week, students take turns writing reflections on our class discussions and...
Mirza Ghalib, was a celebrated poet who lived in Delhi in the 19th century Delhi. He was as famous for his wit and defiance of conventions as he was for his verses. He mostly wrote ghazals—a form of lyric poetry built of rhyming couplets, each standing alone yet...
One of the students in my Human Creativity x AI in Education class is an accomplished Kathak dancer and last week we got into a discussion of how she could bring this personal interest into projects we were exploring in the class. How could GenAI help? So yesterday,...
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...
NOTE: This is a cross post with the Civics of Technology blog. I first read about the "ELIZA Effect" as a high-school student in India, in Douglas Hofstadter's classic rumination on art, music, humanity and AI—Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.. The...
This past week I was in Durban, South Africa presenting at the Innovations in the Science of the Teaching and Learning (ISOTL) Conference 2024: Bridging Ethics, Equity, and Innovation in Higher Education, organized by the University of KwaZulu-Natal. It was a pretty...
Technologies give and they take away. This was poignantly highlighted in a recent article by Lisa Lieberman in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "AI and the Death of Student Writing." The subtitle says it all: "The move away from true hands-on scholarship seems...
16 years ago, Matt Koehler and I were invited to present a Keynote at the Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education (SITE) conference. That keynote changed our lives (link to YouTube video). I was invited back again this year for the same. A lot has...
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...
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 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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Featured image design © Punya Mishra (background image courtsey PxHere) There are many meanings to the phrase "having a voice." It can mean whether you are present and acknowledged within a space - but most literally it means what you say and how you speak? And...
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...
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."...