It is rarely that I hear a talk that blows me away. We have all seen the TED talks, and their mutant offspring. The over-hyped music and catchy taglines; the speaker in front of a rapt audience; the crafted delivery with its carefully punctuated pauses and reveals,...
Measuring what matters: A convening
All of us involved in social design (and I include education in among those as well) ask ourselves, or are asked this question: How do we measure the impact of the work we do? This begs the question, why measure in the first place? Lord Kelvin, one of the greatest...
Facilitating collaborative design: New publication
Essential tensions in design. Image designed by Punya Mishra Design facilitators play an important role in the open-ended collaborative design process. This becomes even more important as design based approaches expand to groups and teams that may not be as familiar...
COVID19 & Education
The COVID19 crisis has disrupted education globally at an unprecedented scale. In some ways, we are living through the largest educational social experiment in history! Over the past year I have been involved in a range of initiatives, discussions, interviews, and...
The value of school: Part 2
Note: This is the second of two posts on the value of school by Kevin Close and Punya Mishra. Read the first post: What value do schools bring? Revisiting Accountability In the previous post we argued that schools play a varied and rich role in the economic, social,...
The value of school: Part 1
Note: This is the first of two posts on the value of school by Punya Mishra & Kevin Close. Read the second post: Revisiting Accountability. What value do schools bring? The accepted assumption is that schools are sites for learning and the role of educators to...
Beware of science envy in designing learning
Mike Crowley has a guest post on the silverlingingforlearning.org site titled: If we need to be right before we move. (If you haven’t read it, I recommend it strongly. Go ahead follow the link above. I’ll be waiting). [Pause] Welcome back. I think Mike makes some...
Tipping point for online learning?
Is the Covid19 crisis the tipping point for online learning? As we wrote in our introduction to the Silver Lining for Learning webinar series …this crisis has forced schools and universities to close, pushing often unprepared institutions to move teaching and learning...
Corona virus: Silver lining? For learning?
A week or so ago, Yong Zhao reached out to Chris Dede, Curt Bonk, Scott McLeod and me with the question: What would happen to our global and local educational systems, if the Corona virus outbreak lasted for a year? We met a week ago (via zoom, what else) to discuss...
Designing learning futures through reflective practice: 2 of 2
This is the second of two posts on the topic of bringing principled innovation practices to designing learning futures. In this post (by Cristy Guleserian & Punya Mishra) we dive deeper into how these practices of PI connect with our model of design. In particular...
Designing learning futures through reflective practice: 1 of 2
This is the first of two posts on the topic of bringing principled innovation practices to designing learning futures. The first post (co-authored by Punya Mishra & Cristy Guleserian) focuses on the need for designing learning futures, and how the PI practices...
Principled Innovation meets Design: 1 new model and 2 videos
Our college has embraced the idea of Principled Innovation as being a core value that informs everything we do. (More on this in this post by Cristy Guleserian and in the PI framework document). Defining Principled Innovation: Design by Punya Mishra At the heart of...
Human-Centered values in a disruptive world
I have seen the power of the market… But when it becomes the only language, when it becomes the only way of thinking about the right thing to do, it leaves us with a very impoverished sense of how to live together -- Giriharadas, 2018 Over the past few years I have...
EDUsummIT 2019: eBook released
EduSummIT is a global community of policy-makers, researchers, and educators working together to move education into the digital age. EDUsummIT has been convening every two years since 2009. In each case the participants focus on some significant theme relevant to...
The OofSI/PI 2019 Report
We are a busy group here up on the 4th floor of the Farmer Educational Building—the space where the teams from the Office of Scholarship & Innovation and Principled Innovation hang out. To be fair, we do more than just hang out. There is quite a bit of work...
My journey through design: Keynote at IDC
Design is core to my identity, to who I am. Education is the space within which I function but I try to approach everything I do as a designer. This was not always the case. Back in 1984, I had just graduated with an undergraduate degree in engineering, and if there...
Pragmatic yet hopeful: Talking creativity with Barbara Kerr
Dr. Barbara Kerr is Distinguished Professor of Counseling Psychology, and is co-director of the Center for Creativity and Entrepreneurship in Education at the University of Kansas. She utilizes innovative counseling and therapy approaches to better understand the...
Perspective Taking on creativity with Vlad Glaveanu
Dr. Vlad Glaveanu, is Head of the Department of Psychology and Counseling at Webster University, Geneva; Associate Professor at Bergen University, and Director of the Webster Center for Creativity and Innovation. He co-edits the book series Palgrave Studies in...
Principled Innovation meets Design: The video
Quick summary: In which I disparage the buzzword "design thinking" even while praising the idea of design; point to the value-neutral nature of design and the need for a more principled approach, and end with a video that seeks to capture a vision of principled...
Principled innovation in hiring
We, in the Office of Scholarship and Innovation (OofSI), have never been big fans of the typical interview and hiring process. We are not sure that the process helps us identify the right people, and more importantly, we find the process to be unnecessarily opaque and...
With Gratitude
This past Monday was a special. That evening I was at Manitas School in Kyrene school district for the ribbon-cutting of the new school model we have been working on for the past two years. An important part of the evening was the reveal of the name of the new school...
Game of Thrones meets Toyota meets Systems Thinking
Anyone who works in the area of social design knows how important it is to develop a systems-oriented mindset and how difficult it is to do so. One one hand, we know that sustained change is possible only when we work at the level of systems not individuals and...
School design in MLFTC News
One of the most exciting projects we have been involved with in the Office of Scholarship and Innovation (OofSI) has been our partnership with the Kyrene School District. We have written about it previously (on the OofSI site as well as on my website),...
A visit to Israel
I just got back from a trip to Israel. I was invited by the MEITAL 2019 conference and the Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts. MEITAL is an organization of higher education institutions in Israel focusing on understanding and responding to local...
Creativity in Teaching & Learning @ Mizzou
I was recently invited to conduct a workshop for the Celebration of Teaching Conference at the University of Missouri around Creativity in Teaching and Learning. This was my first time at Columbia, MO and the conference organizers were wonderful. I did two versions of...
The Theater of Creativity
Dr. Tatiana Chemi is assistant professor and researcher at Aalborg University, Denmark. She has a background in theater that gives her an unique perspective on creativity, the creative processes and the contexts that allow creativity to flower. In her research she...
The School Design Game v 1.0
The journey of design is complicated, filled with conundrums —some expected, others not so much. There are many possible strategies to address them as we iterate our way to the finish line. The School Design Game seeks to explore some of these complexities...
Revealed by what we do not scrutinize: Book review on mobile Learning
Rohit Mehta (shy artist, polite scientist & stealthy educator) and I just published a review of the book Mobile Learning: Perspectives on Practice and Policy edited by Danielle Herro, Sousan Arafeh, Richard Ling, and Chris Holden. You can read the review,...
TPACK as one solution
The Consortium of School Networking (COSN) is one of the leading associations for school system technology leaders. COSN recently released the first of three publications in their series on Driving K-12 Innovation: Hurdles 2019. The goal of this series is to...
Technology & Education: A provocation
Jill Castek, at the University of Arizona, invited me to participate in an NSF funded workshop on developing "Principles for the equitable design of STEM learning environments." The event was being held at Bioshpere 2, which is this awesome place near Tucson. Because,...