The prose below is from a manuscript that was recently discovered in the archives of the Indian National History Museum. It was found among papers donated in 1923 by the estate of Colonel Jackson Vivian Quill III of the Royal Fusiliers, who served in British India...
I spent the last week in Orlando at the SITE 2025 conference. During this conference, I set a new personal record for losing everything from my belongings to an election, from water bottles to conference panelists and more - all leading to unexpected tensions and...
Below is Team AI's blog post for my Human Creativity x AI for Education class. As always, I have not edited their post in any way. You can read the previous posts by following the links here: Post 1; Post 2; Post 3; Post 4; Post 5; & Post 6 This was a great way to...
I was honored to deliver the closing keynote at UNESCO's International Day for Digital Learning 2025 this past week. The event, focusing on "Digital learning realities in low-resource contexts," brought together educators, policymakers, and innovators from around the...
A couple of weeks ago I was invited by Eamon Costello to present a talk at the Education after the algorithm: Co-designing critical and creative futures conference being held in Dublin. And no, I didn’t get to go to Dublin for my talk—had to do it from here 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...
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...
What happens when you drop a ball while running? Will it fall in front of you, at your feet or behind you? Most people are convinced it will fall behind them. Makes perfect sense, right? Where will the ball fall? Then there's the famous textbook problem of a monkey...
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...
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...
One of the deepest pleasures of an academic life is when something you helped create, an idea, a framework, gets a life of its own. Others run across it, who knows how that happens... and they find meaning in it and use it to guide their work. It is both unexpected...
A year or so ago, I came up with this metaphor that working with a chatbot is like having "a smart, biased, supremely confident, drunk intern." While the bias aspect is a crucial issue I've written about elsewhere, for this discussion we'll focus on the other...
Note: For over 20 years I have been taking photographs of everyday objects that appear to have faces, a phenomenon known as pareidolia, for a series I call 'Faces in the Wild.” The above image was captured during a family trip to Mexico in 2012. I have “cleaned up”...
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,...
The second blog post from students in my class on Human Creativity x AI in Education. (You can see the first post here). Just in case you are wondering why this is week 3 and not week 2, we lost one class due to MLK Day. These posts are an ongoing record of what we...
This semester I am teaching a course on Human Creativity X AI in Education. (More about our first week here.) A key focus of the class is on the idea of transdisciplinary creativity – that of bringing different lenses and senses to the process of learning and...
This semester I am teaching a course titled Human Creativity x AI in Education. We have 19 students in the class, split into 5 groups. (And yes though I love prime numbers, having one more participant would have been better). Each week one of the groups will document...
I love playing with type and words. Recently I got obsessed with creating a particular kind of typographic design—layouts where letters in words do double duty. A simple example is given below: “THINK INFINITY” where the shared letters "IN" span both the words....
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...
The news of Lee Shulman's passing has led me to reflect on the profound impact he has had on my career and worldview, despite our paths crossing in person just once. While we never formally collaborated, our academic journeys shared a fascinating connection through...
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've been exploring ChatGPT's ability to analyze images, and the results have been impressive. From interpreting complex refugee statistics to conducting semiotic analyses of street art, the AI has shown a remarkable ability to extract meaning from visual information....
According to MIT Technology Review (AI can now create a replica of your personality) a new paper from Stanford and Google DeepMind researchers claims that a two-hour interview is enough for AI to create an accurate "replica" of your personality. The idea that we can...
In my doctoral seminar last Monday, I started class as I always do - with a "This Day in History" moment. Essentially Nicole Oster and I spend a bit of time digging through that date’s Wikipedia page finding interesting nuggets that connect with topics we are...