Note: This post was updated on March 21, 2024 since some of videos were not showing up for some reason. Over the past few months I have been working with my kids on creating short thematic videos. The themes we chose were the three words, Explore, Create & Share....
Facebook Username
I now have a facebook username! Hah! Check out http://www.facebook.com/punyamishra/
Creativity in teaching, a workshop
The Office Faculty and Organizational Development at MSU conducts an annual Spring Institute on College Teaching and Learning every summer. The past week was their 15th such event (details here) and I was asked to conduct a workshop on Creative Teaching. I was...
Computerized aesthetics… what’s right with that idea?
I just came across this... Online System Rates Images by Aesthetic Quality Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has launched the Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine (ACQUINE), an online system for determining the aesthetic quality of an image. The online photo-rating...
Clement Mok on design
I was reading the final papers written by participants in my CEP 817, Learning Technology by Design seminar and came across this quote by Clement Mok in a paper written by Breanne Edmonds. I wanted to record it for future reference: Design means being good, not just...
7 tools… one big job: Video Explore II
A few months ago I had created a video mashup of a commercial (see the original and my mashup here). This video ended with three key words, encouraging people to Explore, Create, Share! I then got the idea for creating short videos to represent these three ideas. I...
Profesor 2.0, blurring the boundaries
I am in Chicago to give the Keynote address at the 2009 DePaul University Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference. The conference theme this year is Engaging Minds: Pedagogy and Personalism. I was invited by Sharon Guan (she was part of the AACTE Innovation &...
Mea maxima culpa
I try to be scrupulous about giving credit where it is due and yet I messed up big time. This happened over a year ago and to my dismay I did not think about it or realize it till this moment. A year or so ago we received the 2008 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology...
Hobnob with MSU faculty
Paul Morsink & Bakar Razali, two graduate students in our college have been doing this interesting variant of the 60 second lecture. They record short videos of individual faculty members talking about anything that interests them and through that allow viewers to...
TPACK in a textbook!
Just found out from Kathryn Dirkin that a prominent textbook of Educational Technology now features the TPACK framework. The book is titled "Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching" [link to Amazon.com] and is authored by Margaret D. Roblyer and Aaron H...
Serendipitous Connectability… a short history of an idea
A while back I had written about the idea of "serendipitous connectability;" the idea that the web allows us to "to run across things that are stunning in their ability to connect to us in powerful, emotionally touching ways." I was prompted to do this by clicking on...
Milap09
I took photographs at the Milap 2009, the annual cultural program organized by the Indian Cultural Society of Greater Lansing. Click on the photo below to view the photos (hosted on Flickr).
Bad poetry time: Clerihews
Just when you thought I had run through all the bad poetry I can spew (see here for my palindromic poems) here is another set of poems I had all but forgotten about. A few years ago I got hooked into writing Clerihews. For the uninitiated: The clerihew is a bit of...
Palindromes in video and poetry
Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to this extremely creative YouTube video. The funny thing is that I had seen this a while ago but I didn't get it. Of course now that Leigh explained it to me, it seems so obvious. Anyway, the narration is crafted in such a way that it...
SITE08 Keynote YouTubed!
I just found out (via These Apples are Delicious blog, and more specifically this posting: Creative Teachers) that the keynote that Matt and I presented at SITE08 is now available on YouTube! Somebody went through the effort of breaking up the video into 5 parts and...
Representing DNA as code
What does it mean to represent something? Sean Nash (of Nashworld) and I have been having some fun at the expense of periodic representations (my post and his response) and even children's books. I had been wanting to write about this for the past few days but travel,...
Gary Marks, Lifetime achievement award
Gary Marks is the director/founder of the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)and also the Executive Officer of the Society of Information Technology in Teacher Education (SITE). As a part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of SITE, Gary...
TPACK Ambigram
I have been wanting to create a TPACK ambigram for a while now... what would be better than combining my two greatest loves - technology integration in teaching WITH ambigrams! Finally after some subtle prodding by Matt Koehler I have finally done so. This is a...
The benefits of doodling!
Finally science has proved what I knew all along, doodling is a sign of an alert mind and may actually help memory!! Another justification for this, I guess.
Bangalore symposium, now on YouTube
This past August I was in India for a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity. The meeting was organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International Youth Foundation and was "designed to bring together education and...
Gandhi, ambigrams, creativity & the power of small pieces loosely joined
This is an extended piece on the manner in which the web, small pieces loosely joined, can lead to “serendipitous connectabilty” (something I had written about earlier here). All this is situated in a story that connects cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader, Oriya...
Finding myself in EduPunk
Matt Koehler introduce me to the idea of edupunk. As this Chronicle story (Frustrated With Corporate Course-Management Systems, Some Professors Go 'Edupunk') says, Edupunk seems to be a reaction against the rise of course-managements systems, which offer cookie-cutter...
A different language
I have always been interested in how we use words to capture intangibles. For instance wine connoisseurs have developed a specialized language (which sadly is quite opaque to me) to explain to each other characteristics of wine. So the words "fruity" and "dry" have...
The story of Hari & freedom of speech
Last week, Johann Hari wrote an article defending free speech for everyone. You can read the article here: Why should I respect these oppressive religions?. This article was reprinted in the Indian newspaper, The Statesman. This led to riots, death threats, and the...
Darwin Day & A new Gallup Poll
Charles Darwin 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882 On this day, it is sobering to read the results of the latest Gallup Poll: On Darwin’s Birthday, Only 4 in 10 Believe in EvolutionOn the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, a new Gallup Poll shows...
Appreciating Joel Colbert at AACTE
I just spent a couple of days in Chicago at the Annual meeting of the American Association for the Colleges of Teacher Education. On Friday evening was meeting of the Innovation and Technology Committee the highlight of which was a gift of appreciation that we gave...
Photos from Twente
I have uploaded a set of photos from my walk around the Twente University campus onto Flickr. You can see the entire set by clicking on the image below. Enjoy.
Representing networks
Facebook has a couple of apps that allow you to map your friends' network. I knew about them but hadn't really played with them till Matt Koehler asked for some ideas to use in his 956 (Mind, Media & Learning class) and I suggested trying some of these tools out. To...
Ambi-poetry: A mathematician reinterprets ambigrams
My friend Gaurav Bhatnagar (I had blogged about his new book, Get Smart: Math Concepts here), for some reason, known only to him, has decided to create a poetry-blog based around my ambigrams. Each posting consists of one ambigram (taken from my large collection of...
Blogging has been light
the past few days, primarily due to "beginning semester" blues. I hope to get back to full strength pretty soon... there are bunch of things I would like to blog about just a question of finding the time 🙁