Mishra & Yadav (2006) was a paper based around my dissertation research. It took a while to get published and I am including it here for the record. My dissertation (Mishra, 1998) was maybe the first place where I made a specific mention of the triad of...
Posts related to: Psychology
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...
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...
TE150 presentation in streaming video
Terri Gustafson has created streaming downloads of the presentation recently made by the TE150 (Reflections on Teaching, Reflections on Learning) Online team (see this for more context). The video can be seen in two parts: Part I: The presentation "Reflections on...
Reflecting on reflections (TE150)
The entire TE150 team joined together to make a presentation to the College today as a part of the Online Teaching and Learning Colloquia. These sessions are sponsored by the MA-APPC, Center for Teaching and Technology, and the Center for the Scholarship of Teaching....
On beauty in banality
Does beauty transcend banality and inconvenience? If this story about a violin virtuoso, Joshua Bell, playing on the subway station is any indication, we do not have "a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever...
On messing with your mind
A fascinating series of illusions to reveal just how complicated a phenomenon perception is. I was particularly impressed by the "rubber hand" illusion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQtbcgBWobA
Personality analysis of my blog
As you know I am always intrigued by a new breed to personality analysis tools that are out there in the world (for instance see these prior postings: on PersonalDNA; on Color IQ; and browsing for gender). So here is this new website that seeks to analyze me by...
Engineering Education, past & future II
A couple of weeks ago I made a presentation (with Neeraj Buch) to a group of engineering educators from India. This was a meeting organized by the College of Engineering and the Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education. Having made this presentation once I had...
We feel fine
We Feel Fine is a web-installation, "a self-organizing particle system," art project that is powerful and touching - building as it does on people's emotions, harvested from blog postings from around the world. As the designers say, "We hope it makes the world seem a...
APA & Torture
I had written previously (here and here) about the American Psychological Association's long connection with torture and other coercive information gathering techniques. I am still bothered by it. Today's NYTimes has a op-ed by Stanley Fish (titled Psychology and...
Natural v.s. Artificial Intelligence in Teaching
The field of educational technology is littered by attempts to replace the teacher by creating some kind of a technological learning system that would make the teacher redundant. All such attempts have failed. This has, however, not prevented people from trying. This...
Creativity, genius & age
Malcolm Gladwell has a great essay in a recent New Yorker on the relationship between genius and age. It is popularly believed that genius is often tied up with precocity. There are two aspects to this. First, creativity requires the energy and brashness of youth....
Engineering education, past & future
Neeraj Buch and I were invited to talk to a group of engineering educators from India. This was a meeting organized by the College of Engineering and the Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education. The topic I spoke about was was Improving Engineering Education:...
Decision science, neural Buddhists & the loopy brain of David Brooks
I do not understand David Brooks. Brooks is an op-ed columnist for the NYTimes. For the most part his columns are right-of-the-political wing nuttiness, garbed in some erudite clothing. I am not linking to them here but his past few op-eds suggesting that McCain would...
Wicked problems, Design & Horst Rittel
Matt Koehler and I have often talked about the wicked problems of design and teaching with technology (most specifically in our handbook chapter on TPACK). We take the idea of wicked problems from a classic paper written by Rittel and Weber back in 1973. As Wikipedia...
Why I like naps
... because scientific research shows that sleep enhances creativity 🙂
Wong, Mishra, Koehler & Adams (2007)
Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Adams, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. To appear in M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press. Abstract:...
An IQ test for color
If there is an IQ test for everything, why not one for color. This is Howard Gardner multiple intelligences run rampant. Check out the Color IQ test. BTW, my score was 27 (where 0 is a perfect score and 99 is as bad as you can get!). Irrespective of what you think of...
The gullibility of experts
Does it matter whether a brownie is served on a paper plate or on china? Is the Patagonian Toothfish less tasty than the Chilean Bass? In an earlier posting (perception of taste) I had cited research showing that wine with an expensive price tag was judged to be...
Creepy
How do you react to this flash animation? I don't know about you but it completely creeped me out. My reaction is almost visceral in its intensity... It is one thing to read an an article speaking to our fear of snakes and spiders that "Certainly there are certain...
Design for democracy
Very nice piece in today's NYTimes about ballot design (How Design Can Save Democracy). The article offers a list of problems with the traditional ballot and suggests a solution. A good example of the value of information design. Check it out here
Fear, awe and the algebra of the pendulum
In response to my previous posting titled How artists work, Leigh Wolf pointed out a book (Curious Minds: How a child becomes a scientist). I had not heard of this book before and a quick google search led me to this page. Edited by John Brockman (the brains behind...
Mirror, mirror
Imagine you are standing in front of a bathroom mirror; how big do you think the image of your face is on the surface? And what would happen to the size of that image if you were to step steadily backward, away from the glass? A recent article in the NYTimes (Mirrors...
On finding the right (parking) spot
I had posted earlier about a "virtual speed bump" a visual illusion that make drivers think that they were approaching a speed bump when in actuality it was just a design cleverly painted on the ground. Now here's another one: Directions in a car park... As the...
Browsing for gender
Just found out about this rather nifty tool that looks at your browser history and estimates your gender. My personal results were as follows: Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 24% Likelihood of you being MALE is 76% Try it out for yourself, or read more about how...
Solzhenitsyn, RIP
Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken -- Christopher Hitchens Alexander Solzhenitsyn is no more. He was not an easy author to read - and the last time I read him was...
Killing with a thought
I had recently posted a note (It's only a game...) building on some thoughts in an article by William Saletan. In this article Saletan describes how weapons are increasingly becoming like games. His recent post takes that whole thing one level further. He describes...
On embodiment in online learning
Patrick Dickson just forwarded me an essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled The Sensuous Classroom: Focusing on the Embodiment of Learning [Subscription required]. In this article Suzanne Kelly, the author, bemoans the absence of the physical body from...
It’s only a game…
... but what if real people die? Excellent article by William Saletan on Slate about a new breed of war-toys that blur the line between video games and real war. As the article says, "if looks and feels like a video game. But it kills real people." As it turns out,...