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...
Posts related to: Psychology
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,...
Virtual speed bump
Optical illusions are usually seen as being cool visual tricks, an intriguing way of peeking into how our brain works. They have rarely been considered to be functionally useful. Here is an exception: an optical illusion seen as a virtual speed bump! Check it out...
Psychology and Coercive Interrogation, the history
In the context of my previous posting, here is an article that provides "a brief historical summary of the research into forms of coercive persuasion, primarily sensory deprivation, conducted 35 to 50 years ago, in which psychologists, psychoanalysts, and...
Psychology & torture: A sad mix
Martin Seligman is one of the most eminent psychologists alive today. As his wikipedia page says, "He is well known for his work on the idea of "learned helplessness", and more recently, for his contributions to leadership in the field of Positive Psychology." He has...
PersonalDNA & cool survey tricks
I just created a personalDNA map for myself. Turns out I am a Benevolent Inventor... beats being a benevolent dictator I say! However, this posting is concerned not with what the survey found out about me but rather about what I learned about the survey. Let's get the...
The political psychology of images
Browsing through Nikita Prokhorov's website (see this posting about Nikita's new blog about the process of creating ambigrams) led me to a fascinating article about how symbols and the historical weight they can carry. I think a similar issue comes up regarding the...
Ambigrams and the creative process
I received an email out of the blue from Nikita Prokhorov, a freelance graphic designer and assistant professor of graphic design from Connecticut. Nikita runs a blog devoted ambigrams, but in a different kind of way. As the email said, the blog is "devoted to the art...
Finding humor in play
Learning through play has been an important part of my philosophy of teaching (and learning). In fact I have argued that play is far more important than games (though games have been receiving a great deal of educational interest lately). [You can read a previous...
Digital convergence…
A few years ago Sachin Kalbag, then at Digit, contacted me to write an article for a special for the magazine's fourth anniversary issue. The topic at hand was Digital Convergence, what it is, and what does it mean for our future? Other authors who would be writing in...
TPACK Handbook, Chapter 1
There have been many requests for the first chapter of the TPACK Handbook (recently published by AACTE & Routledge). Below is the summary and a link to the pre-publication version. Koehler, M.J., & Mishra, P. (2008). Introducing TPCK. AACTE Committee on...
Chinese-English Ambigrams
During my travel through Taiwan and Hong Kong, I usually opened my presentations with some bilingual ambigrams - words that can be read in Chinese AND English. These ambigrams were created by David Moser, someone I got to know, virtually, through Doug Hofstadter's...
Mishra, Dirkin & Cavanaugh, 2007
I have been teaching summer course in our master's program for years now and for the most part have found them to be the most enriching teaching experiences I have had. These are intense 8 hours a day, 5 days a week programs that typically go on for a month. [We are...
Children & the Internet
Warren Buckleitner, Ph.D., is a graduate of our Ph.D. program. He is editor of Children's Technology Review, a periodical covering children’s interactive media and founder of Mediatech Foundation, a nonprofit technology center based in New Jersey. He also runs this...
Slipping into uncanny valley
MindHacks has a great post related to some of my previous postings about anthropomorphizing interactive artifacts (see here and here) - just that this time these artifacts under discussion are robots. As it turns out, sometime too much similarity between humans and...
Anthropomorphizing interactive media
A recent blog entry about gender and GPS ties in with some research on people's psychological responses to media I had been involved with a few years ago. This line of research led to a bunch of different theoretical and empirical journal articles, conference...
Affective feedback from computers (Mishra, 2006)
Mishra, P. (2006). Affective Feedback from Computers and its Effect on Perceived Ability and Affect: A Test of the Computers as Social Actor Hypothesis. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia. 15 (1), pp. 107-131. Abstract: We report an experimental study...
Dirkin, Mishra & Altermatt (2005)
Dirkin, H. K., Mishra, P., & Altermatt, E. (2005). All or nothing: Levels of sociability of a pedagogical software agent and its impact on student perceptions and learning. Journal Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia. 14(2), 113-127. Abstract: This article...
Mishra & Hershey, 2004
A few years ago I was invited to be a part of a symposium on etiquette and the design of interactive media (organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). I hosted all the papers and presentations from the symposium (links to which I...
Mishra, Nicholson & Wojcikiewicz (2001/2003)
Mishra, P., Nicholson, M., & Wojcikiewicz, S. (2001/2003). Does my wordprocessor have a personality? Topffer’s Law and Educational Technology. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. 44 (7), 634-641. Reprinted in B. C. Bruce (Ed.). Literacy in the information...
Gender & GPS
During our recent NY / New Jersey visit (during the kids spring break) I had the first opportunity to drive a car equipped with a GPS system. It was a case of love at first sight. I got back home and bought myself a Tom Tom right away. I used this unit extensively...
When does the brain make up YOUR mind?
When does the brain make up YOUR mind? Does this question make any sense? Anyway, this was prompted by an article that showed that "Researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making...
Games, claims, genres & learning
Foster, A. N., Mishra, P. (in press). Games, claims, genres & learning. In R. E. Ferdig (Ed.), Handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education. [PDF document] Abstract: We offer a framework for conducting research on games for learning. Building on a...
New course: Creativity in teaching & learning
Announcing a new online course for the fall semester 2008:Creativity in teaching and learning Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently… You can praise them, disagree...
Children & anthropomorphic toys
Andrea Francis and I recently presented a paper at AERA titled "Differences in children's verbal responses and behavioral interactions with anthropomorphic toys." The abstract is as follows: Interactive toys for children are becoming more popular for both play and...
Religious & Magical Thinking, the Darwinian way
Two interesting articles about religions and magical thinking. The first from the Economist is about how scientists are attempting to explain religion in evolutionary terms. As the article says, "religion cries out for a biological explanation," though previous...
TE150 wins MSU-AT&T Award
Matt Koehler and I just arrived in New York, 3 hours late, checked into our hotel, paid 14.95 for internet - and guess what it was all worth it. One of the first emails I had received informed us that we had won the 2008 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards...
Disciplined Thinking
One of the key aspects of the TPCK framework is the manner in which disciplinary knowledge interacts with pedagogy and technology. Till this date I did not have an adequate way of discussing how disciplinary knowledge and pedagogy interact, that is until I came across...
Technology & research
Patrick Dickson just forwarded an article in the APA Monitor titled Beyond chalk and talk, in which Art Graesser, the new editor of Journal of Educational Psychology, indicates an openness to including more technology related articles in JEP. Patrick argued that this...
Of play and games
Some thoughts on play and games inspired by a recent article in the NYTimes Magazine titled "Taking Play Seriously". Based on the article I argue that play is essential for learning... I also throw in some thoughts about the distinction between play and games, and why...