Over the years, our column series in TechTrends has explored the intersections of creativity, education, and emerging technologies. Over the past year, we've examined GenAI's impact through interviews with leading thinkers, practitioner studies, and conceptual pieces...
Tom Stoppard, the renowned playwright, has died. The funny thing is that I never saw any of his plays performed. And yet he played a critical role in making me who I am. The fact that I knew this playwright by reading his plays, rather than seeing them on stage, may...
I was thrilled recently when my friend Josh Brake mentioned me in his Substack post about "The Forward Deployed Educator." He referenced the Unit Circle Demo I had created and wrote about how educators can now use AI tools to build custom learning experiences for...
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about cognitive diversity (and learning styles), essentially arguing that in the process of debunking the learning styles myth we may have lost sight of a bigger issue, that of cognitive diversity. That post, and the ideas...
“When I see equations, I see the letters in colors — I don’t know why. As I’m talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Ernde’s book, with light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell...
Earlier today I had a Zoom call with a doctoral student interested in having me on her comprehensive examination committee. During our conversation, she expressed interest in understanding the idea and process of design, particularly as it applies to educational...
Note: I wrote the following a day or so after I heard of David Berliner's passing. I have links to some other resources at the end, along with some other reminisences from some of my colleagues at ASU, collected here (with their permission). I first encountered David...
I recently had the pleasure of returning to the Modem Futura podcast for a second conversation with hosts Andrew Maynard and Sean Leahy, and guess what, it was even more fun than the first time around. What started as a discussion about the latest AI developments in...
Everyone seems to be clamoring for AI literacy these days—how to prompt effectively, how to spot AI-generated content, how to integrate these tools into workflows. I have been critical of this phenomena, see my post on pencil literacy and a new definition of literacy...
I was recently invited to the 17th annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (EDULEARN25) in Palma, Spain. Getting to visit beautiful Palma, Mallorca, speaking with 800+ educators from across the world... what could be more awesome? At...
Education by Design: Synthesizing Learning Experiences with AIDCI 691: Fall 2025 | Thursdays 9 - 11:45, Tempe CampusInstructor: Punya Mishra Calling all creative risk-takers! This graduate-level course explores how design, as both a way of thinking and as a...
In my presentations I sometimes talk about my four years in engineering school as being something of a disaster. The way I present this fact is through this image, and the math/science types get the pun - Four Year / Fourier Transformation! A slide I typically use in...
A few months ago, the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation at Arizona State University hosted the 2025 Yidan Prize Conference. This conference was both a celebration of my colleague Micky Chi’s receipt of the 2023 Yidan Prize for Education...
I've been experimenting with AI-assisted coding for a while now—in fact my first attempt was back in early 2023. Since then I have engaged in multiple explorations using AI to transform concepts and intuitions directly into functional code. This approach bypasses...
I recently participated in the 2025 Yidan Prize Conference hosted by the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation at Arizona State University. In large part this conference was a celebration of my colleague Micky Chi, recepient of the 2023 Yidan...
Picture this: a small bird desperately trying to balance atop an egg so enormous it keeps sliding off, while its own perfectly good eggs lie abandoned nearby. This absurd image has stayed with me since childhood, when I first encountered it in a popular science book...
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...
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...
One of the ideas we have been exploring in my transdisciplinary creativity class this semester, is that of how generative AI can serve as a bridge between seemingly disparate fields. In this post, I want to share the results of an ongoing experiment demonstrating the...
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...
I joined my Silver Lining for Learning (SLL) co-hosts - Chris Dede, Curt Bonk, and Lydia Cao (with Yong Zhao unable to attend due to travel) - to deliver a keynote at the Global Learning for an Open World Conference. SLL has been a labor of love over the past five...
In my previous post (From Shortcuts to Simulations: Two Contrasting Uses of AI in Higher Education), I shared how my colleague Jim ingeniously used AI to prepare for a difficult conversation about academic integrity. Today, I want to explore another fascinating...
A classic tale of early cinema recounts the 1896 Paris screening of the Lumière brothers' "L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat" (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station). According to popular accounts, some viewers reportedly reacted with panic to the realistic...
Last week, I shared information about my participation in the Superspeaks | Microsoft EDU podcast on the BAM Radio Network. The discussion focused on technology integration frameworks in the context of Generative AI, featuring a panel of educational technology...
The advent, adoption and rapid evolution of generative AI has raised many questions about how we think about creativity (human and machine), and its impact on learning. As part of our ongoing series in TechTrends, my colleagues and I have been exploring these issues...
A few days ago, The Washington Post published a story that caught my eye. Titled: The Marshmallow Test and other predictors of success have bias built in, researchers say, the article discusses the famous Marshmallow Test, long heralded as a predictor of future...
A few years ago I wrote a poem titled “A cosmologist worries (about infinity)” inspired by a conversation with my friend and cosmologist, Tanmay Vachaspati. I remembered this poem recently when I was playing with Suno the generative AI song generator. So I wondered...
Note: The image above is an original design - showing "AI" embedded in the word "WEIRD" Update - March 30, 2025: A few days ago ChatGPT announced a new version of their image generation tool claiming that it was "natively multimodal model capable of precise, accurate,...