This is the second of two posts on the topic of bringing principled innovation practices to designing learning futures. In this post (by Cristy Guleserian & Punya Mishra) we dive deeper into how these practices of PI connect with our model of design. In particular...
Designing learning futures through reflective practice: 1 of 2
This is the first of two posts on the topic of bringing principled innovation practices to designing learning futures. The first post (co-authored by Punya Mishra & Cristy Guleserian) focuses on the need for designing learning futures, and how the PI practices...
Principled Innovation meets Design: 1 new model and 2 videos
Our college has embraced the idea of Principled Innovation as being a core value that informs everything we do. (More on this in this post by Cristy Guleserian and in the PI framework document). Defining Principled Innovation: Design by Punya Mishra At the heart of...
Designing Theory: New article
Theory is of incredible importance to scholars and researchers. Theories allow us to understand, explain and predict phenomena in the world. That said it is often difficult to say just where theories come from. The standard model—that data lead to laws, that in turn...
Human-Centered values in a disruptive world
I have seen the power of the market… But when it becomes the only language, when it becomes the only way of thinking about the right thing to do, it leaves us with a very impoverished sense of how to live together -- Giriharadas, 2018 Over the past few years I have...
EDUsummIT 2019: eBook released
EduSummIT is a global community of policy-makers, researchers, and educators working together to move education into the digital age. EDUsummIT has been convening every two years since 2009. In each case the participants focus on some significant theme relevant to...
The OofSI/PI 2019 Report
We are a busy group here up on the 4th floor of the Farmer Educational Building—the space where the teams from the Office of Scholarship & Innovation and Principled Innovation hang out. To be fair, we do more than just hang out. There is quite a bit of work...
My journey through design: Keynote at IDC
Design is core to my identity, to who I am. Education is the space within which I function but I try to approach everything I do as a designer. This was not always the case. Back in 1984, I had just graduated with an undergraduate degree in engineering, and if there...
Pragmatic yet hopeful: Talking creativity with Barbara Kerr
Dr. Barbara Kerr is Distinguished Professor of Counseling Psychology, and is co-director of the Center for Creativity and Entrepreneurship in Education at the University of Kansas. She utilizes innovative counseling and therapy approaches to better understand the...
Design: Fixing clocks | Negotiating Systems
I just came across a quote from Alan Kay while browsing the web. Alan Kay is a programmer, educator, jazz musician and one of the key inventors of computing as we know it today. He received the A. M. Turning award (informally known as the Nobel Prize of Computing) and...
Happy 2020 (& and new video)
We have been creating short videos to welcome the new year since 2008. This year was no exception. These videos, created on a shoe-string budget, are usually typographical in nature with some kind of an optical illusion or AHA! moment built in. Check out our latest...
The Five Spaces for Design in Education
Note: This post was co-authored with Melissa Warr. I love to talk about design and education. I like to hang out with people who care about design and education. This brings us to TalkingAboutDesign.com, a website/blog created by a group of graduate students (and...
A cosmologist worries (about infinity)
A cosmologist worries (about infinity)December 2019 They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars--on stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places.~ Robert Frost, Desert Places A cosmologist,...
Perspective Taking on creativity with Vlad Glaveanu
Dr. Vlad Glaveanu, is Head of the Department of Psychology and Counseling at Webster University, Geneva; Associate Professor at Bergen University, and Director of the Webster Center for Creativity and Innovation. He co-edits the book series Palgrave Studies in...
Happy Thanksgiving
A new design for my favorite holiday of the year. See animated version below. Enjoy Previous designs can be found here and here.
TPACK Newsletter, #42 Nov. 2019
Here is the latest pdf version of the TPACK Newsletter (#42, November 2019), as curated and shared by Judi Harris and her team. (Previous issues are archived here.) This issue includes titles, abstract and links to 116 articles, 5 book-chapters, and 34...
Principled Innovation meets Design: The video
Quick summary: In which I disparage the buzzword "design thinking" even while praising the idea of design; point to the value-neutral nature of design and the need for a more principled approach, and end with a video that seeks to capture a vision of principled...
Learning science with the body
We often think and understand the world using our bodies. Our senses and movement shape how we form and process knowledge. Paul Reimer, Rohit Mehta and I explore this idea and its educational implications in a new article published in iWonder: Rediscovering School...
Principled innovation in hiring
We, in the Office of Scholarship and Innovation (OofSI), have never been big fans of the typical interview and hiring process. We are not sure that the process helps us identify the right people, and more importantly, we find the process to be unnecessarily opaque and...
With Gratitude
This past Monday was a special. That evening I was at Manitas School in Kyrene school district for the ribbon-cutting of the new school model we have been working on for the past two years. An important part of the evening was the reveal of the name of the new school...
Perfect Vacuum (OR who wrote this poem?)
I was cleaning out my drafts folder and came across this poem. I liked it. A lot. It has my sensibility. My sense of whimsy. But I DO NOT remember writing it. Nor do I remember finding it somewhere and copying it into an email. There is no author attributed - which...
3 super-short stories
Students in my EDT180 class spent some time yesterday writing short stories. Super short stories, trying to tell a complete story in just 55 words! As it turns this (55 Fiction) is actually a thing – as a simple google search will reveal. Seeing my students engage in...
Meta poems too
Layout is the first to go Lines of poetry are sacred to both the author and the reader. To alter the specific construction in line length is to alter the look and rhythm of the poem. However, as ebooks and eReading devices have become more prevalent, readers have come...
Game of Thrones meets Toyota meets Systems Thinking
Anyone who works in the area of social design knows how important it is to develop a systems-oriented mindset and how difficult it is to do so. One one hand, we know that sustained change is possible only when we work at the level of systems not individuals and...
School design in MLFTC News
One of the most exciting projects we have been involved with in the Office of Scholarship and Innovation (OofSI) has been our partnership with the Kyrene School District. We have written about it previously (on the OofSI site as well as on my website),...
Words in 3 Dimensions
A few weeks ago I started doodling words in 3 dimensions, for no particular reason, and before I knew it I had a bunch of interesting designs. Here is a sample: A bit of goofing around with Keynote and some royalty free music from Kevin McLeod, and I had a little...
4 AM: A poem
4 AMJuly 17, 2019 The stupid smoke detectorsBeep IncessantlyThere are two of themRunning this conversationWith each otherThrough the night Their batteries dyingOr dead Funnily enoughThey fall silent during The dayLull you into thinking It is okIt was just a glitch But...
A visit to Israel
I just got back from a trip to Israel. I was invited by the MEITAL 2019 conference and the Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts. MEITAL is an organization of higher education institutions in Israel focusing on understanding and responding to local...
Meta Poetry: I and II
This sentence refers to itself. This sentence declares that this blog post is about 2 poems I wrote recently. Both these poems are self-referential to some degree, namely both poems are about poetry. I have been interested in self-reference for along time—and this...
Algorithms, Imagination & Creativity
Is music a craftOr is it an art?Does it come from mere trainingor spring form the heart?Did the études of Chopinreveal his soul's mood?Or was Frédéric ChopinJust some slick "pattern dude"?~ Douglas Hofstadter Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science...