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...
Creative Learning for Sustainability in a World of AI: Action, Mindset, Values
How can we ensure that education keeps pace and remains relevant In a world where technology evolves at lightning speed and global challenges seem more daunting than ever? In a recently published article, Danah Henriksen, Rachel Stern and I propose a framework that...
Amusings & other creations (from the early web)
I have been blogging for 15 years now, but I have had a website for much longer than that. I built my first website back in 1998 just as I was graduating from UIUC and entering the academic job market. I still remember the URL (www.uiuc.edu/~pmishra). I designed a...
Creative Provocations: Speculations on the future of creativity, technology & learning (New Book)
I am excited to announce the publication of a new book, edited by Danah Henriksen and yours truly. Titled Creative Provocations: Speculations on the future of creativity, technology & learning, it is part of the Springer series on Creativity Theory and Action in...
Silver Lining for Learning as a driver of Innovation
We recently celebrated 100 episodes of Silver Lining for Learning (see the 100th episode or read my blog post about the journey). In this process we have had an opportunity to speak with some amazing people – educational leaders, innovators, administrators, deans,...
Why creativity, technology and education don’t play well together?
What is the relationship between technology and creativity, particularly in educational contexts? In this article, we provide a critical thematic literature review of existing scholarship at the intersection of creativity, technology, and teaching/learning in...
Teachers ARE designers (in many different ways)
One of the pleasures of academia is working with awesome graduate students. This paper is an example of such a collaboration. Melissa Warr, for some reason or the other, decided to do a network analysis of some of the top-cited papers related to teaching and design....
Contextualizing TPACK within systems and culture
Melissa Warr and I were recently asked to write a afterword to a special issue of the journal Computers in Human Behavior. The focus of the special issue was on the kinds of knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA) teachers need to successfully integrate technology in...
Systems level change in education
How do you design for change in complex systems—like education? Implementing large-scale changes within educational systems can be a challenging task. Doing so requires many actors, working at different organizational levels (and perhaps across organizations), to not...
Of metaphors & molecules: Bridging STEM & the arts
Update on blog post that was published May 30, 2018 - since the article is now published (2 years since it was accepted for publication). Square Root: Illustration by Punya Mishra What do President Kennedy's speeches have to do with cell biology? And what does the...
Unleashing Creativity: ISTE interview
A few months ago I was interviewed for an article in Empowered Learner, an ISTE member magazine. The final article, Unleashing every genius: Creative genius isn't rare – but the conditions that nurture it are is now online. You can access the entire issue of the...
James Kaufman on creativity: New article
Dr. James C. Kaufman is Professor of Educational Psychology in the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut and a highly-renowned creativity researcher. He is also a writer and playwright, having recently written the book and lyrics to the musical...
Design, Intuition & Creativity
Chain-Rotational ambigram design for the word "design."One can read the word both clockwise from the top or anti-clockwise, from the bottom. Our latest article in the series we write for the journal TechTrends (under the broad rubric of Rethinking Technology...
EDUsummIT 2017: Summary Report
EDUsummIT 2017 is the fifth International Summit on Information Technology (IT) in Education (EDUsummIT 2017) recently held in Borovets, Bulgaria, on September 18-20, 2017. EDUsummIT 2017 was co-hosted by the University of Library Studies & Information...
Cognitive psychology of science: Old article
Science ambigram with 180-degree rotational symmetry This chapter, published back in 1998, focused on the cognitive science of science. I realized today that I had not uploaded this article onto my website. So, better late than never, here it is. But before jumping...
Organizational & Team Creativity
Illustration for Group-Creativity by Punya Mishra The next article in our series Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century just got published by the journal TechTrends. This article features an interview with Dr. Roni...
Creativity & Flow: New article
180-degree rotational ambigram for "Flow" by Punya Mishra The next article in our series Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century just got published by the journal TechTrends. This article features Susan Perry, social psychologist,...
Science teachers and social justice
I have been editing a series of articles for iWonder: Rediscovering School Science, a practitioner orientated journal for middle school science teachers, published by the Azim Premji University. Our first article was titled "Why teachers should care of...
What we get wrong about 21st century learning
Click on diagram to download a hi-res version Back in 2013 we proposed a framework for 21st century learning based on a synthesis of a range of reports, books, and articles (Kereluik, Mishra, Fahnoe & Terry, 2013 & diagram above). That article...
Webs of activity in online teaching
Space filling web for the word "WEB"(created from the same shape repeated and rotated) I recently received a request (via ResearchGate) for something I had written back in 2004. In looking for it I realized that it had not been updated on my website. So below is...
Handbook of TPACK for Educators, 2nd Edition
The TPACK framework, as we know it today, was first introduced to the world in 2006 in an article in TCRecord (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). An important part of the story of the success of the framework was the publication of The handbook of technological pedagogical...
Perceiving & Patterning as skills essential for creativity
We have been writing a series of articles for Tech Trends titled Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century. You can see the full list here. One of the key focus areas of these articles is on what we call trans-disciplinary thinking i.e. a set of...
Having fun with TPACK (songs, skits & more…)
A search on YouTube reveals a wide range of videos related to TPACK. Most of them are serious descriptions of the framework (heck, I have created a few of those myself). But there is a smaller genre of TPACK videos that don't necessarily seek to explain the...
Creativity, Technology & Teacher Education, Call for papers
We (Punya Mishra and Danah Henriksen, faculty at Michigan State University) are currently planning a special issue for the Journal of Teacher Education and Technology, on the topic of creativity. At the moment, we are looking for brief abstract submissions from...
Who wrote this poem?
Back when I was a graduate student I got bitten by the bug of palindromic poetry - poems that read the same when read backwards. This is consistent with my love for ambigrams and other kinds of symmetrical wordplay. I had posted them on the web a while ago...
TPACK and new literacies
Over 150 years ago Herbert Spencer wrote an essay titled What Knowledge is of Most Worth in which he bemoaned the fact that most of the discussion around what is worth knowing in his day and age was based not on any rational discussion of the issues and the benefits...
A published poet! Yes!
I am now, officially, a published poet! My poem on imaginary numbers (The Mathematical "i") was published in the March 2013 issue of At Right Angles, a school mathematics journal. You can read my poem on my website here: The Mathematical "i" You can...
Endless rewriting: What great academic advising looks like
Helen Hazen, is the author of 1983 book, Endless Rapture: Rape, Romance, and the Female Imagination. In a recent article in The American Scholar titled "Endless Rewriting" she recounts the way the book came to be and in particular the role that her editor (Jacques...
Top 10 tips for doctoral failure!
Tara Brabazon, professor of media studies at the University of Brighton, has an essay in the Times Higher Education, titled How not to write a PhD thesis, providing her top ten tips for doctoral failure. Though the essay is geared towards dissertations in media...
Of Art and algorithms: New article
The latest in our series Rethinking Technology and Creativity in the 21st Century is now available. The article was co-authored with Aman Yadav of Purdue University (and the Deep-Play Research Group) and focuses on the art and science of computational thinking. We...