Punya Mishra is Associate Dean of Scholarship & Innovation and Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University (with an affiliate appointment in the Design School). As associate dean, he leads a range of initiatives that provides a future-forward, equity driven, approach to inter/trans-disciplinary educational research. He is internationally recognized for his work in educational technology; the role of creativity and aesthetics in learning; and the application of collaborative, design-based approaches to educational innovation. He has received over $11 million in grants; published over 200 articles and edited 5 books. With over 55,000 citations of his research, he is ranked among the top 2% of scientists worldwide and the top 50 scholars (top 10 in psychology) who have the biggest influence on educational practice and policy in the United States. An AERA Fellow (2024), TED-Ed educator (2023), he co-hosts the award-winning Silver Lining for Learning webinar as well as the Value Laden and Learning Futures podcasts. He is also an award-winning instructor, an engaging public speaker, and an accomplished visual artist and poet. More here…

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Popular Topics: Gen AI <Posts & Pubs> | 5 Spaces for Design <Posts & Pubs>| TPACK | Design |Creativity | Ambigrams

Blog Posts

Teachers & technology, a quote

Just heard this in a talk by Sugata Mitra, titled Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer .... should be! — Arthur C. Clarke See the entire video...

Undo & the the progress of technology

I have wondered what it would be like if life had an undo button, and what we would do without all this cool technology we have? I guess this is what happens when we use technology for too many hours a day. I was reminded of this when I Stumbled-Upon this online comic...

Spore & learning about evolution

A NYTimes story about Spore, the new game / toy designed by Will Wright (Playing God, the Home Game) speaks about its connection to evolution. As the article says, Mr. Wright and his publishers at Electronic Arts deserve all the credit they have received from some...

The media debate, politically speaking

There is a recurring debate in the ed-tech community about if media make a difference. One argument is that media is akin to a conveyance system bringing in supplies (content). At some level it doesn't matter if the content is brought by a truck or a train, a bullock...

Capturing CAPTCHA or If it can be outsourced…

... it will. We have all see CAPTCHA's (aka Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). They are images with somewhat garbled text on them that websites used to tell humans from automated programs. The idea is to prevent prevent...

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...

Twittering a tale

My favorite short short story is by Hemmingway. It is all of six words long - but boy, does it pack a punch. It goes, "For sale, baby shoes, never used." Wow! It turns out that such short stories are not merely a novelty. The advent of Twitter and microblogging, with...

Orissa Folklore

Just got an email from a fellow Mishra (no relationship, at least I don't know of any), Dr. Mahendra Mishra who works as the state tribal education coordinator in my home state of Orissa as a part of it's Primary Education Program (more at www.opepa.in). Mahendra He...

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...

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By the Numbers

I just discovered a blog by Charles Blow, visual Op-Ed columnist for the NYTimes. Titled By the Numbers it is a site for "discussion about all things statistical — from the environment to entertainment — and their visual expressions." Pretty cool. Check it out.

Connections: Photo Haiku from Summer 2016

Connections: Photo Haiku from Summer 2016

For the past 17 years (with just two exceptions) my summers have been spent teaching in the MAET program. 2016 was the last time I did that, teaching in Chicago the third cohort of the MSUrbanSTEM project. The MAET program runs somewhat concurrently in three...

Speed of travel of information

I had written earlier about how the rate of change of technology is speeding up, i.e. technologies are changing at an ever faster rate. Related to this is something I just came across today (on Kottke.org). Kottle links to a chart that provides a historical look at...

TPACK in Science: New book & chapter

I was invited to write an epilogue for a new book on the development of science teachers TPACK (with a specific focus on East Asia), and I "volunteered" my colleague Danah Henriksen to help with it (thanks Danah). The book was recently published. Here is the citation...

It HAS to hallucinate: The true nature of LLM’s

It HAS to hallucinate: The true nature of LLM’s

Though Generative AI is receiving a great deal of attention lately, I am not entirely sure that the discussions of these technologies and their impact on education and society at large genuinely engage with the true nature of these technologies. In fact I have argued...

TPACK Handbook, 3rd Edition: Call for proposals

TPACK Handbook, 3rd Edition: Call for proposals

I have been an academic for almost a quarter of a century (longer, if you include my years in graduate school), and it is a bit humbling that the work for which I (and my partner in crime, Matt Koehler) are best known for is the creation of a Venn diagram—which, when...

Of teaching & cooking

Elizabeth Helfant over at Digital Learning Environments Blog has an interesting posting titled The Pancake principle. She makes a connection between technology integration and making pancakes, and offers three tenets of the Pancake principle. This posting is inspired...

Funny TPACK mashups, the Aussie way

TPACK is huge in Australia (for instance see this note TPACK underpins Aussie Teacher Ed Restructuring). I am hopeful that one of these days this interest will translate into a trip down-under... It would be great to travel around the continent, giving talks, meeting...

Peer review in the science classroom

Peer review in the science classroom

Fig. 1: Header image. Credits: Illustration by Punya Mishra. License CC-BY-NC. The scientific method is a myth. In more ways than one. Typically in school you are taught that the scientific method consists of making observations, developing hypotheses, testing them by...