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...
A (Wheatstone) bridge to the past
This is a story of serendipity. Of how an out-of-the-blue email request, about an article I had written over two decades ago, led me to rediscovering authors, books and ideas that I had first encountered back in my high-school days in India and have been deeply...
Goodbye 2020 (whew), welcome 2021
2020 has been a heck of a year... and maybe in hindsight (hindsight, of course, being 2020) it will all make sense. But, I think we can all agree that it is time to let it go. A lot has changed this past year but one tradition we wanted to keep alive was the short...
Designing learning futures through reflective practice: 2 of 2
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...
Silly TPACK images (over the years)
I have over the years, for no particular reason, created many silly, fun, (dare I say creative) representations for the TPACK framework. I realized that they had been floating around here and there and deserved to be kept in one place somewhere. It is not like the...
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...
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...
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...
Education by Design, 1 year progress report
"Time" 180-degree rotationalchain ambigram © Punya Mishra I have been at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College for two years now (actually two years and a month, but who is counting). In many ways this has been an incredible two years, a period of personal and...
Paradoxes, illusions & visual wordplay
Figure 1: Eye-llusion Over the past few months I have been somewhat obsessed with visual illusions, ambiguous images, impossible figures and other such fun stuff. This led to the design of a brand new optical illusion, combining an ambiguous image with an...
New optical illusion: An oscillating visual paradox!
A design for the word "illusions" inspired by a design by Scott Kim. I have been obsessed with optical illusions for for a long time. This interest has played out in many ways: from the hundreds of ambigrams I have created to the new year’s videos we create as a...
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...
Multiple metaphors & science learning: New article, new illustrations
180-degree rotational ambigram for "metaphor." I have been (co)writing a series of articles for iWonder: Rediscovering School Science, a journal for middle school science teachers, published by the Azim Premji University. (Previous articles in...
Happy Thanksgiving
One updated ambigram (for Thanksgiving) and one new design for the word "Gratitude." Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Cybernetics, design & creativity
180 degree rotational ambigram for the word "cybernetic," ©punyamishra Here is the next article in our series Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century for the journal TechTrends featuring an interview with Dr. Paul...
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...
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,...
Hidden Figures
In honor of the movie "Hidden Figures" here is a new figure-ground ambigram. Enjoy.
Merry Christmas!
What better way to wish everybody Merry Christmas than with a custom ambigram. The design above, reads Christmas when reflected in a mirror (a wall-reflection) or from either side of the page. For instance imagine printing it on a glass door - it would...
TPACK newsletter #31,
The latest version of the TPACK newsletter (#31) can be found here December 2016 (pdf). All previous issues are archived here. A shout-out to Judi Harris for all the work that goes into this. As I had said in a previous post, based on Judi's...
Update on “The TPACK story” Or “Oops!”
I had recently posted a video of my talk fall Doctoral Research Forum for the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College on the ASU West campus. As I had written in my post, "I thought it best to speak about the role of theory in research. This is something that...
Introducing David Pogue
My college (The Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College) was one of the sponsors of the Arizona School Board Association Annual Conference. As a part of this, we got the privilege to introduce and have lunch with the keynote speaker. As it turns out the keynote speaker...
Why Theory: Or the TPACK story
Note: There are two key updates / correction to this post The first has to do with a couple of things that I either got wrong, or rushed over. More about that at Update on "The TPACK story" or "Oops!"The second has to do with an update to the diagram itself that came...
Happy Thanksgiving
I feel lucky (and quite undeserving) for all that I have been given in this life. It is no surprise that Thanksgiving is my favorite day of the year. To celebrate Thanksgiving 2016 here is a new version an ambigram that I had made before.
A new understanding of our confusion
Reflection ambigram of "Chicago" Over the past two-and-a-half years we have worked with STEM educators in Chicago Public Schools as part of the MSUrbanSTEM project. We have presented about this project at a few conferences over the past few years, and...
Math & Visual Wordplay: New video
The word "math" written such that it has rotational symmetryi.e. it reads the same even when rotated by 180-degrees. The relationship between mathematics and visual wordplay is one I have played with and writing about for a while (More here). I just discovered...
Of Art and Math
Over the past two years Gaurav Bhatnagar and I have written five columns for the Math education journal At Right Angles on the topics of mathematics and visual wordplay, specifically Ambigrams. In this five articles we have explored everything from symmetry...
Rethinking Technology & Creativity
180-degree ambigram for "think-re-think" For the past few years, the Deep-Play Research Group (DPRG) have written a series of articles under the broad rubric of Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century. Note: If you are looking just for...
Writing
{ Creativity & Technology | iWonder | Art & math | Ed Psy } 180-degree ambigram for "Write" I have published extensively in the areas of educational technology, creativity, design, educational psychology, in academic journals, journals for practitioners and...
Bridging the theory/practice gap: A visual exploration
Theoretically there should a reciprocal relationship between Theory and Practice - but it is the gap that every academic bemoans. This posting is prompted not by any particular insight into these matters but rather to share a set of visuals (ambigrams, memes,...