Punya Mishra’s Web

A 5th grade science assignment, transformed. A rant about Mother Goose. A math poetry challenge!  How did that come to be? And what does that have to do with loving the Interwebs? Read on…

I had written earlier about how my 10 year-old daughter had been writing poems on science (Scientific Poems or Sci-Po’s for short). It all started with an extra-credit assignment she needed to do for her science class, and a need, I perceived, to keep her blog (Uniquely Mine) up-to-date. She has quite a few written now. For instance here is one about a news item about scientists finding dinosaur eggs (and other dino-stuff) in India (Cluster of dinosaur eggs found in southern India), and here’s the poem:

Read the rest of this entry »

I had written previously about a blog started by students in our Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Ph.D. program (ideaplay.org) and had designed a couple of ambigrammatic logos for them. You can see the original post here. Here is one of the original designs I had provided:

Read the rest of this entry »

Ambigram.com is a website about ambigrams and the people who make them. Lots of cool stuff for enthusiasts and novices alike. They often conduct competitions and other fun challenges for readers. One recent one was related to palindromes. In brief, they challenged people to create palindromic ambigrams. This is something I had tried a few time a long time ago – but their challenge pushed me to go back and come up with some solutions.

Well, I ended up with more than I had anticipated. I now have a technique, using which, anybody can create a palindromic ambigram of any length! How cool is that.

What is a palindromic ambigram you ask? A palindrogram? An Ambidrome? Read the rest of this entry »

A new ambigram created in memory of Jere Brophy, world renowned scholar on psychology of motivation. The ambigram reads, “motivation” one direction and “Jere Brophy” when rotated by 180 degrees. Click on the image to see a larger version, hosted on Flickr.

Enjoy.

What do you think this is?

Take a guess…

Well, it is the top half of a lake-reflection ambigram. What this means is that if you reflect what you see along a horizontal line at the bottom of the image, the picture you will then get will spell a word. Can you figure out what it says?

While you think about that, let me tell you about this new group-blog set up by graduate students in our Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Program. The blog is called IdeaPlay and is available at ideaplay.org. So sitting here in India I had a few moments to sketch out some ambigrams for their blog. Here are two…

The first is a rotational ambigram that reads the word “Idea” if you go clockwise and the word “Play” if you go anti-clockwise.

And as for the lake reflection ambigram (half of which you saw up there)… well (no great surprise) it reads IdeaPlay as well, like so..

I hope you liked these new ambigrams, and I hope you will check out the the ideaplay.org blog.

My friend, Hartosh (I had written previously about his mathematical novel here) and his wife Pam, recently had a baby boy. This ambigram is of his name: Nihal

Enjoy.

Yesterday after I had posted my two latest ambigrams (see them here) I got a message on Facebook from my cousin Sonny (the one who composed the cool music for my Explore, Create videos) saying

Big deal. I can make “fact” and “fiction” blur together till they are indistinguishable. Using only my brain! And not much effort, either.

Not to be outdone by a good put-down… I created an ambigram that really makes “fact” and “fiction” blur together… Check it out

For one reason or another I have not been bitten by the ambigram bug for a while – till suddenly a week or two ago, two new ambigrams popped into my head. A bit of work with Freehand later… here they are. Enjoy

Computer

Fiction

A while back I had written about the idea of “serendipitous connectability;” the idea that the web allows us to “to run across things that are stunning in their ability to connect to us in powerful, emotionally touching ways.” I was prompted to do this by clicking on a random link on the We feel fine website that led to someone’s personal blog (one that I, deliberately, didn’t link to and have no real record of).

This idea seems to have been picked up a bit and this is my attempt to sort through and see how it started and how it is developing (note: there already is a mutant version out there). Details below. Read the rest of this entry »

Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to this extremely creative YouTube video. The funny thing is that I had seen this a while ago but I didn’t get it. Of course now that Leigh explained it to me, it seems so obvious. Anyway, the narration is crafted in such a way that it reads the same backwards AND forwards. Now this is cool in and of itself, but the kicker is the manner in which the meaning flips when the reading reverses! Very cool.

Here is another one with the same overall idea though less well designed (and a bit more political)

What is most ironic about my “not getting it till explained” is that many years ago I had gotten bitten by the palindromic poetry bug – and had written a bunch of poems that read the same backwards and forwards. Moreover in these poems I tried hard to create a shift in meaning when you began reading the lines in reverse order. So to not notice this self-same pattern when I saw it in the video seems particularly embarrassing. Read the rest of this entry »

The ambigram design I had first presented here is now available through cafe-press in a variety of formats. Click here to buy t-shirts, buttons and more… Just to be clear, the prices for all the items are exactly what cafe-press charges. Matt and I make no money of this. None. Nada.

Hope you like the ambigram design.

I have been wanting to create a TPACK ambigram for a while now… what would be better than combining my two greatest loves – technology integration in teaching WITH ambigrams!

Finally after some subtle prodding by Matt Koehler I have finally done so. This is a reflection ambigram i.e. it would read the same when you hold it up to a mirror. Of course this makes it ideal for a t-shirt design (which I guess is the next step). To ensure that you do hold it up against a mirror I have placed some text below the image that is already reflected (nudge, nudge… ). Enjoy.

If you love optical illusions you have to see this… just absolutely brilliant. The moment she pulls out the driver’s license is priceless. And of course the face / vase flip-flop at the end is cool too. Read the rest of this entry »

Mishra & Yadav (2006) was a paper based around my dissertation research. It took a while to get published and I am including it here for the record. My dissertation (Mishra, 1998) was maybe the first place where I made a specific mention of the triad of constructs: Technology, Pedagogy & Content that later developed into the TPACK framework. I must add that I used the word “learning theory” or “theory” in place of “pedagogy” in my dissertation. By the time this paper came out our key TPACK paper (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) was already in press – so this paper refers to our further crystallized thinking about these issues.

Mishra, P., & Yadav, A. (2006). Using hypermedia for learning complex concepts in chemistry: A qualitative study on the relationship between prior knowledge, beliefs and motivation. Education and Information Technologies. 11(1), 33-69. [Click link to download PDF.]

Abstract and an ambigram follow: Read the rest of this entry »

This is an extended piece on the manner in which the web, small pieces loosely joined, can lead to “serendipitous connectabilty” (something I had written about earlier here). All this is situated in a story that connects cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader, Oriya writer and poet J. P. Das, and the father of non-violence Mahatma Gandhi. This is an interesting story in and of itself, and along the way offers some insights into the nature of the Internet and the psychology of creativity. Quite a lot to fit into on posting but bear with me.

My friend Gaurav Bhatnagar (I had blogged about his new book, Get Smart: Math Concepts here), for some reason, known only to him, has decided to create a poetry-blog based around my ambigrams. Each posting consists of one ambigram (taken from my large collection of ambigrams on Flickr), followed by a short poem inspired by it. Suffice to say, I am quite flattered by all this attention and am highlighting his work on my website (in fact it gets its own sidebar entry on the right). One might argue whether or not these writings can truly be called poems (all I can say is that Gaurav takes full advantage of poetic license), but that is not the point. What is important is the manner in which he often, in true Hofstadterian fashion, understands what inspired me to create these designs in the first place. Thus these poems serve as another layer of interpretation of these designed objects.

As I said before, I am flattered.

Consider for instance two of his poems. The first is around an ambigram of my own name: Punya Read the rest of this entry »

Browsing through Nikita Prokhorov’s website (see this posting about Nikita’s new blog about the process of creating ambigrams) led me to a fascinating article about how symbols and the historical weight they can carry. Read the rest of this entry »

I received an email out of the blue from Nikita Prokhorov, a freelance graphic designer and assistant professor of graphic design from Connecticut. Nikita runs a blog devoted ambigrams, but in a different kind of way. As the email said, the blog is “devoted to the art and process behind ambigrams. It’s not meant just to showcase ambigram work, but rather explore each artist’s individual process & approach to ambigrams.” What a great idea. Read the rest of this entry »

During my travel through Taiwan and Hong Kong, I usually opened my presentations with some bilingual ambigrams – words that can be read in Chinese AND English. Read the rest of this entry »

Eye Twisters: Ambigrams & other Visual Puzzles to Amaze and Entertain is a book edited by Burkard Polster, a professor of mathematics at Monash University. It features some of my work… Read the rest of this entry »