Punya Mishra's Web

My daughter, whose creative exploits have been featured here before (for instance see her design for a math-music game), now has a blog, titled Uniquely Mine. It features original writing (poems, stories) by her. Do check it out. You can find regular updates on this blog via the beauty of RSS feeds on the right column (just scroll down).

The one piece by Shreya I would like to draw attention to is a story titled Obtuse can be right. She wrote this as a part of a fourth grade assignment, and it is pretty cool, with interesting geometry-related wordplay. Enjoy.

My friend Gaurav Bhatnagar (whose doggerel on ambigrams is featured on my blog as well) gave it high praise in his facebook update, saying, “This is a masterpiece. Highly recommender (sic!). As good as Asimov’s short shorts.” I haven’t had a chance to see Asimov’s short shorts but I guess they are cool!

I just came across these lovely visual mathematical proofs.

For instance consider the following sequence:
1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + … = 1

and then see the following image on the blog!!

How cool is that!!!!

I had posted about something similar earlier (see visualizing mathematics).

Note: Before someone gets technical on me, I should admit that these are not “proofs” in the rigorous mathematical sense of the term, but they do provide visual evidence / explanation that helps us understand the underlying patterns.

I also recommend the blog (http://www.billthelizard.com/) on which these “proofs” appeared for a bunch of other interesting stuff about mathematics and programming.

Over the past few months I have been working with my kids on creating short thematic videos. The themes we chose were the three words, Explore, Create & Share. Though the videos for Explore and Create got made rather quickly, the video for Share appeared to stump us.

Much to my relief, after weeks of discussion and thinking, we finally have a video for the word share. I am including all three videos here, in sequence, so that you can see just how these three videos work together. All three videos have original music composed by my cousin, Sonny Mishra.

7 tools… one big job: Explore

Emergence: Create

… and finally,
A helping hand: Share

(Other videos created by us can be seen here.)

The recent (and ongoing) evens in Iran sadden me deeply… but also give me hope. The scenes and news emerging from there speak of courage and a need and demand for freedom. What is also amazing has been the use of technology particularly twitter to get news out of the country.

A few decades ago it was audio-cassette technology that led to the fall of the Shah of Iran. Ayotollah Khomeni had been exiled to France and his speeches would be secretly smuggled into Iran – where an informal underground network of people would dub and re-dub these tapes and pass them around. New technologies lead to new ways of sharing information, new ways to mobilize.

My heart goes out to these protesters as I obsessively track news coming out of Iran. The two best sources of news on this are Andrew Sullivan’s  Daily Dish and The Lede of the NYTimes. Or better still follow the incoming Twitter-feeds collected here.

My mashup of a commercial has been on YouTube for a while and just yesterday I noticed that someone had left a very thoughtful comment… and that comment got me thinking… and hence this posting.

To start with, if you haven’t seen the videos here they are again.

Here is the original commercial:

And my response:

The comment by user witchyrichy to my mashup was as follows:

Nice mashup…but I’m not sure that I agree that a lecture is still a lecture. The technology makes it possible to break that lecture into segments, review different sections, and even, as you did here, cut and paste the important pieces into something new. I listened to a talk by Steinem through Yale’s itunes site: yes, it was a lecture but it was one I would have never heard otherwise, one I could share with others, etc. So, a lecture isn’t always a lecture, imho.

I think the witchyrichy makes a really good point here and something that had been nagging me a bit. What is somewhat ironic is that Matt Koehler and I have been trying for the past year or so to develop a new form of presentation, one that takes a lecture and makes it dynamic. A good example would be the keynote we gave at the SITE 2008 conference Thinking Creatively, Teachers as Designers of Technology, Pedagogy & Content. We “appropriated” a bunch of ideas from Larry Lessig and Dick Hardt (and in the case of the SITE keynote, Steven Colbert!).

To add (self)-insult to irony, I have blogged about lectures and how they can be creatively constructed previously here. Read my earlier posting about The 60 second lecture.

To sum it up, it appears that I may have gone a bit overboard with my critique of a lecture. That said, the larger point I was trying to make in my mashup, about a lecture not necessarily being the best use of technology for teaching, still stands.

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #3: Late April 2009

Welcome to the third edition of the TPACK Newsletter, now with 362 subscribers (representing a 30% increase in the last two months!), and appearing bimonthly between August and April. If you are not sure what TPACK is, please surf over to www.tpack.org to learn more.

Gratuitous Quote about Technology
"Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons."
– Buckminster Fuller

In this Issue:
-2. Introductory blurb

-1. Gratuitous Quote about Technology
0. In this issue (You are here.)
1. TPACK’s Grandfather
2. Measuring TPACK
3. TPACK-in-a-text(book)
4. Recent TPACK Publications
5. Recent TPACK Presentations
6. The TPACK Handbook as Course Text
7. TPACK-based Dissertations
8. TPACK Wiki Work
9. TPACK Video Mashup
10. Display Your TPACK Proudly!

11. Learning and Doing More with TPACK
–. Un-numbered miscellaneous stuff at the end

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the many things I have to do as a faculty member is review grant proposals. This is an important service to the field, but truth be told, given how busy I am I do see it as somewhat of a chore. I was recently reviewing some educational research proposals for a grant giving agency – and I was struck by something that led to this post. (I guess, it is less of a chore if it leads to a blog-post!).

I must say, without giving too much away, that these proposals were broadly related to education and not restricted to just the field of educational technology. That said there were two that were directly technology related, one having to do with virtual partners and the other with webbased learning. It is not surprising that these two would focus on technology directly.

What was surprising however was just how infused with technology all the other projects were. In each of these “non-tech” proposals various forms of technology were used for every aspect of the research from the kinds of information being collected, to how the information was collected; from how the informaiton was analyzed to how it would be reported and disseminated. For instance, there were studies on probing athletes cognition using fFMRI technologies, and another on collabrating across continents using webcams. There was one study that handed student-teachers Flip cameras to help them create digital stories, and subscriptions to surveymonkey or specialized statistical analysis packages!

What this shows clearly is just how fundamentally how we conduct research (in the field of education) has changed with these new digital technologies. And it has changed not in some flashy “pay attention to me, I’m so cool!” kind of a way but in a more insidious and sneaky manner (but no less revolutionary for that). These technologies have become transparent to the researchers – and are just seen as being part of what they do. Now I am sure this is not something unique to education. This is happening in each and every discipline from astronomy to zoology. What this means is that our disciplinary relationship to the world is now mediated through these new tools and devices.
Read the rest of this entry »

Sean Nash over at Nashworld asked me to guest blog for this week while he is out with his students doing some really cool stuff.

Here is a link to my posting: A TPACK video mashup!.

I end the post with a couple of videos, one a commercial and the other my mashup response to it. You can see the videos in context on Nashworld or just see them in isolation here. It does make sense to see them in the sequence below.

Here is the original commercial:

And my response:

Enjoy.

I just discovered (through the serendipitous connectibility of Google Alerts) about Teaching Thursdays a blog from the University of North Dakota. It is a collaborative venture between Anne Kelsh (Office of Instructional Development) and Bill Caraher (Department of History). Check out this recent post on Technology & Pedagogy by Bill Caraher.

He speaks about three different ways in which instructors typically speak about technology: as a tool, as a medium and as a network. Now the TPACK framework is never mentioned but it was clear to me as I read the post that Caraher sees the world in very similar kinds of ways. Consider for instance this paragraph:

In the discipline of history, there tends to be an assumption that certain valid facts exist within a fairly rigid narrative. While scholars obviously do not believe this, students tend to see history this way at the introductory level. So a wiki which encourages them to view knowledge in a more fluid way challenges basic assumptions that students tend to hold regarding the discipline. This could be good, but also could challenge their ability to engage the material and technology thoughtfully… At the end, even the most simple technology — a wiki — is not merely a tool that allows students to work together toward a pedagogical goal, but a node in a series of networks that undergird student assumptions regarding the university experience, the discipline, and the function of technology in a wider context. (And, this does not even delve into the assumptions that faculty have about technology and how they attempt to use them in the classroom — whether they are simply replacing an earlier “analog” technology or introducing a “new” learning environment with new goals.).

In some ways I think the idea of technology, pedagogy and content as a network is an excellent analogy for the complex set of relationships that underlie our conceptualization of the TPACK framework. Don’t take my word for it… read the whole thing.

A followup to my previous posting about the Italian kids calculating the distance to the moon using recordings from the Apollo Space program.

As I read the story on the technology Review website, I came to the comments made by readers. One stuck out. This is what somebody had said:

Wow, they took the speed of light and multiplied by 2.62 then divided by 2. Interesting method of doing it, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist for sure.

By focusing on the surface aspect of the math this person misses the point of the story almost completely. Misses, it I may add by almost the distance from the Earth to the moon. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

I don’t know if anyone has been following the back and forth following my posting about the Periodic Table of Typefaces (see Yet another periodic table…). In brief, I was quite critical of the design of this table and made that point in no uncertain terms. Imagine my surprise at receiving a wonderful note from the Camdon Wilde (the designer of the table) which led to quick back and forth between us. It was a wonderfully pleasant conversation and I am very appreciative of Camdon’s grace.

I was telling my wife about this, reading through my posting, and the comments back and forth… and it struck me just how cool this entire episode was. To connect with another person, someone I have never met, building on mutual respect and openness, was beautiful in being unexpected. And it could not have happened without this wonderful technology called the Web! How very cool is that.

I just found out (via These Apples are Delicious blog, and more specifically this posting: Creative Teachers) that the keynote that Matt and I presented at SITE08 is now available on YouTube!

Somebody went through the effort of breaking up the video into 5 parts and posting them on YouTube (thanks!). Here they are as links (or embedded below)Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V. Of course the video in its entirety can be found, on this website, as a quicktime movie here.

Read the rest of this entry »

What does it mean to represent something? Sean Nash (of Nashworld) and I have been having some fun at the expense of periodic representations (my post and his response) and even children’s books. I had been wanting to write about this for the past few days but travel, work and illness came in the way. However, I stumbled upon a way of thinking about DNA that prompted (actually forced) me to write this post. 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.

I had written about the EduPunk program and my natural affinity to it here. What I forgot to add in that posting was an EduPunk logo I had created. This logo was made using photos of letterforms from Flickr. There is a handy-dandy tool created by Erik Kastner called Spell with Flickr that I used to create this. Here it is.

Matt Koehler introduce me to the idea of edupunk. As this Chronicle story (Frustrated With Corporate Course-Management Systems, Some Professors Go ‘Edupunk’) says,

Edupunk seems to be a reaction against the rise of course-managements systems, which offer cookie-cutter tools that can make every course Web site look the same.

As with any neologism, there are as many meanings as there are users… here are some links if you want to learn more. First the post that introduced Edupunk to the world, and a couple more that attempt to explain its intricacies, here and here. [Note, this is not a comprehensive or even most important set of links on this topic, just what a few minutes with Google revealed to me.]

Now, the idea behind EduPunk, as Mike Caulfield describes it, “with its implication of technical accessibility, a DIY ethic, quick and dirty over grand design, and a suspicion of corporate appropriation” appeals to me a lot. It is something that Matt and I have been arguing and implementing for a while now, though of course we didn’t call it EduPunk. We often said that our course websites worked through a strange combination of “Duct Tape and Magic”. Read the rest of this entry »

I had written a response to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist a while ago (read it here). Yesterday, I received a note from Irfan critiquing my take on the novel. Read the rest of this entry »

T. H. Nelson coined the word “hypertext” and more than anyone else, and much earlier than anyone else, truly understood how computing technology would change the text and print. One of my most treasured possession is a copy of his double-book (“Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now” and “Dream Machines: New Freedoms Through Computer Screens — a Minority Report”) that I bought from a garage sale back when I was a student at Illinois. These books in their choppy, “cut-n-past” and fragmented design seem to invite browsing (rather than reading) and in some strange way (at least it seems so in hindsight) foreshadow the kind of reading we do on the web today.

However, there is one significant way in which the web today is different from TH Nelson’s original idea. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

the past few days, primarily due to “beginning semester” blues. I hope to get back to full strength pretty soon… there are bunch of things I would like to blog about just a question of finding the time

It was exactly a year ago, on the first of January 2008, that I began blogging (see first posting here). When I started I wasn’t sure how well this blogging thing would work out.

Now 12 months and 376 posts later – I have to say that I have truly enjoyed this. I had set a goal for myself of making 30 posts a month, and for the most part (June being the biggest exception, followed by December) I met these goals (actually ending up with more than a post a day on average!).

The design of the site has pretty much stayed the same, some minor tweaking aside.

More importantly I have come to enjoy blogging. I know a couple of people who have been following my writing – and that is great. But the greatest gain has been personal, providing me with a space to put my thoughts into words – sort of half-way between the inchoate thoughts that flit through my mind and more formal academic writing. [I wrote about the three kinds of posts I tend to generate, and how that influenced the design of the site here.]

This is what I would like to expand further in the year to come. So one of my new year’s resolutions is to blog less frequently but more seriously. So fewer links to cool sites that I run across but a greater number of mini-essays on technology, learning, creativity and play.

Here’s to 2009!

Sean Nash of Nashworld (recognizing a fellow data visualization junkie in me) had sent me this link a while ago … but I just got around to it today. Check out FeedVis. So what does FeedVis do – think of it as a tag-cloud generator on steroids. Lots of fun there – jump in and click around.

I knew that website developers would go to great lengths to rise in Google rankings. What I didn’t know was just how far people were willing to go, till I received this email.

Note: I have deleted all the links and names, since that would be giving free publicity to the sites in question – something they are after. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of us live our lives with the assumption of practical obscurity – i.e. the idea that what we do, even in public places, is essentially private. There are just too many people and just too few ways of tracking us individually. So we were for the most part, practically, obscure.

This was all very good till the Internet came along. Suddenly anything and everything that could be tracked and traced became publicly available (or at least potentially so). On top of that we also chose to publicly share details of our-selves, details that we would have been reticent to do otherwise. We placed these public thoughts and feelings, traces of our lives in the form of texts and photographs, videos and status updates, all over the web.

Practical obscurity, almost suddenly, was replaced by ambient findability. It didn’t matter that you were one among a million but for some reason you had made a posting about creating a hypertext of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, it will stay available online for ever and ever, taunting me with its name-droppingly cool early graduate student voice.

I have been intrigued by these two terms, practical obscurity and ambient findability, and the tension between them (and have written about it previously here). However, I think there is a third idea that we need to find a name for. Read the rest of this entry »

I had blogged earlier about my attempts at using micro-blogging in my face to face classroom. As I had said after the experiment

At the end of the class, upon being quizzed, the students seemed to feel that this experiment had been a success and would like to do it again. However, as an instructor I was not as sure. I felt that the pedagogical move of going from a technology to an educational technology had not really be completed, the circle had not been squared. what I mean by this is that, as the instructor, I have not yet figured out a way to bring the micro-blogging activity back to the class. It seemed to exist in this little bubble by itself, apart from what was going on in the classroom.

This past Tuesday we tried it again, with one variation. I decided to keep a few minutes open at the end of class for everyone to review what had been micro-blogged and to use that as a way of tying together the themes and ideas that had been discussed during the beginning of class. I felt that this was a small but significant move – piercing the “bubble” as it were that separated the micro-blogging from the other things going on in the class. Read the rest of this entry »

As you know I am always intrigued by a new breed to personality analysis tools that are out there in the world (for instance see these prior postings: on PersonalDNA; on Color IQ; and browsing for gender). So here is this new website that seeks to analyze me by studying my blog.

Check out Typealizer… Entering my URL in there got me the following analysis:
Read the rest of this entry »

Political debates are heavily analyzed – by pundits and laypeople alike. I had my own minor visual contribution to this discourse through this WordMap/Cloud of the third and final debate between McCain and Obama . Such wordmaps are fun to create and see but are not terribly insightful. Yes you can see that Obama used the word “see” more often than McCain but how far does that really take you in terms of interpreting and making sense of the campaign. And then comes this! Read the rest of this entry »

We Feel Fine is a web-installation, “a self-organizing particle system,” art project that is powerful and touching – building as it does on people’s emotions, harvested from blog postings from around the world. As the designers say, “We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.” It is worth a visit… Check it out

I have written quite a bit about how a technology can become an educational technology (see this, this, this and this). This is a non-trivial task that all educators face, and requires situational creativity in re-purposing / re-designing the existing tool to meet classroom / pedagogical needs. In this posting I would like to describe one current experiment with micro-blogging that we conducted in my CEP917 doctoral seminar. As the wikipedia article says, Micro-blogging

is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates (say, 140 characters or fewer) or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them… The content of a micro-blog differs from a traditional blog due in that it is typically more topical, smaller in aggregate file size (e.g. text, audio or video) but is the same in that people utilize it for both business and individual reasons.

As expected, the experiment was interesting… Read the rest of this entry »