Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

… or just narrow?

I just discovered Britannica blog, a pretty lively virtual space for intelligent discussion. How I had not come across it earlier is a mystery - but again that is the beauty of the web.

Anyway, there is an ongoing discussion there about how the web influences what we do. A provocative argument (based on data) being put forth by James Evans is regarding the influence of the availability of electronic resources on the research process.
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In response to my previous posting titled How artists work, Leigh Wolf pointed out a book (Curious Minds: How a child becomes a scientist). I had not heard of this book before and a quick google search led me to this page. Read the rest of this entry »

While researching my previous post about véjà du and Abraham Wald I came across “The Back of the Napkin Blog” (a.k.a. Digital Roam). This blog is devoted to visual thinking and representation. Very cool and very interesting… well worth a visit. Turns out that there is a posting here about Abraham Wald and his WWII insight. You can read it here: The hole story, What you don’t see will kill you. You can see the author’s page here.

NYTimes article on how publishers are responding to the advent of peer-to-peer sharing of textbook files. Check out First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.

Nice article in the NYTimes (Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?) about today’s generation and how much of their reading happens online (as opposed to reading books). I have seen a change in my reading over time as well. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been catching up on my reading of Slate and came across this gem of an article by Judith Shulevitz titled, The care and feeding of fiction. Shulevitz has written a quasi-review of James Wood’s new book How fiction works and makes we want to read the book itself. Of the many interesting ideas in the article is this wonderful quote that I just had to share:

There is only one recipe—to care a great deal for the cookery – Henry James

A statement that ought to apply to all that we do…

As an aside, it is clear from this essay by Woods that he has a “take no prisoners” style of writing. His take down of most magical realistic writing (which is calls hysterical realism), including Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo and Foster Wallace is a must read. This just makes me more confident that the book will be a wonderfully, idiosyncratic, engaging and intelligent read.

Reuters story titled Technology reshapes America’s classrooms. Couple of quotes worth noting:

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There have been many requests for the first chapter of the TPACK Handbook (recently published by AACTE & Routledge). Below is the summary and a link to the pdf version.
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I have been teaching summer course in our master’s program for years now and for the most part have found them to be the most enriching teaching experiences I have had. These are intense 8 hours a day, 5 days a week programs that typically go on for a month. [We are currently experimenting with a hybrid version but that’s a story for another day.] I haven’t written much about these programs, despite having taught them multiple times, but for one book chapter that was written many years ago (but for one reason or other was published just last year, in 2007). Read the rest of this entry »

Andrea Francis just emailed me a note about Professor Phillip Parker who is the world’s fastest book author. He has over the past five years over 85,000 books to his name. Read the rest of this entry »

Musings on local newspaper headlines, 2001 A Space Odyssey, media and creativity, and ending with some thoughts on the meaning of life… a lot to fit into one blog post but again I had the weekend to work on this. Read the rest of this entry »

Foster, A. N., Mishra, P. (in press). Games, claims, genres & learning. In R. E. Ferdig (Ed.), Handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education. [PDF document] Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Koehler just pointed out a hilarious review of the TPACK handbook on Amazon.com. It is short, pithy and completely unconnected to the book. Read the rest of this entry »

Arthur C. Clarke, popularizer of science and science fiction writer died today. He was 90. Clarke was one of my favorite authors growing up Read the rest of this entry »

I have been reading Moo by Jane Smiley, off and on for a while now. It is a satire of academia set in a fictional Mid-western university called Moo U. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the key aspects of the TPCK framework is the manner in which disciplinary knowledge interacts with pedagogy and technology. Till this date I did not have an adequate way of discussing how disciplinary knowledge and pedagogy interact, that is until I came across Janet Donald’s book Learning to Think: Disciplinary Perspectives.
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I recently finished reading three books: A case of Two Cities by Qiu Xialong, A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami, and Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations by Alexander McCall Smith. These are three very different books. The first two are novels and the third is a collection of short stories. Also, I have read other books by Xialong and Murakami (in fact I have blogged about one of them, the last book I had read by Murakami here) and this is the first book by McCall Smith that I have read (though I have been eying his series on The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency for a while). Despite these differences, both in their content, and in my experience with the authors, all three books, in one way or the another, have to do with the joys and perils of translation - the process of movement from one place to another, of ideas and emotions, across individuals, nations and cultures. Read the rest of this entry »

One Night at the Call Center is the second novel by Chetan Bhagat. I picked it up from the library, since I had read nice things about it on some website somewhere. What a tragic waste of time. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the important events at the New Orleans AACTE meeting was the release of the TPCK Handbook for Educators and the book signing. This was the first time I had ever participated in a book signing and it was great fun. Here are some photographs from the event…

Click on the images to see all the pictures …
From left to right: Joel Colbert, (the missing) Matt Koehler, Punya Mishra, Kamili Anderson, Nancy DePlatchett, Marcela van Olphen, and Mario Kelly.

I just discovered through the PhD-Design list an online book titled “Design: Creation of artifacts in society” by Karl T. Ulrich. Read the rest of this entry »