Punya Mishra's Web

Slumdog rolled into the Oscars tonight. More important to me were the two Oscars for A. R. Rahman for original score and song. It is time that the world recognized his genius. Here is a cartoon by Kaladhar Bapu from his site Point Blank

A.R. Rahman by Kaladhar Bapu

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (see Wikipedia entry) illustrates “our nature in its education and want of education.” It is maybe one of the most famous allegories in literature and philosophy, a precursor to the kinds of mind-games (think brain in a vat) that philosophers like Dennett engage in today [Where am I? is a good example of this genre].

I am not sure I quite buy into the argument being made in the allegory of the cave, or whether there is one “strict” interpretation of it. The other day I stumbled upon a lovely, stop-motion animated, version of the allegory. Check it out below: Read the rest of this entry »

… Or Why I love the web.

I stumbled upon a piece (Lotus Blossom) by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries the other day… and it was like nothing else I had ever seen. At some superficial level it looked like kinetic typography, but both simpler and more complex at the same time. For a while I didn’t know what was going on, but, slowly and surely, I got caught up in the flow of the music and the text, the resonances and dissonances. This was something quite different, and new with a creative and yet uncompromising aesthetic sensibility. Murakami (see here and here) came to mind, for some reason.
Read the rest of this entry »

I had posted earlier about a recent commercial that, though arguing at one level that technology can fundamentally change education, seemed to stick to the standard-lecture (albeit in different and cooler modes of transmission).

Just how little the discourse around educational technology has changed over time (while the technologies have changed drastically) was brought home to me recently through a book I borrowed by Patrick Dickson. Before I describe the book let me provide you one quote from that book.

The scope and nature of man’s learning have always been commissioned by the mediums of instruction which were available. The need for adapting himself to the changing conditions of his environment focused man’s attention upon bettering the tools by which he acquired learning…The modern school is forced to meet the demands of a rapidly changing civilization. Today the world of the learner is almost unbounded. He must acquire facts relating to a bewildering variety of places and things; he must acquire appreciations of far-reaching interrelationships. The curriculum and methods of teaching must undergo a continuous appraisal. New subject matter and new devices for instruction are being scrutinized for their potential contributions to the learning process.

Read the rest of this entry »

We just created another New Year’s Card / Video. Check it out:

A YouTube video of Soham solving the rubic cube blindfolded!

[Thanks for Michael Gondry for the idea.]

One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness — Harold Pinter (1930 – 2008).

There is an interesting article in today’s NYTimes titled Content and its discontents by Virginia Heffernan. In this article she makes the argument the new digital, online media require new ways of representing information, new ways of thinking about how ideas are wrapped and presented, in short they require the development of new genres. As the article says, and I quote:

This argument concedes that it’s not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms. All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries — music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows — are designed for a world that no longer exists. They fail to address existing desires, while conscientiously responding to desires people no longer have.

There is a parallel here to the way in which Matt Koehler and I have articulated the TPACK framework.
Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite pieces of design is the London Underground Map. It has been replicated all over the world – from Mumbai to Tokyo. Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to a BBC 4 video made in 1987 about this map. Read the rest of this entry »

I love reading. I love watching movies. I love over-analyzing books and movies, seeking to find pattern and structure, motifs and motives. I love to break them down in my mind and put them back together again. I read reviews of books and movies by the ton, sometimes while reading the book or watching the movie. It allows me to get another perspective on the book or the movie and I find that it enriches my reading/viewing. I have over time developed, what I think is, an independent mind and taste, what Schon has called an “inner gyroscope” that allows me to read other people’s views on a book or a movie and still maintain my own sensibility and response.

All this fails when I get to video games. I do not play video games and not because I haven’t tried. I find them hard to engage with, difficult to master (the mapping between mashing buttons and the action on screen seems just too arbitrary) and too much of a demand on my time (which I have very little of to spare). So when I read about how video games are the new medium of creativity and expression – I have a wistful feeling of loss. I read the words but there is no real-world referent to which I can personally connect to.
Read the rest of this entry »

I discovered Hulu TV a few weeks ago and have been using it to catch up on previous episodes of The Daily Show. I decided today, as I was working on a presentation to watch Crawford. It is a documentary about “a small town thrust into big politics when George W. Bush moves in next door. Gritty, authentic and often funny.”

This post, however, is not about the documentary (watch it yourself and form your own opinion) but rather about one person in the documentary – the school teacher.
Read the rest of this entry »

Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Adams, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. To appear in M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t want to give anything away… watch it once and then once more…
Read the rest of this entry »

Amol just sent me this BBC story titled: Warner ‘sues over Puttar movie.’ That makes me so angry! How come Warner Bros is not suing me…
Read the rest of this entry »

A fun and thought provoking, recursive music video by Allee Willis titled “Editing is Cool.” The video attempts to capture the process of creating this very video, from the lyrics, to the music to the special effects and so on. Denise Caruso (at Salon) quotes Allee Willis as saying, “… you can see every single stage of the song and video coming together, along with work logs and lyrics and lots more.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Check out Story of Stuff or watch the movie…
Read the rest of this entry »

In my summer classes I have the participants complete a video assignment on understanding. This year as always my students worked in groups over a week-and-a-half to select their topics, develop interview protocols, video tape people as they answered their questions, and then edit the footage into a tight 4-5 minute documentary. Here are the projects they created (I am still waiting on one): Read the rest of this entry »

The Indian Premier League, Twenty20 cricket championship was a great success. I had a chance to watch a few games (including the finals and semi-finals) when I was in india and it was a blast. This posting however is about an extremely creative commercial for the IPL tournament. Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous post I talked about Pangea Day and the Imagine anthem series, where people from one country sing the national anthem of another. Here’s another one, France sings for the USA. Enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

NYTimes technology columnist, David Pogue, has a recent blog entry about Pangea Day, a global film festival coming up in a few days. As he says in his note: 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 »

I discovered PES a couple of years ago when searching for examples of stop motion animation on the web. One glimpse of his work and I was smitten. Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished watching Clint Eastwood’s two Iwo Jima movies: Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Clint Eastwood is an individual who I have come to respect a great deal. His evolution from the somewhat rabid “Make my day” vigilante to the nuanced and thoughtful filmmaker gives me hope (both for myself and for humanity). Ever since his directorial debut “Unforgiven,” Eastwood has developed into a tremendous director, willing to subvert genre cliches and deconstruct traditional tropes and narratives. These two movies are no exception. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oscars got one thing right tonight: Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova for the song, Falling Slowly from the movie Once. I saw this movie a couple of weeks ago, during my trip to New Orleans, and loved every moment of it. I heard that they had been nominated for best song (or whatever the technical term was for the category) and I was rooting for them… and checking the CNN website a few minutes ago discovered that they had won! Read the rest of this entry »

Taare Zameen Par (loosely translated as “Stars on the earth”) is a new movie produced and directed by Aamir Khan, one of Bollywood’s biggest stars. He also acts in it. What is unique about this movie is that despite its Bollywood trappings, it is a somewhat serious take on education in India. Through its story of a creative but dyslexic boy struggling to survive in school, TZP makes a heartfelt argument for going beyond tests and typical academic knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »