Punya Mishra's Web

The quest for a better design continues… Much better, I think, than my previous attempt

I was invited to give two talks at the the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco. One was a Ignite presentation (5 minutes, 20 slides set to move at 15 seconds per slide), and the other was an ED Talk (sort of like a TED talk just without the tea). I chose to speak about creativity and technology – though in very different ways in each of these talks. I think both talks went well… While I was preparing for these two talks, I got inspired to create a bunch of new ambigrams. I recently posted four new designs, and now here are three more. I think all three are pretty good, though I am partial to the last one (the 3rd design).  Read the rest of this entry »

I am now, officially, a published poet!

My poem on imaginary numbers (The Mathematical “i”) was published in the March 2013 issue of At Right Angles, a school mathematics journal.   You can download the entire issue here (it is a large download) or view the magazine in sections here with a link to the poem as a googledoc.

Google has a new doodle out today (the 15th of April) to celebrate the 306th birth anniversary of Leonhard Euler, the Swiss mathematician and physicist. This prompted some reflection on his work (and some mathematical poetry)…

At the bottom right of the doodle above you can see an equation, famously called Euler’s identity. It is usually represented as follows:

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Sandra Sawaya has created a video from photographs taken during our recent sojourn to New Orleans for SITE2013. I think it captures a bit of what we did over there – lots of photos of food and friends, and some presentations. Enjoy.

Ambigrams Revealed: A Graphic Designer’s Guide To Creating Typographic Art Using Optical Illusions, Symmetry, and Visual Perception is a new book edited by Nikita Prokhorov. The book showcases the works of ambigram artists from around the world. It includes commentary, writing from some of the world’s top ambigram artists as well as case studies and tutorials.

Three of my designs made it into the book! I think for someone who does this sparingly, and as a hobby, it is just fantastic to be sharing pages with artists such as John Langdon, Scott Kim, Douglas Hofstadter and more. The three designs that made it into the book are the following:

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CEP917 (Knowledge Media Design) a course I co-taught with Danah Henriksen, in the fall semester 2012, received the First Place (in the Blended Course category) in the 2013 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards Competition. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention John Bell and William Cain as being part of the design team that made 917 possible. You can read our proposal (here) AND see the video that we made as a part of the proposal below.  

The Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Program at Michigan State University is the recipient of the  2013 Best Practice Award for the Innovative Use of Technology awarded by the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE). This award honors both our Master’s Program as well as our doctoral (face to face and hybrid) programs for  incorporating “innovation beyond meeting national or state standards for program-wide educational technology integration.”

In its citation the AACTE committee on Innovation and Technology which reviews submissions for the award cited our program

… for its demonstration of exceptional implementation and research of the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework on a program level. The program engages candidates in the rich problems and interrelationships of pedagogy, technology and content to produce graduates who develop innovative pedagogical solutions. The Committee found technological competency woven throughout the program and seamlessly integrated with pedagogy and content knowledge.

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There was a recent query on the PhD-Design-List regarding sources for designers on how to make good info-graphics and data-visualizations. I am collating the options being put forward by people here, just for the record. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a couple of websites that feature work done by me. I had written earlier about Brad Honeycutt’s website An Optical Illusion at (http://www.anopticalillusion.com/). He now features four different ambigrams created by me: You can find them on this page on his site devoted to my work.

More recently, I received an email from Leon Stein the webmaster for Optical Illusion World (at http://opticalillusionworld.com/) letting me know that our family new year’s video was featured on his site. (If you haven’t seen the video, it is embedded below.) I was pleased to read that he had promptly recognized that we were playing with anamorphosis (something we never really explicitly talked about in the video). As he said:

When I first saw this anamorphic video created by Punya Mishra I was blown away. I immediately played the video again so I could make sure I saw it correctly.

It is always great for one’s work to be appreciated–for it to be appreciated by someone with knowledge of how illusions work is icing on the cake. Thanks Leon. The only thing to add here is to give credit where credit is due. I was part of a great team (called my family) in creating this video. So Shreya, Soham, Smita take a bow as well

Here’s the video:

A quick and dirty ambigram for Valentine’s day, scribbled on the back of an envelope (literally), and photographed using my phone!

Have a great day everybody

From Chris Sloan, teacher at Judge Memorial Catholic High School and a student in our hybrid PhD program, comes a link to a TED talk. The description is as follows:

Creative genius Drew Davies and forward-thinking educator Jaime McGrath propose a new approach to classroom teaching: Turn curricula into design challenges, classrooms into workshops and teach students to think like designers.

Many years ago I constructed an ambigram for the words “good” and “evil.” The idea came to me while waiting for a traffic light to turn green. The memory of it is so vivid in my mind that even today when I come to that particular intersection I remember that moment when the visual insight struck. Out of that came one of my most popular designs—one that has been replicated many times in books, websites, crafted in wood—sometimes with my permission, sometimes without.

The most recent use of the design (with permission) comes in Janet Smith Warfield’s blog post titled: Dancing with words- dancing with wisdom. Looking at this design Janet writes:

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This is a paper that had come out a while ago, and I just didn’t get a chance to post it (actually I just forgot). Anyway, here it is:

Mishra, P., Koehler, M. J., Zellner, A., & Kereluik, K. (2012). Thematic considerations in integrating TPACK in a graduate program. In D. Polly, C. Mims, & K. Persichitte (Eds.),Developing Technology-Rich Teacher Education Programs: Key Issues (pp. 1-12). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.

ABSTRACT

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The college of Education at Michigan State University just came out with a video titled Year in Review. You can see the video below.

I would like to point out that a couple of projects I am involved with made it into the video. They include the project with the Azim Premji University (APU) in India and our overseas Master’s program in Dublin! In fact Anurag Behar (who is also the vice-chancellor of APU) and I show up in the video around the 44 second mark.

I recently received an email with the following request:

I am an engineer living in Turkey and I am going to have my second son hopefully in April and I would love to have their names as a tattoo. However having such a special work that will remain with me for my whole life should be art. Therefore I was thinking if you could perform a symbiotogram of my sons names for me (Demir and Mert).

I love creating ambigrams but haven’t done so in a while… but a challenge is a challenge and over the break I took a stab at the task. As I said in my reply back:

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Our family has a Christmas-break tradition. Over the past 5 years or so, every winter-break, we work together a create a video new-year’s card. And of course, we made one this year as well. As you can imagine, coming up with original ideas has become increasingly harder, and the set-ups increasingly complicated. What has not changed is just how fun they are to make. Take a look at the video below, and let us know if you think we managed to pull it off this year as well…

Have an out-standing 2013!
From Shreya, Soham, Smita & Punya

Just to let you know, these videos always have a few common elements. First, they are usually stop-motion videos (though this year is an exception). Second, they are always typographic in nature, having some kind of play with words and their representation. Third, they are usually animations of inanimate objects, synchronized to music, rarely, if ever, including us (or any other humans). Finally, we try to sneak in some kind of an  ”Aha!” moment— something that surprises the viewer in a nice kind of way.

Speaking of videos made in the past, you can see them by following the links below:

• Did you catch that? Last year’s stop motion card
• The Power of the Shadow (Stop motion cared made in 2010)
• Happy 2010 (stop motion card made in 2009)
• Happy 2009 (stop motion card made in 2008)
• Explore | Create | Share (3 short videos with typographical twists at the end)
• Finding Nemo, the sea-quel (a stop motion sequel to Finding Nemo)
• Taking on Kaplan: A commercial mashup
• or, view my video channel on Vimeo (including the great Hari Puttar Trailer and the Socha Hai music vide0).

I have been a great fan of Baskerville, the font for a long time. I love the manner it looks on a page and most importantly I love its italic ampersand! Check it out below… isn’t that beautiful.

I remember setting my doctoral dissertation in Baskerville and receiving grief from the University of Illinois dissertation formatting police because it was not in the listed list of fonts. I believed in this strongly enough that I fought it – and won! My dissertation remained in Baskerville.

Anyway, I had always assumed that my preference for Baskerville was a matter of personal taste (of course my taste was better than that of others… but still). But now there is scientific evidence of how Baskerville is better than other fonts. Read the rest of this entry »

Brad Honeycutt, a fellow Spartan (he graduated 1996 a couple of years before I started here at Michigan State) is fascinated by optical illusions. He has completed a couple of books on optical illusions the first of which will be coming out in July. Scott Kim, one of my favorite ambigrammists, contributed a foreward and it includes work by Scott and John Langdon (he of Angels and Demons fame).

Brad also runs an optical illusion blog at http://www.anopticalillusion.com and recently featured one of my ambigrams.

This design is one of my favorites… do check it out on Brad’s website, he includes the ambigram and a short note from me regarding how it came to be.

Over the Christmas break my daughter and three of her friends got together to make a music video. The idea was simple, what if there were a version of Guita Hero (Sitar Hero anyone?) for Bollywood songs. Out of this idea emerged a 5+ minute long music video – with a story-line about 4 bored Indian kids, deciding to have a good time. Shot over two days in our basement, the music video was recently screened at the annual cultural program of the Indian Cultural Society of Greater Lansing. The video was great fun to make. Here it is. Enjoy.

Every Christmas-break our family creates a stop-motion video new year’s greeting card. We have been doing this for 4 years or so and it is an incredibly fun way to spend time together. It has become a “signature” thing we do as a family. Anyway this year was no exception – though it took us much longer than before to come up with a good idea – and then to execute it was another challenge. Anyway, here it is (on Vimeo).

A very wonderful holidays and a very happy new year to all of you,
from Shreya, Soham, Smita & Punya

Just a few comments on the making of these videos. First, all our new-year videos are stop-motion videos. That’s how we made the first one and it has stuck. Second, all these videos are somewhat typographical in nature – playing with words and their representation. Third, these videos rarely feature us either individually or as a family. A hand or a still-frame may show up once in a while but for the most part our videos are made with inanimate objects.

This year I tried to change all three of these, suggesting that we make a live action video, with us as actors – and have some kind of a puzzle that was not related to words. After spending days thinking about this, working with various ideas, this whole line of thought was vetoed down by both Soham and Shreya. It was interesting to me that over time we had not only become a family that makes videos but a family that makes stop motion videos! How cool an identity is that! Of course, this meant that we then had to start over from scratch to come up with something that fit what we had done in the past.

Speaking of videos made in the past, you can see them by following the links below:

• Happy 2011 (last year’s stop motion card)
• Happy 2010 (stop motion card made in 2009)
• Happy 2009 (stop motion card made in 2008)
• Explore | Create | Share (3 short videos with typographical twists at the end)
• Finding Nemo, the sea-quel (a stop motion sequel to Finding Nemo)
• Shreya’s friends animate their names
• A commercial mashup
• or, view the complete collection (including the great Hari Puttar trailer)

Over the past few weeks I have been experimenting with using my iPad as a drawing/painting tool. The sketches below were created by tracing on an existing image – usually a photograph. So this is not “freehand” drawing per se – but given my limited talents that may not be such a bad idea.

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The Hindu god Ganesh (the elephant-headed one) is celebrated across India, and the world, around this time of the year. The Hindu community in Lansing is no exception. A couple of days ago I was asked to take pictures of a music program at the local temple. Read the rest of this entry »

The following note just went out to all the students signed up for CEP818, Creativity in Teaching and Learning (Fall semester 2011). 

We hope you have had a great summer are ready to get back to school! We (Punya Mishra & Kristen Kereluik) will be your instructors for CEP818.  You can find out more about us by visiting our websites. This note is to welcome you to the class and offer some specifics about what you will need to do before class starts. Please read this note carefully since it contains important information on things that need to be done before the class starts. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning I was at the doctor’s office and picked up a dated (February, 2011) New Yorker magazine and discovered a great essay by Adam Gopnik: The Information: How the Internet gets inside us. I am not sure how I missed this the first time around but Gopnik does a great job of writing about technology and its influences, under the guise of reviewing a series of recent books about the topic. He is sometimes funny (see his take down of Clay Shirky) and often insightful. I do recommend reading the entire article but here are a couple of quotes, just to give you a sense of his voice. This is how he starts his essay, reminding us just how magical these new technologies are. I am reminded of Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Read the rest of this entry »

I have, for a long time, been interested in the Droste effect – a “specific kind of recursive picture… [in which] an image exhibiting the Droste effect depicts a smaller version of itself in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. This smaller version then depicts an even smaller version of itself in the same place, and so on” [from Wikipedia] Read the rest of this entry »

I have been in Singapore the past few days at the invitation of Mike Thiruman and his team at Educare. Educare is a co-operative of the Singapore Teachers’ Union and sees itself as serving “teachers and schools so as to enhance the quality of teaching.” I had two sessions with them on June 1 and 2 on Harnessing ICT towards transformative teaching and learning in the 21st Century. The first day was a presentation and the next day I presented a full day workshop to 35+ educators.

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TPACK is huge in Australia (for instance see this note TPACK underpins Aussie Teacher Ed Restructuring). I am hopeful that one of these days this interest will translate into a trip down-under… It would be great to travel around the continent, giving talks, meeting some cool educators, and maybe even get to see some cricket! How cool would that be.

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Pauline Kael is regarded to be one of the best film reviewers to have ever lived. Sam Sacks has a piece on Kael in which he describes her style of film review, one based less on academic nitpicking and the presence (or absence) of directorial flourishes than on her personal aesthetic response to cinema. She is quoted as saying that there is only one rule in filmmaking:

There is only one rule: Astonish us! In all art we look and listen for what we have not experienced quite that way before. We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond in a new way.

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