Punya Mishra's Web

TCRecord has an interesting essay on the role of games and learning, by Alexander, Eaton & Egan, titled: Cracking the code of electronic games: Some lessons for educators. As they say, “This is an analytic article that provides a description of an array of attempts to derive educational principles from the perceived success of students’ learning while they are engaged in electronic games.” They identify three key ways that games have been used in educational contexts. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

To understand the significance of April 2, 2011, I have to go back 28 years, back to the summer of 1983.

I had just finished 10th grade, and that summer I took a trip to the hills of North India, as a part of a social work volunteer effort. I remember sleeping on the floor in this little unfurnished hut up in the hills, spending the days digging what would be the foundation of a village school. We had no electricity, no TV, the our toilet was to go out in the woods.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in January I was invited to speak at the Drexel Learning Games Network (DGLN) seminar series. As I had written in my original post (TPACK & Games @ Drexel), DLGN is the brainchild of  Aroutis Foster, former graduate student, now rising star academic and researcher. As the DLGN website says

The Drexel Learning Games Network is made up of faculty and staff at Drexel University interested in game-based learning initiatives. It was established in the School of Education in Goodwin College with the goal of supporting teaching, researching, and designing of games for learning from K- to infinity.

I had mentioned that though I am not primarily a games and learning researcher, I have done some work in the area, primarily through collaborations with colleagues and students around MSU. I had a lot of fun constructing this talk, attempting to make some connections between my TPACK work and the idea of learning from games.

I see digital games as being an important part of learning – but in a somewhat different way than merely learning by playing games. In fact I have been somewhat skeptical of how one can use games for developing disciplinary knowledge. My experience has been that there is a fundamental tension in designing educational games – where the demands of designing engaging gameplay often conflict with the broader pedagogical goal of respecting the core concepts of the discipline or content to be covered. For instance a recent dissertation on how participants were learning Chinese from playing a massively multiplayer online role playing game (Zon) showed that my concerns were justified. Most participants focused on the gameplay rather than on the tasks that were connected with learning the language. I don’t think that finding this balance between gameplay and learning content is impossible to achieve – but that it is maybe the most important challenge faced by educational game designers.

I tried, in my presentation, to make some connections to learning from games by repurposing games – i.e. seeing their pedagogical potential outside of just playing with them. I of course used the TPACK framework as guiding my talk – but also brought in issues related to trans-disciplinary learning and design.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, the entire talk is now available online as a video. You can see it in its entirety by going here: http://gcpsx.coeps.drexel.edu/videos/dgvls_ep2public/

Enjoy!

I am headed to Drexel University to give a talk at the Drexel Learning Games Network seminar series. The DLGN is the brainchild of  Aroutis Foster, former graduate student, now rising star academic and researcher. As the DLGN website says

The Drexel Learning Games Network is made up of faculty and staff at Drexel University interested in game-based learning initiatives. It was established in the School of Education in Goodwin College with the goal of supporting teaching, researching, and designing of games for learning from K- to infinity.

The seminar series (titled: Digital Games: Teaching, Learning and Assessment Seminar Series) is a set of four lectures by invited faculty. Others who are speaking through the series (that started back in November 2010 and will continue till May of this year) include such luminaries such as Chris Dede,Harvard University; David Williamson Shaffer, University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Eric Klopfer, MIT. What am amazing group of people to be associated with!

I am not primarily a games and learning scholar, though I have done some work in this area, usually collaboratively with people like Carrie Heeter, Brian Winn over in the college of communication arts and sciences, Ron Rosenberg in engineering, and of course, with Aroutis Foster. In this talk, I am hoping to make some connections between my TPACK work and the idea of learning from games. Let us see…

I have been told that the session will be recorded and made available on the web. I will of course post it here, when I get a chance.

I was recently invited to present a keynote address at the 21st Century Instructional Technology Conference (titled Elements of Technology) at the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Nevada. Clark County is the 5th largest school district in the country with over 300,000 students and it was a great privilege to be invited to present there. I was invited there by the Instructional Technology Department (led by Loretta Asay) and my contact person was Project Facilitator, Sherwood Jones. They are a great group of people and I truly had a wonderful time there.

Apart from the Keynote I also conducted a workshop on Creativity and Teaching with Technology. I had anticipated having around 25 people for the workshop but the room was overflowing (at least 15 more than I had anticipated). That did throw a few kinks into my routine but nothing that was unsurmountable. I am sharing below some of the things that people created during this two hour workshop.

I explained my idea of a creative idea or product as being Novel, Effective and Whole (the so called New NEW)! This led Terra Graves, Thomasina Rose and Kristina Ernest to create this acrostic poem.

New
Organic
Visual
Engaging
Longevity

Educational
Fun
Freedom
Everyone
Creativity
Teachers
Innovative
Variety
Enthusiasm

Winning
Holistic
Outside the Box
Learning
Exciting

Here are a few more from Lisa Widmer, Katie Jones, Brent Mesenburg and Robert Jackson

The first two are limericks that summarize some of the things we had talked about in the first half of the workshop.

Creativity is our goal
Make it Novel Effective and Whole
When in doubt
Turn it about
And satisfy your soul

A second, funnier, version is as follows:

Creativity is our goal
Make it Novel Effective and Whole
When in doubt
Don’t Freak out
It’s quite alright if you stole

The same team wrote another poem, synthesizing some of the ideas we played with in the second half of the workshop.

Being creative is like heaven
Mimic the great Magellan
And fear not missteps
Just use the five steps
And crank that knob to eleven

The “crank the knob to eleven” of course being a response to the (in)famous scene from This is Final Tap.

A couple of other pieces that emerged from this team (can you tell this was a prolific group) was the quote:

“Tweak it to Teach it”

Somewhat along the same lines was Patrick Whitehead who suggested the following two:

Thinking is tweaking your mind

Think better… TWEAK your mind!

Apart from this display of verbal dexterity, the participants also completed a “letter search” task where they looked for letter that spell out the word “Relax, Repose, Reteach.” I had done a similar activity with students in our MAET program a year ago in Plymouth. Essentially what I did was create a somewhat awkward problem scenario the solution to which were the words Relax, Repose, Reteach. So these were the letters students searched for… and this is what they came up with.

Now for the twist! As it turns out one of the themes of the keynote (and the workshop) were the three words “Explore, Create, Share.” Students watched each of the three videos that we had created (see them here) as well as the mashup that had inspired us to begin with (see the original and the mashup here).

What the students didn’t know was that the three words (Relax, Repose, Reteach) could be rearranged to read… (surprise, surprise) the words Create, Explore, Share!! Here is what that looks like…

I must give a shout-out to High School Freshman Bryan Jones who I “volunteered” to help me out. He had a tough job, collecting all the pictures since there were multiple cameras (from regular digital cameras to iPhones), missing cables, a mac that was running Windows (which mean iPhoto wouldn’t cooperate)… and he had to pull everything together in around 25 minutes while the workshop was still going on… And he managed it without fuss and stress. Thanks!

Finally, we all watched the new Steven Johnson video “Where good ideas come from” and created demotivational posters based on what they heard and saw. Below is the video (just in case you haven’t seen it already) and below that the posters the students created.

Choose Wisely Patrick Whitehead Tim Hart	Innovation Karen Decker Terry Ector	Don’t Worry Michael C. Gregory
This is a hunch Thomasina Rose Kristina Ernest Terra Graves	Ideas Brandi Mizner Beth Pearson Holly Marich Laurie Koelliker Gary Eisnor	Creativity? Roger Mayo Matt Keener

As you can imagine this was a hectic workshop for all of us. We covered a lot of ground and the participants also created some interesting artifacts that can have a life beyond the immediate workshop. What fun!

There have been various descriptions of the TPACK game… some of which I have written about earlier.

• The first instance is something Judi Harris, Matt and I used at the 2007 NTLS meeting at Washington DC. You can find out more about it here.
• Second, is a submission by Karen Richardson from Virginia, written up in the February 09 TPACK newsletter.
• And earlier this year, I had blogged about a game developed by the Littleton School District in Colorado.

Finally, Matt Koehler has mocked up a version of the game online. He created it for the EPET Hybrid PhD program he was teaching this summer. Though he isn’t sure the game is really ready for “prime-time” he does have it available on his website. Check it out: The TPACK Game, Matt Koehler version. The instructions are simple:

In the TPACK Game, you consider how Technology (T), Pedagogy (P), and Content (C) work together by randomly choosing two of the three (C, P, and T), and thinking deeply to find the third that makes them all work together in a pedagogically sound way to teach the content.

Enjoy.

My friend and colleague Leigh Wolf forwarded me this article on Edward Tufte: The Many Faces (And Sculptures) Of Edward Tufte. I have been a fan of information design guru Edward Tufte’s work for years (decades?). I love his emphasis on clarity and simplicity in presenting information. I love the fact that he designs and publishes his own books (so that he can have full control over each and every aspect of the presentation). What I didn’t know of was his playful artistic side. It turns out that ET (as he is known) is also an artist, crafting giant metal sculptures in his “back yard” (if you can call the hundreds of acres that stretch behind his house a “back yard!”).

Over the past few years I have been thinking quite hard about the idea that creative people are not creative in just one area but rather tend to play within and across multiple disciplines or areas. Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein have in their book Sparks of Genius often talked about how the most creative scientists are polymaths, often having artistic and other interests that go beyond their immediate professional interests. In fact they argue, and I would tend to agree with them, that creativity cannot be forced into one box or domain. Creative individuals are curious about everything and often engage in creative activities in multiple areas, though they may specialize in just one area (usually the domain they are most known for).

This is true for the most creative people I know. For instance, consider Douglas Hofstadter (best known for his book Godel, Escher & Back and is work in Artificial Intelligence) dabbles in everything from mathematics to music, wordplay to art. Similarly Scott Kim (best know as a puzzle game designer) creates ambigrams and composes music, plays the drums and teaches mathematics using dance!

In my own way I have tried to do the same. Everything I do, from creating ambigrams to teaching, from photography to developing keynote presentations, from being a parent to advising students on their research, seems to me to be connected and inter-woven. I think my success as a researcher and scholar (to whatever extent I have been successful) derives from this “dabbling” across disciplines.

What is sad, however, is how much such “dabbling” is frowned upon. Through high-school and college, through graduate school and even as a faculty member, I have been advised, always by by well-meaning people, to focus, to find my niche, to become an expert on one thing. I have resisted it, mainly because knowing just one thing, seems, at least to me, such an impoverished way of being.

And I understand why I have received the advice I have. We live in a specialized world. A world where expertise is valued.  And an expert, after all, is someone who knows more and more about less and less. There is no space for dabbling in this world of.

But I wonder about that. I have a friend who is a successful professor of civil engineering. Turns out, that as he was growing up, what he really wanted to be, was a chef! I haven’t had a chance to talk to him about this but I wonder how his vision of being a chef influences what he does as a researcher and a teacher? Does it contribute (in some subconscious manner) to his work? Or has he suppressed it completely?

Either way I see it as a tragedy, in the first case because we haven’t developed a way of speaking of these influences, and in the second case because a possible, fruitful career was nipped in the bud.

The sad thing is that I am seeing school do the same thing to my kids, in fact to most kids I know. NCLB has not helped either. Don’t get me wrong. This is not an argument for some form of dilletantism (dabbling for the sake of dabbling). Not at all. What I am recommending (thanks to the Roob-Bernstein’s for this term) is polymathy. One of my students, Danah Henriksen, is currently working on a dissertation on looking for polymathy in teachers. As she says:

“Polymathy” may be thought of as an informed enthusiasm for more than one field of knowledge or expertise, or excellence in several realms that might seem distant from each other.  It has been suggested that what makes polymaths so successful and fluidly creative is an ability to cross-pollinate ideas and information.  People who open their minds to, and who learn from, multiple knowledge areas can apply new information and unique ways of thinking from one discipline into another.

This for me is the biggest reason for supporting such playing around in multiple areas. These experiences at the fringes (so to speak) of our professional lives, provide us with newer ways of being in the world. They allow us to see the world in new ways. They allow us to question things the field may have taken for granted. Just as Tufte says at the end of the piece, my goal, is to “make people see a little differently.” Turns out one of the best and easiest ways of doing so is by seeing through different disciplinary eyes.

We need to provide better opportunities for our students to do the same.

I just discovered Peter O. Gray’s blog on Psychology Today, titled Freedom to Learn: The roles of play and curiosity as foundations for learning. This is an awesome blog and really worth reading. Here are two of his posts that I strongly recommend. The first states (over and over again) the fact that “School is prison” and makes a good argument for why that is indeed the case. The next post unpacks that statement somewhat by exploring the idea of compulsory education.

• “Why Don’t Students Like School?” Well, Duhhhh…
• Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education

For the record, here are a couple of his papers as PDF downloads (I recommend the first, though it may be a bit academic at first glance).

• Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence
• Nature’s Powerful Tutors: The Educative Functions of Free Play and Exploration

And finally here is a video of a presentation he made at the Evolutionary Studies Program at Binghamton University. Read the rest of this entry »

Ken Friedman, whose article I had used as the basis of my previous posting, From incompetence to mastery, the stages dropped me an email in response to my critique. To provide some context, (you can read my full post here) I had suggested in my posting that it may be inappropriate to label the the highest level of mastery as being unconscious competence. My concern, of course, was with the “unconscious” part – since I felt that true mastery requires a level of reflection, something denied by the word “unconscious.”

Ken wrote that he actually sees examples of unconscious competence everywhere. He went on to say (quoted with permission) Read the rest of this entry »

I had written earlier about the idea of Jugaad, the quintessential Indian idea of situational creativity. One of the masters at this is Arvind Gupta. Check out his website for tons of wonderful science toys and experiments that can be made from stuff we typically throw away. Very cool and a critical part of the kind of repurposing of artifacts we need for creative teaching.

Throwaway Technology, playful Pedagogy and powerful Content… who says TPACK needs hi-tech!

Via Major Fun (aka Bernie DeKoven) comes Arvind Gupta, winner of the Defender of the Playful Award.

I just ran across this blog (Color Me Katie) that just blew me away. Katie Sokoler is a freelance photographer and street artist living in Brooklyn – and her blog just throbs with life, and energy and the sheer pleasure of living. That’s her down there blowing bubbles (wait till you see the stop-motion animation version of this).

I think she says it best:

It’s important for me to express myself creatively every day. I have all of these fun ideas in my head and if I don’t get them out I’m pretty sure my mind would explode. Realistically, I’d probably just get frustrated and fall asleep. But explosion or no explosion, doing something creative acts as a form of therapy for me. I feel better after taking photographs, making street art, painting, or making wall sized collages. The messier and more sweatier I get, the better I feel.

How cool is that!

Physics Games – online physics-based games.

Some cool stuff here. For instance check out Demolition City

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 Office Faculty and Organizational Development at MSU conducts an annual Spring Institute on College Teaching and Learning every summer. The past week was their 15th such event (details here) and I was asked to conduct a workshop on Creative Teaching. I was assisted in this by Mike DeSchryver.
Read the rest of this entry »

I am off to Charleston, SC for the SITE 2009 conference. . I can’t believe it has been a year since Matt Koehler and I presented our Keynote. I am sending this note sitting in the Michigan Flyer bus (making good use of their free wi-fi) and am looking forward to a good conference.

I am involved with four different papers at this conference (details below) well as a few other meetings. I will try keep the blog up to date with the happenings. For now here are the titles and abstracts of the four paper accepted for presentation.
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… 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 »

Why I love the Internets

Aroutis Foster and I recently published a chapter in the Handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education (I had posted about it earlier here). The handbook seeks to provide a comprehensive coverage of the use of electronic games in multiple fields. Complete reference, abstract & link to pdf given below.
Read the rest of this entry »

I had posted earlier that a paper on gender and video games had been accepted for publication. Well, it is published now, full reference, abstract and link to PDF given below.
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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 »

A couple of people have emailed me about the Obama campaign inserting advertisements into video games. Check out this Flickr set with screenshots of these advertisements. Most of the press is reporting that these ads show up in just racing games but as these screenshots indicate they are showing up in a range of games. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, as I was watching the second presidential debate, and following various bloggers who were live-blogging the event, I took a moment to check my email. I found that I had received a note from a former student. This individual had been in my summer cohort last year and also in my Learning Technology by Design class in the spring of 2008. The subject line said “Thank You!” and the note went on to expand on that thought, speaking in detail about her experience with the summer program, and the 817 course. This person wrote about how much they had gained from these experiences and how this had changed their personal approach towards teaching and, maybe more importantly, teaching with technology.

I am not including this email here for a couple of reasons. The first is modesty (not something that people have ever accused me of having, but even I have my limits). Second, this was a private note and I am not sure it was meant for public display. I realized that I needed to write something back in response, primarily because such affirmations of what we do as educators are so rare and I wanted to appreciate this person taking the time to write this note.

I am including below the note that I sent back. I have edited it slightly to remove any information that could be used to identify this individual.
Read the rest of this entry »

As un-official photographer for the Marathi Group, I took a bunch of pictures of this year’s Ganapati celebrations. These are now (finally) on Flickr.

Here are some links that came up during our discussion today regarding web-based software for education. Read the rest of this entry »

Just heard this of stealth assessment idea (from Michael Spector at NTLS) that struck a chord. More here, [word document].

I just received a gift in the mail. It was a box and in the box was Read the rest of this entry »

A NYTimes story about Spore, the new game / toy designed by Will Wright (Playing God, the Home Game) speaks about its connection to evolution. As the article says,

Mr. Wright and his publishers at Electronic Arts deserve all the credit they have received from some scientists merely for making a game about evolution (though it will be fascinating to see how the game fares among people who do not believe evolution is real).

This raises the interesting question as to whether this game can be used to actually teach evolutionary theory.

However, I am not sure just how much the game truly represents evolution as biologists think about it. Read the rest of this entry »

I leave for India tomorrow to participate in a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity being held in Bangalore from the 20th to the 22nd of August. The meeting is organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International Youth Foundation and “is designed to bring together education and education technology practitioners, scholars and experts, academicians and students for an exchange of ideas aimed towards creative approaches and solutions for technology use in teaching and learning.”

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