Punya Mishra’s Web

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I had recently posted a note (It’s only a game…) building on some thoughts in an article by William Saletan. In this article Saletan describes how weapons are increasingly becoming like games. His recent post takes that whole thing one level further.
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… but what if real people die?

Excellent article by William Saletan on Slate about a new breed of war-toys that blur the line between video games and real war. As the article says, “if looks and feels like a video game. But it kills real people.” As it turns out, the company that designed these new tools, Raytheon actually hired game developers to design how these weapons would work. The result is “a user-friendly array of throttles, switches, and thumb controls.”
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A few months ago I wrote about Professor R. K. Joshi (here and here). He was, as I said in the piece, maybe the single greatest influence on my role as a teacher. I had mentioned that R.K. loved absurdity and play. I was reminded of this when I read about this group called Improv Everywhere. Check out their website and the kinds of crazy things they get into. Very cool.

R.K. often talked about similar things that he was involved in, mostly around poetry and typography. I know RK would have been pleased…

Learning through play has been an important part of my philosophy of teaching (and learning). In fact I have argued that play is far more important than games (though games have been receiving a great deal of educational interest lately). [You can read a previous posting about the relationship between play and games here.

Play in my mind (and in my teaching) if often connected with humor. As it turns out, recent research indicates that this connection has an evolutionary history. As this article argues, humor is a part of our "mammalian inheritance, and [is] closely related to rough-and-tumble social play.” Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago Sachin Kalbag, then at Digit, contacted me to write an article for a special for the magazine’s fourth anniversary issue. The topic at hand was Digital Convergence, what it is, and what does it mean for our future? 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 »

NYTimes article titled, Storming the Campuses on the next big thing on college campuses: GoCrossCampus! This new kind of a game (and game genre) has been described as Multiplayer Locally Social Gaming and the way it is spreading, it may soon need to add “Massively” to the front of that already clunky phrase, hence MMLSG!

My 8 year old daughter, Shreya, came to me the other day and said that she had designed a learning game. I asked her to draw it out for me and here is what she had created.

Some thoughts on play and games inspired by a recent article in the NYTimes Magazine titled “Taking Play Seriously“. Based on the article I argue that play is essential for learning… I also throw in some thoughts about the distinction between play and games, and why I prefer one over the other. Read the rest of this entry »