Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

Someone once said that all design is redesign - and it has never been truer than trying to design your website. Read the rest of this entry »

Got back yesterday from a short, hectic but sweet trip to India. I had a wonderful time and still have a lot to do to just document all that happened and connect with all the people I met (hopefully over the next few weeks)… but now it is time to get back to fall semester business. I am teaching two courses this semester, CEP917, my doctoral seminar on design and, a new fully-online course, CEP817 CEP818 Creativity in Teaching & Learning. Of course, the online version of TE150 (jointly supervised by Matt Koehler) continues with Andrea and Tae as TA’s, and they seem to be doing a wonderful job.

I have been playing with an iTouch for the past few days and have have been quite impressed. What bothered me somewhat though was that my website (something I have spent hours designing) didn’t morph itself as gracefully as I would have liked into this new interface. But for every technological problem, there exists a technological solution (and vice versa)…
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Yesterday I met with Sanjaya Mishra, a scholar and researcher in the area of distance education. Sanjaya and I first met at the Vidyakash conference a bunch of years ago and we clicked almost immediately. I always enjoy meeting up with him when I am in Delhi, though it has been a couple of years since we last talked face to face.
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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 »

Our first family vacation in over three years! New Jersey to visit relatives, Delaware to visit friends, and New York city for the big city excitement! Hectic but great fun.

I took over 500 photographs, got back home and deleted around 200 of them - the remaining are now up on Flickr. Enjoy…

Koehler, Mishra & Yahya (2007) is an important paper in the TPACK related work for a range of reasons. The research captured in this paper actually predates the TCRecord (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) article, but the vagaries of publishing and journal waiting-lists led to this reversal of time-lines. This paper contains an extended analysis of design talk and presents an innovative representational scheme to capture the evolution of TPACK. Read the rest of this entry »

A re-edited version of the SITE 2008 Keynote address (by Matt Koehler and me) has been uploaded to the website. You can find the new version here. This presentation depended quite heavily on the exact synching of slide transitions to the audio - and the previous version messed that up here and there. More embarrassing was the fact that we had a typo on the very first screen of the previous version. Oops!

Anyway, all that has been fixed. Here’s the link (once again).

A few weeks ago I had blogged about my experiments with sketching on a Wacom graphics tablet. Here are more sketches I have created in the meanwhile. You can see them here as a webpage or view it as a slide show.

We got back home from SITE 2008 (Las Vegas) last night and there lots of things worth posting but this will have to be brief. The keynote presentation by Matt and myself went of quite well. It was a gamble, an attempt at a creative mashup of presentations styles “borrowed” from Steven Colbert, Larry Lessig and Dick Hardt, to convey our interest in TPACK and creativity. The final result was presentation consisting of 337 slides presented in under 45 minutes! Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

I have had a Wacom tablet for a while now but haven’t really gotten down to playing with it… till a couple of days ago. I started with rough drawings / sketches of friends and family. Take a look and let me know what you think…. You can click on the images to see larger versions on Flickr.

Soham	Jayni	Matt	Shreya	Smita

And just in case you think I drew these from scratch… not at all. All I did was trace over existing photographs.

I include below a copy of the AACTE Major Forum presentation (announcement here) that I made at New Orleans on Saturday, February 9. There were other things that I participated in (as listed here) and I will post about them later. Matt was supposed to do this talk (as part of our standard exchange program) but he fell sick and I had to end up doing this. I too the draft we had developed jointly and made two fundamental changes. First, was tweaking it to match my style of presentation, and second, I wanted to dedicate this talk to R. K. Joshi, maybe the most influential teacher I have ever had. The latter took a bit more work but I think I managed to pull it off so that this dedication would integrate smoothly with the other issues and look tacked on.

Joel Colbert introduces each of the presenters and we went in the following sequence. Read the rest of this entry »

R.K. Joshi
1936 - 2008

R. K. Joshi was a calligrapher, typographer, artist, type-designer, and teacher. He has been maybe the greatest influence on me and what I do as a designer and teacher. And I know I am not alone. He influenced a generation or more of designers in India and elsewhere.

I got to know RK (as he was known) when I was a student at the Industrial Design Center, at IIT Mumbai. Read the rest of this entry »

A journal article on games and gender, that has been years in the making is finally going to see the light of day! The complete reference and abstract can be found below. Drop me an email if you would like a copy.

Heeter, C., Egidio, R., Mishra, P., Winn, B., & Winn, J. (accepted). Alien Games: Do girls prefer games designed by girls? Games & Culture Journal. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote this essay a few years ago, around the time I was going up for tenure. I saw writing this as a welcome change from the usual academic stuff I had been writing. I was bored and tired of taking on this third-person, impersonal intellectual voice and just wanted to write something for the pleasure of it. I wanted it to be intellectually honest but not “academic.” In short I wanted to write something that I would like to read (and would enjoy writing). The result was this essay which was published in FirstMonday (after a year-long wait). Read the rest of this entry »

This piece was written sometime early 1996 when we were expecting our first child. I posted it to the web when we were expecting our second. It still reads well… Read the rest of this entry »

Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) for Educators, Edited by The AACTE Committee on Innovation and Technology
A Co-Publication of Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group and the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago I got bitten by the bug of Palindromic Poetry - poems that double back on themselves, that can be read this way, or that. This is consistent with my love for ambigrams and other kinds of symmetrical wordplay.

Take a look…