Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

I have often wondered, while watching sports movies, particularly the ritual prayer scene before the big game, as to who is god rooting for? I mean, surely the other team is invoking god as well? So how does god decide? And if one team wins does that mean their god is stronger or their faith more deeply held?

I was reminded of all this by reading online that a pastor at a recent McCain rally said the following (see this for a report AND an mp3 version)

I also would also pray, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their god–whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah–that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you will guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their God is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and election day.

This just seems silly and mis-conceived at multiple levels. Read the rest of this entry »

… was born on the 7th of October, to Amol and Kanchan. [Amol was my partner in crime in the making of Hari Puttar!] We went to visit her yesterday and I took some pictures. Enjoy.

View all the pictures

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.

Patrick Dickson sent me this link to an article on Boston.com titled Scenes from India. As the article says:

India is home to over 1.2 billion people of wildly varying religions, cultures and levels of wealth…. Though there’s no possible way for these images to be comprehensive, here are some recent photos of scenes in India. (34 photos total)

Indian Tourism department slogan “Incredible !ndia” holds true….

Sanjay Patel is an animator at Pixar and has come up with a beautifully designed book about Indian gods and goddesses. Read the rest of this entry »

The surprise gift I received a couple of days ago was from Nidhi Seth, founder director and CEO of Global Academic Zone, someone I had met at Bangalore at the Quest Alliance Educational Technology Conference. I just received an email from her.. and got a chance to personally thank her.

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

Jugaad is a Hindi word which does not have a straight forward equivalent in English. I guess the closest phrase I would say would be “situational or indigenous creativity,” the ability to make do creatively with the tools/resources one has at hand.

On Jugadu.com I came across a pretty good definition:

Jugaad refers to an improvised or jury-rigged solution; inventiveness, ingenuity, cleverness. It means creative improvisation and finding alternative ways of doing improbable things. It reflects on a person’s ability to think out of the box and optimize resources in the best possible way.

This is a great example…; Read the rest of this entry »

Just heard this in a talk by Sugata Mitra, titled Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?

Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer …. should be! — Arthur C. Clarke

See the entire video…

… it will.

We have all see CAPTCHA’s (aka Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). They are images with somewhat garbled text on them that websites used to tell humans from automated programs. The idea is to prevent prevent accounts being created until a user correctly identifies letters in an image - something computers have a hard time doing. Read the rest of this entry »

Just got an email from a fellow Mishra (no relationship, at least I don’t know of any), Dr. Mahendra Mishra who works as the state tribal education coordinator in my home state of Orissa as a part of it’s Primary Education Program (more at www.opepa.in). Read the rest of this entry »

The NYTimes has a story (For the Advanced in Age, Easy-to-Use Technology) about companies that are creating tools that are “helping those in their 60s maintain their youthful self-images.” 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 »

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.

Day 2 ended with my meeting KHari (aka Chairman) and Rags (aka Chore) - two BITS batchmates, whom I hadn’t met in almost 18 / 20 years. It was great catching up with them - but what that meant was that by the time I got back to my room I was totally exhausted and didn’t get to work on my workshop…
Read the rest of this entry »

I just starred in a movie!
Read the rest of this entry »

I just completed my presentation Education Technology and Teacher Education, the TPACK framework. I think it went well, though you have to talk to ask the audience what they “really” think.
Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago, as a part of our PT3 project Matt Koehler, Ken Dirkin and I video taped a series of teacher interviews around authentic problem solving in teaching using technology. The teachers were winners of the TAPS (Technology in Authentic Problem Solving) award, an award given by MACUL and MSU. Over the past few months Ken has been working on creating a website to make these videos more accessible.
Read the rest of this entry »

The last session of the day was led by Dr. Nancy Law, Director, Centre for Information Technology in Education, University of Hong Kong. Her session was titled Using ICT to support learning: lessons learnt from international studies
Read the rest of this entry »

Geetha Narayanan, Director Mallya Aditi International School and Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, is someone I have wanted to meet for a long time. One of the pleasures of of this conference is getting an opportunity to hear her speak … and I was not disappointed.
Read the rest of this entry »