Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

I am trying to live blog the conference: Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity [Full agenda here]. Let us see how far I can keep this up.
Read the rest of this entry »

There is a somewhat troubling story in NYTimes a couple of days ago: (If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?) about CriminalSearches.com, a free service that lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United States! This is part of a growing trend of how technology removes / erodes people’s privacy. The creators of the system argue that they are doing nothing wrong, and that this information was always available anyway. “We are just trying to provide what’s already out there in an easier fashion, for free,” Mr. Lane said. “We think it’s pretty helpful to families.” However the potential for misuse is huge. Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s NYTimes story about an economist ranking art by the numbers (see A Textbook Example of Ranking Artworks) bothered me a bit. As the article says, David Galenson’s method is based not on the aesthetic qualities of the artwork but rather on “how frequently an illustration of a work appears in textbooks.” His method is simplicity itself, and I quote: He tallied the number of illustrations of each piece in the 33 textbooks he found that were published between 1990 and 2005, on the assumption that the most important works merited the most illustrations.” By this method he argues that Picasso’s, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as being ranked as number 1. There are two main concerns I have about this methodology. Read the rest of this entry »

My research and scholarship has mostly been in the area of educational technology - i.e. how to improve / facilitate learning through the use of technologies. David Brooks in his latest op-ed (The biggest issue) in the NYTimes flips this around somewhat. Citing research by Goldin and Katz he argues that over the past century there has been a “race between technology and education.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know that any email sent to barackobama@Gmail.com goes to an Indian software developer! Strange but true!

Teachers College Record chooses a couple of articles each week to offer freely to visitors to its website. These are featured in their email newsletter (TCRecord this week), and goes out to thousands of people. Imagine my surprise when I opened my newsletter a few minutes ago. Turns out that the article chosen this week is none other than the 2006 piece written by Matt Koehler and myself, Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge! That’s pretty cool.

Reuters story titled Technology reshapes America’s classrooms. Couple of quotes worth noting:

Read the rest of this entry »

A short and sweet trip to Hong Kong, one full day, two nights, fly in fly out. Read the rest of this entry »

Today was my presentation at the University Sains Malaysia. Read the rest of this entry »

I love Malaysia. I love its greenery, its up and down hilly landscape, the colors and designs of the houses, and yes the food. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been taking photographs as I travel around Asia (what I have previously described as my multi-national TPACK tour) and uploading them onto Flickr as and when I can. Read the rest of this entry »

I leave tomorrow (actually today, given that it is past midnight as I write this) on a multi-national TPACK tour. I touch 4 countries in around 2 weeks!! Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous post I talked about Pangea Day and the Imagine anthem series, where people from one country sing the national anthem of another. Here’s another one, France sings for the USA. Enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

NYTimes technology columnist, David Pogue, has a recent blog entry about Pangea Day, a global film festival coming up in a few days. As he says in his note: Read the rest of this entry »

Academic Analytics (academicanalytics.com) is a subscriber service that ranks specific PhD programs nationwide on a broad number of domains based on faculty productivity. The index takes account, for an academic year, of faculty program level productivity measures like publications (books and journal articles), citations of journal publications, federal research funding (NIH, USDE, etc.), and nationally recognized awards and honors (i.e., from APA, AERA, etc.). Read the rest of this entry »