Punya Mishra's Web

I just read this wonderful essay by UCLA professor Peter Nonacs titled: Why I Let My Students Cheat On Their Game Theory Exam. In this essay he describes an experiment he recently conducted in his game theory class. This is what he told his students a week before the final exam for the class:

… I told my class that the Game Theory exam would be insanely hard—far harder than any that had established my rep as a hard prof. But as recompense, for this one time only, students could cheat. They could bring and use anything or anyone they liked, including animal behavior experts. (Richard Dawkins in town? Bring him!) They could surf the Web. They could talk to each other or call friends who’d taken the course before. They could offer me bribes. (I wouldn’t take them, but neither would I report it to the dean.) Only violations of state or federal criminal law such as kidnapping my dog, blackmail, or threats of violence were out of bounds.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last June I had posted a note (Teacher as filmmaker: An update from down under) about the iVideos created by students from the University of Technology, Sydney (under the guidance of Dr. Matthew Kearney). iVideos or “idea videos” are short films often 2 minutes (or less) in duration in which a student explores an important issue in K-12 education.

The idea of iVideos connects with a couple of strands of work that I have been involved in. These include, the TPACK framework, and the learning by design approach. We have written about this in a variety of articles but the specific one that Dr. Kearney points to is:

Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Siebenthal, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. In M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press.

In this article we argue that there is great value in having teachers engage in such creative, design tasks since it allows them to “transform ideas and practice by immersing themselves in deep pedagogical consideration of subject-matter, significance, audience, learning, epistemology, and aesthetics.” Some evidence of this comes from a blog post by Dr. Kearney, based on his experience of having his students create their own iVideos. He says that,

We noted a high degree of emotional investment, motivation and interest in these tasks amongst our student teachers and postulate that these outcomes were a catalyst in their TPACK development. [You can read the entire blog post here.]

As in the previous year, Dr. Kearney’s students have been busy working on working on a new set of videos for 2011. In this years edition students created iVideos in three main areas related to the use of ICT in education. These topics include, Teacher professional learning; Curriculum; and Social, Ethical, Legal and Equity issues around ICT. There are over 2 dozen videos on the site and you can access them by going to

http://sites.google.com/site/teacherivideos/

Incidentally, you can see last year’s videos by following this link

http://sites.google.com/site/teacherivideos/2010-ivideos

Click the links above to see the these iVideos and, if possible, take a moment to write a comment or response to the videos. It will take you just a few minutes of your time but I know this will be greatly appreciated by the students.

Unoriginal

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.” – Jim Jarmusch

More Jim Jarmusch quotes here. Nice design of a layout for this quote here. Photo credit Emily Smith from flickr.

I have been tracking the Hitler-Downfall parodies for over two years now and it seems that they keep getting better and better. But over the last few days comes the news that Constantin films, which owns the rights to the original movie asked YouTube to find and take down every video that included a clip from the film. So the parodies have been vanishing from YouTube, which is a tragedy for creative freedom and the the right to create and disseminate parodies. This was one of the funniest Internet memes, capable of delivering pitch-perfect commentary on everything from Hillary Clinton’s loss in the Democratic Primaries, to the fact that the iPad did not have a camera! Farhad Manjoo has a great article about this meme (and links to a couple of awesome parodies), titled: YouTube vs. Der Führer

One of the interesting points he makes about the Content ID technology that YouTube uses to identify copyright infringement. As he says:

At its heart, Content ID is like a souped-up version of the FBI’s fingerprinting database. The entertainment industry keeps sending YouTube new reference files for movies, TV shows, songs, video games, and other content. YouTube scans every new upload and the millions of videos in its database against each of these files. David King, a YouTube product manager, told me that the system can find extremely fuzzy matches. It can spot when a copyrighted video has been transformed in some way by an uploader—for instance, it can finger a basketball game even if you pause, rewind, and then replay a clip from it, and it can identify Eric Cartman if you record a clip of  South Park by holding your camera up to your TV.

How amazing is that! Also Manjoo points out that one of the smartest things that Constantin films could have done is take advantage of this free publicity to run advertisements for the original movie/DVD. As Manjoo says,

Constantin never bothered to exercise its rights to run ads on the Downfall clips… according to YouTube, the vast majority of content owners who take part in Content ID are now recouping revenue from videos rather than pulling them down. Constantin would have earned a lot of money—not to mention avoided a lot of bad publicity—had it done the same thing.

It appears that some of the clips have started coming back, as users complain about their videos being taken down. YouTube policy automatically posts videos back if a copyright infringement claim is contested.

Personally, this has been a video / remix that has already given me hours of entertainment. It is a simple idea but with great potential and a wonderful example of the creative possibilities of giving people the opportunity to appropriate, mix and publish media.

Steven Johnson has a great essay on the future of text title: The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book.

I recommend reading the full thing but here is a quote that sort of captures his vision (though there is more, much more). Here is a great quote:

WHEN TEXT IS free to combine in new, surprising ways, new forms of value are created.

In another section he speaks of the page that results when you do a Google search for the word “journalism.”

Who is the “author” of this page? There are, in all likelihood, thousands of them. It has been constructed, algorithmically, by remixing small snippets of text from diverse sources, with diverse goals, and transformed into something categorically different and genuinely valuable. In the center column, we have short snippets of text written by ten individuals or groups, though of course, Google reports that it has 32 million more snippets to survey if we want to keep clicking. The selection of these initial ten links is itself dependant on millions of other snippets of text that link to these and other journalism-related pages on the Web. Along the right side of the page, we have short snippets of text written by five advertisers, mostly journalism schools as it happens, though they are in a silent competition with other snippets of text created by other advertisers bidding to be on this page. And then we have the text in the search field, created by me, which summons this entire network of text together in a fraction of a second.

What you see on this page is, in a very real sense, textual play: the recombining of words into new forms and associations that their original creators never dreamed of. But what separates it from the textual play that I was earnestly studying twenty years ago is the fact that it has engendered a two hundred billion dollar business.

In his article Is Google making us stupid? the author Nicholas Carr takes Sergi Brin to task for something he had said in a 2004  interview with Newsweek. Brin is quoted as saying “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

What is the relationship of information technology and cognition? What about human creativity? What role does technology play, if any, in getting us to be less or more creative? Read the rest of this entry »

Image Credit Leeks

As readers of the blog know, Matt Koehler and I work together quite a lot. In fact we just rotate author-order in our papers since it is hard to keep track of individual contributions. (I would like to claim that the cool ideas are mine – but again he is bigger and stronger than me so I don’t often do that, at least not any more.) We are also huge fans of Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (which consists of 4 books, something that makes perfect sense if you have ever read Adams). Anyway, a bunch of years ago we decided that we needed to act on our love for this man, and his writings, by citing him in an academic paper. To our great pride, we did it! In fact we started the article with a citation to Adams.

Read the rest of this entry »

I guess ’tis the season of Math-Po’s! Sue VanHattum, whose challenge started all this, commented on my recent Math-Po (Math-Po (Mathematical Poetry): Goldbach’s Conjecture) by providing an example of her own writing, a poem titled Imaginary Numbers Do the Trick. That piece so inspired me that I spent the next hour (and a good part of a faculty meeting), writing one on the same idea. A close read of both these poems (hers and mine) will reveal that I was more than inspired… some phrases and words from Sue’s work insinuated themselves into my pre-frontal cortex and ended up in my poems. As they say, plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery. Read, The Mathematical i, after the cartoon…

Read the rest of this entry »

Patrick Diemer commented on my previous posting, All you can cheat, the web & learning by saying:

Do you have any words of wisdom or resources on how to create appropriate questions? This sounds great, but easier said than done in my humble opinion.

I started writing a response to his comment, but as I wrote on, I realized that it was better as a post in its own right. So here it is…
Read the rest of this entry »

I am in Chicago to give the Keynote address at the 2009 DePaul University Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference. The conference theme this year is Engaging Minds: Pedagogy and Personalism. I was invited by Sharon Guan (she was part of the AACTE Innovation & Technology Committee that edited the TPACK handbook). The title of my talk is Blurring the Boundaries, The Personal and the Professional in a Webbed World. Here is a brief description of what I will be talking about

Dr. Punya Mishra of Michigan State University asks DePaul faculty to consider the role of the professor’s identity (or persona) in course design. What are the challenges, benefits –and limits — of bringing personal experiences, values and interests into one’s teaching? We want our students to see us as “being knowledgeable yet accessible, wise but funny, cerebral but warm, benevolent and yet firm.” How can we do this in an age where we are increasingly communicating via electronic media that alter, extend and/or challenge the teacher’s identity?

I guess this is the final update on the David Jiles, Ph.D. plagiarism saga. Those of you who came in late can get the complete picture by starting from David Jiles, Ph.D., Creativity Expert, Plagiarist!

The sequence continued as follows: Emailing a plagiarist | Plagiarism, note to Root-Bernstein’s and Creativity Portal | David Jiles plagiarism issue, update | Plagiarism, update II | Update III | Update IV | Update V

This has been an interesting experience – both in terms of tracking these issues down and seeing people’s responses to my blogging about it. Some quick updates: Read the rest of this entry »

Here is an email from Rita Selle-Grider, of Young Bright Minds & Inventors Academy. I have spoken about her response (which I admired, contrasting it with some of the other responses I have been getting).
Read the rest of this entry »

Chris from Creativity Portal dropped off a “strong” message to me on my website (see it here).
Read the rest of this entry »

David Jiles Ph.D.’s book is no longer available on the Lulu.com website. Another example of delete and hope the world will forget that I didn’t do my homework. See here and here for more on this issue.

Just heard back from Innovation Tools. They are changing the status of the articles by Dr. Jiles to “not visible” till, as they say, “the matter is settled.” Read the rest of this entry »

An update on the ongoing saga of David Jiles, Ph.D. For context see this.

(Please note the David Jiles referred to in these posts is NOT Professor David Jiles of Iowa State University and Cardiff University.) 
Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some emails (for the record) that I have sent recently to the Root-Bernstein’s (the authors of Sparks of Genius) letting them know of how their intellectual property has been stolen by David Jiles, Ph.D. Details in my original posting: David Jiles, Ph.D., Creativity Expert, Plagiarist.

Also are copies of emails that went to websites that have posted these plagiarized works.
Read the rest of this entry »

I am sending the following email to David Jiles, Ph.D. whose plagiarism I have documented in this posting: David Jiles, Ph.D., Creativity Expert, Plagiarist.
Read the rest of this entry »

I do not know who David Jiles, Ph.D. is. I do know that he is a plagiarist, an intellectual crook and a thief of the highest order!
Read the rest of this entry »