Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

In response to my previous posting titled How artists work, Leigh Wolf pointed out a book (Curious Minds: How a child becomes a scientist). I had not heard of this book before and a quick google search led me to this page. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine you are standing in front of a bathroom mirror; how big do you think the image of your face is on the surface? And what would happen to the size of that image if you were to step steadily backward, away from the glass?

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I had posted earlier about a “virtual speed bump” a visual illusion that make drivers think that they were approaching a speed bump when in actuality it was just a design cleverly painted on the ground. Now here’s another one: Directions in a car park… Read the rest of this entry »

Just found out about this rather nifty tool that looks at your browser history and estimates your gender. My personal results were as follows:
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Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken — Christopher Hitchens

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is no more. He was not an easy author to read - and the last time I read him was back in high school (or maybe college). But I remember them still. Read the rest of this entry »

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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Patrick Dickson just forwarded me an essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled The Sensuous Classroom: Focusing on the Embodiment of Learning [Subscription required]. In this article Suzanne Kelly, the author, bemoans the absence of the physical body from online classrooms. I beg to differ… Read the rest of this entry »

… 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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Optical illusions are usually seen as being cool visual tricks, an intriguing way of peeking into how our brain works. They have rarely been considered to be functionally useful. Here is an exception: an optical illusion seen as a virtual speed bump! Check it out…

In the context of my previous posting, here is an article that provides “a brief historical summary of the research into forms of coercive persuasion, primarily sensory deprivation, conducted 35 to 50 years ago, in which psychologists, psychoanalysts, and psychiatrists worked for the CIA and the Pentagon to understand these techniques.” See pdf of Psychology and Research into Coercive Interrogation by Dr. Jeffrey Kaye.

Martin Seligman is one of the most eminent psychologists alive today. As his wikipedia page says, “He is well known for his work on the idea of “learned helplessness”, and more recently, for his contributions to leadership in the field of Positive Psychology.” He has served as the president of the American Psychological Association (the most significant psychological association in the country) and has written numerous bestsellers in the area of positive psychology (a field he helped establish).

I was therefore saddened to learn that his name was mentioned in Jane Mayer’s recent book “The dark side: The inside story of how the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals.” as being involved with the administration’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques [Full disclosure: I have not read Mayer’s book, and base this posting on reviews and other web based resources.] Read the rest of this entry »

I just created a personalDNA map for myself. Turns out I am a Benevolent Inventor… beats being a benevolent dictator I say! However, this posting is concerned not with what the survey found out about me but rather about what I learned about the survey. Read the rest of this entry »

Browsing through Nikita Prokhorov’s website (see this posting about Nikita’s new blog about the process of creating ambigrams) led me to a fascinating article about how symbols and the historical weight they can carry. Read the rest of this entry »

I received an email out of the blue from Nikita Prokhorov, a freelance graphic designer and assistant professor of graphic design from Connecticut. Nikita runs a blog devoted ambigrams, but in a different kind of way. As the email said, the blog is “devoted to the art and process behind ambigrams. It’s not meant just to showcase ambigram work, but rather explore each artist’s individual process & approach to ambigrams.” What a great idea. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

There have been many requests for the first chapter of the TPACK Handbook (recently published by AACTE & Routledge). Below is the summary and a link to the pdf version.
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During my travel through Taiwan and Hong Kong, I usually opened my presentations with some bilingual ambigrams - words that can be read in Chinese AND English. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Warren Buckleitner, Ph.D., is a graduate of our Ph.D. program. He is editor of Children’s Technology Review, a periodical covering children’s interactive media and founder of Mediatech Foundation, a nonprofit technology center based in New Jersey. He also runs this awesome conference on games and learning called Dust or magic. This much I knew… Read the rest of this entry »