Punya Mishra's Web

I received an email yesterday from the State News (our local university newspaper) about what I thought of the 60 second lecture—a trend sweeping through online courses. Some of my first thoughts about this are below. Read the rest of this entry »

As the TPACK framework has developed and received greater research and scholarly attention there has been an increasing demand for a survey instrument that can help us measure TPACK. There are now two such measures available.
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Finally science has proved what I knew all along, doodling is a sign of an alert mind and may actually help memory!! Another justification for this, I guess.

If you love optical illusions you have to see this… just absolutely brilliant. The moment she pulls out the driver’s license is priceless. And of course the face / vase flip-flop at the end is cool too. Read the rest of this entry »

Mishra & Yadav (2006) was a paper based around my dissertation research. It took a while to get published and I am including it here for the record. My dissertation (Mishra, 1998) was maybe the first place where I made a specific mention of the triad of constructs: Technology, Pedagogy & Content that later developed into the TPACK framework. I must add that I used the word “learning theory” or “theory” in place of “pedagogy” in my dissertation. By the time this paper came out our key TPACK paper (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) was already in press – so this paper refers to our further crystallized thinking about these issues.

Mishra, P., & Yadav, A. (2006). Using hypermedia for learning complex concepts in chemistry: A qualitative study on the relationship between prior knowledge, beliefs and motivation. Education and Information Technologies. 11(1), 33-69. [Click link to download PDF.]

Abstract and an ambigram follow: Read the rest of this entry »

I have always been interested in how we use words to capture intangibles. For instance wine connoisseurs have developed a specialized language (which sadly is quite opaque to me) to explain to each other characteristics of wine. So the words “fruity” and “dry” have specific gustatory connections.

I was reminded of this on hearing this NPR story (Andrew Bird: Words As Instruments) about singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird. This is how he describes the goal of his latest album:

Bird says that his main focus while working on Noble Beast was to represent texture in his music.
“I think of like, when I was a kid, and I would get my Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass and throw myself down in a pile of mulch or something and go in there and pretend that I was microscopic,” Bird says. “I wanted to capture that kind of woody, mossy, decaying kind of sound.”

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Terri Gustafson has created streaming downloads of the presentation recently made by the TE150 (Reflections on Teaching, Reflections on Learning) Online team (see this for more context). The video can be seen in two parts:
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The entire TE150 team joined together to make a presentation to the College today as a part of the Online Teaching and Learning Colloquia. These sessions are sponsored by the MA-APPC, Center for Teaching and Technology, and the Center for the Scholarship of Teaching. Read the rest of this entry »

Does beauty transcend banality and inconvenience? If this story about a violin virtuoso, Joshua Bell, playing on the subway station is any indication, we do not have “a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written.” This of course leads to the more fundamental question, just “how many other things are we missing?” in the madness of our everyday existence. Read the rest of this entry »

A fascinating series of illusions to reveal just how complicated a phenomenon perception is. I was particularly impressed by the “rubber hand” illusion.

And then, from Gizmodo, comes the Yoshimoto cube. Words are not enough to describe what this mind-bending object can do, you just have to watch the video.
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As you know I am always intrigued by a new breed to personality analysis tools that are out there in the world (for instance see these prior postings: on PersonalDNA; on Color IQ; and browsing for gender). So here is this new website that seeks to analyze me by studying my blog.

Check out Typealizer… Entering my URL in there got me the following analysis:
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A couple of weeks ago I made a presentation (with Neeraj Buch) to a group of engineering educators from India. This was a meeting organized by the College of Engineering and the Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education. Having made this presentation once I had a better sense of what I should be talking about – and that is reflected in the new set of slides. You can download a pdf version of my slides here: Improving Engineering Education: The Past and the Future.

We Feel Fine is a web-installation, “a self-organizing particle system,” art project that is powerful and touching – building as it does on people’s emotions, harvested from blog postings from around the world. As the designers say, “We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.” It is worth a visit… Check it out

I had written previously (here and here) about the American Psychological Association’s long connection with torture and other coercive information gathering techniques. I am still bothered by it.

Today’s NYTimes has a op-ed by Stanley Fish (titled Psychology and Torture) about this very issue.
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The field of educational technology is littered by attempts to replace the teacher by creating some kind of a technological learning system that would make the teacher redundant. All such attempts have failed. This has, however, not prevented people from trying.

This is particularly true in India, where teacher recruitment, retention and most importantly quality are immense challenges. In such a context the idea that computers can replace teachers is quite attractive. For instance, the Azim Premji Foundation spent millions of rupees in developing curricular multimedia CDs that were distributed directly to students, sidestepping the teacher altogether. Their own research shows that this tactic did not work.

Now, for someone like me, who values what teachers bring to the table, this result may not be much of a surprise. It is interesting though to find that there really isn’t much research to support my position. Such research is difficult to do – and comparisons are hard to experimentally control and study. This is why I perked up when I saw an article in the latest edition of the journal Educational Technology Research & Development. Read the rest of this entry »

Malcolm Gladwell has a great essay in a recent New Yorker on the relationship between genius and age. It is popularly believed that genius is often tied up with precocity. There are two aspects to this. First, creativity requires the energy and brashness of youth. Think of Einstein publishing three key papers in 1905 at the age of 25, or Picasso, or Galois. Second, as a corollary to the first, once you cross a certain age there is no hope of a truly original idea.

Gladwell reports that there may be certain fundamental problems with this perceived connection between genius and age. He argues that there are two kinds of genius, the prodigies and the late bloomers, and that most of the attention has been paid to the former. Read the rest of this entry »

Neeraj Buch and I were invited to talk to a group of engineering educators from India. This was a meeting organized by the College of Engineering and the Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education. The topic I spoke about was was Improving Engineering Education: The Past and the Future [Download presentation PDF].

I do not understand David Brooks. Brooks is an op-ed columnist for the NYTimes. For the most part his columns are right-of-the-political wing nuttiness, garbed in some erudite clothing. I am not linking to them here but his past few op-eds suggesting that McCain would make a great president despite the shallow, erratic and negative campaign he has run have become somewhat repetitive and tiresome.

And then, once in a while, when I have just about decided not to read his columns any more, he throws out some really cool and interesting stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Koehler and I have often talked about the wicked problems of design and teaching with technology (most specifically in our handbook chapter on TPACK). We take the idea of wicked problems from a classic paper written by Rittel and Weber back in 1973. As Wikipedia says, Rittel was “a pioneering theorist of design and planning, and late professor at the University of California, Berkeley.” Rittel’s writings are often hard to get hold of since he published in a range of journals across multiple domains. Professor Ellen Do at Georgia Tech has created a webpage with links and downloadable PDFs of many of Rittel’s works. Check it out here.

… because scientific research shows that sleep enhances creativity

Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Adams, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. To appear in M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press. Read the rest of this entry »

If there is an IQ test for everything, why not one for color. This is Howard Gardner multiple intelligences run rampant. Check out the Color IQ test. BTW, my score was 27 (where 0 is a perfect score and 99 is as bad as you can get!). Irrespective of what you think of the test, I must say the interface for collecting the information is quite cool, similar to some of the survey techniques I had discussed in the personal DNA test.

Does it matter whether a brownie is served on a paper plate or on china? Is the Patagonian Toothfish less tasty than the Chilean Bass? In an earlier posting (perception of taste) I had cited research showing that wine with an expensive price tag was judged to be better than the same wine with a less expensive tag!
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How do you react to this flash animation?
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Very nice piece in today’s NYTimes about ballot design (How Design Can Save Democracy). The article offers a list of problems with the traditional ballot and suggests a solution. A good example of the value of information design. Check it out here

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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