Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

I just starred in a movie!
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Today’s NYTimes has a story Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod about universities handing out iPhones and iTouchs to freshmen. A part of this may be making specific universities look “cool” to their incoming students - a requirement in the highly competitive world of university selection. But as can be expected, some faculty are not amused.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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I have blogged previously about the challenges faced by higher education (here and here), exacerbated (or maybe revealed) by new technologies. Here is an essay by Charles Murray — not a person I thought I would ever cite approvingly
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Just found out about Dimdim (bad name!) from Manas Chakrabarti’s blog, At Any Rate. Dimdim is an opensource, free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees. Hmm… Wonder if I can use this in the creativity course (Mike are you listening?).

The next session State of ET in India Today and was led by fellow BITSian Manas Chakrabarti (now an independent consultant).
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During Dr. Jalaluddin’s keynote I took some time to search online for some reports, prompted by what he had been saying. (Yes I was listening not just browsing). Read the rest of this entry »

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.
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I leave for India tomorrow to participate in a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity being held in Bangalore from the 20th to the 22nd of August. The meeting is organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International Youth Foundation and “is designed to bring together education and education technology practitioners, scholars and experts, academicians and students for an exchange of ideas aimed towards creative approaches and solutions for technology use in teaching and learning.”

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… or just narrow?

I just discovered Britannica blog, a pretty lively virtual space for intelligent discussion. How I had not come across it earlier is a mystery - but again that is the beauty of the web.

Anyway, there is an ongoing discussion there about how the web influences what we do. A provocative argument (based on data) being put forth by James Evans is regarding the influence of the availability of electronic resources on the research process.
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I had posted about this really cool video I recently found (see Life is about editing). Behold my surprise when one of the comments on the blog was from none other than Allee Willis (see her wikipedia page here, and personal website here). Read the rest of this entry »

A recent story in the NYTimes about Peter Gabriel (An Old Rocker Gets Digital) brought back memories of Peter Gabriel’s album covers. It tells you a lot about me that I know album covers better than I know his music!
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A fun and thought provoking, recursive music video by Allee Willis titled “Editing is Cool.” The video attempts to capture the process of creating this very video, from the lyrics, to the music to the special effects and so on. Denise Caruso (at Salon) quotes Allee Willis as saying, “… you can see every single stage of the song and video coming together, along with work logs and lyrics and lots more.”
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I have been playing with an iTouch for the past few days and have have been quite impressed. What bothered me somewhat though was that my website (something I have spent hours designing) didn’t morph itself as gracefully as I would have liked into this new interface. But for every technological problem, there exists a technological solution (and vice versa)…
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Over the past few weeks I have noticed that some webpages I visit have banner ads that are targeted to me quite specifically - in particular to my Indian origin. 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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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 »