Punya Mishra is Associate Dean of Scholarship & Innovation and Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University (with an affiliate appointment in the Design School). As associate dean, he leads a range of initiatives that provides a future-forward, equity driven, approach to inter/trans-disciplinary educational research. He is internationally recognized for his work in educational technology; the role of creativity and aesthetics in learning; and the application of collaborative, design-based approaches to educational innovation. He has received over $11 million in grants; published over 200 articles and edited 5 books. With over 58,000 citations of his research, he is ranked among the top 2% of scientists worldwide and the top 50 scholars (top 10 in psychology) who have the biggest influence on educational practice and policy in the United States. An AERA Fellow (2024), TED-Ed educator (2023), he co-hosts the award-winning Silver Lining for Learning webinar as well as the Value Laden and Learning Futures podcasts. He is also an award-winning instructor, an engaging public speaker, and an accomplished visual artist and poet. More here…
Must reads
Webinars & Podcasts:
Value Laden (archived)
Apple | Spotify | Simplecast
Blog Posts
Metaphors, Minds, Technology & Learning
Note: The shared blogging experiment with Melissa Warr and Nicole Oster continues. This time we delve into metaphors of the mind, technology and generative AI. The core idea and first draft came from Melissa, to which I contributed a substantial rewrite. The final...
Who speaks for the university? Social fiction as a lens for reimagining higher education futures
Note: Image above created using Adobe Firefly, Photoshop and composed in Keynote. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of connecting with author Dr. Phoebe Wagner through the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. We discussed her...
Why are we surprised? Hallucinations, bias and the need for teaching with and about genAI
By Punya Mishra, Melissa Warr & Nicole Oster Note: This is the first post in an experiment at shared blogging by Melissa Warr, Nicole Oster and myself. Over the past months we have found ourselves engaged in some fascinating conversations around genAI, education,...
SITE 2024: A recap
The Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education (SITE) conference has been an integral part of my professional journey for over two decades. My first presentation at SITE was back in 2001 with Matt Koehler and through the years, SITE has played a pivotal...
AI in Education: Potentials, Perils & Policies
NORRAG, based at the Geneva Graduate Institute, is a global network focused on international education policy and cooperation, known for its commitment to addressing under-researched topics related to education quality and equity and amplifying voices from the Global...
Krishnamurti & Dewey in the Metaverse: Education & Experience in an Age of Virtuality
What does it mean to have an educative experience? As Dewey famously wrote: The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative ~ John Dewey Questions such as these come to...
The (Neil) Postman Always Rings Twice: 5 Questions on AI and Education
Note: This post has also been cross-posted on the Civics of Technology blog. Marie Heath (with whom I recently co-wrote a blog post about GenAI in Teacher Education: A techno-skeptical perspective) and I were invited to write a chapter for an edited volume titled...
Creative dialogue with Generative AI: Exploring the Possible with Ron Beghetto
As part of our ongoing series for the journal TechTrends exploring the intersections of technology, education, and creativity, we have recently turned our focus to the potential impacts of generative AI (GenAI) on these domains. Our latest article features a...
Generative AI in Education: Keynote at UofM-Flint
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to give a keynote at the Frances Willson Thompson Critical Issues Conference on Generative AI in Education. It was great to go back to Michigan even if for a super short trip. One of the pleasures of the visit was catching up with...
… or check out some random blog posts
Dewey meets Wong
David Wong is a colleague of mine at the College of Education and an avid John Dewey scholar. He also loves to fish. You can learn more about his work by going to his web site here. (I had earlier blogged about his work around visually representing ideas here and...
Student engagement in school, the tale of 2 graphs
Gallup recently released a poll on student engagement - and the main finding is that "the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become." As the post says: The Gallup Student Poll surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than...
The opposite of truth
Niels Bohr, the 1922 Nobel Laureate in Physics once said: The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth. I was reminded of this when I saw this TED video. Check it out... (h/t Andrew...
The Deep-Play Group & our robotic overlords
The Deep-Play research group started as an informal group of faculty and graduate students at Michigan State University, mostly my advisees. It has now grown to include Arizona State University and a couple of people there. Of course my advisees...
Into mindfulness & creativity
We have covered a wide range of topics in our ongoing series on creativity, technology and learning (in the journal TechTrends), including 30+ interviews with some of the top scholars in the field. More recently we have been trying to create a series of 2-4 articles...
TPACK @ PLP: cool webinars, great resource
Leigh Wolf pointed me to an fantastic resource for teachers and educators interested in learning more about TPACK. These are a series of online interactive webinars titled TPACK Fridays and are organized by the Powerful Learning Practice (plpnetwork.com). What is...
Visual thinking
While researching my previous post about véjà du and Abraham Wald I came across "The Back of the Napkin Blog" (a.k.a. Digital Roam). This blog is devoted to visual thinking and representation. Very cool and very interesting... well worth a visit. Turns out that there...
I can resist everything except temptation (or marshmallows)
Have you heard of the marshmallow experiment? It is a pretty famous experiment conducted at Stanford back in the 60's. Walter Mischel a psychologist conducted this experiment on four-year olds in which the children were given one marshmallow and promised a second...
Who wrote this poem?
Back when I was a graduate student I got bitten by the bug of palindromic poetry - poems that read the same when read backwards. This is consistent with my love for ambigrams and other kinds of symmetrical wordplay. I had posted them on the web a while ago and there...