A great honor: 10 most influential people in Ed Tech

by | Monday, May 30, 2011

I just found out that I made “The Big 10: The Most Influential People in EdTech for 2011.” This list is created by the Tech & Learning journal—a magazine for Ed Tech leaders. This news came  as a total surprise to me since I did not know that I was even in the running for something like this. The June issue, which has this as a cover story, will be out in a few days though you can access it on the web (link below). Here’s the cover, and that’s me on the first row (second from the left).

The other nine people are really some of the biggest names in the business. They inclue, Doug Levin, Karen Cator, Greg Festa, Ann Thompson, David Warlick, John Kao, Salman Khan, Jonathan Ive and the Apple design team, and the Google for Educators developer team! Even as I type these names, I wonder if there has been a mistake in including me in this list. How did this list come to be? This is how the note from the editor describes the selection process:

Who has the biggest influence over your career? Your first instinct is most likely to point to a boss or a colleague, or maybe even your students. But there are other people out there, far removed from your everyday business in classrooms and administration offices, who are creating new devices, crafting policy, and pursuing far-out ideas that will ultimately have a huge effect on how you do your job.

These are the understated yet significant men and women picked for this year’s most-influential list (“The Big 10,” page 33) in a survey of readers and advisors plus a dash of editorial privilege. We believe that these men and women will profoundly change the way we think about learning in school, how we use technology to effect that change, and how we incorporate policies that make that change nationwide.

It is indeed a great honor to make this Big 10 list, and I am humbled and grateful to the editors and people who proposed my name and voted for me. I hope I will be able to live up to this recognition.

To top it all they got a professional illustrator to create pretty cool cartoons of each of the people on the list. I think mine came out pretty good 🙂

You can find the magazine online (PDF version) here.

 

Topics related to this post: Uncategorized

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Google ranking, a self defeating approach

Matt Koehler has an interesting post (Keeping track of the Koehlers) about his attempts to rise in Google's rankings for searches on his last name. In the last few months he seems to have had some success judging that he has moved from page 25 to somewhere in the 3-4...

The KISS principle & weather

Keep It Simple Stupid is one of those adages you hear lots of times, but here is a website that has truly taken it to heart. See how an online weather related website can be taken to its logical, simplest extreme. Check out Umbrella Today?

A pome a day

Greg Casperson is a graduate student in our Ed Psy & Ed Tech program. He has been engaged, over the past few months, in the most interesting experiment. He carefully selects and posts to his website one poem every day! Greg's RSS feed has become one of the first...

Creative teachers study cited by neaToday

Danah Henriksen and I recently published a paper in TCRecord titled:We teach who we are: Creativity in the lives and practices of accomplished teachers. More details of the paper and link to download it can be found on this page: Creativity & Teaching, new article...

Keep TPACK clean 🙂

I came across this sign when I was in India recently and I just HAD to take a picture of it. Click on the picture for a larger version Of course, much of the effect comes from the inadvertent yet appropriate peeling of the paint from the letter "R." But fun...

The Innocent

I first read Ian McEwan many years ago (in the 80's I think) when he wrote grim and macabre novels and short stories, full of strange dark humor. I found him somewhat interesting but not enough to seek out his books. And then, years later, this past fall I read...

Deconstructing TV news

The video below has been getting a lot of attention on the blogs lately, and despite that it is pretty good. No kittens riding skateboards or mentos and Coke here. Just a beautifully constructed take down of TV News. A must see for all media literacy courses. Check it...

The media debate, politically speaking

There is a recurring debate in the ed-tech community about if media make a difference. One argument is that media is akin to a conveyance system bringing in supplies (content). At some level it doesn't matter if the content is brought by a truck or a train, a bullock...

Summer Institute for Superintendents, presentation

I was recently invited to present at the 2009 Summer Institute for Superintendents at the beautiful  Crystal Mountain Conference Center in Thompsonville, Michigan. The yearly institute, which began in 1999, is co-sponsored by the MSU College of Education and the...

16 Comments

  1. Ajay Sharma

    Just learned about it.Very cool! Congratulations, Punya. As others have said, you definitely rock!

    Reply
  2. Payal Arora

    fantastic news… not surprised though!

    Reply
  3. dheera

    congratulations …….

    Reply
  4. Josh Rosenberg

    Punya you rock! The site I developed for Learning Through Design is rocking… http://www.studybio.com

    I’m considering designing sites for other teachers.

    Josh
    twitter.com/jrosenberg6432

    Reply
  5. Lynn

    You have a halo!!!

    Reply
  6. Bob Reuter

    WOW! That’s great news! I personally can only confirm that it was a good choice to include you in this list… because your TPACK papers have substantially and deeply changed my theoretical views and my teaching practices… Thanks for making many things clearer to me and my colleagues!

    Reply
  7. Prakash Unakal

    Congrats!!

    Reply
  8. Marion

    Congratulations punya

    Reply
  9. Pankaj jhunja

    Congratulations, on this achievement

    Reply
  10. Sean Nash

    Wow. This is very very cool. It took me a while to figure out why they would paint a halo behind your head. I mean, you always seemed like a super guy to me, but… I had no idea it was that extensive.

    Then I realized TPACK. Got it now. Not sure why I was so bubble-headed myself.
    😉

    What an awesome honor. I’d ask for an autograph, but you don’t ask a guy who has been a guest blogger in your space to do such a thing. Actually, your digital signature is already there. Cheers!

    Reply
  11. benoy mishra

    wonderful.

    Reply
  12. benoy mishra

    woderful.

    Reply
  13. pratima

    Hey Punya, congratulations!

    Glad to read this news. Keep it up good work and best wishes for the future.

    Pratima

    Reply
  14. raj

    WOW, Punya,,, Cant say much more.. Keep it up.. I am sure you deserve it.

    Regards,

    Raj

    Reply
  15. Saikat Mandal

    Congratulations Sir. I am very Happy to have you as my Guide.!!

    Reply

Leave a Reply to raj Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *