The economist and thinker Andrew Scott once said something that blew me away. He said that: The 20th century created the idea of teenagers and retirement. I had never considered that the idea of teenagers and retirement was a 20th century idea. These seemed to...
S. Giridhar (Giri), Chief Operating Officer of Azim Premji University (APU) and I had a chance to chat for a Silver Lining for Learning side conversation. Giri is a good friend and we connect at multiple levels. We both went to the same undergraduate institution (BITS...
The Center for Science and the Imagination at ASU has a new series called Us in Flux. Every two weeks they publish a (super-short) short story that explores "themes of community, collaboration, and collective imagination in response to transformative events." They...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic8FHlawAdA Over the Memorial day long-weekend I just felt the need to create something to commemorate the 100,000 individuals, in the United States, who have lost their lives over the past few months to COVID19. That is a staggering...
It is rarely that I hear a talk that blows me away. We have all seen the TED talks, and their mutant offspring. The over-hyped music and catchy taglines; the speaker in front of a rapt audience; the crafted delivery with its carefully punctuated pauses and reveals,...
All of us involved in social design (and I include education in among those as well) ask ourselves, or are asked this question: How do we measure the impact of the work we do? This begs the question, why measure in the first place? Lord Kelvin, one of the greatest...
Essential tensions in design. Image designed by Punya Mishra Design facilitators play an important role in the open-ended collaborative design process. This becomes even more important as design based approaches expand to groups and teams that may not be as familiar...
The COVID19 crisis has disrupted education globally at an unprecedented scale. In some ways, we are living through the largest educational social experiment in history! Over the past year I have been involved in a range of initiatives, discussions, interviews, and...
Note: This is the second of two posts on the value of school by Kevin Close and Punya Mishra. Read the first post: What value do schools bring? Revisiting Accountability In the previous post we argued that schools play a varied and rich role in the economic, social,...
Note: This is the first of two posts on the value of school by Punya Mishra & Kevin Close. Read the second post: Revisiting Accountability. What value do schools bring? The accepted assumption is that schools are sites for learning and the role of educators to...
Kij Johnson, an award- winning author, editor, and Associate Professor in the University of Kansas’s MFA in Creative Writing program. In her teaching Kij brings some serious credibility as an artist, scholar, and all-around “uber-geek.” Kij has published three novels,...
Mike Crowley has a guest post on the silverlingingforlearning.org site titled: If we need to be right before we move. (If you haven’t read it, I recommend it strongly. Go ahead follow the link above. I’ll be waiting). [Pause] Welcome back. I think Mike makes some...
Is the Covid19 crisis the tipping point for online learning? As we wrote in our introduction to the Silver Lining for Learning webinar series …this crisis has forced schools and universities to close, pushing often unprepared institutions to move teaching and learning...
A week or so ago, Yong Zhao reached out to Chris Dede, Curt Bonk, Scott McLeod and me with the question: What would happen to our global and local educational systems, if the Corona virus outbreak lasted for a year? We met a week ago (via zoom, what else) to discuss...
- afternoon walklingering on the shore linetime for reflection - - Reflections © Punya Mishra. All photos taken with my iPhone, over the years. (published 2/27/20, revised with new photos 3/16/20) On Reflection: Haiku by Catherine from her website: Still Standing on...
This is the second of two posts on the topic of bringing principled innovation practices to designing learning futures. In this post (by Cristy Guleserian & Punya Mishra) we dive deeper into how these practices of PI connect with our model of design. In particular...
This is the first of two posts on the topic of bringing principled innovation practices to designing learning futures. The first post (co-authored by Punya Mishra & Cristy Guleserian) focuses on the need for designing learning futures, and how the PI practices...
Our college has embraced the idea of Principled Innovation as being a core value that informs everything we do. (More on this in this post by Cristy Guleserian and in the PI framework document). Defining Principled Innovation: Design by Punya Mishra At the heart of...
Theory is of incredible importance to scholars and researchers. Theories allow us to understand, explain and predict phenomena in the world. That said it is often difficult to say just where theories come from. The standard model—that data lead to laws, that in turn...
I have seen the power of the market… But when it becomes the only language, when it becomes the only way of thinking about the right thing to do, it leaves us with a very impoverished sense of how to live together -- Giriharadas, 2018 Over the past few years I have...
EduSummIT is a global community of policy-makers, researchers, and educators working together to move education into the digital age. EDUsummIT has been convening every two years since 2009. In each case the participants focus on some significant theme relevant to...
We are a busy group here up on the 4th floor of the Farmer Educational Building—the space where the teams from the Office of Scholarship & Innovation and Principled Innovation hang out. To be fair, we do more than just hang out. There is quite a bit of work...
Design is core to my identity, to who I am. Education is the space within which I function but I try to approach everything I do as a designer. This was not always the case. Back in 1984, I had just graduated with an undergraduate degree in engineering, and if there...
I just came across a quote from Alan Kay while browsing the web. Alan Kay is a programmer, educator, jazz musician and one of the key inventors of computing as we know it today. He received the A. M. Turning award (informally known as the Nobel Prize of Computing) and...
Quick summary: In which I disparage the buzzword "design thinking" even while praising the idea of design; point to the value-neutral nature of design and the need for a more principled approach, and end with a video that seeks to capture a vision of principled...
We, in the Office of Scholarship and Innovation (OofSI), have never been big fans of the typical interview and hiring process. We are not sure that the process helps us identify the right people, and more importantly, we find the process to be unnecessarily opaque and...
This past Monday was a special. That evening I was at Manitas School in Kyrene school district for the ribbon-cutting of the new school model we have been working on for the past two years. An important part of the evening was the reveal of the name of the new school...
I was cleaning out my drafts folder and came across this poem. I liked it. A lot. It has my sensibility. My sense of whimsy. But I DO NOT remember writing it. Nor do I remember finding it somewhere and copying it into an email. There is no author attributed - which...
Students in my EDT180 class spent some time yesterday writing short stories. Super short stories, trying to tell a complete story in just 55 words! As it turns this (55 Fiction) is actually a thing – as a simple google search will reveal. Seeing my students engage in...
Anyone who works in the area of social design knows how important it is to develop a systems-oriented mindset and how difficult it is to do so. One one hand, we know that sustained change is possible only when we work at the level of systems not individuals and...