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...
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...
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...
As generative AI continues to reshape our world, we're faced with a crucial question: Will we repeat the mistakes we made with previous technologies or will this time be something different? George Santayana famously warned, "Those who cannot remember the past are...
It is natural, if you have been working in a field for a while, and have been somewhat successful, that some accolades will come your way, just by dint of being around long enough. As Bing Chat wrote, when asked to create a funny, self-deprecating profile of me in the...
Should we tip machines for the work they do for us? Does that question even make sense? What follows is a reflection on metaphors, technology, deceptive design, AI and more... Read on. Metaphors and more In her book God, Human, Animal, Machine, Meghan O’Gieblyn...
I am pleased to share our latest article in our ongoing column series for TechTrends on the topics of technology creativity and education. Over the past few months we have focused on generative AI, through conversations with thought leaders such as Chris Dede...
If oral cultures prioritize memory and print cultures emphasize systematic organization, what types of knowledge will AI systems foster? Marie Heath and I wrote this line in a chapter that is currently in press. But the idea underlying this quote has been with me for...
It seems no conversation about AI and education is complete without discussing the importance of the ethical use of the technology. There are numerous reports and academic articles about it (this and this and this ... I could go on and on). There is, however, one...
Since December 2008 we have been creating a video to welcome the new year. When we made our first video we had no idea that we would still be doing it 16 years later, and, frankly who knows how long we can keep it up. These videos are usually typographical in nature,...
A week or so ago I was joined by friends Sean Leahy, Rachna Mathur and Kellie Kreiser on the Learning Futures Podcast. The topic: looking back on a crazy, dynamic, transformative year of generative AI. As is to be expected, we covered a lot of ground in the...
Note: The image above is the result of a two-stage creative process—done in collaboration with AI. Dall-E was tasked, over multiple iterations, to craft a woodcut-style image, to abstractly capture the idea of AI and education, with dark and light motifs, aiming to...
The Five Spaces for Design in Education framework argues that design in education happens in 5 interrelated spaces: artifacts, processes, experiences, systems and culture. We have typically represented this as follows. Over the past years we have published and...
The Five Spaces for Design in Education framework argues that design in education happens in 5 interrelated spaces: artifacts, processes, experiences, systems and culture. We have typically represented this as follows. We, however, are also very aware that any...
I was recently invited as a guest on the Better Learning Podcast. I had a great conversation with the host, Kevin Stoller (and boy does he have a voice designed for audio!). Turns out that we both went to Miami University, though our paths didn't overlap or intersect....
A few weeks back, Sean Leahy – friend, tech aficionado, futurist, and the co-host of the Learning Futures Podcast – reached out to me via email with an intriguing proposal. He was playing with the concept of harnessing generative AI to craft Halloween stories. The aim...
I recently received an email from dean recommending this post titled Thoughts on Now and Then by Andrew Hickey. In this extended essay Hickey provides his thoughts on the new Beatles remake, Now and Then. The essay is a thoughtful and loving analysis of human...
In a previous post I explored some of the visual capabilities of ChatGPT. This is a continuation of those experiments, where ChatGPT helped me identify the date and time of a solar eclipse based on a photo I took decades ago, as a graduate student at the University of...
I have been blogging for 15 years now, but I have had a website for much longer than that. I built my first website back in 1998 just as I was graduating from UIUC and entering the academic job market. I still remember the URL (www.uiuc.edu/~pmishra). I designed a...
AI can now see! And talk to you about what it sees! ChatGPT released its latest upgrade - the ability to not just create images but also to interpret them. I had been waiting for a while now to get access to these new vision features - and just this morning it popped...
I was recently invited to present virtually at The Heart of Innovation Summer Summit, organized by the Heartland Area Education Agency in Iowa. The video of my talk can be seen below. Maybe my first serious keynote talk about generative AI and education. Enjoy...
Good design cares about details. Good design is humane. Bad design is neither. Designers must bring this attention to detail and humanity to every aspect of their work. And this applies even the invisible parts. This, caring for the "invisible" details, is captured in...
I found out about Vinit Masram's passing a week or so go. I did not know Vinit personally, having met him just once, at IDC's Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2020. But the news of his death hit me hard. I had been a fan of his work for a long time - having stumbled on...
Lovers of mathematics relish challenges, enjoying the manipulation of numbers and geometrical figures, seeking and creating patterns. Their fascination sometimes extends into language and other seemingly unrelated domains. An intriguing example of visual wordplay,...
Update (added March 17, 2024): There are a few more instances of using GenAI in creative ways that I would like to add to the list below, in particular 2 posts about using the the image analysis capabilities for ChatGPT: When AI can see and Total eclipse of the sun...
What is this thing called learning? What does it mean to learn something? What makes us want to learn? Why is it fun? Why do we want to know? Even as educators, we often don't take the time to ask ourselves these foundational questions. So it is rewarding when we get...
I had written earlier about a contest organized by Dark ‘n’ Light (an e-zine) around the theme of "IT TAKES TWO" and had shared some of my experiments, exploring this theme, using Generative AI. You can see my experiments at: It takes two: A scientific romp using AI...
Technology integration in teaching is deeply rooted in specific contexts. One could argue that contextual knowledge is of critical importance to teachers and the absence of it would limit, in significant ways, their effectiveness and success as an educators seeking to...
Dark 'n' Light is an e-zine that "explores science, nature, social justice and culture, through the arts and humanities." It is a labor of love by a small, dedicated team led by Susan Matthews, former legal and policy wonk, turned editor and podcaster. I came to know...
I have been playing with Photoshop Beta, a version of Photoshop with a range of AI-powered tools that let you add, extend, or remove content from your images using simple text prompts. This is similar to Adobe Firefly, a web-based image manipulation / generation tool,...