https://punyamishra.com/blog
31 posts
Writing 35% · Culture 23% · Tech 19% · Life 10% · Science 10% · Politics 3%
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How many students feel pride in the work they are made to do for school? My guess is very few. Pride if anything comes from the final grade not the work itself. The work too often is just meant to be seen by the teacher. I have been thinking about this idea of pride in […]
I thought I was done with this series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. Earlier posts explored, how this project started, the method, the role of wonder and beauty, the craft, how scientists think, what keeps them going and how they deal with not knowing, what shaped these scientific […]
This is the last post in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. Earlier posts explored, how this project started, the method, the role of wonder and beauty, the craft, how scientists think, what keeps them going and how they deal with not knowing and what shaped these […]
This post is long overdue. I was in Bangalore, back in December 2025, for the Quest 2 Learn Summit organized by the Quest Alliance. Quest and I go back to 2008, when I first attended one of their conferences. Our paths have kept crossing since: the Quest to Learning conference in 2018, conversations about youth […]
The latest installment of the Rethinking Technology & Creativity column in TechTrends is published. This one, co-authored with Danah Henriksen, is called “The Mirror and the Black Box: AI Metaphors and What They Mean for Learning.” (Full citation and link below.) The core question is deceptively simple: what metaphors do people reach for when they […]
Danah Henriksen and I have a chapter in the Third International Handbook of Educational Change (2026), edited by A. Lin Goodwin, Andy Hargreaves, Victoria Showunmi, Corrie Stone-Johnson, and Jennie Weiner. In our chapter, “The Classroom and Beyond: Teacher Education in a GenAI World,” we explore what it means to prepare educators for a technology that […]
This is the seventh in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. T Earlier posts explored, how this project started, the method, the role of wonder and beauty, the craft, how scientists think, and what keeps them going and how they deal with now knowing. This one steps […]
This is the sixth in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. Earlier posts explored, how this project started, the method, the role of wonder and beauty, the craft and how scientists think. This one is about what keeps them going—and the very different ways they live with […]
A week or so ago I wrote a letter to Richard Dawkins — part tribute, part diagnosis — about his now-famous two-day conversation with Claude (or rather, “Claudia”), in which one of our most celebrated skeptics concluded that the chatbot might well be conscious. The letter was personal. Dawkins shaped how I think, and watching […]
Earlier this year, the University of Glasgow held its first International Symposium on AI in Education, organized by the School of Education and the Centre for Teaching Excellence. I was invited to give the keynote. The catch: I was in Arizona. Mark Peart, Gabriella Rodolico, (the organizers of the conference) and I came up with […]
“Students aren’t great at asking questions well.” This was Kristen DiCerbo, Khan Academy’s Chief Learning Officer, in a recent Chalkbeat article. She was offering her explanation for why Khanmigo hadn’t lived up to its promise. I was reminded of a story about the physicist and Nobel laureate Isidor I. Rabi, who was once asked, “Why […]
Facebook!!! How it has changed over the years. I remember the time when it was a space to connect with friends and family, get their updates and more. It was a bit performative, for sure, but it still felt like a space worth visiting once in a while, to check in. All that is long […]
Note: Richard Dawkins made the news recently with an essay describing his two-day conversation with Claude, the AI chatbot from Anthropic, ending in the conclusion that Claude must be conscious. There have been many responses; this is mine — partly about that interaction, but more about what Dawkins has meant to me. There are some […]
Tech bans, and calls for more of them, are in the air. The Los Angeles Unified School District just banned screens. Australia banned social media for everybody under 16 years of age. Other districts and states are following, or weighing whether to do so or not. That was the theme of our latest AIR|GPT meetup. […]
This is the fifth in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. Earlier posts explored the origin of the project, the method, wonder and beauty, and craft. This one is about something that surprised me in the data: these scientists don’t just study different things. They think in […]
I recently was a guest on Bob Greenberg’s Brainwaves Video Anthology, a remarkable project that since 2014 has grown into an archive of over 2,500 conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers of our time. Bob’s mission of making the “best and brightest” minds freely accessible is admirable and I was happy to contribute […]
This is the fourth in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. The first post told the origin story. The second described the method. The third explored wonder and beauty—the spark that draws people into science. This one is about what happens next: the encounter between beautiful ideas […]
Last summer, digging around in an old Dropbox folder, I stumbled across a Kant quote I had used in a comprehensive exam back when I was a graduate student, almost three decades ago: “Concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind.” That quote, together with a conversation with Raaghav Pandya about a lovely, […]
This is the third in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. The first post told the story of the transcripts. The second described the method. This one is about where science begins: in wonder. And what happens when wonder meets beauty. 03: Wonder and beauty in scientific […]
Two pieces crossed my feed recently, both about Sal Khan and the AI tutoring revolution that wasn’t. The first was Matt Barnum’s reported piece in Chalkbeat, where Khan himself acknowledged that Khanmigo, the AI chatbot tutor he launched three years ago with world-changing ambitions, was “a non-event” for most students. “They just didn’t use it […]
Danah Henriksen and I recently wrote a paper, currently in press, titled “The Mirror and the Black Box: AI Metaphors and What They Mean for Learning.” It’s about how the metaphors we choose for AI shape what we can and can’t think about it. The paper traces a continuum of metaphors and concludes by asking […]
Sometimes you do a project and think it’s done. You archive it, link to it from your blog, and move on. And then, years later, it finds a second life you never anticipated. A few years ago, during the pandemic, I was part of one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve been involved with. Working […]
This is the second in a series of posts about the human side of science, based on interviews with 27 leading cosmologists. The first post told the story of how these transcripts came to exist. This one describes how they were analyzed. How the analysis was done I should confess something upfront. Everywhere I go, […]
I was of three minds,Like a treeIn which there are three blackbirds.—Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” I thought of Stevens’s three minds earlier today when I looked at my calendar for the upcoming week. That’s what I usually do on Sundays, just making sure there are no surprises coming up. And […]
SITE is my conference. It has been for years now, and not being able to attend this year’s meeting in Philadelphia was bittersweet, to say the least. But even though I couldn’t be there in person, our team had a strong presence, and that’s what matters. A huge shoutout to Lindsey McCaleb for stepping up […]
This is the first in a series of posts about the human side of science, based on interviews with 27 leading cosmologists. The series explores what drew these scientists to the universe, how they think, what drives them, and what shaped their paths. 01: How this series began Sometime around 2013, I did something I […]
In this episode of Digital Education Dialogues, the discussion centers on the intersection of AI, teacher training, and the future of educational innovation. It was fun to be a guest on a show run by Chris Dede, since we are usually co-hosts on Silver Lining for Learning. Chris along with is co-host Waleed Al Ali, […]
I recently wrote a post about my son Soham, aged two, replacing words in the Humpty Dumpty poem with a nonsense sound (“Dampuni”) and what that small act of linguistic mischief reveals about play, evolution, and how children learn. I thought I was done with it. I was not. The story kept nagging at me. […]
When my son Soham was about two, we used to sing nursery rhymes together. He knew them well, I knew he knew them and most importantly, he knew that I knew that he knew them. That last part is critical. Anyway, one evening I decided to start Humpty Dumpty. “Soham, wanna sing Humpty Dumpty?” “Ya. […]
I have a new chapter out, co-authored with Danielle McNamara, Gregory Goodwin, and Diego Zapata-Rivera, in the latest volume of Design Recommendations for Intelligent Tutoring Systems (Volume 12: Generative Artificial Intelligence), edited by Anne Sinatra, Vasile Rus, Arthur Graesser, and Paige Lawton. Danielle was originally invited to contribute to this volume and asked if I’d […]
