Punya Mishra's Web

About a year ago my friend Bhawna Parmar published a piece in The Caravan called “Off the Books: Schoolgirls in Odisha tune into right-wing YouTube.” Bhawna spent months reporting in Khordha, a district in Odisha, my home state, and followed Roza, a fourteen-year-old who gets two hours a day on a phone. Roza’s school advertises […] Source

Kottke.org is one of those sites I have been following for a while now, and a while back Jason Kottke linked to John Hartnup’s Poster Prompts. John wanted to see what range of visual styles AI could produce (beyond the typical AI slop), and ended up creating prompts for a hundred different design styles for […] Source

AI Literacy is having its day in the sun. A quick google search will reveal at least 679 different frameworks from pretty much every organization, every state department of education and ed-tech company with a PDF budget. They may come with a list of competencies, a handful of principles, but they most definitely will have […] Source

A few weeks ago I wrote about Education by Design, the graduate seminar I taught at ASU last fall, and about the paper Emmanuel Adeloju, Lindsey McCaleb, Nicole Oster and I wrote describing it, “Designing in Uncertainty: The Course I Love to Teach”. One of the arguments in that post (and the article) was that […] Source

The second of four editorials on the grand challenges facing technology and teacher education is now out in the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. This one was led by Natalie Milman, with Jason Trumble, Andrea Harkins-Brown and me as co-authors. The first editorial argued that educational technology research had earned its crisis of legitimacy. […] Source

I was part of two conversations recently that covered two extremes of what we are talking about when we discuss AI and schooling. The first was an episode of the AIR|GPT podcast where we discussed the disaster that is Alpha School. We had actually talked about the Alpha School model in a previous episode but […] Source

Why don’t students use AI-based tutor-bots? Holt calls this the 5% problem: only about five percent of Khan Academy students use the platform enough for gains to show up on standardized tests, and that five percent skews toward higher-income, higher-performing kids, who would have done fine anyway. Ben Riley, over at Cognitive Resonance, names a […] Source

Hyperlinked is a collaborative book that Raaghav Pandya and I are writing at hyperlinked.us. Each chapter starts with something from the culture, usually a film or a book, and follows it to see what it can tell us about learning, teaching, and technology. This chapter took me longer to write than most. For some time […] Source

Since 2012, Danah Henriksen and I, along with the Deep-Play Research Group, have been writing a regular column for TechTrends. The most recent one, on agentic AI, came out in August, and it was number 77th, with the next one coming in a few weeks. Somewhere along the way we started to wonder what the […] Source

Danah Henriksen and I recently finished the latest column in our TechTrends series, a piece on what we call “hollow signals” that should come out in the next few months. Soon after, I read Steven Barrie-Anthony’s essay in The Atlantic, “The Dead Silence of AI Therapy.” Barrie-Anthony is a psychoanalyst, and he signed up for […] Source

Note: Eighteen years ago, Kevin Kelly wrote an essay titled “Better Than Free.” In this essay he focused on the ease of making and sharing copies of things with the advent of digitality and the internet. It stood to reason, he argued, that when the price of making copies drops to zero, the price of […] Source

I have been teaching a version of Education by Design for longer than I can remember. I designed it when I was at Michigan State and carried it over when I came to ASU. And to say that I love teaching this class would be an understatement. It brings together everything I care about: education, […] Source

A few things have come together over the past few months that feel less like separate announcements and more like a single shift in trajectory. So here’s the update. I’ve been appointed a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, affiliated with the Center for Universal Education and the Global Economy and Development program. This […] Source

I first heard the name Kohei Sugiura in a classroom at IDC, from my professor Kirti Trivedi (or KT which was what everybody called him). KT often spoke of Sugiura and suggested that he might be one of the greatest designers (and thinkers about design). He showed us his work, through slides and some of […] Source

On the first day of a class I sometimes ask my students to trace their own lives backwards, from this shared moment in this one room to the place each of them was born, naming the accidents and choices and forces of history that carried them here. Run the exercise on me and the line […] Source

I blog about a lot of things. Some posts are just updates on talks and publications, a public record of what I do. My favorites are the short essays that begin with an idea that pops into my head and end up somewhere bigger. And I tend to circle the same few themes, albeit from […] Source

A week or so ago I was invited to an #AskTheExperts webinar on Raising Independent Thinkers in the Age of AI. It was organized by the Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development and is the first event of a new series they are calling Character Matters: Values and Resilience in the […] Source

There is a particular humility in being invited somewhere as “the TPACK guy.” TPACK is the framework that Matt Koehler and I developed years ago, and it has since traveled farther and wider than either of us ever imagined… far enough, it turns out, to take me this summer to UNIJUÍ, the Regional University of […] Source

It has been a busy summer. On the personal front, my son got married, and the wedding was everything such an occasion should be, everything it could be, and then a good deal more. Things have been busy on the professional front as well though not much of it made it to the website. The […] Source

Some months ago Natalie Milman, Jason Trumble, and Andrea Harkins-Brown, the editorial team at the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, invited me to join them in writing a series of four editorials on the grand challenges facing technology and teacher education, one to run in each of the next four issues. They asked me […] Source

Dictionary.com shortlisted agentic for its 2025 word of the year. Not surprising, given that everybody is selling agents these days. Salesforce says you can hire them the way you hire employees. Microsoft imagines companies that are “human-led and agent-operated.” Sam Altman promised that AI agents would join the workforce. All of which got Danah Henriksen […] Source

Education by Design: Learning With & About AIDCI 691: Fall 2026 | Tuesdays 1:30 – 4:15, Tempe CampusInstructor: Punya Mishra Calling all creative risk-takers! This graduate-level course explores how design, as both a way of thinking and as a transformative process, can be amplified by the emerging possibilities of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). We’re interested […] Source

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 […]