Punya Mishra's Web

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 […]

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, […]