This is the first episode of the new series called “Time to think”. The name of the series was inspired by this article, which examines the life and work of Howard Gruber. He dedicated his life to understanding how we shape our ideas as they evolve through time – and this is exactly what this series will focus on. Gruber showed that important ideas emerge gradually, through years of questioning, writing, revising, and connecting seemingly unrelated experiences.
In this interview, I had the pleasure of speaking with Professor Punya Mishra, an educational psychologist, designer, and one of the leading voices in creativity and educational technology. His work has profoundly influenced how we understand the relationship between teaching, learning, and technology, most notably through the development of the TPACK framework. More recently, his research has explored creativity in education and the opportunities and challenges that artificial intelligence brings to teaching and learning.
Personally, what drew me to interview Professor Mishra was the remarkable breadth of his interests. Throughout his career, he has moved fluidly between education, design, science, technology, and the arts. He has cultivated an intellectual life where these seemingly distinct domains continuously inform one another. I was curious to understand how these diverse interests came together to shape his thinking, and that’s exactly what this interview explored.
To begin, what first drew you to the study of creativity? Was there a particular question or experience that convinced you this would become a central focus of your work?
That’s a really good question. I think I got interested in issues of creativity in high school. I was a voracious reader, so I would just read everything and anything: science, math, literature. But there was a book by Douglas Hofstadter called Godel, Escher, Bach that was sort of my first introduction to AI and psychology. He was very interested in creativity and was personally a very creative person. I don’t know if I thought of it as something worth studying, but I thought of it as something interesting that I wanted to know more about.
After high school, I went into engineering, and I hated the way it was taught in India. But at that time, I used to paint and write short stories and fiction, and I got a couple of friends who were sort of similarly interested, so being creative was always important to me. Then, I went to design school to make educational film, and so the whole creativity thing continued over there. As creativity became more of an interest, I read a lot about the psychology of creativity. In my career, I was interested much more in what it means practically for educators. I brought this design perspective to everything that I did, and sort of creativity came along for the ride.
Usually, it might be something in the back of my mind which I’m sort of dabbling with. Then, I got a student who was really interested in that. Danah Henriksen, who’s now a colleague of mine here at ASU, was in the PhD program and had an interest in creativity. She did her dissertation on creative teaching. We have now been working together for over 20 years but the work became more serious when we got the chance to write a series of articles for TechTrends around creativity, technology and learning. I feel very lucky that she joined the PhD program with that interest, and that just led to a flowering of work with over 60 articles, just in that series.
And what about education? At what point did you realize that education would become the place where you wanted to explore those questions about creativity?
That’s a good question. I grew up being very inspired by amazing writers who could explain science in very powerful ways, whether it was Isaac Asimov, Stephen Jay Gould, or Richard Dawkins. At the same time, watching Life on Earth by David Attenborough, which in India was very hard to access back in the early 80s. I was lucky to live in New Delhi, where I had access to good libraries.
This idea of communicating ideas beautifully and powerfully has always been with me. When I was finishing my engineering degree, I realized that I didn’t want to become an engineer. I had lost confidence in myself. I was pretty sure that I was not good at science and math, but I loved it. I loved art, literature, film, cinema. I used to watch a lot of movies, like international films and all of that sort of stuff. So, I said to myself: “This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to make educational film and share my love of ideas with other people.” That was what got me into education.
I went to design school to make educational film. This was back in 1988, when I first came across the Macintosh computer. I sort of had the sense that these machines, or some aspect of them, would become part of our lives. With my love for science and my sense of visual design, I thought that computers could become a communication medium of the future. I didn’t know what it would look like; I had no idea that there could be something called the Internet. But I felt like that box had potential. If film or television were the medium of the 20th century, computers were the medium of the century that’s coming along. I don’t think I articulated it that clearly in my head, but I just had a gut feeling that it would be where the exciting stuff was going to happen.
That’s how I ended up coming to Urbana-Champaign to do my PhD at the intersection of education and technology. Education has always been there, whether it would be formal or through film or something. It wasn’t clear to me. I thought I would end up becoming a documentary filmmaker about science. That’s what I’d started with, right? Then this machine comes into my life, right when I’m a grad student. The first graphical browser, Mosaic, was created in Urbana-Champaign, so I was there when the web first started. I’ve had a website since 1996, although those versions are lost. But it became part of my philosophy: I publicly share on my website everything I do, which sort of boosted my career because people would find my stuff. I’m sort of a child of the web, in some way.
Education has always been key to how I see the value and the power of ideas to understand the world, to understand ourselves, and our relationship with it. Over time, I think my understanding has become more complex, sophisticated, and nuanced. But that core mission has never really gone away.
I really like that expression, “child of the web.” It captures the idea perfectly.
I was thinking about that. The web, for good or for bad, social media for good or for bad, influenced everything in my life. Professionally, at least. My kids are 27 and 30 now, so I told them that their lives are going to be driven by this thing called AI, for good or for bad. You know, I’ve come to realize that there are a lot more complications to technologies and how they play out in the real world than we think.
I know that a large part of the success I’ve had is because of the original TPACK paper. It got accepted in 2004 but wasn’t published until 2006. But I put a pre-print version on my website after being accepted, and people found it. By the time the actual paper was published, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education had already read the paper because it was on my website. They reached out to Matt and me and said: “We want to do a handbook on your framework.” None of that could have happened without the web.
I am a great believer in sharing what I do. Even if it’s not fully fleshed out, or even if I know the ideas are evolving. I’m totally comfortable with sharing drafts. Some people wait for things to be perfect, but I know they never will. The TPACK framework we published in 2006 was done in the early 2000s and, in 2019, I proposed a modification of the framework, so I’m still tweaking it. And that’s okay, because that’s how it should be.
You mentioned education, design, the arts, science, math, engineering, technology. Your work has connected these areas in ways that were not always common in educational research. Do you see a consistent thread connecting these different areas of inquiry?
I think the thread that connects everything happened when I graduated from engineering and went to design school. Design is always for a purpose, so education is a design discipline. Design works by creating stuff, not by just sitting and thinking. There is always an action orientation towards design, which for me becomes this all-encompassing field. Design is my overarching frame – and it is a very inclusive one.
If you’re a cognitive psychologist, there are certain things that cognitive psychology doesn’t know how to talk about. For example, it really doesn’t know how to talk about aesthetics and beauty, so the learning sciences have no way to talk about it. But design doesn’t care for field boundaries. Design, at the end, cares about the final product and its impact on the people using it. Designers are extremely eclectic people. They also understand that there is indeterminacy from what we know to what the final output will be. We will never have complete information, but we have to make a decision and act. So, designers are always action-oriented. I mean, as long as the thing works, right? (laugh)
I call myself not an educational researcher, but an educational designer. Research is one piece that I do in order to become a better designer. Design for me is the overarching frame, and then once you have that, you cannot say, “oh, you cannot talk about X or talk about Y.” If it is helpful to think about what you’re doing, then you’ll talk about it, or you will bring it in.
As a designer myself, I can completely relate to that. But when you talk about design, are you referring to it as a broader way of thinking, or to the specific practices you’ve been involved with, such as filmmaking and graphic design?
Yeah, graphic design is a part of it, but it’s not all of it. For me, design is like Herb Simon defined it, and I’m going to mangle the quote here: A designer is somebody who works on going from an existing state to a preferred state. Whatever the existing state, whether it might be a classroom, a textbook, or this conversation we are having, there’s an existing situation, and we want to make it better. Designers are always hoping to make things better for other people.
Imagine that you are throwing a party for your friends. You’re thinking about how the invite should be sent, how the food should be laid out, what should come first, what should come second. You’re also thinking about “if I invite this friend and I don’t invite that friend, they might feel bad, so damn it, I have to invite them even though I don’t feel like inviting.” That’s all part of design. To me, design is this deeply human activity that we do to go from existing situations to preferred situations. And once you define it broadly, then engineering, graphic design, aesthetics, user experience, psychology, art, all of them become a part of that mix.
For example, teachers are designers, because they are designing educational experiences for learners. The approach “here is my learning theory, and this is what I’m going to do in the classroom” doesn’t work, because the teacher brings that practical wisdom of the moment: how to respond to this student versus that student. That’s not in your theory or in your textbook. But that’s where you act as a designer.
In the design field, I’m very influenced by Herb Simon, for instance. By Donald Schön, and how he talks about teaching and learning and practical wisdom. Don Norman, another huge influence. These are key critical thinkers who have helped me articulate this perspective of design. The moment you talk about design, creativity comes in, play comes in, all of those things come in. So, if you look at my career through the lens of design, everything sort of makes sense. Otherwise, it looks like I’m all over the place. (laugh)
I really believe very strongly in this idea of creativity as being play within constraints. For example, I do these ambigrams. You must stick to legibility but also should read the same as you rotate it. You have to just play. There’s no algorithm to get to the answer, right? And I think design is the same way. There is no algorithm to good design.
Take good architecture, for instance. When you enter a building or a space, you feel different. That architect is not just following some formula. They’re following some formulas, but the rest is instinct, or talking to people, or what the material you are working with forces you to do. Stone can do X, concrete can do Y, and you have to know how to work with that. It’s the same way designers have to work with the materials at hand. If I’m building a website, that’s different from building an app for a phone. Everything changes. That’s where I think design becomes a very interesting lens.
There seems to be a persistent assumption in education that knowledge comes first, and creativity comes later. Has your research led you to see that relationship differently? Do you view creativity as an outcome of learning, a process of learning, or something else entirely?
The more knowledge you have, and the more flexibly and creatively you can think the better it is. However, in an educational situation, I think the sequence of learning, then creativity, then learning is a false dichotomy; learning, then creativity, then learning again. I don’t think that makes sense. I think both are happening at the same time, and good educational experiences are the ones where both are sort of happening.
A child or a beginner in a given domain can be creative in a limited kind of way. Doesn’t mean that they’re going to create something that will wow everybody in the world, but in their context, it can be something that’s creative. I think that we overemphasize how much knowledge people need to have in order to be creative. I think that you can be “little-c creative” in many different ways, even with limited knowledge of something. Over time, as your knowledge grows, you will get better at it. But because we emphasize so much the primary learning, by the time we say to students, “go be creative,” they haven’t exercised that muscle ever in their lives.
I worked a lot with teachers when I was at Michigan State. We would just throw them into these really open-ended, ambiguous activities, and give them such a short amount of time, where they were doomed to fail. But you could see the amount of creativity that would emerge out of that. Then, the question we would ask is: “What does this mean for your classroom? What can you do similar to this?” Because they’re engaging with ideas.
For instance, there’s a lot of research on students’ misconceptions in science classes. So, we would have our teachers reading on some of these scientific misconceptions, and then we would say, “now you have 45 minutes to work in a group of 3 or 4 people to create a short video which enhances the misconception.” Not removing it, but enhancing it. And teachers are like, “What the hell does this even mean?” They’ve never made a video before, but they have to figure it out. Next thing you know, they’re climbing on top of chairs with their phones and shooting whatever stuff they’re shooting, making a 40-second video using stop motion animation, and such. That’s creativity right there under very tight time constraints. What was that experience like? Was it fun? Was it stressful? What did you learn through this? What does this mean for your practice? That’s how you sort of open up people’s minds to the possibilities of what we can do. So, I think that this creativity and learning dichotomy is just a false one.
You’ve written extensively about creativity in education, but I’m also interested in how your ideas take shape. In your own work, how much of your thinking happens before you begin writing, and how much emerges through the act of writing itself?
I think it’s a bit of both. Usually, I have some sense of what I’m trying to say, but it’s not well articulated, and in the act and the process of writing, that’s when the idea really starts getting fleshed out.
A good example would be actually the TPACK framework, where Matt and I had done quite a bit of work. We have published some articles and presented them at conferences. Strategically or not, I was going up for tenure, so I said to Matt, “We need a good publication together. I think we should write something for Teachers College Record.” Matt was skeptical because they don’t usually do tech. But I said that we should write something anyway. At that point, the canonical diagram with the circles wasn’t there, and that actually emerged while I was playing with Illustrator and seeing how we can represent the ideas, going back and forth. I basically rediscovered a Venn diagram, which seems very silly, because we’ve known about Venn diagrams forever, but I had to struggle to discover it.
Finally, we wrote that paper, we submitted it, it came back with major revisions, we revised it again, and our thinking was evolving as we were doing that. We wanted to write a paper that sort of captures everything that we have done so far and sort of talk about the future, but I didn’t know a lot of the details of it before we started writing. I just knew that we had a framework. It was built on Lee Shulman’s idea of pedagogical content knowledge, and we had done some work on it. I wanted to write a piece that would bring everything together. Once I had a draft, Matt and I went back and forth and back and forth. When we write together, we sometimes have up to 20 to 25 versions. Which means the ideas are not set in stone, not something that we can just put out there. We are struggling to find the right way to express ourselves.
I see that a lot in my blogging, where I will read something in the news and be like, “what does that mean?”, and I’ll start just jotting some notes of what I think it means. It’s in the act of writing that I will discover possibilities and so on. Sometimes they just fall apart. I’m like, “Oops, there’s nothing here.” My instinct was wrong, and that’s fine, too. That happens a lot, right? The act of writing, of putting words down on screen – not on paper, we don’t do paper anymore – shows you its weaknesses and flaws that you hadn’t thought about. Then you have to figure out ways of addressing them, and if you can’t, you can’t. But if you can, then it’s a question of polishing it and fine-tuning it.
When you look back at your earlier publications, do you ever encounter a “younger version” of yourself wrestling with ideas that you now understand differently? Have there been moments when you rediscovered something you wrote years ago and thought, “I was onto something important here”?
Both are true. Sometimes I go back and look at some of the stuff I’ve written, and I feel like that was a very naive version of me. An example would be my early writing when social media first started coming out. I was very deeply focused on what teachers could do with it, what it could do in the classroom. I didn’t understand at that time the broader sociocultural economic space within which this technology was entering.
Now, in hindsight, social media has been good and horrible all at the same time, and I feel very guilty as a scholar who should have known better that I didn’t think about that aspect. That, to me, was like a gap in my thinking. That is, it makes me feel sort of bad that I should have thought about it, because there were people thinking and writing about it, and I didn’t give them the due attention. I sort of got taken up by the shiny thing. It just felt like something amazing was entering into the world, and I didn’t realize how the existing structures of the world are going to distort this technology, or move it in certain directions, which will be about information bubbles, about extreme content, online hate, all of that stuff. I feel like I missed the boat.
Now, if you read my current stuff around AI, you will see I am very clear about that, because I don’t want to make the same mistake again. I write both about what this technology can do and how powerful it is and what its weaknesses are. But I also spend as much time thinking about the broader socioeconomic context within which this technology is entering. That’s going to drive, to a large extent, what this technology will become in our lives, not just the property of the technology, because it can take many different forms.
Looking back, the parts that I feel like I got right in some very good ways are from very early on about design. My thinking about it has not shifted all that much. It’s actually fun to see that I had a pretty sophisticated idea of design. If you’d have talked to me 15 years ago, it would not be very different from what I talk about now. That makes me feel pretty good. There was a line of work that I started in 1999 which had to do with people’s social and psychological responses to media. I have a paper, titled Does My Word Processor Have a Personality?, where I did studies on children playing with robotic dogs, and that line of work sort of faded away because the TPACK stuff took off. When I go back to that work now, with GenAI in the world, that stuff is absolutely relevant. So, in some ways, I was 26 years ahead of the curve, so that makes me feel really good.
A lot of my writing now focuses on the psychological impact of these technologies, and I feel like I am very prepared to talk about that because of this work I had done literally 26 years ago. So that’s a good feeling. But I think the design work is the one that still stands. The context of writing about it may have changed, but it still holds true.
Hearing you talk about your work on robots and human interaction made me wonder whether this is one of the ideas that never received the attention it perhaps deserved because TPACK became such a defining part of your career. Looking back, are there other ideas that never achieved the same visibility as TPACK but that you still find yourself returning to? What do those overlooked ideas reveal about your intellectual journey?
I think that stuff would not have picked up anyway. It was too early. It needed something like GenAI, which is this talkative, garrulous, hallucinating thing, for those ideas to come back. I felt I was lucky to start thinking about those things, but I don’t think that the time was right for that.
There are other things that I have done which I feel have not received the attention they deserve. Everybody associates me with the Venn diagram, but then is my work around beauty, aesthetics, science learning, and STEM education. I have written a decent amount about it, but it never got any traction, and I think those are incredibly powerful ideas. I think I did good work, but it never really picked up, never got cited, never went anywhere, and didn’t have any direct impact in either research or practice. The stuff on creativity, I think had a decent impact. But everything that I do is always seen through the lens of TPACK, which is kind of the tragedy. But at least people are reading my stuff. I know that when I publish something, more people read it than if I hadn’t had the TPACK boom, so to speak. So, I’m very grateful for that, but every positive comes with its own little negatives, and that’s okay.
The piece of work that I feel has not received enough love is on the role of beauty and aesthetics in learning, which is something very close to my heart because that’s how I sort of started in this field. It goes back to being inspired by reading Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould or watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. That’s what got me into everything that I do today.
I know the feeling because I’m also inspired by people who can communicate complex ideas with remarkable clarity. I also started in graphic design before moving into psychology for my PhD. It’s funny because I’ve had almost the exact same experience you described. As a designer, my instinct was always, there has to be a way to make this work. Some of my psychology colleagues would say that wasn’t possible. But there has to be a way. More often than not, there was. So, it was fascinating to hear you describe that same mindset.
I listen to my colleagues who are learning scientists and learning engineers, and they’re like, “The data and the theory drive the design.” You know, my dissertation had a whole chapter, which was called Unpacking the Black Box of Design, and my committee said that I didn’t need to write that chapter. But I insisted. I kept notes of the software that I developed and wrote this chapter about how it was to design it. People just don’t understand that. There are millions of choices at every point when you’re doing design. What color you choose, what font, where you align it… and you just make a call, and after that, that determines every other move that you make. The moment you put that circle in this corner, let’s say, it determines the rest of the layout in weird ways. If you move the circle, everything changes. I don’t think anybody but a designer truly understands that.
So much of what I see in EdTech, particularly among people in the learning sciences and learning engineering, assume that once we have the right theory, and all the data, the design of the artifact will follow. How? I mean, if it’s a website, the kind of aesthetics and design is going to be different. The kind of interaction the learner is going to have is different. Your theory might just go flying out of the window. They just don’t realize the messiness of actual practice.
That’s what I love about Donald Schön. He gets that our decisions have ripple effects, and that there is no science telling you what each decision can and should be. As a designer, you just have to act.
The TPACK framework has become one of the most influential models in educational technology. I’m curious about its origins: what was the initial problem or puzzle you were trying to solve when these ideas first emerged? And as the framework evolved, did you have any sense that it might become such an influential framework?
Second question first: no, definitely not. We were pretty confident that it was a good framework. I’m proud of the way that we wrote it, but the framework broadly was in the zeitgeist. In fact, there’s a dissertation by Melissa Pierson where it has almost the exact same diagram, published a few years before ours came out.
We wrote it up in TC Record, which had high visibility back in the day. It had 75,000 subscribers by email, and I told Matt, “If we get it there, 75,000 people are going to at least see the title, whether they read it or not.” So, this was a conscious decision on our part, but nobody could predict that it would become this impactful. We did good work, but we were also extremely lucky for it to be at the right time and for the right people to find it.
Now, how the framework came to be: Shulman’s idea of pedagogical content knowledge had been around for a while, and he was actually at Michigan State when he did that – where Matt and I both were, so we knew that framework. In our work in EdTech, it became very clear that technology was being separated from pedagogy and content. Teachers were not making that connection. Most professional development in the early 2000s – and maybe even now – was like, “we’ll give you a workshop on how to build a website or how to make a wiki.” If you are a math teacher, what are you going to do with it? That line was never connected.
It also became clear that different media had different propensities. For example, if you want to memorize all the names of countries in the world, a wiki is not very useful. Some kind of index cards randomly coming at you on the screen might actually be better for that. So, there was this understanding, instinctively or intuitively, that technology can be many different things. Different pedagogies or subject matter disciplines need different kinds of technologies, and I don’t think people had talked about it that clearly.
When I was doing my master’s in design, I did a project which was called The Life and Death of Stars, which was about how stars evolve from gas to becoming a black hole or a brown dwarf, or whatever. I made the argument that just making the video was not enough, because video moves you in certain ways, but you don’t think rationally. You’re just being swayed along. So, with the video, I designed a small booklet, which you could read and think about more slowly and understand the concepts. Then, I made a set of inspirational posters that would make you want to watch the video, arguing that different media have different strengths.
There is some hint of that back in my design days coming into the TPACK framework. But this was really work that Matt and I did together, and it’s really hard to tease apart his contribution from mine. It was truly one of the best collaborative experiences I’ve ever had in my life. We are very different from each other. He’s much more analytic, grounded, data-driven. I am much more about ideas, and I joke that we are like a hot air balloon – I am the hot air, he’s the ballast. If it were left to me, I would just fly away. Left to him, you’d be sitting on the ground. We had to learn to trust each other.
I think that’s where the TPACK came from. I felt like the idea was in the zeitgeist at that time. We were really lucky to have written that paper at that time. I think it was a moment in time that we just lucked out, partly because the web was coming up. So, a lot of things came together.
The aesthetic stuff, for instance, never got that storm. The creativity stuff, to a certain extent. Some of the stuff I’m writing around AI now is also getting some attention. Partly because everybody is into AI, but also because I think of a slightly different perspective on it – a sort of psychological otherness which people haven’t talked about.
Throughout your career, you’ve witnessed several waves of educational technology. Does AI feel like another chapter in that story, or does it represent a fundamentally different kind of technological shift? What makes this moment different from previous ones?
There are technologies, but there are some which we call cultural technologies. Print is one, television is another, radio, social media, the web… those are cultural technologies, which means that they transform how we think about knowledge, how we interact with each other, and how we think about trust. You know, when somebody on television comes and confidently says something, do we trust them? Or how we form parasocial relationships with characters in TV shows, for instance.
When we think about EdTech, we often think very narrowly. We think about what’s happening in the classroom. In that sense, AI is a very powerful cultural technology. Whether or not it will change the classroom, it will change the world within which that classroom exists. So, whether or not you are a teacher who uses social media, whether or not you have an Instagram account, doesn’t matter anymore. You live in a world where every child in your class has been affected by social media. Not necessarily in negative terms – I’m not saying it’s always bad – but that’s the world that they grew up in, and that’s the world within which your teaching is going to happen. So, you have to factor that in ways that are creative and thoughtful.
Plus, I think most of the educational benefits of AI have been overhyped, like the idea that a chatbot is going to be your tutor and all of that stuff. I don’t think that works, honestly. I don’t think students want to sit in front of a screen. They would rather be talking to each other than be talking to a screen. But they will definitely talk to these bots about their emotional and social needs. That’s going to happen outside the classroom, but that’s going to affect what you do in it.
I have no great hopes for AI in education. I really don’t. I think it’s going to be one more tool in that space, beneficial in some ways, in certain contexts, not in others, just like every other technology. Was the web good for education? Sure. I mean, I have access to more information today. If I have a certain question, I can go on Wikipedia, I can look it up, blah, blah, blah. That’s fantastic. Has it truly shifted educational outcomes or made people more open-minded? Maybe not. I think AI will be sort of the same way. I don’t necessarily feel that it’s going to transform learning in the classroom context, but it is going to transform our world.
Talking about it, do you think the role of writing in education is changing? Beyond being a way of communicating ideas, do you still see writing as an essential tool for learning and thinking in the age of AI?
I think it is, but it’s going to be really hard to get people away from AI because we are cognitive misers. We will always take the shortcut. AI will give us something that will have the idea of quality without any deeper sense of it, because AI really doesn’t understand a thing. It’s just spreading out words without us having really struggled with how to express the idea. And that’s more problematic for novices and learners, because they don’t have the judgment to evaluate the output of AI.
Weirdly enough, AI is actually making expertise more important. The more expertise you have on a topic, the better you’ll be able to leverage AI. But your role is going to change. Your role is going to shift from being the primary creator to being a curator and then an editor. For instance, I used to write something and then I would edit and so on. Now, I can throw it at AI to give me a draft, and then I have to spend hours cleaning that up because it’s not saying exactly what I wanted to say. But if I don’t know that topic well, I won’t know what it is that I want to say. That’s the problem. It’s going to be a huge challenge. I’m not that worried about it, however. I think people will figure a way through authenticity, which is going to become more and more important. Finding your authentic voice is going to be critical.
That seems closely related to another question I’ve been thinking about. There has been growing concern that AI may encourage people to delegate not only writing, but also parts of the thinking process itself. From your perspective, is this a genuine risk? How do you see this playing out among teachers, students, and even in your own work?
I’ve been writing for a long time. I really like the process of writing. While writing, I never fall in love with it. My students know this, and they hate this about me. We’ll spend days working on a paper, and then I’ll say, “This is all wrong. We’re going to start again from scratch.” It just drives them nuts. I don’t love my writing. I love it once it’s published and I go back and read it after five years. I’m like, “Oh, that paragraph is good.” You know, certain pieces I’ve written I feel good about, but not all of it.
If AI gives me an output, I have a good sense in my head of what I want it to be. I’ll give you a personal example: My son got married a month ago, and I’m supposed to give a speech. I had the idea for what I would say, but then I worked with Claude to polish it. There was one sentence that Claude gave me that I thought was perfect. But there were other suggestions it gave me that didn’t stay. It was written by Claude, but again, there were lots of sentences that didn’t make it through. I chose the one that stayed.
There’s this joke about this kindergarten art teacher whose kids would win all these awards at painting competitions. The other teachers came and asked him, “How do your kids win all these awards? What is the magic?” and he said, “The magic is that I know when to take the paper away from them.” You know, the kids will keep going on and on and on. If you take it away at the right moment, that’s judgment. Basically speaking, I know when to take the paper away. (laugh)
What I struggle with when I’m working with AI is how not to lose that judgment which has been cultivated over decades of work. In other words, my editorial control is very strong because I’ve been writing for so long, so I know what my voice is. I have a voice, a distinct voice. One of the greatest compliments I receive is when people read my academic papers and say that they can hear my voice. I bring a certain sensibility to the work. That’s uniquely mine. Maybe right or wrong, maybe good or bad, that’s not what I’m saying, but it’s still uniquely mine.
In my blog, I’ve tried to really think about that. Who is this Punya when he’s writing on the blog? It has to be me – but it’s not really me; it is a persona in some way. What am I conveying through my writing? What is the mood? What is the intentionality? All of those things that you work very hard on. Everybody does, if they’re serious about their writing. So, I think that’s a huge benefit when it comes to writing with AI. I know what I want to say, so I can use it to organize ideas and so on. But then I spend hours editing it, because it has to be me. It can’t be that weird and strange voice that much AI writing has.
“It has to be me.” I really enjoy that. Building on that, alongside your academic work, you have also worked as a visual artist. Do these feel like distinct identities to you, or are they simply different expressions of the same way of engaging with the world? How has each shaped the other over time?
That’s such a good question. So, here’s an analogy: if you have a really complicated shape and you shine light on it from different directions, you’re going to get different shadows. I think these are just different shadows of whatever nonsense is going on here. (laugh)
This stuff just gives me joy. There are thousands of typographical designs I’ve made, which nobody in the world has seen. I’ve thought about making a store so I can sell them on T-shirts and stuff. I’ve not done them to hide them. But I don’t know if that’ll ever happen, because that’s not their primary purpose. It’s therapeutic in some way. I love solving those little visual challenges or puzzles. It just gives me joy. I mean, that’s when I’m in flow. Every one of these visual puzzles is different, and I can go back to the same idea after two years and think, “How come I didn’t see this? This solution is so beautiful compared to that one.” It allows me to engage in things like aesthetics and beauty and expression. That’s just fun, you know, so I waste a lot of time doing this.
For all my blog posts, I create original images. Sometimes a blog post will get written in an hour, while the image will take me two days. I have some simple rules that I made for myself: the font is always Futura, don’t ask me why. Some early day I decided on Futura Condensed, and now I’m stuck with it. I will never have people’s faces in those images because of issues of representation. Unless, let’s say, I’m interviewed by you, and this screenshot can make it. But in general, it has to be some relatively abstract representation of the idea. AI is a lot of fun to play with. But once the AI output is there, I work a lot on it. It just gives me joy. I mean, I really don’t do it for others. It is completely selfish. You don’t do it so that people will say it’s beautiful. You do it because it feels the right thing to do.
I did this thing recently where I was making typographical designs. Then, one day, I started this process where I would create this typographical design and send it to Claude. We would collaborate on a little poem or a pithy quote around that design. The final product would be my typography with our collaborative little statement. This whole interaction with Claude gave me so much joy.
When people say that AI is going to stunt creativity… I don’t know, it depends. If I use AI just to create stuff and not ever question it, not ever engage with it, of course it’ll stunt. But the way I used it was great. It was truly one of the most fun. These typographical designs are beautiful in and of themselves. If you have two words, and they have letters in common, you place them on top of each other, and you stretch the two common letters. That’s it. But then, after that, you’re trying to do it aesthetically, and so on. And you choose the words carefully. It was so fun.
What ideas or projects are currently occupying your attention? Are there new directions emerging in your thinking that may shape your work over the next few years?
I think the biggest pieces that I’m working on, or thinking a lot about right now, have to do with this intersection of AI and education, AI and the broader sociocultural matrix within which AI is entering. That’s broadly what most of my attention is right now.
I’m also 61 years old. The question is, how long do I keep this going? I’ve never really thought about that. But now a lot of my friends are talking about retirement. When does that happen? I’m very excited by the possibilities of doing interesting things with AI and learning from that. Being in this field for 30 years or so gives me a better perspective around the sociocultural economic context within which this technology is entering. So, a lot of my work is going to be around that.
Finally, when future scholars look back at this moment in educational history, what do you hope they will say we understood correctly and what do you suspect we may be getting wrong?
Oh, we are getting so much wrong. I don’t know, at least in the EdTech field, we are getting so much wrong. We get sucked in by new technologies and these shiny things. We get sucked in by the hype that is being pushed by these big companies who truly don’t care about learning or anything. They just care about shareholder value and data extraction. So, we get sucked in by that. We forget the deeply human nature of what teaching and learning is. The creative, open-ended things which we need to be doing, rather than this test-taking and all that kind of stuff.
There are very few things that collectively we are getting right. One thing that future scholars should learn from us is to look back and say, “man, let’s not do the same stupid stuff that those guys did.” I think there are individual scholars and smaller groups of people in schools and other places who are trying different new things, and I think that we should learn from them. But the overall arc is not very positive, to be honest.
I’m a very positive person in general, but the last 10 years or so have been very difficult to reconcile with. You know, I don’t often write about politics, but we are living through a really crazy time where things that are really important, like global climate change, are not getting the attention. I feel bad for the world that we’re leaving behind for our children. In that sense, our generation failed miserably. We might have created AI, or we might have created the web, but in things that really matter, I don’t think we have done a really good job. Political polarization, income inequality, climate change… I mean, that’s going to be so hard to undo. How do you fix a burning planet? I don’t know. Those things do worry me.
I don’t complain about the youth, though. I think they are great, given what they’ve been given. I have a lot of faith in that. I mean, we are the ones who screwed things up; why blame the young people? They’re dealing with the aftermath of the wreckage that we created as best as they can, so I don’t worry about that at all. It’s just sad that evolution hasn’t prepared us for things like this. We think in the very short term.
My instinct was that education would help improve it. But I don’t know. Ted Chiang, the science fiction writer, said that most people’s fear of technology is not fear of technology; it’s fear of capitalism. Imagine if this AI thing had come about not with these 5 companies, led by these 5 or 6 men who have extremely narrow views of what humanity is, what profit-making is, and so on, and it came in a very different kind of garb. Imagine if this entered a world, at least in the United States, where there would be healthcare for all, where there would be job security or something that way. The conversation would be very different. You see what I’m saying? It’s not inherent in technology per se. Those are choices we made – or that we are making. That’s the kind of thing that worries me more than anything else.
You can learn more about Professor Punya Mishra’s work at his website. You can also connect with him via LinkedIn.