Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

In a previous post I mentioned a new study on children and the internet recently completed by Warren Buckleitner for Consumer Reports Web Watch. Anyway, towards the end of the post I mentioned how the final report includes links to YouTube videos of the actual data and how that shifts the interpretive balance of power from researcher to reader. This is not to say that the researcher has no role at all, clearly it is their agenda, interests, style that is driving the project, but rather that by allowing readers to see the raw data (once again, within limits, since there is editorial control of this by the researcher) it changes the control the researcher has over the conclusions and the meanings one can draw from the research. What I didn’t realize just how deeply YouTube was used in this research… Read the rest of this entry »

I leave tomorrow (actually today, given that it is past midnight as I write this) on a multi-national TPACK tour. I touch 4 countries in around 2 weeks!! Read the rest of this entry »

Warren Buckleitner, Ph.D., is a graduate of our Ph.D. program. He is editor of Children’s Technology Review, a periodical covering children’s interactive media and founder of Mediatech Foundation, a nonprofit technology center based in New Jersey. He also runs this awesome conference on games and learning called Dust or magic. This much I knew… Read the rest of this entry »

MindHacks has a great post related to some of my previous postings about anthropomorphizing interactive artifacts (see here and here) - just that this time these artifacts under discussion are robots. As it turns out, sometime too much similarity between humans and robots can really mess things up in our mind - and we fall into, what has been called, uncanny valley. Read the rest of this entry »

There is an barely interesting article on today’s NYTimes.com site by Steven Heller on campaign souvenirs being sold by the three presidential candidates through their websites (read: From Mousepads to Piggy Banks). I thought his earlier columns on the graphic design of the elections (blogged here and here) were more interesting by far. However, while skimming it I came across the following statement: Read the rest of this entry »

Just found out about this website www.zipskinny.com, a great example of how the web makes information easily available. This website allows you to enter your US zip code, and see US Census data and comparisons with neighboring ZIP codes (or other ZIP codes, upto to 20 of them, that you enter in by hand). It also provides multiple representations o the data, comparing it to national averages and so on. Pretty cool. Take a look at what my ZIP code looks like: Get data for Okemos MI.

Matt Koehler suggested that my reasoning in a previous post (Google ranking, a self-defeating approach) criticizing his attempt at raising his Google ranking was mistaken. Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous post I talked about Pangea Day and the Imagine anthem series, where people from one country sing the national anthem of another. Here’s another one, France sings for the USA. Enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

NYTimes technology columnist, David Pogue, has a recent blog entry about Pangea Day, a global film festival coming up in a few days. As he says in his note: Read the rest of this entry »

Suzy Cox is a lecturer in educational technology and educational psychology at Utah Valley State College and also a doctoral candidate at Brigham Young University (working with Dr. Charles Graham). She is currently working on her dissertation which seeks to develop a conceptual analysis of the TPACK framework. Read the rest of this entry »

Great examples of funny, absurd and weird signage from across the world. Archived for use in my 817 or 917 classes. Read the rest of this entry »

Academic Analytics (academicanalytics.com) is a subscriber service that ranks specific PhD programs nationwide on a broad number of domains based on faculty productivity. The index takes account, for an academic year, of faculty program level productivity measures like publications (books and journal articles), citations of journal publications, federal research funding (NIH, USDE, etc.), and nationally recognized awards and honors (i.e., from APA, AERA, etc.). Read the rest of this entry »

A recent blog entry about gender and GPS ties in with some research on people’s psychological responses to media I had been involved with a few years ago. This line of research led to a bunch of different theoretical and empirical journal articles, conference presentations and so on. I decided it was time to blow the virtual dust of some of them and make them available to the world (an ongoing process of updating this website). Read the rest of this entry »

Mishra, P. (2006). Affective Feedback from Computers and its Effect on Perceived Ability and Affect: A Test of the Computers as Social Actor Hypothesis. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia. 15 (1), pp. 107-131. Read the rest of this entry »

Dirkin, H. K., Mishra, P., & Altermatt, E. (2005). All or nothing: Levels of sociability of a pedagogical software agent and its impact on student perceptions and learning. Journal Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia. 14(2), 113-127. Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago I was invited to be a part of a symposium on etiquette and the design of interactive media (organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). I hosted all the papers and presentations from the symposium (links to which I will post later, since the pages have to be cleaned up a bit for this new server I am using). A fallout of this symposium was a special issue of the Communications of the ACM on this topic. The article I wrote for this special issue is given below: Read the rest of this entry »

Mishra, P., Nicholson, M., & Wojcikiewicz, S. (2001/2003). Does my wordprocessor have a personality? Topffer’s Law and Educational Technology. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. 44 (7), 634-641. Reprinted in B. C. Bruce (Ed.). Literacy in the information age: Inquiries into meaning making with new technologies. (pp. 116-127). Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Read the rest of this entry »

During our recent NY / New Jersey visit (during the kids spring break) I had the first opportunity to drive a car equipped with a GPS system. It was a case of love at first sight. I got back home and bought myself a Tom Tom right away. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Koehler has an interesting post (Keeping track of the Koehlers) about his attempts to rise in Google’s rankings for searches on his last name. In the last few months he seems to have had some success judging that he has moved from page 25 to somewhere in the 3-4 range. Read the rest of this entry »

The award ceremony for the 2008 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards was last Friday. I drove back from Purdue in time to be there - mainly because I wanted to hear how people would respond to our faux radio interview Read the rest of this entry »