 Welcome everybody. Welcome to this week's Future Transform. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm your host. I'm the creator of the forum, and I'm your chief cat herder for the next hour of conversation. Today's topic brings together two very, very different ideas and brings them together with elegance and fun. So one of the topics is emerging technologies for education technology. And we've been exploring that as long as the Future Transform has been going. New developments of mobile devices, extended reality, virtual reality, AI, all kinds of stuff. And the other is games and play. And again, we've been exploring serious games, games for learning as long as we've been around. And what I love is that the project we're looking at today combines the two of these. We have Ryan Wetzel and Zach Launsinger. Both are at Penn State University. One manages the creative learning initiatives and the other one's learning experiences as a designer. Now, what they've invented is a new game called What the Deck. It's a card game that exists in digital and print format, and it lets you play through conversations about emerging technologies. So just to get them on, let's bring them on stage so we can get a better sense of what this means and how it works. So let me just bring up Zach Launsinger right now. Hello Zach. Hi Brian, how are you? Very well. And it's also good to see you following the forum guidelines that everybody has to have a beard. That's very important. Zach, when I introduce people, or I get them nature used themselves, the way we do it is to ask, what are you going to be working on for the next year? What are the big ideas and topics that are looming largest for you? Right, yeah. So thanks for the introduction Brian. As Brian said, I am a learning experience designer at Penn State. I work on the Creative Learning Initiatives team and for the rest of this year, our team, we're currently looking at how we come back and work in the new normal at Penn State University. So we've been remote for the better part of all of last year. So right now we're coming into a space called the Dreamery, which is where what the deck sort of originated from. The Dreamery is this open collaboration space where faculty, staff and students can come in and sort of get to know what we do at teaching and learning with technology. And right now our group is in there a few days a week just figuring out trying to get rid of the old technology, trying to get a new technology, trying to figure out new initiatives, and trying to figure out what the new normal is going to look like when Penn State is projected to bring mostly everybody back in the fall almost at 100%. So yeah, it's going to be fun, interesting and a ride come August. Well, what a great position you've got, Zach, and I really envy that. And also I don't envy you getting rid of old technologies. That's much harder than introducing new ones. It is a hard decision. We're trying to figure out what to keep if it has any specific reason to keep repurpose it or use it for different other things like that. So yeah, it's a good problem to have. It is that. Well, let me bring your colleague up. And if he doesn't have a beard, at least he has 80% of the proper name. Hello, Ryan. Hey, Brian. Oh, God, the naked face. No, no. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, you too. Thank you for having us here. This is going to be a lot of fun. Well, very exciting. Well, you heard the question that I put to your colleague. What what are you going to be working on for the next year? Right? Oh, sure. So, you know, as we return to campus, we're going to get just pick up right where we left off. And actually in many ways, inspired by kind of some of the complications and challenges of the last year to do even better, right for our faculty and students. So something we're looking at is different ways of scaling virtual reality and immersive experiences for the general masses, whether that's through easy access to commercial apps, 360 degree videos or building high end custom experiences for research, or even finding ways for non technical faculty and students to curate virtual spaces, much like you would just furniture around a room. So this is a key area for us to continue to explore over the next year. Wow. What would all of those virtual experiences be? So right now, we're looking at designing something that we are loosely calling the Infinite Museum. And I think the idea would be to make it so that and as I'm sure many of, as you know and much of your audience knows, creating new virtual experiences is a complicated time consuming process. And so can we dial down how long it takes to have a meaningful experience in that space and also to create a space that's yours to be able to tell a story in that space without having to become an expert in unity or a 3D modeler. So these are spaces that we're exploring currently. Oh, fantastic. I envy your colleagues and the students that get to work with you as well have to learn from you all. Well gentlemen, you prepared a set of images, a set of slides to explain your project and how it came about. I want to bring that up just to show people, give people a little visualization of where things are and if you could just introduce what is what the deck? Sure. So I'll jump in and then I'll quickly turn over to Zach, who this is really his brainchild. So I think to understand what we're trying to do with what the deck, it helps to know kind of the problems that we're trying to solve at Penn State and where teaching and learning with technology lives. So this is actually a central IT organization. So we serve everybody across 24 campuses across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. And so any of our technology solutions have to scale quickly to an audience of 100,000. So we keep that in mind anytime we're designing a new solution or considering our options to help our students and faculty have meaningful experiences with technology. So to that end, within my group we have things like the Media Commons that invented the one-button studio about not quite a decade ago to simplify the video creation process. We run a 3D printing service that's university-wide so that anybody for free can experience 3D printing in their own course content or for their own exploration. And we're designing labs for immersive experiences and doing lots of research and development on new technologies. So this is the perspective we're coming from when we design a new solution for our students and faculty and one thing that we really wanted to help with is to make that feel like a personal experience. An experience that has meaning for not only what they're studying or what they're researching but their day-to-day lives and the people that they know in their lives. And here at the Dreamery we invite hundreds of students a semester in to experience some of these new technologies. But how do you introduce those concepts? How do you make connections to real-world problems that this gadget that we're showing as the latest and greatest actually has meaning for something they might do in their career or their future research? And so what started as just an icebreaker and an idea of, hey, how do we get them talking about technology quickly and maybe about themselves as well became this experience that we hope is fun. We hope is illuminating for our students and we hope is even challenging for them to think about how the decisions that we make with technology in this world affects themselves and others. Well, this sounds great. So this brings us to what the deck. I guess you're handing it off to Zach here. I can take it away. Yes, so what the deck. Thanks, Brian. And for everyone listening like if you have any questions anytime feel free to just raise your hand and ask them away. We are here for the conversation. We're here to share what we built and we hope that you find it interesting. Maybe potentially even use it where you are teaching or working. But a brief overview of what the deck if you see Brian linked to what the deck in the bottom left hand corner which if you went to the website you've seen this definition so I'm not going to read it to you. Essentially we built a card game as an exploratory one based around conversation. So we use the term game loosely because in this game there really is no winning or losing in this game. Our goal is to encourage conversation based off of technology, based off of unique characters that we built and we are building more characters as we're currently working through our first expansion pack and we'll talk more about here later on. But a quick background of what the deck and we kind of have how it started in 2020 so we started thinking about this game in early 2020 before the world kind of shut down and I'm thinking about this around March of 2020 Penn State was still in the office and we got this idea we're like how can we get students thinking about the technologies we have in the dreamery. So before 2020 we used to do these things called technology tours or technology showcases classes would come in and we would introduce them to just a broad range of technology from VR headsets, 360 degree headsets, little bits, 3D printing, robotics, drones. It was great and frustrating all at the same time because we had a lot of technology and only 50 minutes sometimes to show this. So we're struggling with how do we do this intentionally or with meaningful conversation. The main goal with this was technology, how to introduce students to this technology so we wanted to create a physical card game and then we went all remote, the summer came and we turned this into a summer project for our team and a year later we've kind of expanded outside of the dreamery technology it's less about the technology now and more about empathy so it's more about connecting with different characters perspectives around the world because we'll show a few examples here soon but you'll see that the characters we built are not we were very intentional about not creating characters students would encounter at Penn State University Park which is central Pennsylvania we wanted students to have think about these technologies that weren't familiar with their backgrounds and it's no longer a physical deck in fact we don't even have a physical deck, it's all virtual, it's all based off of a website we do plan on printing a physical deck maybe in the future but right now we're focused on building a very good experience of online play we've gotten enough feedback and good vibes from it from around the Penn State community that we're working on the first expansion pack with a Penn State faculty partner she's an entrepreneurship faculty member so the expansion pack is entrepreneurship themed and she's been really great, we're hoping to launch that expansion deck in August or September so with the coincide with the fall semester that's a lot of work and this is what the deck looks like, this is what a sample of play is we'll zoom in on this so everyone can see it and you can explain what we're seeing okay great, so what you're seeing here is we have three card categories in what the deck, we have the blue cards which are your character cards, we have the red cards which are technology cards and we have the green cards which in the first deck of the original game we call them reflection questions and the expansion pack we're growing that and we're going to be calling the reflection question action cards because the new action cards are not questions but they're more they have different prompts that don't fit the mold or reflection questions but essentially what you do is we have a mechanic built into the online game where you hit shuffle and the deck draws three random cards one from each category you can see that the green card has a prompt on it that you input the character you input the technology and it builds this scenario for whoever's playing and then around that question around that story the players will usually just talk about how this technology affects this character from wherever they live whatever they do and as you see this character is Jeffrey he's an expert Loomweaver so you see these character cards we built them in a sense that the character has sort of this backstory where they live what they do and this little fun little what they like to do on some of their characters cards is about family dynamic things like that as you see we have 15 characters 15 technologies and 20 questions and the expansion pack we're almost doubling everything we have here so I'm really excited about the expansion pack I know I've been talking a lot about it but I think it's going to add a lot of different elements to the game and we're adding more criteria to the character cards as well so we're adding a family dynamic criteria so yeah we're really expanding the characters have a lot of more technology cards coming too I think it's going to grow the game well this is great let me just pause you for one second friends this is the time when if you have questions if you have comments this is your place so you can click the Q&A box to type in a question or you can hit the raised hand button to join us on stage so we have plenty of room so if you're curious about why they pick individual characters or how they pick out which technologies questions about the questions this is completely your place we have a quick question right now from Stan Heller who asks how does the character inform the conversation so Zach let me jump in real quick and then we'll turn it back over to you so part of the role of the character is to create a space where especially if your audience is students particularly we see a lot of first years second years coming in for this it helps them feel comfortable to talk about things so they don't necessarily feel comfortable talking about themselves you may pose these questions and they may sit quietly and wait for somebody else to answer but if we're talking about somebody else even a fictional character on a card it opens them up in a way that they're more ready to share and it's not too long until now they're talking about themselves right so it's really sort of an invitation to let them share their actual thoughts they're having on this another thing is this is an invitation to research so if you get a card that you don't know some of the details that's on the card there's not necessarily a time limit on this spend the time to do a quick google search and learn a little bit more about this place or the kind of roles that these characters could inhabit great answer Ryan and Stan thank you for the question and this is again the forum here is for all of you for your questions and thoughts so you saw what Stan did you can just follow suit if you excuse the terrible pun which it didn't mean and you can ask more questions let's hear a little bit more about this I think you've explained the rules which is all about the conversation all about the interpretation and that if you're not familiar with any part of this where you can just dig in and research absolutely yep and like Ryan said I want to just reiterate that research that's something we strongly encourage a little later in this we actually built a facilitators guide too for people they can use this at their campus or university or school but in that facilitators guide we explicitly call out encourage the players the users if they come across a character card or application they're not familiar with or a technology they're not familiar with that's an opportunity to pull out google or ask a classmate or a peer just try and figure out like how does wankayu peru affect this technology or what is a CNC machine yes we tell you what it is briefly but maybe you could search popular CNC machines things like that just to give you an opportunity to learn more about what's on the cards very nice very nice and then we want to proceed a little bit further you had I think three stories or three examples of people using this to tell stories can you speak a bit more about that absolutely so we picked three unique what the next stories that we've had over the past year and as you can see they're in a chronological timeline it worked out super nicely the first this may have been the first time we've ever held a what the deck session officially in the summer of 2020 this was very early on once we were still figuring out how what the deck works we held play sessions before this with Penn State faculty Penn State staff but the engineering summer bridge program was a unique invitation from the leader of the engineering summer bridge program and what this is briefly it's a summer program that's incoming students in the college of engineering they pay a small fee and like a six week program where they're introduced to Penn State they're introduced to unique opportunities available to them in the college of engineering and at Penn State things like that and they reach out to us asking us to provide them with an technology sort of overview because our group specializes not necessarily specializes but we offer a lot of services across Penn State Ryan mentioned a few earlier the media commons the maker commons so we did a small introduction into those services and then we ended with a one and a half hour session that played through what the deck and then we ended with a spark storytelling activity so that was unique we were kind of tinkering around early on what if we added sort of an artifact that after they played through this they built something with it so these students weren't necessarily college students yet they were in that in between between high school and college figuring out how college or university works so it was fun working with them because that was our first sort of full on student experience and that turned out well I mean even with the spark storytelling activity we hosted one of our spark workshops with an online platform that you can quickly create a web page so we had the students work in small groups and then they created a website of their character that they chose or one of their scenarios and they sort of built out their scenario they researched the location added in pictures of the technology so at the end there were about five to seven minutes where they all presented their scenario which added a unique element to what the deck so that was fun to see and then in the fall we hosted this with IST 110 this faculty member we worked with her a lot she usually came to the Dream Marine before the pandemic and we would do that technology showcase with her so in place of that we did which was our main goal of creating this in the first place and she had a unique ask to which we did one round of the full character technology and question cards but then we have a mechanic on the game where we can lock certain cards so we lock the character cards and we shuffled a random technology and a random question and then the students themselves became the characters in the story they had to introduce themselves they had to say where they were from either what their major was or their aspiring career and then just tell like a fun fact about them and then we all had a conversation of how the technology and the question would affect them so that was a unique way of how you can play this game you don't have to use the cards you have you can put yourself into the story which was really good launching it this became a storytelling tool along with role play yes yes storytelling is a big aspect of our group we technology is important but we like to use technology to tell stories or through storytelling if technology works we pull that into but we felt I mean storytelling is as old as humans are and that's just how we connect with things so we always feel that's a powerful tool to intertwine into almost everything we do right well I think this is very exciting do you want to just walk through a hand of the game what I'd like to do is in a second I want to flash one just quickly generate three random cards and put them up but I would like to get one person from the participant swarm one person from the audience to be a volunteer so if you'd like to join us just click the raised hand button the bottom of the screen who would like to be the first to come up I promise we're all pretty nice and remember there's no losing the game it's entirely about conversation just click the raised hand button if you want to join us otherwise you'll have the terrible spectacle of watching Ryan and Zach play completely and you don't want to get Ryan playing who wants to join us up front on stage I see nobody's twitching everyone's nervous about this we can't oh no all right I think we're going to have to try it out for them oh wait wait wait we did get one we of course who else but the awesome Roxanne Riskin from Connecticut let me bring our dear friend up on stage hello Roxanne sorry I had to get my mic well I'm glad you could join us so let's let's take a round of this let me bring up one of these slides so this is what the this is what the back of them look like so these are the random cards you can't tell what they are and then on the website you press launch and you get three so let's take a look at these and let me step back Zach Ryan Roxanne how do we proceed from here sure so traditionally when we do this we always encourage this to be a facilitated conversation so we have a facilitator in the room we've only ever done this virtually so far so we haven't done this in person yet but the facilitator will shuffle the cards we the facilitator will read them out so the character is Thomas he's 31 years old and is a shop owner in Christchurch New Zealand and also an environmentalist or an activist for the Maori culture the technology we have is an electric scooter or car which we have the definitions there motorized transportation that uses electricity to power an engine does require a place to charge internal battery for motor and common examples are hoverboard segues or Tesla vehicles I'll take all of them I would like a Tesla myself and how can Tama use electric scooter or car to improve their occupation or their day to day life at this point we would just encourage the conversation open it up sometimes we would step back other times we participate if there's no one speaking but I will kick this off to whoever wants to start just one quick detail note that you in the reflection question but kind of almost mad lib style how can insert character name and insert technology very good very good well what do you what do you think Roxanne how can what's the connection between Tama and electric scooter do you think this is something that she'd be interested in because she's an environmentalist and wants to get to a post carbon post greenhouse lifestyle I do because she could use the scooter to look at her carbon footprint and make comparisons to other people who aren't using electric powered vehicles or transportation that's a definite improvement and an awareness raising that climate awareness perspective with her her customers I guess she's a shop owner so I would influence and maybe post that somewhere in my shop I'll see if you use this vehicle you will improve not only your carbon footprint but you can influence your customers behavior in a good way without climate shaming them we don't want to do that anymore maybe she could park it in front with a big placard you have me thinking here Brett maybe a map of where she's gone to and maybe post that on her social media and advertise that definitely definitely sorry is that me you're doing well I also look at the functional used to like as a shop owner she could use the electric scooters just to travel back and forth between work or gas money or just quickly I just google Christchurch to see that it's not a small town or small city it's a relatively large population so it could be just a way for transportation back and forth between different shops around town or things like that too and as a shop owner perhaps she's very entrepreneurial in spirit maybe renting out a fleet of electric scooters in front of her shop encourages that kind of environmentalism amongst the city right and so then that gets me thinking about what is a business model for that look like and how does how do the scooters function around town how do they get them back right what unique elements of Christchurch allows for that or would make that difficult one of those app based scooters we had those in DC last year I'm blanking the name of them but I think they were two different brands but yeah San Francisco has some too I think are the electric bikes electric bikes but also scooters you unlock them with your phone and people are driving around town with them now this is a really good point I like the way you're running with this in terms of the business I mean that Thomas can be a way for her to illustrate this also to show her work if Christchurch is that widespread a place then she can basically advertise herself by driving around to depending on her business to pick up supplies to meet with clients that kind of thing oh go ahead please is this a real person I have a question is this a real place but is Christchurch you said it's a church are all of the cards are they real are they real places are they real people and how did you develop how did you develop the characters put in here and who designed them are they sensitive to diverse character I mean I have a million questions about the technology I picked the right person yeah those are all great questions so the locations are all real locations around the world the characters are all fictional characters they are built and generated using we have a creative designer on our team super talented he uses an open source sort of character builder that generates these characters almost randomly he's able to piece together certain the clothings and he can add on spatial elements to change the looks of them but yeah all the characters are fake characters and the names and the their occupation we also randomize those using sort of this character story builder tool that we discovered and actually early on we still have all these descriptions built out and written so we use this description story builder which uses this form of artificial intelligence where we input a few elements and then it builds this story it's like a full paragraph worth of like who this person is like their family things like that and then we would go in and add to it and our original goal was to add this description onto these characters but we quickly found out the character card so like in our minds we have a bigger picture of who these people are because they have full back stories which we'll get to include but yeah no their characters aren't real the locations are and they're built a creative designer designed them but we have a team that sort of added to their story they're saying there's definitely diversity in the characters and their clothing and their ethnicity their backgrounds yeah diversity and representation is really important to us absolutely vital and what we would do after the reflection I mean how does this end I mean we reflected together what's the ending and where's the feedback where's the feedback loop in the evaluation part you know educators are going to ask all these things or we're thanking them right yeah so that goes back to the first session that we had where we were tinkering around with that spark storytelling activity where after the small group sort of had that conversation around this scenario then they would take this and then build that spark page so that was one thing we sort of tinkered with and then we're playing around with but we're not sure we like that yet I think we're still figuring out figuring it out like what does that end game look is it just a discussion is it just an icebreaker that opens up a class or a dream re-experience I think you'll see in the expansion deck that we are looking at that more closely with the faculty partner she's really asking those hard questions and pushing us to figure out what that is and with since we relabeled them action cards we're adding a different mechanic into the game that sort of doesn't give a win-loss scenario but kind of does and I think that's all I'm going to say about that for now as we're still working on it. Well I like the game of the tape and aspect of it and to add that extra card even if that's the expansion deck because it will give the teachers your curriculum designers maybe an opportunity to look at that as an outcome base that not only they're exploring it but it's facilitating it's taking kind of the back door into engagement with technology which faculty may not want to come in and say oh yeah do you have a VR set and I don't know they're not going to identify a fear of not knowing how to use it or feel embarrassed that they haven't explored that area yet so this really opens up a lot of potential and a lot of possibilities for those immersive design learning experience and you could tell them maybe I'm a learning experience designer too but I've met in VR quite a few times already That's right. We've got a question and an observation. Thank you for having me come up Oh, our pleasure. Always good to see you Roxanne. We had a question and a comment from Ciel. Ciel had the comment of if you shop those deliveries, this is about the hand provide the electric scooters to employees, new deliveries Very good. Take that further. Ciel also asks can you share the character building tool you used? So if you've got a link to that or something just put it in the chat. Yes, I will find that it's in our notes, our brainstorming notes. I will go back and find that while we are talking. The multi-tasking brainstorming Yes. Something that Zach alluded to is that this is still relatively new so every time we share with a new audience or do a play session with a new group there's always lots of feedback which is great for us so that we can incorporate it so we can make sure that there is better diversity and better representation in the characters that there are different scenarios that sort of open up conversation in areas that regard the real world or different technologies that we hadn't considered that may be very important for another field of study that should absolutely be included. And my favorite are always ones that open up ethical questions and then have students kind of taking sides of comparing how they think this character may react in that situation or how they themselves may react in those situations. Very good. Do you want to try another hand with another volunteer? Troy? Well, let's see. We have another volunteer or someone who I think I have just shared, which is our dear friend, Ryan Downey from Georgetown University. So let me bring Ryan up on stage. And real quickly I found the character generator and I placed that in chat if anybody is curious. Thank you. Hello, Ryan. Hello, Brian and Ryan and Zach. It's always nice to have that synergy between those names going. I don't know what we're going to do with you, Zach, but you've got that magnificent beard. Now I feel up down. Now I feel like I need to change my name or something. First you're having two Ryan's. But just to let you know, I have a secret agenda in bringing Ryan up and that he is a tabletop gaming expert and a fissionado. You can see behind him on his shelves. You can see some tabletop games. He is also a passionate educator and a very skilled and thoughtful one. Let's see what he has to bring. And if we go to our next hand, which brings up. All right. I can read this one. This is Joyce. She's 35. A single parent with three kids. Thank God. And Chicago Illinois who is changing careers. The technology in question is AI, which includes the ability to program machine to hypothetically think and learn. It can be used to answer questions, learn environments and stand human and computer interaction. Common examples are Apple and Microsoft. And the reflection question here is what does AI allow Joyce to ignore? How could this be used to enhance Joyce's career or in this case dealt with her career switch? Interesting question. Well Ryan, what do you think? Yeah, I think that this gives a lot of potential here. That when we start looking at what does AI do, especially in terms of being on the market, changing careers, going through those job searches, we have the ability to craft that individual profile for who Joyce is and let the AI go out and look for those opportunities all on its own and come back to Joyce with well, maybe you want to do X, maybe you want to do Y. Here's an opportunity from company Z over here and that AI is going to do a lot of that legwork that right now we would have to do manually going through Indeed and Glassdoor and LinkedIn. So maybe the AI can take some of that changing careers aspect and automate that search for Joyce and find some better choices that she might miss because maybe the words aren't quite what she thinks she's looking for but the AI knows a little bit more about Joyce than Joyce is looking for. Oh, well that's deep. I look where you're going at the end that she can learn more about herself through reflection through the AI than she may have had right away. I'm always afraid of how much Amazon and Google know about me, Brian. I'm very happy with what I know about you thanks to Amazon and Google. I think this also, I'm thinking part about her being a parent and I'm wondering to what extent that AI in this sense can help her with parenting. I don't know the age of her children but I wonder if it will help her with logistics of either say getting children to and from school or from date there and if she can ignore some of those because the software can handle it. Well, obviously there are risks and complexities and business models there to consider but that was my first thought there. Even having the AI prompt to remember when homework is due, right, or reminders about what lunches need to be packed, right? Or even if somehow they could entertain the kids so she could just ignore her kids for an hour to get a moment to herself. They're maybe really nice ones. Yeah, I had the same thought because I'm also a parent. I'm not a single parent and just with two kids it's just chaos so I can imagine being a single parent with three kids I think artificial intelligence could greatly help but also I'm looking at Chicago. I've been there once before. I know the city can be kind of crazy so maybe if she does get a job interview that she doesn't have to worry about figuring out how to get there that the artificial intelligence can sort of just map out the best routes, the best time to leave. She can just follow those instructions and not have to worry about getting a traffic or being late so that could be another thing that she doesn't have to worry about. Including mass transit. There are several different systems in Chicago and that's interesting. Combining a few ideas there that AI could then look at what time is the interview where is the babysitter schedule that babysitter to come in take care of the kids. Do meal services need to be brought in Grubhub shows up and feeds the babysitter and the kids while she's off at the interview. That is like the dream isn't it with artificial intelligence that is talking about true artificial intelligence because real quick divergence on this card is we listed common examples of being Siri and Cortana and Alexa on expansion 2 we went back and edited most all of the cards so now we don't provide common examples anymore since we want to future proof these cards. If you really get into what is AI technically Siri and Cortana and Alexa aren't true AI they're more digital assistants so I think that adds another element to the cards like we're really take another path at these cards and making them better and in turn making the conversation deeper as well because I feel like we've gone more into these definitions and carefully reviewed them better too. You just gave me a stray thought if you want to do some interesting sociological work come up with a pack of technologies that is old say technologies from if you want to do a little or 1950 if you want to do a quick dive through people's sense of the technologies Becca Davidson says AI can eliminate jobs that conflict with kids schedules. Very good thank you Becca. I had a question about this and this is this kind of bonehead question from the outside how does this connect directly to education that is are you thinking about these characters as students and if they're physically removed I mean one's in Chicago one's in New Zealand they're clearly distant learning student or are they staff or are they faculty what's the formal education here I'm missing. So the characters are largely stand-ins we feel for the participants themselves and so especially when you're assuming that the students are the participants we believe that critical thinking about technology is vitally important regardless of the discipline that you're studying at Penn State and being able to know when to use a technology and when not to use a technology or when to trust a technology or when to think about how it might be incorporated into their work or research is important across the board and so giving them these tools across discipline fits within any of the many colleges and areas of study that we have here. Very good. And one more thing to add there is we've actually had asks before from groups at Penn State asking like could you do a college aged themed expansion or could you just give us cards around college students age frames and we push back on that saying what is the traditional student age anymore or would that not sort of put the college students in this frame of mind like oh everyone's around my age or they all look like me or act like me so I think this encourages them to think about everybody around the world and also introduce some two technologies too so when they graduate college there's a short time in your lives when you graduate you could be these characters and how do these technologies affect you and the future sort of thing. It would be really interesting to do a round of this with alumni or development offices and say imagine these characters are all alumni and then you can shape that like maybe they left without a degree, maybe they have a graduate degree and then of course flip this for admissions too you could really shape different forms of this for different people. Speaking of which, Ryan Downey thank you for coming and joining us, thank you. Oh absolutely this is fantastic I really love the depth of this and the way that this is so applicable to so many different situations. Brian you just gave some great examples of how to extend this so thanks so much. Hi praise Ryan, hi praise. Do we have time for one more round? One more hand? Yeah. Alright let's advance this Who wants to join us or do I have to pick on somebody? Oh I would be so cruel. I would be that cruel. No volunteers yet? No volunteers yet? Well I think it's going to have to be I think I'm going to bring up Douglas Maines. Douglas are you ready for us? Sure Excellent, hello. And I've got the beard. That's the rule now I fit in. I like this. Welcome and where are you Doug? You're at the University of Texas? Yes, the Health Science Center in Fort Worth. Oh very nice, I bet it's a little warm there right now. It is. Oh gosh, well thank you for getting dry heat. No, no. Well welcome and let's put up the next card and what do we have? We've got Jeffrey who's a farmer and Juan Caio Peru. He's also an expert loom reaver. The technology is proximity tech. These are sensors that have the ability to detect nearby objects without touching them and this can be used to trigger other outputs, signals or notifications. Common use cases are automatic doors, backup cameras and vehicles and so on. The reflection question is what are the ethical implications of Jeffrey adopting proximity tech? This is a deep one. What do you think? Do you want to be called Douglas or Doug? Well, Doug is fine. What do you think Doug? What do you think? Strolling with the ethical part of it. I'm not sure why it would make a difference with respect to ethics. I would think it might be helpful and depending on if the looms are automated or not in sort of giving him notice if things are going wrong or making sure that things are in accordance with what he wants, how things should be going. Ethical implications? I don't know. Maybe it would eliminate jobs. Take the place of people that are working with them or for them. That's a good point. Also take away from the handmade craft part of it if that's what he's doing. I went in a completely different direction. I like yours a lot better. I was thinking if he's walking around engaging a proximity sensor the proximity sensor's response might reveal something about Jeffrey that he doesn't want revealed. If he's going into town and he's trying to give up smoking gets ads for buy this new tobacco based on his shopping. Or if he's gay and doesn't want to be out in public and gets ads for game magazines for example. I'm thinking of that Tom Cruise Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report where a character goes through a mall and gets flagged with ads to him. This is called Our Lives now. That's a great idea and that gave me another idea of proximity tech. When we created this cart Apple's air tags weren't a thing. Now that Apple's air tags are out there's all these questions about privacy about because essentially that's a proximity tech. You can drop that in someone purse and you can track someone. I wonder the privacy issue of if he uses these on his farm or if he uses them in his neighborhood. Like could he track people? What does that mean? How would other people look at him in his community if he starts using this technology? A good point. In a chat Becca Davidson says proximity tech could help to keep various limbs out of machinery. That's a very good thing. Right he's already got one artificial. That's true. I missed that. That's a good point. That's a really good point. You guys are sneaky designers and Doug you are right. He might have a personal story there. I'm curious about professional development too. How proximity tech could play a role. For example if he's walking through a market looking to get a sense of what people are interested in buying and selling. If either he can run software that he himself can detect, can look for keywords in the area or certain sounds or certain images to get a sense of the market. What kind of clothing, what kind of fabric, what kind of size, what colors are being sold after. That might be one thing to do for himself or for his staff if he has people working with him or colleagues. This is a tricky one. I'm just going away by the leg part. That's just brilliant. I think another important thing to look at is that second definition there is they can be used to trigger other outputs or signals or notifications. That's the true power of proximity tech. It's like you use these to trigger something else to happen. It could be having happened when he uses these beacons. He could use it for good or he could use it for something bad. Depending on that bad thing is it could be very ethically no or maybe it's good. I think that could get gray then. To encourage people to put limbs in machinery. On a more benign task, Vanessa Veil, our dear friend and longtime forum participant says my blind son could tell you more than I could about application for disability access. That would be really... There's a term for this. The sound made by traffic signals for pedestrians. When you switch from walk to don't walk, it's any people with visual impairments. Not Navicon. It's actually a term for this. It's designed to appeal to people who have visual impairments. For everybody else. The opposite of good is the fact that we are out of time. First of all, Doug, thank you for coming up on stage and being great sport. I really appreciate it. I appreciate your keen eye. Thank you. For everybody else, let me just say Ryan and Zach, what a fantastic project you've done. This is terrific. Thank you so much for sharing this. How can we keep up with where this project is going and how can we keep up with the two of you? The website that was linked here is a great way to keep up with what the deck. You're welcome to reach out to either one of us through LinkedIn or through Twitter. We're happy to share where that's going. As Zach mentioned, there is the facilitator's guide that's now available on the website. If you are interested in using this in your own context with institution, with students, with other staff, colleagues, we are happy to make sure you have access to that and that the facilitator's guide is useful to you. We also welcome feedback on any and all aspects of this to make sure that it is as inclusive and useful as possible to all of our populations. Excellent. Once again, thank you both. This has been a real treat spending time with you all. This is an exciting project. I just can't wait to hear where this goes next. In the meantime, take care both of you. Don't care where you're trying to go. I just want to tell you where we're headed for the next few weeks. Again, just to remind you that we've got a whole series of sessions coming up on education, equity for black students, mentoring, professional development, trauma informed teaching, the history of personalized learning along with extended reality. If you'd like to keep talking about this and some of you have been doing so in Twitter, just use the hashtag FTE and we can keep talking. You can follow me at Brian Alexander where Shindig is Shindig Events. If you'd like to go look at our previous sessions either on emerging technologies or on gaming or both, just go to tinyroll.com slash FTF archives and we've got more than 250 sessions there for you to look at. Remember to subscribe. In the meantime, thank you all for playing this game, for reflecting on it with us. Please take the spirit of playfulness and fun forward through the summer. Above all, all of you take care and be safe. We'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.