 I think we should begin because we have the top of the hour and some people are showing up and we have guests here live in the Educo studio. So to begin, hello, to begin, welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see some of you here today and to lead to be here in this unusual location. We're here at the Educo International Conference in Chicago, Illinois. If we get a hello from the crowd around us, say something. Awesome. Why don't you turn your camera around so people can see it. Just grab a laptop and see who, yeah. You can see all those people there. So this is one of those special sessions where we combine the virtual and the physical, the digital and the analog, the global online and the intimate face-to-face. So before we do all that, let me just introduce the program and explain how it works, what it's about, what we hope to accomplish, and then we'll start off with a whole bunch of conversations. So to start off with the Future Trends Forum is a conversation-based program where we have discussions about the future of higher education. Unlike your typical webinar, we don't have any slides. What you're seeing right here is just the introduction. Instead, we are all about back and forth, about questions, about exchanges, and about sharing information and knowledge. The idea here is to collaboratively grapple with higher education's future, and we've been doing this now for almost eight years. When I say we, I'm Brian Alexander on the forum's creator, host, and your chief cat herder for the next hour of conversation. Now, if you want to learn more about the forum, we have a lot of stuff online, including an archive going back, again, nearly eight years. Just go to tinyurl.com.ftfrchive and you can find nearly 100 reportings of sessions. In fact, if you go to our website, forum.futureofeducation.us, you can find a whole table of contents of looking at our sessions as we cover everything from learning management system to copyright, to presidents, to leadership and more. Now, if you want to see what we're coming up with, over the next few weeks, we have sessions coming up on a wide range of subjects, including information literacy, new developments there, intermediary organizations. Organizations that are neither appropriate nor academic and how they can help academia, and we also have another session on the changing landscape of higher online education. Just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to learn more about that. Now, we can only do this work with helping some generous sponsors, and I'd like to thank them before we proceed. NizerNet in New York State, actually, NizerNet has some representatives here. I hope they get to see this. They are a non-profit that does great work getting all kinds of colleges and universities online and doing great professional development work with them, we're grateful for their support. And we're grateful to Shindig because if you're new here or if you haven't been involved in Shindig for a while, it works pretty interestingly. What we have in the top half of the screen is the stage. We call that because everybody can see and hear everything that goes on stage. And we also have the bottom half of the screen, everybody else. So all around you, you should see different logins or different people. In fact, if you want to get to know more about them, just mouse over them and you can see more. And if you'd like to meet somebody that is on our program, just double click on them. And if they want to talk to you, your two icons can snap together like Legos, which is pretty cool. How do you participate in this overall conversation? Well, there are a few ways. And on the mobile app, you should be able to see some buttons for this. And on your web, you should be able to scroll down to the bottom of the screen and see a white band running along it with a few different buttons. One of those buttons is a number. When you press that, you get a chat box. And people use the chat box all the time. In fact, if you haven't said hello in the chat box, say hello. I'm going to say hello from Chicago right now. Now, next to that chat box, on the white strip are a couple other buttons. One of them is a raised hand. And that, if you click that, that tells me you want to join us on stage, which is easy to do. And next to that is a Q&A box, which you can type a question and I'll flash that question up on the stage when the time is right. So those are the ways to participate and we're grateful to Shindig for making them available. Last but definitely not least, we're grateful to our supporters on Patreon who contribute as... I mean, some of these guys contribute as little as a dollar a month to keep all our lights on, our machines happy. And the rest of them contribute $10 a month. Folks like Phil Long, like David Attle, like Chris Sessons, we're really grateful to them for their support. And you can join them. Just go to Patreon.com slash Brian Alexander. Now, today we're at the EDUCAUSE Conference in Chicago, Illinois. We're on the third day of events, lots of sessions, lots of conversations, lots of discussion. And we're in this great spot where we're in a wonderful studio run by the great Jerry Vane. And around us are a couple of dozen people who are here to talk to you and to answer your questions. Or just to listen and see what's going on. So to start with, I'd like to bring to the stage our good friend and splendidly moustachioed man, Thomas J. Tobin. Tom does, among other things, he works remotely from Pennsylvania where he works at the University of Wisconsin. He consults widely. He writes a lot. He's like a one-man army. And I'm going to bring him up here so that we can share some notes. The idea here is to connect to the physical conference with the virtual. Hello, Tom. And hello, Brian. Good to join you from EDUCAUSE today. Welcome, friends, for joining us here at the EDUCAUSE conference. And those of you who are online joining us for this special episode. Excellent, excellent, excellent. Glad to see you. If I could quickly get a quick sound check. Can those of you hear us? Tom says there's a little echo. Yeah, looks like I'm coming through when you are as well. Very good, very good. And just for you, the people online. We'll do this wave again. I'm going to turn my camera out here. And those of you here, wave hello to your friends who are online in the session as well. Thank you very much. Excellent. So what I was hoping you do, Tom, was to ask you a couple of things. First, you were presenting a really, really great poster. I'd like to hear about it. But also I want to hear about your experience here at EDUCAUSE. What have you been seeing? So let's start off with your poster. What was it about? I presented some research that's going toward the new book that I'm writing called Universal Design for Learning at Scale. I'm working with 11 different colleges and universities in the United States and Canada to take what had been, up until now, largely an individual effort. Some instructors can use the framework of Universal Design for Learning in order to lower barriers for their students. But we're doing that in individual sessions or individual applications. I'm working with colleges and universities to help scale that up to entire institutions. And so I present on that. I bring a lot of people stop by. And listeners, if your college or university is anywhere along that journey, I'd love to hear from you as well and perhaps feature your ideas in the book. Well, I have to ask a couple of questions about that. One is, when we think about Universal Design for Learning, we often think about accessibility. How important are accessibility offices or departments to this measure? Accessibility office, A, pay them more money and hire more staff for yours, here and here. And folks who are doing disability support and accessibility support work in our colleges and universities, they are doing one change, one time for one person. They are helping people to make accommodations. So these are students who have documented disability conditions in their environment, and they're helping lower those barriers one at a time. Now, what I want to advocate for is Universal Design for Learning, which goes hand in hand with the work that our colleagues in disability support offices are doing. That work is how to think about the learning interactions that our students have with materials, with other, with us, with support staffers, with the community. If all of those interactions, if we're designing them so that there's more than one way to take advantage of them, then we're the barriers not only for students with disabilities, but also students who have work and family responsibility live far away from campus, or they just haven't been able to build their models of like standards that are using more robust technologies. What that does is by lowering those barriers more broadly, we're actually making more time for our colleagues in the disability service offices and spend more un-concentrated time with the students who are helping them most. So what we're doing is we're helping them focus more on their mission. While we're also making it a little easier, not only for our students, but also for us as instructors, as administrators, as support staffers at colleges and universities. So on the one hand you're increasing efficiency, both at an institutional level and a personal level. You're improving the experience that the students get and the quality of their learning and their outcomes. And you're also at the same time doing what they sometimes call the curb-cut principle, which is if you make an accommodation for disability, it can also benefit people who are not in that disability category. A little summarized. Yes. Oh, this is excellent. This is a terrific work, and when you look forward to your book and when it comes out, let me know so we can bring you back just to talk about that. What kind of feedback did you get? Speaking of feedback. From all the audiences. Ask your question. Folks are interested in it, and by the given this talk or poster five years ago, many people would not have known what universal design for what it is. UDL was one of the major cause of top ten issues just before the pandemic. So in 2019, accessibility and universal design and universal design learning made it into top ten. And a lot of people now know about the concept. So if you're interested to learn more about how they can scale about all the big themes that you're causing this year is scaling up our efforts and increasing efficiency of what we're doing collectively in lots of different areas of colleges and universities. That's interesting. I hadn't realized that about the current issue. In the chat, Tom Haines is a really good comment. He says that if you're smart in your design, ADA, for those of you outside the U.S. and American Disabilities Act, ADA concerns usually fade into the background. For instance, he says, since I don't give tests, you don't have to worry about affording extended times and all those sorts of things. That sounds like a really good point, Tom. Thank you. Well, to carry this transition on a bit, as you walk around in the conference, what are some of the other themes and ideas that you're hearing about as you go up the hallways and as you've been to sections I couldn't think of? Absolutely. I'm sure you're hearing three big things here at the EDUCAUSE conference. First off, stocks are back. All of the vendors in the exhibition hall are giving out little swag items and things like that. And for the last few years, they've been a notable back of free stocks. So everybody's got to hear a stock story here from the vendor area. That's the number one. I've had to be more serious, though. The big theme on everybody's lips today is generative artificial intelligence, generative AI. Many people were involved in artificial intelligence and large language models from a research perspective over the past many years. But it was only until November 23rd of 2022 when chat GPD got released that suddenly it's on every administrator's mind. How are we going to respond? And we're just now coming out of the whole of this need and it has so much possibility and working through the emotions of ban and block and what do we do with it and how do we make ethical use of large language models and chat GPD and generative AI. So there's a huge theme in lots and lots of sessions. And even sessions that aren't nominally about generative AI, people are putting it into their thought processes. That's interesting. In my session on generative AI, we thought it was possible that one outcome that we might right now be in an interstitial stage. We were passing through the pre-generative AI, the post-generative AI stage, in which GTA will be ubiquitous. And now we're having bubbles and scrapes because it's brand new for us right now. Absolutely. So generative AI, the SOCs, and one more thing. And the one more thing in all of the conversations I had with folks who are CIOs or in information technology space, the other concern is about budgets. Negatively, in higher education, we are seeing an enrollment cliff. We don't have as many students coming to our colleges and universities as before. And unless we are the IVs with gigantic endowments, the majority of colleges and universities in North America, we're feeling a pinch and we're having to figure out where we can go in order to figure out efficiencies, make with smaller budgets, make consortia of those kinds of things. From the stage today, we had the EDUCAUSE Top 10 session from the students of Project and she eloquently summarized some of that research that the folks at EDUCAUSE have been doing and talking about how worldwide we're seeing that trend of how do we do more in certain circumstances. And so those two trends put together a little bit challenging. Make AI wave and fewer resources. I've got to say, Tom, I could talk to you forever, but I've taken you out of your session. Let me thank you for coming. Tell everybody, what's the number? That was poster 508. I don't know which WAG in EDUCAUSE gave you the same section of the law that deals with disabilities from section 508 of the Renewalization Act, but it's easy to remember. So if you're on the EDUCAUSE website and you want to see the materials from the session, just you can search by my name under the conference session. Thanks for having me on the show again. It's a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you. Thank you for doing the great work. And while Tom goes off, let me bring up another guest. So you have to mention that all around us, we're seeing all kinds of people going back and forth. This is kind of like the grandest stage here. I think it's good to see all kinds of people here. So just a quick shout-out to make a hello. If you could all yell back a hello at us. Hello! Some of them are on their way to Starbucks. So they might need some more getting to this. But let me bring two people up here who are wonderful guests. Wonderful, I know very well. One, I don't know. So I'm calling him, and a wonderful guest. Now the channel is going to have to be wonderful. You know what? You can sneak in anytime. It's not like you open a door. And we have to know this guy, he literally came in from off the street. We were just talking about accessibility, university design, we were talking about A&I, we were talking about financial projects. No! Let's talk about another topic. In order to introduce my good friend, Lisa, Lisa is in Chicago right now, right? I am. Where she's doing a lot of things, doing a zillion different education. She's a brilliant person. One person that I've never heard of, she absolutely needs to know. And she runs a great website. If you're interested in learning space, so if you're thinking about it in common, if you're thinking about doing your library, if you're thinking about creating a lab, if you change your pattern, if FlexXX is reminding you of the best place in the world to see an example, see research, see research, and connect with a deal. FlexXX is the dishonest thing that we do. I'm so happy to have her come back and update you to see what's going on. So first, before I bring my other colleague on the stage, let me just ask Lisa, hello, how is your presentation of FlexXX doing here today? What do you have to tell us about that? I would like to tell everyone that this is a freely available resource. If you have a .media account, please share your learning spaces at FlexXX.org. You can go in and create an account, and people are using FlexXX to get all sorts of ideas. And the slides are next to me. Yeah, this guy, with a spatial error problem. He's Joe A. from UCLA, and also the Chairman of the Board of Higher Education Technology and Manager of the Alliance. So we are working together to grow FlexXX even bigger. And then the other thing I'd like to say is I'm always astounded at the generosity of our colleagues who share not only their learning spaces, but also upload all kinds of helpful as we're back to our colleagues today. Quickly ask. Yes, yes. We need to do some research tools, all sorts of cool stuff, a lot about inclusion, diversity, good stuff. Excellent. I want to explain. Well, Joe Joe, you're all serious. Welcome. I'm glad to see you. You're here for UCLA? I'm here for UCLA, so I'm the Executive Director of Digital Spaces as my 9 to 5, which is really exciting. I know it's the greatest thing I've ever heard, but it tells you nothing about what I did. It is fantastic. And really what it is, is that it was actually your role created in order to really rethink how we use our spaces. Because we know the classrooms and learning environments are no longer just four walls on a chalkboard, right? We now live in this new world, this hybrid world, the high flex world. There are a number of buzzwords out. And how can we now leverage that and push that forward? And that's really what my job is created, so I've been there for about this week five. So, so far, you know, it is fantastic. Well, I was going to tease you and say that you've got to leave UCLA to enjoy a touch of what cool weather is like. Yeah, you know, it was 92 degrees the day before I got on a plane. That's right. The suffering and the struggle are real. Yeah. But you're also called the digital learning space. The digital space. So how does the digital play role there? You know, really, all of what we do now lives in this weird virtual hybrid world, right? So the idea is, how can we connect all of our space? How can we connect students to make the seamless experience across the enterprise? What are the interesting things about my new role? It's not just classroom. That's only 20 percent. We have everything from our signage to our conference rooms, to our study rooms, to our libraries, to our conference and events, to our housing. All of those things, the rooms we take, the student, we look at who the student is. We're a global research student in person right now. And they're known by their identity. You know, a fun fact is the average 13 to 25-year-old is no better by their Instagram handle than they are their own first name. And so now... I just want to hear that thought again. That their Instagram handle is more... It is more known than their own first name. And a social media influencer is the number one highest revenue job for the 13 to 25 next to sports. So therefore, if you realize that this branding, a student now is their own brand, and that is exactly now what we're trying to do and what we're doing at UCLA is say, can we leverage that? Can we leverage this new demographic? And can we take our spaces, whatever they're doing, and take the technology and make it work for them? Because we know, students now, you know, one of the things calling good or bad, I won't make a judgment, but it's true, is, you know, we learn during the pandemic you don't have to learn just by sitting in a class and being lectured to. Right? And now students want to keep that going. They're saying, hey, you know what? If we're all going to take the same 100-level class, can we just need a Starbucks, have our coffee, collaborate together? And you, for a very long answer to your very short question, can we now go and say, can we use digital tools for virtual whiteboarding? Can we use collaboration tools? Can we do all of those types of things? Toolwork together, no matter where we are and where we want to learn from. And then? And interestingly, the founding people who are flex-based, all of our advisors and any of our sponsors and supporters said at the beginning this needs to be bigger than just built learning environments. You know, we need to be sharing more about the digital learning environment. So even though we're currently a physical built environment, it's rapidly expanding to all sorts of other cool stuff. Well, I'm curious about so many things when you said, Joe, and about what you're describing flex-based. But if I could, what kind of feedback have you gotten from here at Educosm? What questions have people put to the two of you when you talk about this? What issues do they bring to you? Well, from the flex-based perspective, we are unveiling a brand platform and we're very excited about that. Just a couple of the key differences is the age, speaking at the point that they'll communicate at the record level. So we have a question about a particular space that maybe it will reach out and speak to the person about what it is. Fantastic. Or somebody else. It is looking not to be able to perhaps answer a question. And the idea board is kind of like our interest on the service for various spaces. Every individual user will be able to create their own idea board to share about it. So it is no longer limited to just administrative. Oh, good. I would totally use that. And a bonus. Fulfillable. So, how many of those individual learning space to take the pictures? We have I'm going to bring it in a few minutes. We're going to be talking about the flip of the flex-based integrated planning pathway where we can use this example where we use the edge across learning space training system to help campus advisors understand what the learning potential is in their various rooms on campus. This is good. And then we get them all together around the table because they've got some native word for it. And then the flex-based is to start looking at whole groups because we're in 75 different countries now. There's some cool spaces in there without you from Japan, Australia, Canada, yes, certainly Australia. That would be awesome. That sounds terrific. And Joe, I'm curious, would the viewer have any perspective at doing that? One of the great things because obviously we're unveiling this week the dating, emerging, the collaboration of flex-based into, hadn't had a higher education technology manager at my.org. And we have an opportunity to do a commercial in the program over there. I was going to ask you for the URL. So at my.org it's actually a great community. We're an advocacy organization, actually only four years old, we have now 750 institutions that are lists serve over 30,000 which is crazy. But really it was founded in order to give a community four technology managers and their learning environments. And I was always a fan of flex-based from day one. Ever since I had I was brought into higher ed from live events and I came in and said, hey, where how do I even start designing a classroom that's based on the answer. So there's this like this that turned into a wait a minute. Now we have this new 3.0 platform starting with the community with the tool I think is going to be huge and it will always be free and we'll bring this together and leverage great partners in the industry are going to allow that to happen. So anybody at any institution is looking to be able to use this space be affected with this space will be able to go here start like to me the exciting part of the idea of I love it because I love that now we can work through the process and then collaborate for the whole process while building up with the people who are the ones who end up using it and supporting it. Productive social media where this house this house actually did you give us the URL for flex-based again? Like what do they stop work? There you go. We're very excited to see the project because everybody is essentially a money administrator. So that's where we're very interested to hear what we can get out of the life of our partners and maybe we can go to a great day. Well, I want to keep you from that. I do want to say in the chat Tom Hems mentioned designing a whole campus around third space and he chairs everything so you should definitely check that out. Thank you Tom. I'm going to have a live session already. Oh my pleasure. Headphone, work, and text message. Wonderful to see both of them. Thank you. Have a great day. And everybody, we're going to, of course, be happy to hear any of your questions about the conference. We'd love to hear any of your thoughts if any of you'd like to talk about it. And in the meantime, there are a few people here who can possibly join us. We have a lot of kinds of folks, including I mentioned. And while we wait to see people, I don't know, can I look at you? Can I just move this over here? Oh, you don't want to see me. Oh, you don't want to get over there. I'm talking to an invisible person. This is often the sign of some kind of early onset mental illness. But instead, I'm talking to my good friend, Jerry Bing. Jerry is a multi-media mask. He is based in Illinois. He's in Indiana. And he is, among other things, the multi-media program manager. So for years, he's been doing interviews. He's been doing podcasts. He's been doing videos. And he's just terrific at this. And he's been a great host. And so I wanted to first thank him. But also to say, what have you been hearing as you've been talking to people? You've been doing interviews. Yeah, right here in this space, you get to have people walk by and ask you questions. What's your sense of the vibe? What's the intercourse conference telling you right now? Oh, that's a good question. I'm sort of a little bit removed from the conference, even though we're right here on the courseway here, because I have my little studio here, and I just gave visitors from the conference. I did a very interesting interview just this afternoon with somebody named Hegga Parsi. She's the Chief Privacy Officer for... I have to look it up because it's escaping. She is the Chief Privacy Officer for UC San Diego. And we talked a lot about privacy in regards to vendor relationships. And that was a very interesting conversation. I very much encourage people to check out her poster, her session, because it's a very comprehensive view of privacy, one that's much more expanded than what we think of her. The thrust of her argument is we think of privacy in very narrow terms. Trump is so much more special in the digital realm than people think of. And that the vendor and private industry is talking sort of a different language of privacy than activating it. That was interesting to talk to. I'm the sort of person where you cook on the spot and get in trouble. Oh, you're great. That was a very rich line that you just expressed. It's interesting that you say that, because it reminds me of what Joe was saying a few minutes ago, that this is a generation that rises where social media is so crucial to what they do. The one line about someone's histogram will be more famous than they are. How does that do you think jibe with this problem of privacy? That's a good question. That's just so not my expertise. I do know that this mirror being bought is told as profiles to different industries. There may be a Brian Alexander out there that's different at Brian Alexander than this other industry has. We have many personalities. I think that's happening more and more. People are still pretty far into the digital age. We're still young enough that people are just now starting to grasp that. There are personas out there that have been drafted from what they bought here, that they talked to there. That's a fantastic way of describing it. It reminds me a bit of personas in design thinking. We have doppelgangers running around, constructed of us that are similar but different in some key ways. Maybe for one, you're looking for a watch for your wife. You want a vintage watch and an old watch. Suddenly, there's a profile out there that's very interested in watches. Even though two weeks later, you're not that person anymore. But that profile lives on somewhere. I wrote about, this is some time ago, about 12 years ago, about giving up caffeine and giving up alcohol on the same day. Also giving up spices. It was a serious move. I posted it on Facebook. The key thing was, I started getting ads for substance abuse. Alamon and everything else. I was like, I don't need this. I was kind of a troll about it. Facebook is caring about it. But there's a persona that's going out that has these issues. What happened? Is that persona now gone? That's a fascinating thing. I asked you a couple of questions about your presentation. You're turning the table. This is great. You've talked about artificial intelligence. These are fairly obvious questions, but I'd love to hear you talk about it. How do you evaluate it as a threat versus a promise? Every industry that is disrupted, there are people that are not going to have jobs. If we want to go clean energy, there are people that are disrupted out of the coal industry. But AI seems to be able to disrupt several industries at once. Remote cars. Cars driving by themselves. Creative stuff. What do you think of that? Do you think there's going to be a lot of pain before you really see the promise of AI or will they happen at the same time? I think pain is the order of the day. To back up a little bit, today is Wednesday. On Monday, I gave a pre-conference workshop about AI, generative AI in higher education. It was a very exciting event. We had lots of people, lots of conversations. This came up. A lot of anxiety were there, wondering about where things were headed. As mentioned a few minutes ago, I think there's the possibility of moving to a ubiquitous AI future in the near term. This is one that we're experiencing now may be interstitial. In fact, one of those things that came up was that while we have tools like Jachi PT or Mid Journey or Pi, those might be really interstitial because the way we look at our experience in AI is through the tools that are more used to it. So Photoshop right now, for example, has AI built in. Lots of people use Photoshop just for a living life. Of course, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google... What's the Excel spreadsheet for Google? Google Sheets. So all of those have AI built in. And that may be where we end up being. Can I ask you one last question? I'm just answering it, but that's a good question. So I think many of these are the pains of this transition. Some of them are caused by some of the proponents of AI who are doing the old move fast and break things kind of school. And some of it is caused by just the shift in complexity of modern civilization into which we're jamming this intensely complicated technology. It's also technology that's moving super quickly, changing on a weekly basis and on a daily basis at times. And that adds complexity as the friction. And that's not even getting to stupid. So I think that's a quick answer to your question. Can I ask one more question? I know we need to move on to talk to this right gentleman right here. Do you think this move in development and AI in all fronts, we've got some creative tools like mid-journey, to do some creative things as well. That taking into consideration as well as all the other things. Do you think the progression of AI will have any effect on the humanities? The humanities has been suffering for several years. People are, this is making an accurate but nice sense, that people are moving towards academia for job-related things. Science-related things. The idea of the humanities has a profitable or encouraged pursuit. Has dwindled a little bit? And I wonder if, do you think AI will have any impact on that to a positive or negative? I think it will have a huge impact at a few different levels. And one of them is the context that enrolled in the humanities has been dropping steadily. More so in some fields than others. Languages are then English, for example, is really steep. I think religion is going to continue to drop, especially religious belief in the US continues to drop. My own field where I came from English has been dropping as well. History is doing poorly. So I think it depends on how we react within the humanities and how the rest of the world perceives AI. So for example, if we think about a generative AI as an artistic and creative tool, this helps us communicate, this helps us write, this helps us draw, then we might see some help as people go to an art class and they say, okay, I want to learn paint brush, I want to learn photography. I also want to figure out how to make a journey really dance and say, you may have someone in a journalism class who says, okay, I'm good at writing here, but I also want to know, I'm going to get hired by the Chicago Times, right? I'm just making this up now. And if they may be having AI built into our internal content management system, I want to know how to work with that. So that's one possibility. It's also possible that we make it experimental, because if you take a look at some of these questions, what does it mean to write with Chachi B. Taylor? This is the kind of question that people in literary criticism have wrestled with for hundreds of years. What is a creator? What does it mean to pre-mix things? We have a lot to say. Unless we drop the ball, unless we don't engage, which is, I'm afraid, also possible. It feels like we're becoming more editors than originators. You are good at this. If you say you're drawing like you just drew wonderful things, you're editors, not originators. You know, there's a great documentarian, Aaron Morris, a wonderful, wonderful guy. He did Think Blue Line, for example. He was a wonderful documentarian. A lot of war? A lot of war, oh my gosh. And the movie about Rumsfeld, it's the only time I've seen him on screen, he actually loses temper. I asked him what he was doing, what does the digital world do for filmmaking? And he was kind of like, he said, you don't need to shoot video anyway. What do you mean? There's so much video content available that you can make a movie right now by remixing. And he cited a great great documentarian, Adam Curtis, whose work is nothing but remixed pre-original video that he arranges and then speaks over. And they're powerful. I don't know if Morris is completely right in that, but it blew me away. We're editors. Maybe where we go. We're going everything from great technical details to deep philosophical structural questions. Now I'd like to welcome another guest. And this is a friend who is in my line of work. He's a futurist, and he also works with GAB. And this is Eddie. And then, I always want to put an L in there. I'm not quite sure why. Yeah, for a pilot last year, it's made so many different ways. Why would you shoot my whole life? I'm very grateful to Ed Bennett for buying me so many beers and bars over the years. That's been a great benefit. So you appreciate it. I'd like to add in to the conversation just completely. Composers. AI engineer. For music? Yes. So you can match the AI-generated music. And it is now about what kind of process you want to fit in there. Definitely. There's an academic in Ohio, and I'm sorry to go to his name, but he had built a generating a world of music tools. And it basically generates what sounds like Bach revolving from the next room. And it's pretty convincing unless you're an expert in the 17th century music. It's pretty surprising. But this is a good point. We were just now, before we started, we had a Vietnam tool, a barrage, which comes with so many pre-existing clips, and you can make a lot of stuff just by shuffling it around. So Ed, what do you, first of all, what do you do at AI? What did you do here at AI? Well, if you give me a little bit of background, or to get the audience a little bit of background here. I've been in AI for about 16 years. My background is in... 16 years. I was there from the ground floor. My background is in literature and biology. I change over time, my whole life, and it's my interest in futurism. My technique is encoded to student success. So, looking at the different ways that we can support students, particularly through technology. In our case, a CRM, an analytics technology, and how we can start for sure, too. And using H2 to essentially connect students to services, be they by view, to HLA, to health services, academic support, career advice, you name it. And my colleague, Kathy Shaw, who presented this yesterday, showed just how far the gap is. Most schools have all these services available. Only about half of students are aware of the services available at their school. And only about 20% of them are using it. Oh, no. But those that use it, feel as if they're longing, are more likely to stick around, and be retained. Yeah, something along those lines. There's something out there. The schools are already spending money on this stuff. It's actually a very encouraging thing for me to look at and say, but if you don't want to make big new investments, you have to stop the need to promote it better. And that's going to be involved in changing the layer of you from students coming to us, to you today, and perhaps AI has an opportunity to be there as well. I've been hearing more and more about student services and everything from student data and using it to better shape the services. What have you been saying here, that you caused? What have you been hearing? Well, so, I had a conversation yesterday about the fragmented data of the texture around campus. Now, you might have 23 databases. You did the elements, the SIS, or whatever you've got around, initial data, HR data, that all could be long from until I do any problems with the students' success. I'm going to leave this to Matt if we can talk about that for a minute. Matt, how much math do you do to students? Sorry, I thought you were saying an acronym for a second there. Matt, Matt. How would you get a sense of where your first year class is? Under math or operation? Whatever you don't. I'm going to score so much math. You can pull information from so many databases around campus, but unless you have good data governance, you can't. And so, sadly, it's a good goal, and I think the education policy I'll give this morning pointed to that in a number of different ways. As far as what I've been learning from my conference, I've been asking a lot of questions that are like, well, where do you see the future go? No, especially for success. Universe, every school where I'm talking about about a half a dozen institutions like this runs right to the same phase, but with a perception of that. Are we going to be in good year? How do we know about it? And it's just a holiday for students to go ahead and call them out some years from now. Feel that they want to invest time and money, and we'll talk about it. I had a fascinating conversation last night where we developed an analogy which was, well, this university or a college. It's a journey through the night. It's an opportunity to spend two to four years from how long you're going to be in. You're going to have to spend a little longer to get into the water. Really just exercising about the link. And in mind that way, we are preparing students for jobs that you don't need to do this straight. How do you prepare students for jobs that you don't need to know what that job is? Well, it makes you stronger. And whenever you come all the way you will be able to deal with an even more thoughtful way. So this is interesting. You start off with biology. But now you've entered the realm of communication. You say that first there's this big problem in campuses where they have all these great services and the board hasn't really gotten out of it. Now you're saying that higher education is doing this great brain gymnasium work but we haven't really convinced the country about this. Yeah, it's hard to talk about, right? Because somehow we got inter-boldened talking about learning. Yes, yeah. Whatever the lead you're creating is on a degree. And then that actually warrants us into this is major versus this is major. And yes, all that, right? What about the end of this out there right now? Let me say at age 35 a liberal arts community needs to make more than a technical major. What happened then? I don't think about the Japanese in analogy. They got to move between different skills. They got to jump between different machines. They shot boots and they lifted weights and when they leave they can take a job at the penalty scene and then maybe later they can get a job with the basketball. Yeah, and I will go ahead and say this as a STEM major myself, you may need two majors to make better managers. They understand their people better. That's part of the training. So if we were telling the public this sort of stuff at age 25 you'll make more money if you are in these fields out of the public please. But not across the course of your career unless you get some additional training on top of your technical major. Maybe you're a real powerhouse. But we're terrible at talking about it so we're starting to communicate in that way. We need to get better at that. We do, especially because we're now making our future. We have fewer available Gen Z students who are just fewer. Fewer than want to go to college so participation made of high school grads has been shrinking now for about 10 years almost. We get the pandemic they've added in and then we've got this math problem that I alluded to a minute ago. If you look at the needs scores of what is going on in K-12 right now in terms of arbitration levels it's not great. If we had something like maybe 45% or any graders in the past on a college level track for math maybe not what they call it but they're on the trajectory. That's not 35%. So we've lost 8 out of 7 of the students that we have a brutal population. So we have a thing to do here because you can actually have math that touches so many different programs we'll look at three different criteria. Those schools that have not had developmental education programs of scale so if we have scale if you were a university school that is one of the best students what happens if you're in your faculty and your master's degrees are really there? This is fantastic. Are you going to be on the vendor floor? Yes, I'll actually be out there from 3 p.m. on the day which is when we can put a transfer for any of the students tomorrow. Oh really? So it's a 9-3 more mornings at AI but right now where is your EAB your number on the floor? It's 9.19. In the 9th of general. If you're in your college you have to talk about either your company or student success rate. Thank you for joining us I appreciate it. You can stick around for a few months if you want to we're going to push the monitor to bring back one of our dear friends and repeat a serial guest in fact. Let me introduce Maya Gordieva Everybody knows Maya. I've always introduced her as the person who along with her and Ray Craig are the world's great experts in how higher education engages with extended reality but over the past couple of years it's not content just to have that Maya has moved on to become expert and a leader in two other fields she's been working a lot on wanting computing, winning awards and winning grants and working in AI she is a wonderful machine an army of brain and she does this all with a plong, brilliance and being very kind of the same time so first of all I just want to say thank you Brian, it's a real treat I know I see a lot of you online and I also want to say hello to some of the friends I see on the session but it's a real treat to see you Brian in person and it's a great week in Chicago so yeah, add you guys Let me ask we just put these things up those three topics each of which is enormous AI, quantum computing and XR which of those have you been working on here at your cost, which of the things you're presenting, talking about which of these would you like to talk about right now? Alright, so for me it's actually the way I like to think about this is for tier technologists and the way I like to think about this convergence and it's really the convergence of those and it makes sense of them and also mediums that you're a force multiplier which will have a significant impact but here at your cost yesterday I spoke about the innovation center which is my playground the innovation center at the news group has three labs and that's the XR lab, the AI lab and the quantum labs and under these labs we actually the reason they exist is in a way to create a track, a launch pad and these opportunities have been useful and they recognize us also as the person's school of design so under these we engage with curricular, extracurricular partnerships things like hackathons, design gems empowering students in these three labs so yesterday I spoke about that about just creating this ecosystem for me it's really a playground and a launch pad we need students in time it really creates an opportunity to think about in the context of all different backgrounds, programs that exist at the news group but tomorrow tomorrow morning I will get to do a critical conversation with my co-spirited Emery Craig at the frontier and that focuses on AI in higher education and society and that would be something that this fall and particularly we picked up an incredible pace at the new school in terms of how I engage with conversations with faculty and students so as we spoke earlier this week I've been mentioning we are running a series of events and workshops and we kind of try to put them in one form and short form and that's my thinking and one form is these conversations that are beyond just a demonstration it's really on the ethical and philosophical kind of questions and elements and I think we bringing a bring a little bit more a little bit of time and try level reflection but also some of them kind of need immediate conversation in higher education and then on Thursday I get to bring my research assistant and she actually stands by me and we go into things with the journey and stay with the fusion and whatever else comes our way Adobe and Sound and Video and it's a really kind of playful session but we get into hands on into it and so it's a real treat and Joe Julio is just an amazing designer technology undergraduate student at Parsons Oh fantastic, an undergrad, we're looking forward to meeting you Julio, but this sounds terrific and I love the way that you're working at such a high level and of course Ed and I are both very delighted to see this at a futures oriented level thinking about how you can combine AI and content in order to, for example, power content creation, VR and XR, it's a terrific but what are you hearing from all the participants here at Educause when you talk about this stuff do they bring you projects they have a month or questions or are they frightened what kind of feedback are you getting? Yeah it's interesting, I mean there are a lot of good sessions and as usually it happens the session provides a great platform for the conversations that linger and the level in engagement in the conversation plus session I think it's just as being just as insightful and a good opportunity for me to kind of get into more of the deeper questions I think today we're in a space where a lot of people are still learning and I think it's good to be in a learning mode and if you think you know what's happening then I would caution that because first of all it's going with rapid space around us and also we're just stretching the surface, right? I mean we have a lot of institutions have brought in things like chatbots and other things and we have some awareness how to run this and they serve a good purpose in addressing some questions and then there's a lot of conversation about chatGTP and academic integrity and quite so here at Adagio Girls lots of people behind at home in charge of running some of these services so very I think a very kind of question around academic very strong trend around this conversation what we make of this I think still looking at a lot of the other opportunities and I think it's very important even until how we think about that across our programs so I think there's some conversation and also how we prepare our faculty staff to engage with that whether it's in professional development or in the classroom so nothing as much as a deeper level I think there's an awareness that needs to happen but of course this project is just happening they're right now happening so what I see a lot more is a bit like on that level just communicating we need to do this and this is what we're doing I think we will know even in the institutions and we did the same thing in the spring it's still like I think the reflection point is much more on doing things and running things and I guess communicating results but that's I can't for the moment This is fascinating I think one of the things I've been hearing from where you took that answer is something that we're just hearing from then and also that we've heard earlier from Tom and we also heard from Joe and Lisa how much of this question of technology it's easy to say it's a human question but I think operationally so much of this is about changing institutions so that they can apprehend and enculture these technologies and how they change the institution at the level of communication at the level of restructuring offices, departments, curricula and then sharing all this information in order to become more creative become more just become more efficient to better adapt to the future changing all around us and also thinking of your student to help make that future happen and we are at the end of the hour we have to grab things up we just heard from several people about where to find them here Maya, where can we find you in the conference? So at the conference tomorrow morning Thursday at 9.45 am it's actually in the central concourse level next to the food and right next to the entrance is an open session it's going to be right here actually publicly and available start by and yeah and we will be bringing what I think will be an event and a series of conversations that have taken place this week to a moment of really thinking in that what happens in that next frontier how do we evolve because the question is not it is really about that transformation we've been talking about for the last two decades we've been in this conversation for a long time but at this point we have no time left if we actually want to make sure that our students are really engaging with us that our institutions are going to be successful the time is now Exactly, what a great moment to end up and I'm going to be here tomorrow but everybody else should be so they can go see your session Maya Maya, Ed, thank you both so much it's been great having you here I have to wrap things up right now I don't want to close that tab just so that it'll end that video in this place thank everybody for being here before I want to say thank you I want to mention one more thing this is from one guest Eric who managed to share this thought just a comment library consortium staff here my executive director leans on EDUCAUSE reports it's a reliable source for landscape review even it burns eye consortium point of view so thanks to all, thanks to all and I hear that Eric this is really really important research and I'm glad that we can share some of this work with all of you online I'm really grateful to EDUCAUSE for giving us the hour to play in the studio, I'm grateful to Jerry and to his colleagues for doing all kinds of work making sure all of this functions I'm grateful to all of you online for putting questions to us for thinking and for putting work together now a couple of things looking ahead a bit just to remind you that the forum is continuing if you'd like to continue discussing these issues be it the human way of apprehending and culturing all the technologies or ways of communicating or ways of doing learning spaces we can keep talking about this just use the hashtag FTTE wherever you are here is me on twitter on mastodon, on threads, on blue sky wherever you are in the socials I think we can find you if you'd like to look into our previous sessions which cover all these topics including a couple of these folks as guests like Maya and Lisa just go to tinyurl.com looking ahead we have sessions on information literacy intermediary institutions and the changing landscape of online education and thank you all for being with us for this extraordinary live session thanks everybody for contributing see you next time online be safe and be well everybody bye bye