 It's time to begin because we have one cat who decided to join us and she is here to give us permission to commence our operations Welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm glad to see you here today We have a really great guest who's written an important new book. I'm very much looking forward to our conversation One of the ways we've been thinking about Information technology and information academic setting has been in terms of scarcity for millennia Human civilization has dealt with scarcity of books a scarcity of people a scarcity of communications and being able to reach people Who aren't near you then starting with Gutenberg and accelerating with literacy in the 19th century and then really taking off with the internet in the 20th century we are now covered in information We are drenched in connectivity the question is how do we change higher education as a result? What does this mean for teaching and learning and here in the forum? We've been thinking about versions of this question for some time, but today I want to join an expert to us This is Dave Cormier coming to you from Ontario in the only Canadian city that is south of Detroit He's the author of this excellent new book right now Learning in a time of abundance and the subtitle itself is a provocation. The book is delightful It's really accessible very thoughtful, and it all reflects lifetime spent of trying to think through teaching in the digital revolution So without any further ado, let me welcome our guest put him up on stage and We can meet him Hello Dave Cormier. Hi Brian. Thanks very much That was a lovely introduction. That was really really nice. Thank you. You're welcome. It's completely deserved And I have a lot more that we can say Just just so you know you have fans in the chat room one of them already said let loose rhizomes of learning I Probably told you I'm a long time to Lizzie and so this makes a lot of sense. Yeah, absolutely Dave. First of all Where are you today? Where have you found you? I'm in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, which again as you say south of Detroit I'm in my basement And I've just come back from dealing with an aphasia conversation where we're building nice open resources, which is what I do at the University of Windsor. I'm a learning specialist and my title says Digital strategy and special projects meaning I do random things From one day to another Excellent excellent Well, it's good. It's good to find you in your lair And I have to ask what's the what's the weather like there? Ah, it's 10 degrees and sunny Yeah, no sub Windsor is it's kind of like the I It's like a banana peel belt I wouldn't say banana because that gives you the sense of ripe fruit that would be tasty So think banana peel. It's the banana peel belt of Canada So it's it's actually quite warm here a lot of the time the weather's quite temperate Yeah, I moved here from the East Coast and we get three more months of cycling weather here Environment cycling weather like normal person cycling weather. Wow. Well, that's fantastic No, no, I lived in Michigan for quite some time as you know and yeah about March in Michigan I usually expect, you know some more ice some more snow some more freezing but not here But you get to slide in that banana peel. Well, I'm glad to hear it Dave when we invite people to the forum we ask them to introduce themselves in an unusual way academics often use the academic obituary style of talking about everything they look But what we'd like to know is what you're working on for the next year. So both, you know materially What are the projects those special projects? What is the stuff you're working on? What are the ideas that are uppermost for you for the next 12 months? So I've just it's funny to say that because I've been working with a lot of professional programs lately And we keep coming across the same thing my kids aren't ready to get out to to work Law program social work kinesiology education And so something we just started is called the uncertainty community and what we're looking at is trying to come up with ways of addressing professional programs in ways that allow them to talk a little bit more about uncertainty and a little bit less about Facts and processes and stuff like that which are not something that they're not important But the challenge that they're all seeing and it's the exact It's so funny because you see them will get in or pull them in together in meetings and one person will say Oh, yeah But in law you don't have this problem and the people and I'll be like we totally have that problem and it's happening again and again and so we've got this sort of Community that I've tried to pull together where we're gonna start asking questions Like how do we prepare students for uncertainty and not in that weird future jobs kind of way not like for an uncertain future We're 66% of the jobs won't exist like not that thing But like almost a daily uncertainty. So a good example is If you're a law student who's just going into a law clinic What does that first interview look like because what they're seeing very specifically is a law students are going So what should I do when I get in there to my interview to talk to the client and the person who's supervising goes? I don't know. I don't your your job is to go in there and find out. Yeah in that sense of uncertainty Is something that's a real challenge for them and we're trying to look at different ways So that's that's the big sort of goal for me in the next year. Wow Really, I mean so I mean you you emphasize uncertainty in this book So now you're really carrying it out beyond the pages of book and the practice for for law and education Yeah, that's the idea. Oh, excellent. Excellent Well, Jim Stoffer in the chat says I'm a recovering certainty addict Which is very good Well, I wanted to ask you to start things off a couple of questions about your work and then everyone in the audience I want to turn it over to you Now if you haven't had a chance to read the book on the bottom left corner of the screen You should see a big kind of tan colored button There's learning at time of abundance and that's that'll take you to the johns hopkins university press book Page where you can buy copy So you can really rely on that but also you'll find that uh, Dave is just a fountain of ideas And so as he answers my incredibly kindergarten level questions on a graduate school level level Why don't you take a you know, think about what you'd like to learn from him and what you'd like him to address I mean, so one thing I want to Ask you about in the beginning of this Is you have a really really nice line Here's the problem We were not trained for a world that had too much information We were trained for a world that had too little information Our ways of thinking about the world have prepared us for the scarcity party We are the nouveau riche of the information management set. We have all the wealth and none of the aplomb And this is this is beautifully said by the way, um, and this needs to be a tattoo on somebody I wonder what what have you seen in higher education of academics actually trying to Learn and apply lessons of abundance. What are what are some of the examples with the the MOOCs? For example, which you're assessing for their birth. Would that be an example or the open education movement? I'm just curious. I mean change is always complex Where are you seeing the seeds of change and the first responses to your question? um I would point to the open pedagogy movement Not open pedagogy and the open educational resources that I use in my classroom, but rather an openness of my pedagogy So catherine cronin comes to mind So walking into a classroom not necessarily knowing what's going to be worked on that day because what i'm looking to do Is help you deal with the abundance you're going to find whenever you ask a question and sort of transfer my own skills as somebody who has more experience in this field And and you you made a reference to the the subtitle of the both community is the curriculum To me, it's it's about inviting you into the community of people who know how to talk about this field Who understand how to make decisions in this field? Yeah, so that open Pedagogy community will say I don't necessarily know what we're going to learn. So if you think of the work kathy davidson has done on uh learning contracts where you open up the design so that You're able to allow students to do discovery but also provide enough scaffolding So that when they run into something you can provide them with sort of the The level of expertise that they need to be able to make decisions inside of whatever they're finding and to me That reflects the experience that most students are going to have whenever they leave The classroom and not just for work, but when they leave classroom and decide How to handle their home heating as a Very important conversation Like like my environmental impact the financial like these are complex situations that we deal with in our lives Certainly have them in our professions But in our lives and if we treat In knowledge as something that is fixed and decided because that's the easiest way to maintain scarce knowledge Then that doesn't prepare us for Doing a google search right now for how I should heat my house Which will give you a I can't even imagine what you'd get randomly the first time you did that google search But you're gonna have to go through it. You're gonna have to learn things You're gonna have to find out about the impact of The electricity on your local grid like there's all kinds of intersecting administration That's a long answer to your question Well, no, but this is great. I mean so on the one hand you're starting off with the open teaching So open education not in the sense of oer but in the sense of of sharing this right now Lee, um, I hear you're on m-track. Uh, that's awful in terms of connectivity Please if you want switch over to your phone or the shindig mobile app that that might be might be more reliable I know the m-track wi-fi all too well Dave you start off by talking about the open education and among other things it makes me think of Educators sharing their work with each other as well as opening this up to their students, but then The community as the curriculum is such a fantastic phrase Um, it is so so rich and here you you're giving a whack at one part of that Where students are welcomed into a community of practice and a community of knowing Uh, rather than just uh being allocated a certain part of the curriculum Actually, I think this is just uh fantastic Ha allocating a little bits, you know little little bits of this Um, even worse what we do is this we show it to them And then we hide it behind our hand and we go Remember what was behind my hand. Can you tell me what I just showed you a second ago? Yeah Yeah, or we take the uh the acetate Um display and we cover up parts of it and reveal that's right. That's right. That's right Yeah, but in your in your conclusion, um, you have this wonderful chapter that everyone should just take away with Which is you know what we should do and how we should live in this world Um, and you have all kinds of of wonderful recommendations Starting off by practicing humility, which you really do Um, I mean there's an authority you you come across. There's very humble very accessible Very human But I do wonder about the the pro social web I mean, I immediately agree with this. Um, but I For reasons of space you only had a couple of pages to talk about it But how should how should academics now? Advocate for and practice the pro social web I mean, is this something where we should be turning to uh more open software like work prints Should we be avoiding proprietary platforms like facebook or tiktok? Should we be escaping the lms at long last? What is the what is the academic pro social web look like wherever would we go if we left the lms brian? I know, um So a couple of things I want to say at the beginning first of all this can only go in Response to the amount of privilege you actually have If you're a contingent faculty member, you're somebody from often racialized groups particularly racialized women racialized people Binary non-binary people lgbtqi Like those people are not in the same position to do things on the open web That an old white dude can get away with and I just want to make that that claim right off the bat that Working in the open can be risky for a lot of people in a lot of different ways That being said, um, I think My personal position is to stay unless the places are amazingly egregious My position is to stay in the spaces as much as we can because as we leave spaces behind they get increasingly populated by Um bots and bad actors and commercial groups and stuff like that. So to me We any platform that is making knowledge in our society is one that we have a certain responsibility to within the scope of our privilege um, and I think as academics people who like I think and I made this argument and particularly faculties of arts lately Um, we're about epistemology. We're about making knowledge. We're about Like those sort of core ideas Culturally and I think that we need to be able to go to those spaces where Information is distributed and knowledge is being made and do our best to bring Our values to those spaces And I think that's part of our responsibility as people who care about information who care about knowledge So that's that's how I feel about it. Then I think the more we can understand I think the the book talks a lot about this but The more we can get into the habit of deciding with our values and interacting with our values Because we haven't had to as much particularly as you say let me even imagine Culturally as you go over and I love the introduction in terms of the way you you talked about abundance over time I think it's the same with values over time Um, if you live in a small community and no one leaves that community No one needs to talk about the values of that community Right, you don't have to negotiate them. You may not like them. They may not be fair But everybody knows where they are Um, as we start to cross over as we become as our cultures start to interact You're suddenly confronted with the conversations That are uncomfortable that are outside of your experience and That we're not Trained to that, right? So I remember you mentioned mooks earlier. I remember in the first mook um, we had, uh, Viplav Baxi came to us from he was in deli at the time And he showed up and I think it was the second week And he came into one of the conversations and he's like man This is so global north like I can't even that the pieces of this you guys are missing And he went on to explain his position with respect to the thing we're talking about And as those experiences continue to happen You can either retreat and entrench Or you can open yourself up to consider how your values impact these situations And I think that's the real challenge You just had me looking into one of the practices that you advise which is Um focusing more on our values and uh, and you don't do that in a cheesy way It's it's a very heartfelt and very practical, which I really admire In the chat, you've got all kinds of commentary people are rousing you people are running Our mutual editor and good friend greg britain says he'd love to take a class with you. I think we all would Tom hams is showing stories But we did have one question, which is a pushback from a fellow french canadian here Mathieu Plibert asks Are you back to edu punk circa 2008? Jim groom anyone Because you know some of us who have been talking about open education and opening my teaching for quite some time and the open web um How do you respond to uh, your your guling connect? I wouldn't trust that Jim groom guy with anything. Um Um, that's my first response. I think uh, Jim is one of those guys who's done if you guys aren't familiar with Jim groom's work He's done a good work everywhere. He's been um, I've learned a lot from Jim over the years for sure um, his work particularly with with brian lamb, there's a period where the two of them were tag teaming a little bit and I think there's a there's a way of questioning the education field that I certainly adapted to some degree from from learning from from jim I Edgy punk is a funny thing, right? So it's counter it and it being punk its counterculture And there's been 17 references in the chat to rhizomes and I just won't want to dress that for two seconds I wrote a bunch of stuff about rhizomes And you can like if you do a google search of rhizomes and me you'll find it then if you need good nap material It's probably there This work is about it's still in there. I don't say that. I don't think I say the word in the whole book But it's still in there it's just me trying to come up with a way of talking about the things I used to talk about in deep dark postmodern language And put it in a way that somebody could enjoy reading it and I won't say in all this translation I won't say dumbing it down because that's certainly not what I mean But it's an attempt at taking a storyteller's view At that conversation So for me edgy punk is a is a resistance Whereas this is my attempt at trying to call out the things that everybody already knows And just cast it in a story that allows you to see it from a different perspective That's a really nice way of putting it You both mentioned jim groom in the chat. I quickly tossed in a link jim was actually the eighth guest I want to teach your trends form. That's right way way back way back Thank you for for that answer The we have questions coming in so I was about to invite the audience to put questions to you And they've already just started putting them up here. So I just have to get out of the way and share them with you Here's a really good one which touches on a subject that I think we both care a great deal about This is from Elaine lost to the University of Albany Suni who says, where do you see librarians fitting into open pedagogy and supporting information assessment literacy, etc How do academic librarian faculty partner instructors do instructors even want our support? Hmm I will I'll tell you the the project I'm working on with the librarian right now So we're talking about so this librarian Supports a lot of students who come in with assignments with like let's say essay writing Where they don't know how to start. So he's the research librarian that helps students that kind of work And it turns out that increasingly students are coming in I want to put this in in the in the best way possible task oriented I have a task. I just want to complete the task. Give me the quickest path between here and there And they're coming in with challenges that they don't necessarily understand And so they don't they're being asked the answer asked to answer a question for which they do not have the context So what a what he would have traditionally done as a librarian, which is tell me what you're interested in The answer is blank and the answer is no And so what we're looking at is trying to find ways to bridge the gap and getting the the information That the student needs contextually To be able to ask a research question To the student and how do we interface that conversation? We're talking about Um, I I know this is going to sound super revolutionary using wikipedia um, but also talking about how some of the ai platforms can help you Get that basic knowledge that you need to be able to ask the question to be able to do the research So I think there's a there's an information management challenge here That is I mean, this is the bread and butter of the library as far as I'm concerned Not just how can I get you to a book? Obviously, which I'm sure there's no librarians who just do that anymore But how do I get you to understand amongst this abundance enough of the pieces enough of the the sort of hooks that get you towards people who have seriously and seriously worked through this not the people who are trying to sell you something for instance I'll you know navigate your way to the beginning So that you can then move along, right? That's a that's a personal. It's a very pro library answer and a very detailed one um, I Elaine I I hope I hope that works for you and if you like to follow up with the questions either You know click the raise hand button or or follow up with another question You've got some very very good discussions actually about wikipedia And I wanted to mention one of them because it was something that's very dear to my heart, which is that You mentioned the paraphrase that wikipedia gives you a sense of knowledge not as a finished product But as something that's contingent and in the process. I love showing students the talk page The article just because it's so messy and And argumentative and shows things in that kind of process Well, we have we have more questions coming in and friends if you're new to the forum That's an example of a q&a question. So feel free to click that question mark button the bottom of the screen Our dear friend much abused tom hams Has another question Isn't the key variable in an age of information abundance perspective? Should we be teaching people perspective of learning how to learn? Sorry perspective as part of learning how to learn Um, can you follow up on that tom and tell me what you're you're sort of meaning by perspective there? I wouldn't want to get you the wrong way. Yeah, tom. I could think of a couple of interpretations of that I just want to make sure I get yours Yeah, feel free to type in another response tom or to just click the raise hand button that can beam you up on stage um The uh, well, oh and he immediately volunteered because he knew he knew I was gonna pick one and put him up on stage Hello tom in the blue room Yes In the blue room for a change back back in the home digs, um Just for one day at least until the summer hits the uh, no the question I have is that, uh One of the things I've been working on as far as dealing with the questions of information abundance is this idea that The the biggest problem with information abundance is loss of perspective That we only see small chunks of it at a time as human beings. We have trouble processing it We have lousy tools for gaining perspective on things and I think that's a role that education plays Should play but often doesn't because what ends up happening is that a lot of times in classes We give people a people like you were describing earlier, you know hide it behind your hand Right. Yeah, exactly. And so we give people that that peephole view of our Of our of our discipline, but also on top of that the discipline on top of uh The discipline in in in isolation from other disciplines as well And so, you know, one of the things that I think We have as a result of information scarcity and the end up Uh, did tom just that? Nope, you're back. Did I freeze? Yeah back now. Okay Increasing scarcity and then The information I mean we're used to an information scarcity in the industrial environment which led to ever increasing specialization and and so the The name of the game was to go deeper and deeper and deeper down rabbit holes of You know scholarly inquiry and stuff and at a certain level, that's fine But first, you know, the general undergraduate population They don't necessarily need to know this medieval poet debating the with this medieval poet kind of stuff Uh, as much as I think a lot of times they get, you know fed Um, not to pick on that. My father is a medievalist Yeah, yeah, but um the um, but you know, I think the um Um But the question I have is shouldn't we be teaching people to be able to Learn how to generate perspective. Shouldn't we be giving them tools to create perspective? Because I don't see another way of getting over this question of information about this So if if by perspective like it's like the context to be able to decide It's a map, right a real map as opposed to a google map, right? We're back to rhizomes again so, um I'll describe I'll I'll answer with the description of something that I teach in class and we'll see if it if it So one of the things that I absolutely because I teach bachelor of education students right now and it's I love teaching be at students Um, and I teach them, uh, learning styles So for those of you in the room, probably about six or seven of you just flinched Um, but the idea of learning styles from a cognitive science perspective is absolute nonsense And yet in the k-12 school system, it's almost religiously observed And so we have this huge Sort of separation and I love it It's it's beautiful for teaching. So what I do is I get them to go in and do a search for I get them use, uh, we used Bard I think this year But give me a lesson plan to teach two by two multiplication to students using learning styles And so whatever system will just give it to you and then you get it And then they showed it around and we talk about it We talk about the relationship you kind of search they make and kind of results they get And then I say okay now put hate in your sentence somewhere Or aren't evil or whatever some negative word and then they do the same activity and they're like the whole room freezes and they're like but I mean We just and then and I'm like, okay And so inevitably I let it settle down and inevitably one of them goes which one's right and I go And then we get we get into it because right in this case. It's just a question of your perspective on it So inevitably somebody who believes in learning styles will say well if they're learning Uh Oh, what's the word that people always use If they're learning preferences, then it's fine. So really that's all we're talking about whereas the scientific will say well there's no Brain reason why this works and somebody else says well it puts kids into pigeon holes and they come up with bad habits And then all this conversation goes around the room and then eventually they're like, well, what are we supposed to do? And I'm like, it doesn't matter to me My goal here is to give you enough of an understanding of this So that if you're ever in a conversation you yourself are going to take a while to come up to decide what you feel about this And I don't I'm not telling you to listen to The cognitive science community and I'm not telling you to listen to this community when I'm trying to give you a sense of is What the community discusses and say we say the community is a curriculum I want to bring you into the conversation So that you have a chance to see enough of the pieces that are there and not so that you can decide Because I don't think it's fair to ask a 21 year old to see in this conversation for the first time to decide How they feel right? Exactly But rather give them the tools that they need to understand that there's a conversation Give them a sense of so this researcher who hates learning styles Let's take a look at them for a little bit and then they start digging in they're like this person's super biased And I'm like they're inevitably they're like I thought research was unbiased and I'm like But it's understanding all those pieces So that they get a sense of that conversation and And be able to engage in it, right? So one of my students at the end of one of those classes, he looks at me goes What if I think of learning styles as like a celebration of the senses and I'm like Sounds fantastic. Take that away with you But to me that's the that's the navigation we got to help them through As as instructors is here's all of the things around this thing and more importantly Here's how you navigate something so that you can understand that there are different perspectives you can understand Where those different people's perspectives are coming from Right. Do you think we teach navigation enough? Oh, absolutely not. I I don't think that anything has impacted I'm going to be overly dramatic here, but anything has impacted our society as much as search has and we've had the same problem for 20 years And we're still not Doing the work we need to do with it. If you look at the way an average student does Research right now, right? So when I'm going to say we We're younger. I'm not pointing at the three people. I'm not making any claims But all of the fuzzy faces in the chat room, but just the people I can see on top here We had to go through cue cards and go through the library and read 25 things before we found one thing That we could use to actually write something. Yeah, all of that reading around That's the actual learning process the contact building the understanding the field When I talk to phd students now that I Younger phd students than me I'm like they're like, well, no, why would I do that? All I do is I go to google scholar. I put in my search question I find an article I control f through it and I find one link I copy and paste it That's what you've asked me to support my argument, right? They don't read sometimes not even the quote they're copying Probably not the paragraph that's contained in it. It's definitely not the article that it's there Right and it's searched that's done that to us Yeah, it's allowed it so that you can do what used to teach people how to do something like Write an essay and turned it into a task that um Darcy had made the made some nice language about this earlier It turns it into a task. That's just about obedience Yeah, just you're just sisyphus pushing the rock off the hill. That's all you're doing Yeah, I've written entire articles about books that I found next to the book. I was actually looking for Oh, this is interesting. Let's go down this rabbit hole. Okay, but yeah, thank you Thank you and thank you tom. As usual you ask the best questions. Thank you Friends if you're again if you're new to the forum, that's an example of a video question So if you'd like to join us on stage, please just quick click the raised hand question And in effect, we have another one, which is good because I was hoping to ask her about this This is our wonderful friend lisa genic hinchliffe and she asks let's see Do we have her? Yes, we do. Where are you lisa? I'm at home. Believe it or not. Oh wow You good to see you. Thanks. Yeah, so I typed this in the chat but Um So just in just for other people who don't know spent 25 years as an information literacy librarian um So I have to say I I feel Dave you might have a little bit of a The good old days in your comment going on there because I'm thinking back to the work I was doing when students were doing all of this in print They were certainly looking for that one Key quote that they could just copy in they weren't necessarily reading the whole printed article so always a little bit of challenge of Of remembering the the good students and maybe not knowing what students were doing in the library if you weren't seeing them But I was the worst student. I was doing what you're talking about But I still had to scan those articles to get All the difference between scanning And like I've got to get there somehow like and you can go to the back of the book and go to the index Yeah, I I I hear you and I'm still saying I think it's a I think there was less engagement there than than you might hope but It could be that I just have seen a bigger range of the curve and that you know, you think you were that student There's a few more down on the curve But that's actually not my my my question for you My question for you is it strikes me that one of the challenges with these gotcha pedagogies And I'm not saying you're trying to trick your students But where you're like, okay now put the word evil hate etc And you get this moment, right? Like you get this moment of like, oh my gosh and destabilizing their world So essentially what you're doing is you're trying to take them out of a state of naivete Into a state of knowing But The real to me danger in that moment is that you inadvertently Tip them into cynicism Well, there's no there's no truth. It's all just your opinion. In fact, somebody put it, you know in the chat here as You know You know, what's right? It's just your perspective, right? It's all just opinion So I'm wondering what pedagogical strategies you're seeing or thinking about That move people out of naivete But then protect them from moving into cynicism because honestly, I think we were better off If I I mean even as info that librarian this this worries me of what I've done in my career, right? Like are we are we better off with naivete than cynical and on some days? I think yes I agree First I think the the keystone to all of this is trust You can't do the activity. I just did fairly If there's no sense of trust and you also can't do it if you've already decided what the right answer is before you start So I legitimately don't have an opinion on learning styles Um, I've read all the stuff from that I've been able to find on both sides And I don't think it matters a whole lot whether or not it's true or not So I'm not setting them up in the sense that I have and there's there's two ways to run that activity If you do it and then the right answer is hidden Then you're breaking trust If you do it and what you're saying is I've introduced you to something and we're going to expand this conversation If you already have a trust relationship with that class I mean you can't have a trust relationship with every single student like I get it But you need to build your way up to that to the point where people have a sense of how this thing progresses you start with things that are less tightly held And so it has to have that gradual release of responsibility piece to it right where you start with things that are not as contentious And you move your way towards things that are more contentious So all of those things are like the pedagogical approaches that are built into that um I think to to your broader conversation around cynicism um, there's absolutely no one who needs to teach a 17 year old how to be cynical You're starting from cynicism. We have nothing to do with that in a university structure um, I have uh spent an amazing amount of time in the last five years So especially through covet I had 80 different, um Co-op students work with me because they couldn't get other jobs and they were forced to work with me Uh, so there weren't people who chose to work with me. There are people that stuck with me And we spent a lot of time I'll give you an example And I've told the story a dozen times. So if anybody's heard before I apologize Um, but I was in the middle where a week and a half into into working together and these are like I said they're in my employees and One of the kids, um One of the young people I was working with Uh, look, I just need to stop you for a second. I need to apologize to you and I'm like apologize to me nicest kid too nicest young person As well, and I just I didn't I didn't could idea where they where it came from and he goes You've been asking me for my opinion for the last week and a half and I assumed you're relying Because no adult has ever asked me a question without already knowing what answer they want it That's the place that they're starting from Right. So what I'm trying to do is build a classroom environment where their opinions actually have a place Right and these guys are going to be teachers I mean, there's no place where you're doing more freaking micro decisions than sitting in a grade five classroom You're making them all the time, especially there because you're you're teaching everything Right, so I'm trying to get them to the place away from that cynicism That they're inheriting from this abundance world that they're in um I think that I had a great deal of the naive tale that you're talking about when I went to university for sure I was a I was a kid from the north shore of New Brunswick from a town of 350 people. I grew up on lobster boats Um, I had a lot of that these kids don't There's no 17 year old kid who hasn't seen every atrocity available on the internet Who hasn't seen like all of this stuff they're absorbed to already I'm trying to bring them back from that place So so what I just heard you say though doesn't sound like cynicism to me. It sounds accurate Right, the student who says an adult has never asked me a question without already knowing what they want That actually sounds like what you actually have posited is wrong, right? Like that that student actually is a cynical. They're correct And then they're applying that to yours. So that's not an act of cynicism to me That sounds to me like an act of saying like Based on everything I've experienced. This is the way the world works I'm having a dissonant moment That um, and I'm saying like I'm sorry. I assume like I applied my mental model I mean, it's I mean or are you positing that indeed their their curricular experiences up to that point? We're actually adults asking them Truthfully in the way you are. I mean you see what I'm saying like it's not wrong If that is actually what's been happening to them. That's not cynical. That's actually I don't think cynical is wrong though I think you can be cynical and be right about it um I think they're being cynical about anything that I'm asking them and they're being and they have good reason for feeling that way um, what I'm trying to do is give them a sense that when they're dealing with intellectual ideas that they that the question what is your opinion about this is Legitimate like that. I legitimately mean it which puts you in a grading nightmare Right because we're still forced to give number grades inside of my school I do effort-based grading. I do contract grading on all kinds of stuff to try to twist myself out of the way Of putting them in a position where there are right answers to some of the questions that again, I'm not a relativist I'm not saying that there are things that are wrong I'm saying that in most complex conversations where the topic of the conversation is a non-counting noun um There are multiple ways of approaching it. Let's not say that there are in facts. There are lots of counting nouns out there um But anyway, yeah, I don't want over. Yeah, I guess that's part of what I'm trying to figure out is like How do you make sure that they see that they're school of facts? Right that that the the sort of thing you're trying to draw out of them, which is reasoning around and about facts um, doesn't mean there aren't facts right and that's what I'm seeing in a lot of um That that that facts are just the pieces of data you can find to support and so that just Right, so that's what I'm trying to grapple with which is how do we do exactly what you're talking about the Sort of thinking around and about facts with a in such a way that doesn't lead them to the there are no facts I mean, I think that's why we need to talk about like how knowledge is made So, you know, brian and I both have written about complexity for years And when we make the distinction between something that's complex A complex so you look at the riddle and Weber stuff from 1971 still one of the best articles I've ever read It's it's the titles weird a general It's the wicked problems are Where you end up with a topic that has no way of framing a proper question. There's no way of getting to an answer Those issues need to be seen as complex without real answers. What's the answer to poverty? It doesn't mean we don't work on it But I think the real cynicism comes in when you think of wicked problems As if they're fact-based problems as if they're design problems that you can solve I think that whole design conversation gets us into trouble too Because so often the way that it's deployed not that it's always done this way But it's deployed in a way where the design idea is to get to the answer right to that engineering model like I was in a A meeting seven or eight years ago in government where People were telling us to run our healthcare like lulu lemon and fail fast and I'm like no You don't fail So wow, they have facts about their success. They make money And the more money they make the better it is Healthcare is just not that kind of thing. Are there facts in healthcare? Of course there are But do we know what a healthy person is? And I think it's important for us Like and in my case talking about students who are going to be teaching students to understand the distinction between things that are facts And things that are about the way that you apply your decision making to very difficult things that don't have exact answers When you do that, it's not the relativist thing, which is what gets fired at me all the time It's not there aren't there are definitely wrong things But there are several right things you could probably try And you may want to try one and realize that it works for one group and not another because that's teaching Well, I appreciate this. Well, thanks for letting me tussle with you a little bit over this It's thank you very much. I've really been thinking about a lot this whole question of cynicism and It seems to me that cynicism is a very pernicious force in The way it's destroying communities and civic life and so I just really Have been struggling with sort of how do we How do we conceptualize Not furthering that while at the same time doing the the pedagogical things we think we should be doing so appreciate it Thank you, Lisa. Always good to see you and we appreciate that question very much in the conversation Friends we have uh, we're coming up in the last 10 minutes And we've got some questions left that we haven't gotten to yet So I want to make sure that you still have a chance to ask your question Um, uh, we have one day of a few minutes ago. You you were talking about google search and a few people in the chat Uh went off in different directions. I think Greg and Darcy were talking about microfiche. She's a bigger fish Um, and it was uh, it was very very interesting But here's a question that that that spins off of that Uh, what do you think of the effect of the inclusion of AI content and search engines on the challenge of information abundance? Does this change what we should do and that's uh, jason green at university or at the last decade of college Uh Yeah, I'll put that back. I do remember her name She is the researcher who was fired at google for talking about AI. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah um If somebody could put her name in the chat room because I'm referencing her right now, but I can't remember her name I have I have pieces of it But it's I always get there. I want to get the pronunciation right. Anyway, if I don't I'll find it in a second She would say that the biggest challenge we have is increasingly AI is going to create the content that AI is going to be sourcing Right. So the further we get down this road the more that content is Automatically generated based on our existing language models Everything continues to narrow, right? So, um, I like to call it the the sort of auto tuning of knowledge You lose all of the all of the nuance all of this and it just starts to get narrower and narrower As AI draws from AI to do AI tasks. So I think it's terrifying Um, and this goes back to the other conversation. Oh stochastic parents This goes back to the other conversation you're asking earlier about the responsibility of academics I think that there's also a responsibility to lay Your name next to your work in a way that allows people to find those kinds of things Uh, it reminds me of what larry Sanger was trying to do with the first wikipedia So those of you who don't know this, um boring old story Um larry sanger worked worked at wikipedia and he was working on something called new pedia and the goal of that was to bring together Research ideas from researchers on important topics and they throw at this thing called wikipedia that try to just train the software And you'll remember how that went But I think that that sort of collection of Of work that has that's been vetted and and sort of it's going to become more and more necessary I've been doing a lot of work lately with faculty trying to do Um annotated bibliographies On very specific topics to try to bring together Um a bunch because a lot of people have these But they're not public and I think that if you've got somebody who you have identified as a researcher that you respect Having the list of articles that they've gone through And talked about gives you that way of getting around an ai The way that searches work and whatever else it gives you another way of actually accessing the information I think I hope I think at least that that's the way we're going to go to address a lot of those issues Kind of if if you're going to if you're going to throw us back into the past a bit It runs me a bit of of um social bookmarking tools going back. Oh, yeah, no one's delicious Or right now. I mean I use dgo and pinboard And that's uh, it's a way of kind of showing your work In in some interesting ways um In uh in in the chat. Elaine allows that says we used to call them pathfinders in in libraries And Darcy norman takes us even further back to blog roles Um it met you also uses dgo. Good for you. Good for you. Wow. There's a there's a lot of You triggered a lot of stuff on on that question So first of all, thank you for the answer dave and jason. Thank you for the really really important question Um, I think we're going to keep coming back to that Wow, we have another question and this comes in from mike walker at north central state college in ohio Uh, and mike asked a question about another another spin on teaching in this way Is there still a future for on the ground classrooms? Versus a model that a few have pioneered a pop of leasing of space as labs situated in the community Bring up resources for retraining faculty Um, so that's the 12th century peresian model of universities. I like it Um, can we get the little taunt your hair too so that we can't be arrested while we're doing it? That'd be awesome. Oh, no um, so um, so I I think that universities right now are mostly caring. I don't want to make claims about universities in front of brian, frankly Uh, because he knows way more about this conversation than I do. Um, but We're still in a branding conversation Right, it's not about universities are not about teaching They can be but they don't live and die on teaching they live and die on whether or not kids choose the brand and actually pay for it um So I don't think that any of those other models are going to impact The way that a university actually runs, right? I mean, it's an incredibly complex organization um with all kinds of archaic rules and and very important rules Some of which help us stitch together a community. Some of which get in the way Um, but I don't think we're going to see a lot I think we're going to see the same thing that brian keeps tracking, right? Which is important institutions lose important parts that people don't understand Um, what value they serve inside the organization and we'll see Uh universities that brian loves close. Sorry brian. Um, and I think we'll see um governments doing drastic dramatic things that are not necessarily going to help. I mean I I don't want to get too far down this rabbit hole a bit We're 60 years into a conversation around higher education being something we pay for An increasing sort of drive towards making it expensive so that fewer and fewer people go And that pushing against the fact that more and more people want it to go And I think we're going to see that Push start going back the other way as it just becomes financially impossible for people to do Like you're more of a problem in your country than mine, but yeah, I mean you're you're seeing that from from Canada which has a higher degree of Support except you're in Ontario which where the government just decided to clobber the international student population Which is uh, going to be a horrible thing for you Well and the the the secret text there is that the reason why we had to have so many international students is they continuously cut our funding um, so it's two phases, right and so Um There are certainly some governments on some part of the political spectrum who are better served by this historically Um, and we see that pattern continuously developing and it's troubling Let me try and pull this out of that Out of that hole or as um as as Lisa Durf says she's expecting a mad hatter at this point Um, let me let me ask you to imagine what would happen to a campus where everybody reads your book A lot of naps Well, maybe maybe some maybe some beer drinking, but But they're all influenced by this so the the the faculty the administrators The students were interested the librarians the technologists all the support staff um, what is what does a college and university look like Say in five years of following your ideas What a fascinating question um So one of the things I talked to my students about is organ sorting your values And then making decisions accordingly. So I for instance would say that I want a student to like math More than I care if they got the answer right Um in a pretty five math class So my argument being if you like math, even if you got it wrong, you might be willing to try again Whereas Getting it right doesn't mean you're ever going to do it again Right, so it's about so if the the sort of the the To me the core message here is about treating students as if they're humans And imagine for a second and then Focusing on care first and foremost, right and there are a whole bunch of conversations around how that happens to me The outcome of this is even if you wanted to teach in the way in that sort of objectivist Hide the hide the word sort of it's not going to work anymore So I I feel like we're past the point of the argument about whether or not Instructivist or constructivist models of education are going to be paramount The instructivist models along the way that they've been done for a century are no longer going to work Right, so we've got students right now who are now handwriting essays in class Inside of universities because that's the only way people can maintain the models they had before um To me the only way to get a student to do work When they're not being watched In 2024 is for them to care about the work that they're doing So in my mind five years into this you'd have 28.5 of your conversations would be How do we encourage how do we create an environment where we're encouraging students to care about the work they're doing? Because if they care about it and I don't you're not going to get all them not all the time But if they care about it They can engage with the work Right and they might do the work at home and they might learn stuff because they're actually interested But that's not the model that we have And we could punish students into doing the work before And now we can't So We start with this radical idea of treating students of people And then we and then we push the idea to make them We care for them and we help them care for the subjects I think that would be a deeply humane Uh campus and a deeply powerful place to to work and to learn Um, I I hate to say it, but we're we're out of time. We're the That's too bad. It's been great. The chat is going is going wild. Um, uh, Darcy you asked about an AI pen Here I got one for you right there in the chat So let me let me ask you because people are now going to go crazy and they're just going to Run greg britain out of all copies of this book. Yeah, it's the bottom left copy What would you what's the best way to keep up with you now? I mean, is your blog really the best way? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I would have said twitter um Sadness Yeah, I I think the blog is probably the best way to get a hold of me Um, I mean people are welcome to my email address. I have no problem hanging it out here Thank you But um, yeah, my blog is still up and running. It doesn't get as much love as it used to but I'm still good for Six posts a year almost Okay, um, some great stuff there. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that Pedagogy of care indeed um, well in uh In that case, uh, I don't want to carve out any more of your uh of your afternoon than we already have Dave Thank you for being an inspiring thoughtful guest who is just Wild us all and given us so much so much to think about and to implement. Thank you. Thanks very much, Brian Thanks for everybody. I mean, thanks for being thanks for bringing the hard questions, too. I really enjoyed it Well, it's it's our problem. Please take care and and be safe Take care folks But don't go away at everybody. Uh, just if you'd like to keep talking about this About Dave's work, uh, and the ideas that come today everything from AI pens to treating students as people We can keep talking about this online if you like elsewhere on twitter mastodon threads or blue sky or on my blog Uh, if you'd like to look into our previous sessions, uh, including uh, what we've hosted some of the people that come up in this show Just go to tinyurl.com slash fdf archive If you'd like to think about what we're doing next, uh, take a look at these topics that are coming up You can find them on the forum website forum that future of education dot us And above all, thank you for the thoughtful questions. Thank you for all the great ideas It's again always a pleasure to think together with all of you. I hope you're all doing well I hope you're safe and sound and we'll see you next time online. Take care Bye. Bye