 Hi everyone, thanks for coming. We've got some more people some students and some faculty which is great This is our last session for this event, and we're thrilled to have Dr. Alexander come up again and talk to us Or help guide a discussion about educational technologies and the future of educational technologies for the remainder of the time just to Because many of you weren't here. I'm just gonna briefly read Brian's bio again Dr. Brian Alexander is an internationally known futurist researcher writer speaker Consultant and teacher working in the field of how technology transforms education His PhD was completed at the University of Michigan with a dissertation on doppelgangers in romantic era fiction and poetry awesome In 2013 Brian launched a business called Brian Alexander LLC Through his consulting firm. He reaches out to higher education in the United States and abroad and speaks on And publishes frequently on articles and topics associated with educational technology He is currently writing a book called transforming the University in the 21st century the next generation of higher education And he's writing it for and through Johns Hopkins University. So without further ado, let me introduce Brian Alexander Thank you so much Thank you very much and Those of you who just got here welcome. Who are you? You just wait your head and you have a fox in your shirt. Yes. Who are you? What do you do here? Robert Jacobson I teach mathematics here. Excellent. Excellent. Very good. We were talking about teaching math Just what you came in I think the Apple people were here and then apparently I've scared them up How about the rest of you guys? Who are you? Hi, I run the academic support program at the law school Okay, okay, you're sitting next to two librarians. Do you know that? Okay, okay, it's a special place and who are you? International program development. Oh Fantastic. Now does that mean? Well, you look familiar Remind me. Do you are you working with international students or programs about your How's the program going? It is We're transitioning Thank you, I would love to hear more when you can Yeah, I bet I bet And you sir, you're growing a beard. That's a good start Part of biology or you can sell biology you can add Hello in the back excellent that's better than the rest of these guys What do you study? Excellent, what do you want to do with that? Well, you're in the right building for that The right room for that we can put you up front. See I ain't gonna address the jury. Good luck And you heard what your provost said it is all about you quite sure But you blew it Where you based are you in the library building or are you in there? That makes sense Miss anybody else. Oh very good. Very good. Well, thank you for Thank your whole organization for letting us stomp all over the place and use your network Thank you Business school management. Oh, great. Excellent. Excellent. I was mangling a whole bunch of macroeconomics earlier this morning So maybe we'll come back to that and you can help us out Were you here before? Okay, so it's like the end of Wizard of Oz, right? Okay, you were there scare crow and you Tim. Okay. I think you're good Unless you're new I just walked in Who are you? I'm Ryan Sherry. I'm a grad student with the masses of public administration program. Oh good So I'm here to hear what you have to say. That's a good thing Where that's a good the timing is perfect for that. We have another librarian from the university library brand new. What do you do? Well, what have you done so far are you serials are you reference are your government documents outreach or Yeah Well, I'm glad to see this wide variety and strange diversity of people this morning I gave a presentation and Covered a wide range of topics about the future of education and technology and that was largely me yapping a lot and Showing you slides that were not quite as appellicious, but we're still I think punch it But I wanted to hear more from you and for the next time the next 40-odd minutes or so We had mind was for you to share your thoughts and concerns about this topic and then I would help facilitate a discussion I have a browser open here so I can show you things And throw them open To show you a one-minute video that might disturb you But that's the goal. I have a whole bunch of topics that I've noted that came up this morning That would like to return to and I came up. I mean that you surface not that I did That's not a good plan Well think about those are you who have been here today Think about what you've seen and thought about and what occurred to you And then get to watch the spectacle of someone typing in the search box. It's really exciting And those of you who were not here, oh, no, that's not the right one. I'm going to find it from the web itself There we go That's Boston.com. It might work. Let's see. Have you all seen this already? No this morning. I was talking about automation and I use that phrase to include a wide variety of software Algorithms AI and even big data analytics as well as hardware thinking about robotics as well as other devices I just wanted to show this because this is a company. That's a nearby company That's very very creative and they have this fascinating sense of the uncanny. There's also a black mirror episode If you haven't seen this show, I do recommend it. That is very much about this This is called. Hey, buddy. Can you give me a hand? I'm just gonna play it without any other explanation Now one question that comes to mind is what part of its body did it used to open the door? What else do you think when you see that? What are some of your responses? They don't have to be sophisticated necessarily. Yeah, I see that from the title and you see it from the operation true little in the sense of being frightening or being What do you do here? What do you do here? Fantastic, I mean doing creative writing or communication and composition And then and then you he teaches your students through you that's kind of uncanny to us collaboration got a little too far Yeah, there's something creepy about this a little unsettling. Yeah, please Right between the two of you is this aisle this is golf and this is how a lot of people react to robots You probably know the uncanny valley idea And we we have that we hate it or we love it. No, we're really it's it's hard to pin down at different times When you mention the Terminator, it's interesting that they keep picking physically attractive people to be the robots so you have that mixture of Hatred and despair as well as admiration Yeah, when they strip away the fleshy facade they become the most terrifying object of you know What technology or governor of California? Please It's uncanny to watch for for a lot of reasons Well to me I was struck by the sort of the anthropomorphizing Yes, the humanistic qualities of yes robots and that one was intuiting that the other one needed help without Watching So that's a key part of collaboration So, you know the mechanical Turk idea There's several centuries of people practicing and building fake robots or real ones Actually around ho words and devastating articles were improved the chess playing robot was actually a guy in the box So with this we don't know to what extent this is autonomous Or free program Or there's an operator behind one of these objects At the stage we draw dynamics is a pretty amazing company. They could they could do any of those things But that's a key point. I mean a lot of this a lot of these developments are done Behind a veil that we have to get behind in order to show more So this is a little glimpse of the future. It's a day and a half old. I'm sorry But but when we look at robots, we keep building them and when you mention that they were cute One of the things that's interesting is that we do have that affection, but also these are semi I mean that is that they want to ask the question about what part of the body does it use in many ways to build a robot That looks like a person is Unnecessary and most industrial robots look like nothing else. They don't they look like a functioning tool So we might expect more of this But I want you to think about that Now coming back coming back to the some of the topics that have bubbled up before as we were thinking Let me ask you the question that our Apple representative Mentioned which is this idea that we have many businesses that don't physically own content But service mediators or platforms. So we mentioned Airbnb. You mentioned Skype Netflix Netflix is the biggest video provider. They don't own a single theater. They said that in education We should think about that. I would ask you is that a model that education that would actually work in education Should we expect somebody like edx or Coursera or a startup in some Providence garage or some large company like Google to Provide an interface that we that students could then access and get Outflank us as we do higher education Is that possible? If so, how could it work? Yeah, please rush Brian one of the topics that came up. This is one of the exact topics that came up over lunch I was having a wonderful discussion is this idea of Publishers Owning content. So they publish a text books and there's a cost of text books a hundred twenty nine dollars, whatever but in an effort to To grow as a company now they're creating curriculum and they're publishing their textbooks with a canned Curriculum like curriculum in a box. Yes, and a lot of faculty that I've spoken to over my, you know time here our not free but Question, you know, who assesses that content and and and what and it published the curriculum How do they know? Right, they're not traditional universities or they're not colleges or they're not Educationalizations that right would otherwise be deemed as acceptable by governing or accrediting law To say that this is curriculum. That's acceptable for this particular class. So I think that that there Might be something we want to focus on too to think about this idea of publishers moving to from content just If I excuse me, tell me your name. I'm sorry Lauren when you were mentioning that we couldn't tell what was actually happening behind the curtain So there's this it's a similar theme. This has come a couple of times the transparency and opacity that you have to Wonder does the publisher make these decisions of transparent and accessible to us? Is there an advisory board of instructors in the relevant fields, for example, are there expert thinkers built in or is it completely in a black box? That'd be one question to ask but having publishers move into this is an interesting idea If you take a look at Elsevier, for example, which is actually read Elsevier They've been publishing an awful lot of scientific content and what they do now is they add to it Tons and tons of data and data analytics. So if you want to get you publish an article about architecture You want to see where it goes? You can trace its responses its links and citations with a great deal more Data of our power than you had before. So that's where the publisher can make some value for themselves Now if if you write an article in architecture, which I'm surprised. I haven't mentioned in the past half hour I've left you alone. I'm sorry. I Know I know I have to talk about I have to make some terrible Hungarian But but if you do then that that is an extra benefit than publishing open access I mean, so if you're hosting an open access journal say and she publishes that great There's the PDF we're good, but if Elsevier can say yeah, well, there's all this data We can add to it. The publisher gets to add value That's is that a way of giving somebody outside of the usual spectrum a way in that might be one way forward Is a Romano the common core state that's a lot easier to do especially in public higher public either 12 Does this question make sense Coming together the high school Like That's a great question it may really free up the curricular questions so that You would have to say another company that creates a curricular map or uses one of many that are published and accessible and then runs with that So you think about curricular map for biology or engineering You can find many many models for that and a company could point to those Or just point to all the content. That's that's publicly available, but what field are you in I'm sorry? I? I work with the architect I'm co-teaching the class on campus of the future with the school Fantastic fantastic. I'm a planner by trade Specialized in higher education planning physical higher education wonderful. We could just forget everybody else. Just you and I could talk So I'm Opponent of you got to get together to learn Definitely we'll kind of to some extent argue that that has to be a component Linda is okay, but you have to get together of the part of the community Maybe that's what stops maybe that would stop what your platform from happening is that schools like RWU are very very good at getting people in a residential space Or a commuter space depending on how it's set up and that that's something which can't be disintermediated Unless we think about Airbnb So maybe there's a way to get students together in another space I don't have a quick answer to this question. I thought the Apple representatives question was very intriguing And I don't see an answer. I don't see anybody else who's done this yet I don't know that some of the MOOC providers Coursera EDX Udacity tried to do this, but they're actually producing their own content much like they're actually as publishers basically I think one of the fears that was Verbalized if not at launch and certainly over conversations that I've had with other faculty is what what does that mean for the role of the professor It's it's no longer in a situation like that if that if that was to be a acceptable Class What does the professor become is you know, how does that? position evolve If I if I could ask that's a fantastic question That's one that we didn't address enough this morning if I could ask first of all the faculty here who are involved in teaching How are you seeing your role changing and think back over your career say back over the previous ten years? How do you see these these conditions changing? I mean do you feel yourself making the move from the classic move from sage on the stage to guide on the side? Do you feel more in touch with the personal face-to-face experience than before? Yeah, please Yeah So I'm simultaneously trying to be a Woman in philosophy, but I don't believe that I'm filling empty heads with knowledge where it's equal But the community is needed What can a philosophy do you do are you Anglo-american continental? I am continental heavy, but I believe in a bridge between analytic and continental I like all philosophers, but I teach critical philosophy of race philosophy education and early modern Whatever here I do intro all that. Oh fantastic. Oh when I was in grad school. I hung out with Ed Curley and we kept a Sorry if I haven't established my nerd credits enough But but yeah, I was really interested in the Italian autonomous take on spinos anyway But this is but you tell me your name Chris you've raised a whole series of questions if I could unpack a few of these at once once is one is the question of Pedagogy so the I can't remember his first name. I'm sorry the upper representative talked about construct Are you here when he was giving us? He's describing that his background of being a nursing professor Professor teaches nursing rather who is nursing at the same time and he said that he was Learning constructivism backwards that he was actually doing constructivism and then he found out that's what it was called And so that's of course the opposite of the banking that you described Just filling empty heads with bright thoughts. Yeah, exactly So there's this interesting Pedagogical divide and one of the things I'd be curious to see is if we managed to unbundle the university Breaking this all these functions up. What kind of pedagogy would follow out? for example as a few critics like George Siemens and Algebra's are pointed out a lot of Ten lot new startups are coming up with pedagogies are basically behaviorist That is you know You fill in these blanks click these things and then you get rewarded or punished in a kind of basic way of Mastering the material rather than making content and discovering a path through it So that's one piece the second that I get I'm gonna condense this too far I think is you're pointed by gender and you'd wonder how gender would play out in this So for example, if we have a society that is structured patriarchally then would such a Vendor a platform then how would it reproduce that would we see for example people taking more classes from ed? Because he's a male rather than from you because you're clearly not marked as a male. I mean that would be an interesting problem How am I doing so far? It's complicated Yeah, especially Anglo-American philosophy, which is really really male Differences of opinion about about what we do It's to me personally for my Content that's filtered down from somewhere else that a publisher develops something and then I just give it to the students That's like my nightmare scenario And I think you know very related to this is the notion that I'm looked at as a way for my students to eventually get a good job Right, that's not I don't feel that that's my role even though that's a great side effect of what I teach math Right, like that's a great side effect of math. I've been doing a lot of math is is potentially you can make a lot of money with it Legally to yes legally You know, I want to mentor students during their education and it's the students who find their way through So I'm holding their hand Guided toward their ignorance And any of my colleagues could do the same, right? So I had a colleague I won't name not in the room, but but this colleague told me such and such a professor a Sets and such a publisher. They are the experts in teaching X and I just thought to myself like wow their marketing department is really working well What actually goes on behind the scenes of these publishers is they're sending me desperate emails Do you want to publish your textbook with us, right? And and I know what who I know people who sit on the boards whose names end up in the front of the textbook was the advisors to the text and I And so the view from from the inside is so different from what may appear to be Maybe maybe really this is a bimodal thing Maybe it's possible for a third party who could be an academic unit But you know it could be Harvard or whatever, but they they produce a content heavy publisher heavy Gateway into a lot of content and right now the web is has tons of content. I mean I mentioned we heard this morning I'm so I don't it's okay. I just don't want to repeat myself this morning the rest of you guys I can repeat myself That's fine, but for him I'm more But I was talking about open education resources and one of things is now there's so much of it That's a on average good quality that we can point to things one of the ways that we train AI's It's by giving them something like Wikipedia and say go think you know we're trained on this So okay, that's one model. We could have that kind of gateway. We could set up an Airbnb or Netflix for educational content for post-secondary education and then what you described and what you've described Chris, okay So, do you know the Dunbar number? This is a great thing to know. This is so awesome to know My background is as English and we can borrow from any discipline at all So anthropology Paul Dunbar is anthropologist. Have you heard of this? I love this He was looking at social networks in New Guinea not online, but it face-to-face You're trying to measure how many people a given person could know by name and face So you can't put a number in his right. I'm gonna fledges about 120 And they published it was done and they moved on and someone replicated this and had the number of 118 It's really close So other people have been studying this they've got numbers ranging from 110 to 130 Maybe as high as 140 as low as 100 It seems to be able to built in you know hardware limitation the brain of how many people we can know by name and face It's really interesting and then you can push that like with memory tricks in different ways Some people fall have that fall off the page of this like if a pros like agnosia for example But it's really interesting and so whenever I travel I go to a campus I start feeling the Dunbar number creep up and think ah, okay. I'm gonna hit somebody's name. Oh, no It just fell off the page. So that's why I'm glad I've ever do it with students all the time. Yes Think about that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's a real issue You can stay there right and then and then repeat all these numbers and get Yeah, and you could possibly design buildings around that Just as a but what you're describing and what you're describing is a pedagogy. That's very very different I mean, I'm using constructivism as one phrase But also very student centered in which the faculty member is someone who's helping them think and helping them as you said Connected to or their ignorance and mentoring as well Now the tour the ignorance is interesting because you can map that out pretty objectively pretty clearly But we're describing something much more personal and also I think much more variable Those are two really really different models It could be that second model is what this university gets to do well that nobody else can replicate I mean in a sense, we've just rediscovered liberal education But in in a sense No, because you know we're talking about something that's much more student centered and so far based on the conversation Not necessarily something that can't be done online So that's an interesting division. Is this making sense here? It look kind of stuck. You're a student. Is this making sense to you? Okay, I Mean when this math prop, do you know this guy? Okay, so when when he said, you know, yeah, getting a career isn't necessarily the first thing the uppermost I was gonna ask is I don't care with you, you know Okay I and community and growing up, I mean, these are 18-year-old kids who come to their own. We hope it's not a clarity. Right, so I think there's a whole lot more to education. The question is how does that come into this? How much do you, of that to you, shoulder and how can you connect? Can you unbundle that? And if so, then what does that look like? Can you say that yes, if you go to Providence, you take a class there and it doesn't really matter because it's more important for it to become convenient to them to be with people with whom you already have established a relationship. So how does that feel? That's fantastic. We have to look at the difference between a current 18-year-old and us. To me, being together is co-located. For an 18-year-old, being together is merely connected. So if two 18-year-olds are on their cell phone a thousand miles apart, they consider themselves to be together. And that's a whole lot different than me. I consider somebody to be together here, not by my phone. I'm sorry, I don't mean this in a personal way. How old are you? How old am I? 29 with experience. That's very good. Our friend from Public Administration, how old are you? I'm going to guess 26, am I right? Thank you, 32. You're welcome. How do you feel? Because you're right in the middle between these two people. Do you need to be physically with someone to be together or is online world enough? I think I'm stuck in the middle between online and being connected because I'm very torn between, for instance, like learning because I'm in grad school. I love the brick and mortar of going, listening to a lecture, but I also like the ability to be able to just connect at the house and not have to go to school or if I'm stuck at work and I can't get out, I can just open up my laptop and be able to talk to people online. Actually, I'm torn in between. Have you seen this guy before? The technical term is telepresence robot. Oh yes, that's the one that projects a person so they can see, you can present from home to a lecture hall. Yeah, I call it a double bot. Other people call it iPad on a stick and it's shown up in a few different TV shows. Years ago I used one and went around the philosophy department knocking on the doors and my colleague told him I had a mind-bottling problem. I love it. Just my head was on the screen. Cartesian humor. There's not much like it. That's really good. It's really, if you haven't been around these, they're a lot of fun. I presented at conferences thousands of miles away with these and they really do change dynamics a bit. Can this one alter its height? It can, in fact. So I was able to roll over and sit down at the table. It's a really great name. It's freaky. We've dressed it up. I taught at another school at an 18-year-old urban school and this is when I had gotten a grant to get one of these and it's a professional school so we had to dress up in suit and tie so we put a tie on it and like a suit jacket on a coat hanger. It's kind of fun. So this is maybe a more, tell me your name, I'm sorry. Ryan. Ryan? Yes. One letter but almost perfect. I'm Brian. So this is another example of that kind of quick connection. So if you're at home and you can't go out, people have used these when they physically can't get somewhere. So we've seen people do this during fires or during accidents. People use these from hospitals. What I'm waiting for is for hotels to have a clutch of these at the front desk for conferences, that kind of thing. I'm glad I could pick on you because you're at 32, you're in the right age just for this. But it may be that we have a different sense of community, one that's emerging as we go. Hang on one second. If I could walk back, when you're talking about connecting dots and content, I did want to say, I'm not sure, that may run a fellow of the library's mission. If I can go back to Ragnathon's famous slogan, which is for every person in their book. In part, you do that work of connectivity, of connecting people. I mean, you have three days of experience of doing this. Well, I don't know anything else beyond that. I would have to ask you, which of course is what one should do with librarians. But that is part of your function, is to connect people with resources. So that's part of academic life. And that's integrated to different degrees in classrooms, and classes depending. It may be that I'm trying to track down that famous saying from Goethe about architecture is frozen in music and I can't find it. So I go to a reference librarian and say, please help me find this out. And so the dots are connected, so that's part of it. I'm sorry, please, I missed you. There's another dynamic. So I've got a 10-year-old woman and 11-year-old, so my daughters are hopefully going to be a future university student. And one of the great challenges they face growing up in this new context is navigating the information swamp. What do you mean by swamp? I'm sorry. The plethora of sources of information, kind of information, the endless depths of YouTube, Google, and they're told by a teacher to go look for something else. Where they start and they navigate. So I think another tool that's really important is helping people navigate to find the resources that are important to many elements. And that's a new thing that I think is, I'm a librarian, since this is the job of a librarian, but it's got a new dynamic and I think it's even more important. Information literacy is so vital. I'm sorry to ask, were you here this morning? I was not. I touched on it very briefly. And information literacy is a key thing. If I could just say a couple of words about this. I've been doing research for about two years on this subject. Earlier, I should confess, I actually led bibliographic instruction at a college for a bit because this is fascinating. We took the term digital literacy and unpacked it a bit. And one straddle below that is the whole field of information literacy. What's interesting is next to that, or below that chronologically, is the field of media literacy, which goes back to the 60s and 70s. So you have this idea of trying to look at mass media, like newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, and trying to figure out what's in there. There are all kinds of exercises. So we now add the digital literacy layer to incorporate. And when we were investigating different countries or different digital literacy ideas, they really varied. So we looked, for example, at Europe, most of the digital literacy definitions had to do with conforming to different European Union directives, which is interesting. They still had the idea of you should try to find good information and accept that bad. But it was really clearly aligned with that European perspective. We looked at African information and digital literacy ones. And they were all about getting jobs. We looked at Middle Eastern ones. And they were all about trying to assess good and bad media, which says something really interesting about the different Middle East. UNESCO did one, so it attended a global definition. And that included a whole bunch of arguments about the rights of citizens, including the rights of citizens to make contact. The right to information, very exciting stuff. And then the ACRL built their own new framework, which is very exciting. So it may be, just forgive me for the digression. This is complicated stuff with a lot of depth to it. It may be that this is one of the jobs of a university is to really teach students this, so that you can learn not just how to sort good from bad, but also how to ethically respond. If I find a bad story on Facebook, should I complain to Facebook about it as a bad story? Should I write a comment saying I think this is BES? If I'm on Twitter, how should I cultivate people in lists? All of these different ethics. Not to mention, I'm not going to talk about copyright. But this is the kind of thing which students aren't really going to get from any other places. K through 12 doesn't really have a lot of time to teach this. And once you're in the professional world, you're taught your professional skills. So I'll be more likely to be taught, which of you is the law library? So if I'm a working lawyer, I'm more likely to be told how to use Lexus Nexus and how to use a few other databases and tools, and less likely to be taught how to use Google, for example, because I wouldn't expect I should know that already. So this could be a huge goal for the RWU. And I submit from a basic experience so this can be taught online very easily. I mean, there are many, many modules. I'm sure you guys have seen these information digital literacy. I'm really glad you mentioned that. One of the things I mentioned this morning is, up until November 2016, it was hard for me to get faculty interested in this. Ever since people are interested. Thanks to the whatever you want to call it, the fake news epidemic, the age of the troll. Well, those of you who were here before, are there any topics that are staying in your mind that you want to address? Any problems? Any concerns? So those of you who worked here, we talked about a variety of topics, mostly technologies. We covered a bunch somewhere on this table. We talked about robotics. We talked about virtual reality. We talked about augmented reality, mixed reality. We talked about video. We talked about mobile devices, lots and lots of technologies. And beyond technologies, we talked a bit about demographics and about economics. And then at the end, I try to tie this all together with a few different major developments, including the idea of a higher education crisis. So just thinking about it, and those of you who weren't here this morning, are there any ideas that have bubbled up in the past 35 minutes or so? Please, someone had to hand them. Yes. Just sitting here, what I have been doing in the past to help students read the dense material that law students have to read, because a lot of the work I do is with students who have, some of them for the first time from the 1930s and 40s. Oh my gosh. So a lot of work I do is helping students decipher words and material for the first time in a very detailed way that they've never had to do before. And I was just thinking that what I've decided to try to do is to become more efficient by using technology to do some of those teaching, because what I've had to do up until now and what's effective is to go side by side in my office one-on-one with a student for a lot of reasons, for the relationship building, for the confidence building, and to kind of get a sense of where the student is emotionally, because law school can be very stressful. Yeah, famously. But I was thinking that if I can use videos more, because I've got three kids who go on YouTube all the time and they learn from YouTube, I can use videos more to at least get a student a little further along in the skills I want to teach them before they meet with me. I was thinking that's really why I'm here to use videos or that to connect the skills first and then still meeting with them one-on-one, because it's kind of a nest, for me it's a necessarily connection for a lot of the students I work with who are struggling with the law school. Oh my gosh. Just really quickly, the Microsoft presenter, is he still here? This morning he talked about the difference between focusing on doing the form of the task rather than its purpose. You're focusing on getting these students to become lawyers, and so if the mechanism is sitting next to them with paper or showing them a video, the key thing is it doesn't work. That's a huge task. I was going to ask a couple of questions about this. Did you want to respond to this? Please, please. In the tutorial world, not yet today. I think this is the kind of content legal methods want as a topic, in discussing Iraq, formation, and all this stuff. There's so much basic content that can be delivered through a vehicle-like commentary at the rate on the students' learning. You can ask the tutor to go again, but it frees up the classroom to do that kind of interpersonal and original, original stuff. My favorite example of this, I'm a Generation X person. I hate being autobiographical, but I'll mention this one. My wife teaches emergency services classes, and she inherited one, and the entire class was all lectures, lectures up to three hours long. I didn't know this, but a lot of people go into the EMT world because they have ADHD. They want something that's structured and also exciting, and they can get involved with it. These lectures were killing them. They had to achieve a national exam result, and the past rate was pathetic, it was a 20%. They took all the lectures off, turned them into podcasts because they were just audio, more practices. The past rate went up to 65%, 70%. Just a real basic flip that class. An example in part of what you're talking about. Is it that word we should all be... It depends on the curriculum, I think, in many ways. We think about the purposes of different... In the sense that there are things out there that are body and knowledge that you can get out of here, and that are more knowledge that you can cultivate out of podcasts. What I wonder about, though, is, for example, in the case of EMT instruction or in the case of law, role-playing is a very, very powerful pedagogy. It predates the internet. It's a very powerful one that we can all use. In, say, someone here had a partner who was in 17th century literature, that's a harder pedagogy to pull off, for example. I'm not saying that, therefore, they should lecture more. I'm just saying that the curriculum would dictate different ways that plays out, as would, of course, the personality of the instructor. I don't mean that in a whimsical way, just in terms of their practice and their skills and how they play out. Is there a possibility that we can actually place ourselves at that point in time through virtual reality? Is it there a point in time we're going to be able to place ourselves all in an environment that we do in now? But you can't recreate your mind to be the mind of a person living at that time, though. There's still going to be limitations about your ability to transport yourself to that time. Those limitations become the map of ignorance in a sense, they become the power. Do you know that they've reacted to the past? Have you guys talked about this before? It's a fantastic pedagogy. Yes, excellent. Are you the only one who hasn't said anything about it? It's a role-playing exercise for historical simulation, where you simulate a very specific historical event that's often a court case or major decision. And you get the trial of Socrates, for example. And so people get to say primary source documents to try to reproduce different roles in those. It's very popular. I taught a version of this online. I team taught a class on the Vietnam War. I taught it in literature, and in history, and in policy. And they developed a framework for simulating the Johnson administration's decision to escalate the war in 1964 and 65. So we had 10 different actors that our students had to simulate and role-play, which was extraordinary in all kinds of ways. Most extraordinary was when we did it three weeks after September 11th. Really, really powerful stuff. But there's a lot you can do with this. I want to come back to the question of tutorials. I want to come back to the question of teaching reading, as you were saying. Tell me your name again. I'm sorry. Kathy. Kathy. Thank you. The moral world is huge. I mentioned earlier that YouTube may be the world's single biggest cultural bizarre right now. People stage video, stage physical protest to be caught on YouTube because it's that powerful right now. And YouTube is filled with all kinds of informal content. I live half off the grid and part of that is we heat entirely with firewood. And so I chop a lot of firewood, stack a lot of firewood, which in Vermont we call this aerobics. But one of the... So I learned, and this is where my nerd credit goes completely off the grid, I learned about the medieval German wood stacking technique. Now it's fascinating by this called Holzhousen. That's really cool, actually. So I went to YouTube and found a stack of videos and then I tried this out and got, oh, that's a problem, made it work. And then shot videos myself and uploaded them. So any of these other completely demented people who want to learn more about this can do this. The tutorial world is really large and again we can feed that into AIs in many ways. But to come back to your reading question, my first response was does anybody here have any knowledge or thoughts that react to Kathy, right? To Kathy's question. Have you seen any other ways of teaching difficult reading to students that you would throw at her? Because I had two quick ones, but I wanted to hear from other people. Right behind you is one. That's your whole life. Yeah, that's my whole life. So how do you... I'm a generation expert as well, but I also fall in between with the connection question and the 40. So I go from I'm on the wireless philosophy team and we partnered with Con Academy to make tutorials, animated 10-minute tutorials for all the basic concepts in philosophy. And so after trying to read the text slowly line by line sometimes, full text or comparing different translations or just doing it that way to a wireless philosophy 10-minute video on the same topic to a class discussion because you need the dialogue and community of learners. So yeah, as multiple ways as I can. So, paradox of the ravens. Fantastic. I saw that. Oh man, that was pretty tricky. So this is one response, is to have more faculty making more of this stuff. And again, it's in the open way. I mean, use the word open, I think. Yeah, open access philosophy so that anybody can use this. If they're not at a university or anything else. That's a great answer. I hope that's one start. We also have any other answers to show. Can I mention two really quick? Please go ahead, I'm sorry. We need some more nuanced language. Of course nuanced language exists, but maybe not in the common vocabulary that we're all used to speaking with. More nuanced language about teaching versus content versus content delivery versus learning from that content. I think we're in this beautiful golden age of content on YouTube for example and Colon Academy. And I love that. I use it all the time. But has it fundamentally changed how I teach? I think the answer is no. I think at the end of the day the student somehow has to spend that intellectual effort. That has to spend that intellectual effort to understand. And if the tool is a way that allows me to make the student comfortable with spending that effort, that's great. It's a success. We can look at the history of all these different technologies. When books became popularly available they weren't too expensive for the common person to get a common student to get a hold of. There were voices saying what's going to happen to the lecture? Couldn't we just put our best lectures in a book and then shoot that? When I was a kid laser discs were in every classroom. Right? That was my generation. Now we have YouTube. Of course Sarah and Mooks they're going to completely and we can go decade by decade cataloging all of these failures to live up to those promises. And I think it's not a failure of the medium. I think it's a misunderstanding of those venues of those platforms of content do what their role is in the learning and teaching process. I wouldn't call them failures. I would say they're failures. Well I'd say they're failures for the wrong question. Because the cognitive act of trying to understand number theory this is not going to alter that in the sense that the brain has to proceed through that. But what they are is questions of access which is really huge. My Holzhousen example is a little whimsical but there was nobody I knew that I could ask about that. So I would otherwise be left in the dark. But I had a laser disc that might have worked but they were expensive to produce and I brought that many of them to play. The same is true of books. We have a long history of correspondence courses people benefiting from having books available. The history of the book is a pretty fascinating and disturbing thing to think about. This morning I mentioned that there was this development between 1900 to 1700 people who thought they had too much to read. And it shows up in weird places. The Fairy Queen for example a great English epic has this scene where our hero, the knight is fighting a monster and the monster rears up above him opens its mouth and vomits out books. Hamlets, broadsides. I mean that's the same people. Oh my gosh this is terrible. We have so much to read. It's kind of goofy but we developed new ways of responding in all kinds of ways. I'll show you two quick technologies if you don't mind. And one of them I'm biased about so I have to confess. The one I'm not biased about is comment press. So this is a tool which lets you have comments running horizontally alongside a text. So let me see, I have to pull a good example of this. Let's see. Oh I haven't seen this one yet. Okay let me take a look at this. So on the left you don't have to read the text here I can even begin it for you but the point isn't reading this necessarily is that's the text that people are commenting on and responding to. So on a blog you have a post and hanging from the post is one or more comments or none, depending. This puts them on the side which makes it easier to read in a sense of dialogue and then comment press lets you do a few fun things so you can read through here. Sorry I'm having a hard time with the trackpad here. I can look at this paragraph and see how many things people have said. I can look at all the comments on this one page. I can look at a person and follow them through and so on. It's a free download that fits into the WordPress blog. If that doesn't make sense or seem easy to you talk to Russ and his team and they'll help you out. This isn't brand new so there's a lot of practice people have of using it. So it's not like I'm saying try this crazy thing this is pretty established and pedagogically fascinating and people use it in different ways. The second is a little more intimate as it were which is hypothesis. Does anybody here use rap genius or genius back in the day? So an interesting question about digital documents is being able to annotate them. So if you get a PDF it's actually kind of hard to do things to it. People have the desire to print them out and people aren't that great. Adobe Acrobat Pro has a bunch of tools you can use to mark up but they still feel kind of awkward. I'll watch people poking at them on iPads trying to manipulate them. This is one where hypothesis basically adds an annotation layer to anything on the web and then you can comment and write to it. Now what I'm saying I'm biased I'm on their board so I'm on their board because I like them. That's the order of events but I would recommend checking them out. It's a free tool and you can add an annotation layer. So you can ask your students to read this one Supreme Court decision from say Louis Brandeis and then work through it carefully and then... Oh you're welcome. I'm very passionate about being able to read. My first scholarly publication I'm sorry I forgot your name you teach composition. Dave, my first scholarly publication was actually a paper about teaching composition with some technology circa 1995 so it included the cutting edge technology of email but I was able to use email to change what my students read which just made me very happy. That's a good question. I'm looking at the time it says 305 and I don't know if that means we're out of time. I do know that it take us closer to the apocalyptic moment of traffic. And Boston traffic is the worst I think in the United States buying part one Triple A did a study they're trying to figure out who had the worst drivers and I think it was Boston and Worcester. It was going to reach to the bottom. I didn't believe that. No I'm talking about you. Let me take a step back thinking about where you are. You've been talking about some of the theoretical and some of the very practical issues involved in productively thoughtfully integrating technology into the undergraduate and graduate curricula as well as into pedagogy. I'm delighted that in the past 45 minutes without any pre-reading without anything besides a crazy robot video that we hit on everything from constructivism to spinosa to questions of markup and mobile devices. I think strongly, I haven't made many recommendations but one of them is this is the kind of conversation you need to have to figure out where this university can go ahead in the future. You have these open discussions where people feel free to mention things that upset them or that don't work out and across all the different disciplines to have philosophy here, mathematics, architecture, biology, I think it's fantastic. If I can come back to you tell me your name again. Yes. And Ryan, right? Yes. I hope that these are the ways that we can better serve you and make your careers here and elsewhere more productive and positive. I'm going to have to drive about five hours so I need to get going pretty soon. I'll stick around here for about five minutes or so before I have to hit the road. But let me thank you all so much for your attention, your thoughts and your time. Thank you.