Thoughts and Impressions from POD 2018

POD is the conference for the pod network community of professionals working in areas that focus on academic or educational development in higher education.  This year's conference was in Portland, Oregon, which right there was a real treat.  Add to this the opportunity to spend almost a whole week with over 1,000 folks who are passionate, enthusiastic, and creative about working with faculty to improve student learning - what is not to like?  Here are some impressions from my first time attending this conference.

One of the great opportunities of this conference is to see and talk to all the folks who are well-known in this field, with the additional bonus that they are all very interested in sharing their ideas (including tangible takeaways like handouts, web sites, online tools) and hearing what your ideas are.  The conference started with workshops and moved into 4 days of sessions, with some carefully scheduled opportunities to step away from the more formal sessions and network with colleagues by exploring different aspects of the city - you could run in the morning, do some yoga, explore the food or museum scene, and even do some karaoke.

The sessions were focused on Leading in Times of Change, which is so broad that many ideas can fall under it. I focused primarily on sessions that addressed inclusion, diversity and equity topics and of course learning spaces. I found it interesting that not many sessions had any kind of technology angle, and that, instead, were sharing strategies and techniques. 

One of the highlights for me was José Bowen's keynote, and even though I had seen and heard some of his speech before, the content had been changed enough, with other kind of data, that it was again very engaging.  He certainly knows how to use the novelty and wow effect of data to engage with his audience.  Key takeaways from his talk that higher education needs to focus more on process than content and that the curriculum should be seen as a tool box giving our students an assortment of tools to solve problems, be creative, and think and evaluate critically the world around them and their lives. He reminded us that we need to start where the students are (not where we hope they are) and that testing needs to be carefully designed so that it is not anxiety-producing but getting to the results we want - students showing to us and themselves that they have mastered a skill or knowledge set successfully.

In a different session, I was introduced to a new idea for practicing critical thinking which is authentic, geared primarily towards graduate students.  The retraction watch,

https://retractionwatch.com, is a site that lists any research that is being retracted for small or more serious reasons.  Having students analyze such an item to see what the problem is with reflection on how they can improve their own research can be helpful.  Another resource are various preprint servers for different disciplines, where one can access manuscripts not officially published yet, to provide a kind critical review to the authors:

http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/lets-talk-about-preprint-servers is one such preprint server.

Oh, and did I mention food trucks

and Powell's and Voodoo Doughnuts?

Ideas from Edspaces 2018

Here are my takeaways from the various sessions I attended at Edspaces.

This is a very different audience - not only are the professionals primarily architects, interior designers, and of course the sales people of the various furnishing companies, but almost all of the folks representing educational institutions are from the K-12 environment, and most of them are not necessarily faculty but people involved on the state or local level with designing schools.  As a result, the presentations appear to be focusing on ideas that folks in the instructional design and instructional technology communities have been talking about for a number of years - for example, having folks talking about what a flipped classroom is seems somewhat strange to me, having folks talk about how online learning is a new trend that should be seen as disruptive innovation is also interesting - just reminding me how slowly ideas work through different segments of the work force.

On the other hand, seeing some of the examples of what K-12 schools look like and, more importantly, what they are doing, is just amazing.  For example, one of the sessions on maker spaces gave the examples of multiple schools where the school culture has been profoundly impacted by introducing a maker space into an area that is publicly available.  (Reminder - a maker space is not just a space with tools, either physical or digital, but a space with these tools that gives students space to explore ideas with the specific purpose of solving a problem that they perceive by building/creating a solution and testing it).  One school where a maker space has allowed for a change in school culture, improving student attendance, retention, and graduation rates is Tilden High School in Chicago. Of course it is the people who make this happen, but the space makes it much easier.

Maker spaces are also described a space where you can learn to take risks - and risk taking was claimed as a core skill just like communication, leadership, and collaboration.

Showing another example of schools can be different, Chris Lehmann, founder of the Science Leadership Academy, a high school focused on letting students learn, challenged us to change our language so that we no longer say that we are teaching a subject but that we are teaching students a subject.  Adding the word students shifts the focus away from the content to the people - as it should be.  As the content can change rather quickly anyway, focusing on students is the only way to go (one person stated that every 73 days, medical education changes).
Part of this teaching the students is that we need to give students the space to learn - and that means the space to make mistakes and truly learn from them.  We take it for granted that athletes and musicians take years of practice before being good, if not even great at their skills.  For some reason, we set a different standard when it comes to other subject matters.

We also need to make sure that the environment allows for empathy and caring - change is scary, and it becomes even scarier when you do not have a safe space at home.  Caring is essential, but caring does not mean that I do things for and to you (that is control and management); caring means that I do things with you and by you.

And so our schools need to reflect the caring and the focus on student learning - and this means that we need to move away from learning spaces that are designed as prisons and as crowd control, and need to move across the board towards spaces that encourage curiosity, exploration, social justice, civic engagement, and innovation - for all, not for the school districts with a high socio-economic background

And finally a little fun - we did a rapid prototyping process in one of the sessions to come up with a learning spaces design, using, among other things, playdough.

Discoveries at Edspaces

This week, I am discovering new furnishings and other ideas at Edspaces in Tampa - while this conference very much focuses on K-12, there are some sessions covering higher education, and of course it is always great to see what K-12 is doing, to see what we in higher education need to expect from our students when they come to our campuses.  It is quite clear that the discrepancies continue to grow, and that the schools that are able to renovate/build new and change the way they are teaching are sending students to university who have a very different idea on how learning should happen.

While the sessions of the conference are interesting, I will focus more on ideas and products I am encountering.  Here are some ideas for starters.

 How about a storage cabinet where the sides can be used for writing?   Smith System, now part of the Steelcase empire, has some interesting solutions, and other companies, like Gratnells, are also quite fun.  I also found a couple of other erasable writing surfaces that may be worth exploring, for example Polyvision's ceramic steel, which can look and behave like a chalk board, comes in different colors and claims to be easier on the eyes than glass and more durable.

Or a rocking chair that is very low to the ground? Quite comfortable, though it took me a moment to get out of it. This one is built by Virco.

 And here is an example of games that can be played with your feet, by RichTech Display.

 Think about what kind of collaborative spaces you can build out of these shapes - and apparently they are virtually indestructible.  One version of this is the one shown by Fomcore.

this kind of chair can be taken anywhere and will potentially improve your posture.  HowdaDesignz won an award for this concept.  Yes, I tried this one as well.  

 And yes, this is a grassy knoll for creating green spaces inside, by NorvaNivel.

 This lab table has magnets so that the stools can be attached for storage.  Notice the additional storage behind the stools.

a maker space on wheels,

 height adjustable learning stations,  and what would be cool if this could be combined with something like the FootFidget for folks to stand during lecture and be able to move just a little

 wobbly stools to keep you moving,

and storage desks with velcro sides to add flexible sides - this is part of their STEM Starter cart - NorvaNivel also has velcro blocks to create privacy barriers for testing