Book: Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Joseph E. Aoun, President of Northeastern University, is calling on higher education to adapt to the times and change its teaching and learning models rapidly to ensure that students learn not only the traditional content but learn how to learn and how to be creative to allow for their success in a world that is more and more shaped by robots, computers, and ever-improving artificial intelligence (AI).

He is delineating 3 literacies and 4 cognitive capacities that, combined, allow for students to become creative life-long learners in a world with the potential to give humans the possibility to create solutions for new problems, invent new products, and improve life for everyone.  This subject to teach he calls humanics.

The literacies and cognitive capacities are
1. technological literacy:  knowledge of mathematics, coding and basic engineering principles,
2. data literacy:  data analysis with an emphasis on the context,
3. human literacy:  knowledge and skills of interacting successfully with other, diverse people
and
1. critical thinking:  "analyzing ideas skillfully and then applying them fruitfully" (62),
2. systems thinking:  connecting different sets of thoughts, systems in (unexpected and creative) ways,
3. entrepreneurship:  the "means for people to distinguish themselves in the digital workplace" (66),
4. cultural agility:  "the mega-competency that enables professionals to perform successfully in cross-cultural situations" (70).

Higher education needs to give students the opportunity to learn and practice these 7 facets, including the practice of learning through mistakes and failure in a relatively safe environment.  Active learning in its various appearances will help provide students with some of these experiences, including study abroad and internships/co-op positions.

Higher education needs to provide students with new ways of learning, moving away from the one path to one degree and create opportunities for quick immersions (bootcamps), personalized learning (online), and a more customized slate of learning experiences leading to a degree and various credentials.

Higher education needs to realize more effectively that it does, as a whole, spend its resources and people power on teaching, not on research. Some of his numbers show that of the ca 1.5 million college and university employees in the US who work in instruction, research, or public service - so not administration and support - 1.2 million are primarily instructors. 270,000 balance research with teaching, and 65,000 do research only. The numbers of pure instructional staff are growing (131). 

Some of the challenges to overcome are
1. robotics and AI are replacing humans in repetitious and time-consuming positions. This means that the concept of working your way from the bottom up in, say, a law firm, may no longer be the case as these boring entry-level positions are no longer needed.  How, then, will we gather the necessary experience?  Co-Op opportunities seem one opportunity, but can we really make this possible for all students in meaningful ways?
2. How can we guarantee such a meaningful education for the 21st century for every single person on earth?  And if that is not the goal, how are we going to provide for the potentially millions, if not billions of people who cannot participate in this system?

I think the book raises interesting questions that need to be brought into the discussion of where higher education is going - I am wondering if it needs to be applied to all of education to ensure that all human beings can benefit from these ideas.

Book: The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

I finally managed to finish Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen's  The Distracted Mind:  Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, MIT Press, 2016.  Not too surprisingly, reading this at work was not at all effective because of the constant disruptions that pulled me away from the focus of this book.

This book focuses on how our brains, still ancient in how they are able to set goals and how they are easily distracted to sense potential danger, are struggling with today's overload through social media, non-stop connection to information through smartphones, and the need to satisfy our "information foraging." Their hypothesis is: "We engage in interference-inducing behaviors because, from an evolutionary perspective, we are merely acting in an optimal manner to satisfy our innate drive to seek information.  Critically, the current conditions of our modern, high-tech world perpetuate this behavior by offering us greater accessibility to feed this instinctive drive and also via their influence on internal factors such as boredom and anxiety" (13).

When set goals to achieve anything, the danger to lose focus and, in the long run, either take much longer to achieve our goals or not achieve them at all, is brought on by the novelty of external influences that are coming in on social media and smartphones.  Humans have always had this challenge, but with the world at their fingertips, the challenge has increased, to the point where we have great difficulties not having our phones with us.  Some mind-boggling (and maybe self-reflective) data:
Smartphone users check their smartphones

• on an average of 27 times a day, ranging from 14-150 times per day depending on the study, the population, and the number of years someone has had a smartphone,
• when they have time to kill (42%),
• while driving (55%),
• in a movie theater (35%),
• on a dinner date (33%)
• during school performances (32% of parents),
• during church (19%),
• during a shower (12%)
• during sex (9%)

Smartphone users (75%) have their phones within 5 feet of them at all times, with 75% of the younger users sleeping with their phone next to their bed, on vibrate or ring, waking up at night to check.  80% reach for their phones within 15 minutes of waking up; 62% reach for their phones as the first thing after waking up.

This leads to lots of screen time right before bed, which disrupts sleep patterns and leads to increased anxiety (108-9).

Add to this the constant mental stress of multi-tasking and task-switching, and it is no wonder that people do not accomplish as much as we are hoping for as they have the constant challenge of work interruptions (you need to reply to that email right now) or social media interruptions (so much more fun and gratifying).  FOMO (Fear of Missing out) and simple boredom also increase our social media usage.

For education, research has shown that students with lower GPAs tend to spend more time on Facebook, tend to do a lot more task-switching, spend more time on media during the day, and lack study strategies.  I learned about the game cellphone stack, that apparently is played at dinners where the person who first needs to look at their phone will pick up the tab. Maybe this can be used for teaching as well.

The authors do not leave us completely hanging with these depressing numbers but provide a couple of chapters with suggestions on how to cope with this need to forage for information.  We can change our brains or change our behaviors.

What are methods to change our brains?  Consider meditation, cognitive exercises, video games, nature walks, certain drugs and physical exercise - all these, in some ways, allow us to focus on goals more effectively.  

What are methods to change our behavior? Focus on getting a good night's sleep by limiting screen exposure in the late evening.  Here is a list of questions to reflect on that may help with changing behavior:

• "How might I increase my metacognitive view of how my own mind performs in a given situation, and in what ways are my actions not in line with how I should behave based on my goals and an understanding of my limitations?
• How might I change my physical environment to reduce accessibility of potential distractors?
• How might I assess whether I am self-interrupting because of boredom, and how might I make the task more interesting to stave off that boredom?
• How might I recognize when my actions are driven by anxiety about missing out on something in my virtual world, and what steps can I take to reduce that anxiety?" (238

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

Race Equity Workshops - what I am learning

Our Office of Inclusion and Diversity has provided us the great opportunity to participate in a series of workshops focusing on awareness around race equity (and lack thereof) and strategies for ourselves, our courses, and our academic culture to become (more) equitable.  Part of this series is that we are going to implement projects in our disciplines or programs to improve equity across campus.

The workshop series is conducted out of the University of South California's Center for Equity, and it has been a great experience so far.  I am not going to retrace all of the steps and discussions we are having; instead, I will highlight some of the points that took me by surprise.

Maybe you saw this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education a while back and thought to yourself, this is not happening in my classes or, this is happening in my classes but I don't know how to improve the situation.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Traditional-Teaching-May/243339?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=d9bc9e4ee59f4eea9168c9f5d77010ed&elq=e3b3c595e6bb4e5793fcf596213a6ee8&elqaid=18996&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=8587

So here are some very simple ideas to get you on this track of thinking more inclusively with more equity in mind:
1. When you use examples, case studies, and other assignments for your class, use non-Anglophone names. It helps if you use names of people you have met so that you can say to your students you indeed know someone with that name (because you may get push-back using names not familiar to your students.  This strategy broadens what kinds of names are possible to use in a classroom.
2. When you put together readings for your course, choose texts from non-canonical authors that introduce the idea that not all scientists, philosophers, engineers are white men - I am exaggerating, though I suspect you recognize the problem. Including these voices shows all of your students that anyone can be successful in your particular field.
3. You may say that you are only using a text book and thus do not have this option of bringing diverse voices into your course.  Think about how you can connect your area of teaching then to issues of equity.  It may be worth it to give a brief history of your subject that includes references of scientists who are not often discussed.  Keep an eye out for news items connected to your subject that can highlight inequity or equitable use of your subject.
4.  Give your students a voice.  In an active learning space, you have already done this - take it a step further and consider creating spaces where students can briefly reflect on what is happening in their world, whether that is announcing a campus event (building community) or discussing a news topic that impacts them.
5. Include a statement in your syllabus about equity.

Because this should be our goal:

More to come!

Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, is an interesting book connecting psychology, human behavior, everyday life, economics, learning situations, and research.  This book outlines a multitude of experiments he and his colleagues have conducted over the last few decades to show how human behavior impacts and often counteracts rational decision making.

Starting the with concept of System 1and System 2 thinking, something we all do, he shows how humans most of the time make decisions quickly, based on our emotion-connected System 1 thinking.  Most of the time, these decisions are accurate as they are grounded in our experiences, but many times, we need to take a moment to switch into our System 2 thinking, which takes more time, is more difficult, but tends to provide us with a more nuanced view and thus a less biased decision.

Add to this his findings on loss aversion - we do not like to lose or perceive that we lose, so we rather stay where we are than take a gamble, on avoidance of change - System 1 thinking makes it difficult to see change as valuable, on single evaluation -- based in System 1 thinking and plaguing justice systems, on hindsight bias, the illusion of understanding -- the list goes on and on.

What does this mean for teaching and learning?
1. We should be concerned about fast answers to complex issues. We need to give our students more time to come up with more nuanced answers, no matter how uncomfortable this may be.
2. We need to remember that experts when asked for their expertise tend to overthink and move into outlier situations while statistical data is more reliable, and we need to remember that we as teachers are seen as experts and may fall into the same trap.
3. Unlearning something is very difficult because it is part of our System 1 thinking that helps us create a vision of the world that makes a coherent sense - even if it is not founded in facts.  We can be blind to the obvious and to our blindness.
4. We can see the illusion of understanding in our classrooms all the time. How do we deal with this illusion?
5. We do not like to take risks -- so how can we construct our learning assignments so that students do not see them as major risk taking?
6. Opting out and opting in:  when you ask people to opt in, you get a lower response rate of participation as when the default is already set as in, and you ask people to opt out.  Not only are people lazy but opting out suggests that they are missing out on something - which humans do not like.  What can we do in our classes so that students are by default part of it and they can opt out?