EP 17 - Bonus Fall “Catch-up” Episode as John and Jason talk about current reading, fall presentations, and upcoming OLC sessions.

In this episode, John and Jason talk about current reading, recent seminars, and their upcoming OLC Accelerate Conference (2023) presentation in Washington, DC

 

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Resources:

• John’s Book Recommendations:
  • The Renée Ballard series by Michael Connely
  • Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell
  • The Whistler and The Judges List by John Grisham 
  • How to Make Sense of Any Mess, by Abby Covert
• Jason’s Book Recommendation:
  • Everything is Figureaboutable, by Marie Forleo
• John & Jason’s Slides from the University of Tennessee’s 1st AI Symposium “Reimagining online assignments with and because of AI”
• John’s Slides from Sweden where he talked about the promise of AI and whether it can democratize innovation or dilute quality. 
• OLC Session 1: EXPLORING THE IMPACT OF AI ON STUDENT CONNECTION AND BELONGING IN EDUCATION (Thursday, October 26, 2023 - 9:30 AM to 10:15 AM)
• OLC Session 2: ONLINE LEARNING IN THE SECOND HALF: TURNING DANGERS INTO OPPORTUNITIES (Thursday, October 26, 2023 - 1:15 PM to 2:00 PM)
• Contact John or Jason through LinkedIn if you are an educational podcaster and would like to join them in a recording session!

Transcript

 We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions!

 




[00:00:00] John Nash: Do you smile when you talk? Did you know when you smile while you talk, it actually makes you sound like you're like. 


funny. It  


works. 


[00:00:06] Jason Johnston: that's what they, that's what they told us to do in telemarketing. 


[00:00:09] John Nash: That's right. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. 


[00:00:14] Jason Johnston: Now I'm laughing. I can't. Okay, I'll 


try it again.  


Intro 


[00:00:19] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great and a lot of it is, but a lot of it still isn't. How are we going to get to the next stage, Jason? 


[00:00:42] Jason Johnston: That's a great question. And I've got an idea. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? 


[00:00:48] John Nash: I love that idea. Let's do it right now. 


[00:00:50] Jason Johnston: good. Today, I wondered if we could talk just a little bit about the road behind, the road ahead, what we've been doing lately what we will be doing next, we've got some exciting events that we're doing together in the next little bit. 


[00:01:03] John Nash: We do.  


We do.  


[00:01:04] Jason Johnston: First I was wondering about have you been reading anything these days, John? 


[00:01:09] John Nash: I've been reading my usual kinds of journal articles and other things , but 2023 has been a little different for me in terms of the topic of reading because the funniest thing happened to me in January of this year. I started reading electively non academic. books, novels. And I don't know how it happened, but I just did. I was I was on a work trip to Honolulu and I found, I discovered that you can check out books from your public library and put them on your Kindle. 


I didn't know about Libby, the app Libby. 


[00:01:45] Jason Johnston: Libby's amazing. 


[00:01:47] John Nash: Yeah, it's amazing. I'm running around my friend's house in Honolulu going, Hey, do you know you can do this? As if, just split the atom or something. And yeah. And so I've been reading I read a bunch of Michael Connolly novels. About a female detective in Los Angeles contemporary of Bosch's, and I liked those a lot, and now I'm on like book 12 of the novels about Kay Scarpetta, the fictional and famous Virginia chief medical examiner it's a longstanding series written by Patricia Cornwell.  


[00:02:20] Jason Johnston: Is this like a secret desire to be a detective and solve crimes for a 


[00:02:24] John Nash: Yeah, I don't know, but I do, I'm drawn to these novels because I don't know, I guess I like the technical aspects of these novels with Kay Scarpetta as the protagonist, because they do get pretty technical about some medical issues related to examining the dead and help having the dead speak. 


Actually, there's a UT Knoxville tie in, they talk about the body farm a lot in these novels. Yeah. And for those who may not know the body farm is the outdoor laboratory outside University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where bodies decompose and they study them. 


[00:02:57] Jason Johnston: And as part of that body farm as I understand they're actually buried under the field at Neyland Stadium. So if you watch a UT Vols football game the bodies are buried underneath that field. , last. Fall, my son and I were at a game just right around Halloween. 


And the band at the halftime did thriller, and then they spelled out body farm. So it's all part of the lore there. That's great. 


[00:03:22] John Nash: Yeah. Yeah. 


[00:03:23] Jason Johnston: You know what book I just started that was on your recommendation, is Everything is Figureoutable. 


[00:03:31] John Nash: No, I don't remember recommending that to you. Yeah. That sounds like a great book. 


[00:03:36] Jason Johnston: Yeah maybe. 


[00:03:38] John Nash: I think you just recommended it to me. 


[00:03:41] Jason Johnston: Oh, that's funny. It's so funny because I've all throughout this book, like I'm only, three or four chapters in, but I've been thinking this is such a John Nash book. I can totally see why he enjoys this, from a design thinking standpoint and the person is witty and pretty terse and just to the point so easy read, really easy  


[00:04:00] John Nash: I'll check it out. 


[00:04:01] Jason Johnston: Oh, good. I'm glad I could 


[00:04:03] John Nash: hilarious. I might have recommended it to you. The older I get, the more I say stuff that I don't remember ever saying. 


[00:04:09] Jason Johnston: But you haven't read it, right? Is that  


[00:04:11] John Nash: No, I don't think I've ever read that book. 


[00:04:14] Jason Johnston: That's funny. That's a great phrase, isn't it? Everything is figured out. 


[00:04:18] John Nash: Yeah. Yeah. I know. I'm just looking at, I just brought onto my desk here, How to Make Sense of Any Mess, which is the one that I'm, I do recommend by Abby Covert. 


[00:04:26] Jason Johnston: Oh, I bet you that was it. I think that was the one you recommended, and somehow I ended up on this book. Probably some sort of loop off of 


[00:04:35] John Nash: It's got a similar cadence to the title. It's Oh, this must be the book you recommended. 


[00:04:39] Jason Johnston: Yeah. But this last weekend, it was a great story. I served for a number of years at a small boarding school in Eastern Kentucky, called Oakdale Christian Academy great school. where people from all the world and from all sorts of different contexts, often students that are. Not making it in their current context and they needed a, another opportunity for them and lots of great students, lots of great staff. 


So I was there for six years and this last weekend they were decommissioning a hundred year old chapel, just this kind of small chapel. It was like it was maybe 30, let's 30 by a hundred and something feet, right? There's this kind of one room. Chapel. They were decommissioning after about a hundred years. 


Anyways, somebody got up and told the story who he was born in 1935 and he was a teacher there in the 50s, okay? And this relates back to the book, but also the kinds of things we talk about. There was a teacher there in the 50s, and so one summer, after, school was over, he and another teacher, their job was to move the chapel. The president came to them and said, we got to get this chapel moved, it's too close to the road, they're expanding the road, and we got to move it down here to the creek about, maybe 500, 600 feet or something like that. And just figured it out. They'd never done this before. 


They had no engineering background, but this is just what you did in the 50s. It was like, okay, and so he told this story about using some old telephone poles. to put underneath the chapel and move inch by inch as they pulled it with the school bus down to where it currently sat for 70 years until now finally the whole thing is, it's a big wooden building, the whole thing is coming apart and so they were decommissioned. But I, but it's funny because I started this book like the day before and then heard the story. And then I was talking to the outgoing president of the school. And I was like, isn't it amazing what teachers can do and have done, Like when you don't realize, especially, and he was joking about the fact, yeah, they just, they didn't really even conceive of the fact that they'd never done this before. 


Weren't asked whether or not they did this before and they just figured it out.  


[00:07:04] John Nash: I love that. Yeah. I guess the, I'm already thinking like, what would I do? I don't have an engineering background, but we could probably figure that out. You just have to be careful that you lift at the same time everywhere at the right time, and everything's level and nothing's going. 


Yeah, everything's battened down and then we go slowly and watch and tweak, right? 


[00:07:25] Jason Johnston: Go slowly, take it easy and think about what you're doing. And but I also thought about the fact that I'm afraid right now, if somebody asked me to move that chapel. I would just say I, I can't do that. It's not within my scope of doing. Why don't we hire somebody now? 


I could maybe, help you find somebody that could do it. We could hire. Maybe I could help you raise some money to get a proper moving company in to move it from here to there. But I'm just so inspired by their their tenacity just to take it on.  


[00:07:58] John Nash: It reminds me of a show that my wife and I powered through seasons and seasons of it. We were somehow addicted to it. It's called Homestead Rescue. It's on the Discovery Channel. And there was an episode where. This family of homesteaders who are really good at it, save other homesteaders from themselves who have gotten themselves into a difficult time after trying to go off the grid. 


And they found a, an old school, a one room schoolhouse that a family on a compound didn't want or need anymore. They donated it to this new family, but they had to move it. And they didn't have any professionals, they just got the homesteaders out there and some logs and a long trailer and a truck and moved this structure intact all the way, several miles. 


It was fascinating. Yeah, I was Batia was like we don't have anybody to hire. We're going to have to do this. 


[00:08:48] Jason Johnston: And I guess that's what you do, too, when it's yeah we are the solution, and so let's figure this out, and everything is figureoutable.  


[00:08:55] John Nash: Yes  


[00:08:56] Jason Johnston: . So John, also on top of our reading we've been doing a few other things together and also wanted to talk about our OLC sessions coming up, and then you were just out of the country, but first back in, I guess it was the end of September. 


We talked at UT's, University of Tennessee, Knoxville's first AI symposium  


[00:09:17] John Nash: Yeah, we  


[00:09:17] Jason Johnston: re imagining online assignments with and because of AI. 


[00:09:23] John Nash: Yeah, that was a great symposium day long. And it was great to do that session. And I also got a lot out of the student session that they held. 


[00:09:34] Jason Johnston: Oh, that was great. 


[00:09:35] John Nash: That was great. I'm finding more and more that as the institutions and schools start to think about AI and they have these kinds of symposia whenever they include the students, those are the most enlightening, Because they really get at how students are using these things, how they view professors and instructors attempts to use AI. 


And I think it gives us a lot of it gave me solace in thinking that we're going to be able to get through this in a good way. I don't think the issues with cheating are as bad as we think. And I think the students are just as circumspect as. The adults are in terms of thinking through how and where and why generative AI can be useful in our lives. 


[00:10:20] Jason Johnston: Yeah, that's great. And we'll put up the link to our slides if you're interested in learning more about what we were talking about, but I, as well with you, I learned a lot throughout that day. It's a great point about making sure that students are part of this conversation. 


I think often, we're the ones up in the ivory tower talking AI things and how they're going to affect students without actually bringing them in on the conversation and I think that's really important. Yeah, that's great. And John, you just also just came back from Sweden. 


[00:10:51] John Nash: I did I was at the conference called innovation by collaboration put on by the group in Sweden, that is the professional organization of university innovation advisors and IP transfer folks. And so we were in Halmstad, Sweden in the West Coast. And I gave a talk on AI. 


We talked about the the promise of AI and whether it can democratize innovation or dilute quality. And it was a great conversation because The interest in use of generative AI and particularly chat GPT is very high amongst folks in Sweden. I've talked to industry folks in Stockholm, then we went to the conference in Halmstad and talked to people across a wide swath of university institutions, startup culture folks, incubators. 


And the use of generative AI is high. And equally the concern of how privacy rights will be perceived and equally how privacy rights will be respected how the use will potentially dilute the ability of people to teach across areas that are important and was it an opportunity to really underscore some of the things we've already been talking about, Jason, and with some of our guests around what's un AIable and forthcoming episode with Brandeis Marshall talking about critical thinking, context, conflict resolution. 


So it was a nice. Chance to affirm that we're on the right track and the ways we're thinking about things and also learning where we in the US have tools in our hands that aren't quite yet in the EU. For instance, Claude is not out in the EU right 


[00:12:32] Jason Johnston: Oh, interesting. 


[00:12:33] John Nash: And and so talking about the variety of tools and the companies that put these out and what their interests are. 


Those are very important issues I took away from what my Swedish colleagues want to know about is how is this going to be ethically fair and socially minded going forward? 


[00:12:50] Jason Johnston: Yeah those yeah, those sound like some significant concerns, things we've been talking about for a little while here, and also leads us into thinking about our next couple of sessions we're going to do that I'll just say briefly. First, we're going to do one in coordination with the company company Inscribe, Inscribe. 


talking about navigating the impact of AI while cultivating a sense of belonging. I'm really excited about talking about this. We're going to do this at OLC Accelerate in Washington, DC. And that panel will be talking on that Thursday morning. 930 to 1015.  


And then in the afternoon, we'll be doing our own session, which I'm really excited about. Can you believe they let us use this title, John? I probably shouldn't say this out loud. They may not let us do this again. But it's actually called online Learning in the Second Half, Turning Dangers into Opportunities. 


[00:13:42] John Nash: can't believe they let us have that title on two fronts. First of all, we stuck the name of our podcast in there as the title of the session. And then the stuff after the colon is a little ominous, turning dangers into opportunities. 


[00:13:56] Jason Johnston: We figured that they probably had five zillion AI requests and they probably will have five zillion AI requests. Sessions, which is great. This is where we're at. I'm going, I'll be there for all of those, right? I'll be at everyone. But I also thought this was an idea to broaden our thoughts beyond AI, I'm sure will be part of our conversation, but broaden our thoughts in terms of thinking about some of our hopes and challenges for online learning in the second half as we move forward. 


[00:14:26] John Nash: Yeah, I agree. And so we're going to get to talk about a lot of the things that we love to talk about in this series, which is inclusivity, authentic assessment, engagement, and personalization. I think that this is going to be really important for us to think about as online gets more prevalent than it Is now hard to believe, but it's going to. 


And with AI, and I think all the instructional designers want to know how they can stay on top of that too. 


[00:14:57] Jason Johnston: Yeah. And I'm planning to use our podcasts as research. I hope to quote as many people as possible, but just even think about the conversations we've had since February about these two things dangers, opportunities, and what the very, very smart people we've been talking to about this. 


And as we've had different conversations about our, Yeah. experiences. Yeah, so looking forward to that. So please, if you're going to be at OLC, we'll put the link in the notes, OLC, Washington, D. C. Please join us. You can always reach out to us on LinkedIn as well, if you have questions about that. We're also going to try to do a podcast meetup. 


So if you're an educational podcaster out there someplace. Please reach out. We're going to do a meetup and maybe do another Super Friends episode if we can. So I've already started to reach out to a couple podcasters, but if you'd like to do that, I won't say where it is at this point but if you just reach out to us, then we can hopefully connect. 


[00:15:48] John Nash: Yeah, we had a really successful Podcast Superfriends episode in Nashville at the last OLC, and I would love to repeat that. I think that there's a great opportunity to have a conversation here. 


[00:16:00] Jason Johnston: Yeah. Thanks, John. It's good to catch up with you a little bit and looking forward to seeing you in D. C. next week. 


[00:16:07] John Nash: Yeah. Next week. Hard to believe. 


[00:16:10] Jason Johnston: know, it's next week. 


[00:16:11] John Nash: Yeah. Yep. All right. See you soon. 


[00:16:14] Jason Johnston: Okay, we better get going right after this call. It'll be ChatGBT. Make me some slides. 


[00:16:20] John Nash: Make me some slides. Make me smart. 


[00:16:24] Jason Johnston: Make me smart. 


[00:16:25] John Nash: See ya. 


[00:16:26] Jason Johnston: All right, see ya.