Intentional Tech, with Derek Bruff

[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 277 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Derek Bruff discusses his new book Intentional Tech.

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[00:00:11] Male Speaker: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:20] Bonni: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

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Today, I’m welcoming back to the show Derek Bruff, he is the director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching and a principal senior lecturer in the Vanderbilt Department of Mathematics. As director, he oversees the center’s programming and offerings for faculty and graduate students, helping them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching and learning. He also consults regularly with campus leaders about pedagogical issues seeking to foster a university culture that supports effective teaching.

Bruff’s scholarly interests include educational technology, faculty development and visual thinking. He writes about these topics on his blog, Agile Learning and his second book Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching will be published in 2019 by West Virginia University Press. Derek, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:47] Derek: Thanks, Bonni, I am super excited to be back. I had a fun time talking with you here a couple of years ago. I’m excited to catch up and talk more about technology.

[00:01:56] Bonni: That was nuts for me to look back and see how long it had been because it seems like just a short time ago. It’s been great to stay connected over social media. I think we just might want to hear what you’ve been up to since the last time you were on the show.

[00:02:09] Derek: [chuckles] A few things, yes. I think the biggest project I’ve had over the past couple of years is this new book that I have coming out called Intentional Tech. I had written a book on teaching with classroom response systems back- it came out in 2009. Again, it’s hard for me to think that it’s already been 10 years since that book came out. I wanted to do another book. I finally got the idea and made a pitch to Jim Wayne over at West Virginia University Press, and he liked the idea.

It was really weird but gratifying to go back into a big writing project like this, because I think I had grown as a writer over the last 10 years since my first book. When my first book was finished, I took two months off of not writing at all then I started blogging. That’s really when I started my blogging life. I think that’s helped me develop as a writer over time. It was really rewarding to go into a new big writing project and bringing some of those skills I had developed. I found out that I like writing actually. I really enjoyed the process of putting this book together.

[00:03:12] Bonni: That is fabulous. I wish I could like writing. I like when writing is done. It feels so amazing but the actual process is often times stress inducing for me. I wonder if that’ll change over time. I’m going to have to just when this airs, will be on my way to releasing my first book so that’s– I am do another writing too. I’m writing a column for EdSurge once a month. I’m doing more writing that might get exposed to larger audiences and maybe I should leave my mind open to the fact that that might change. We’ll see.

[00:03:42] Derek: I just had this memory of sitting in the coffee shop and this metaphor coming to me, I was trying to solve a particular problem in a chapter, how to explain something and this metaphor hit me almost like a lighting bolt. I’m just like, “That felt really good. That was great.” It was a topic I had talked about in the past, but I hadn’t really taken the time to think hard and creatively about a better way to explain it.

[00:04:05] Bonni: That’s great tapping in-

[00:04:06] Derek: It was fun to have that come out of the writing process.

[00:04:08] Bonni: -tapping into your creative spirit. That is wonderful. Well, I love the title of it. I just love any chance I get a chance to talk to you or to read your work. When you were on the show last time, you talked about this times for telling. I know we’ll have a lot of new listeners since then. We’re not going to spend a lot of time on this. I’d encourage people to go back and listen to that other episode because you had so much to share, but would you talk about times for telling?

[00:04:34] Derek: Sure, and because I do think it’s a really useful concept. It comes from a paper from 1999 by Schwartz & Bransford, and they talk about creating these learning experiences where students are primed to learn something new. Often, it involves some type of experience first that prepare students to want to know the answer to something and to be ready to understand that answer. I have a whole chapter on it in my book and I tell the story of when my daughter was in preschool and they had science day, and they asked the parents to come in and do some sciency things.

I was the dad who brought in the diet coke and mentos. If you’ve seen the YouTube videos or done it yourself, you put the mentos breath mints and the diet coke, and you get this giant geyser of diet coke. The five-year-olds they see this, they’re amazed, and then they ask, “Well, how does that work? Why does that do that? Why do you use diet coke and not regular coke?” I just think it’s a nice example of this idea of creating the time for telling. I could have started by explaining the whole process to them and try to explain it in a way that five-year-olds could understand.

They were much more interested and ready to here some kind of explanation after they saw the demo. I use this a lot with faculty. In my work at Vanderbilt, I direct a teaching center and so I’m often consulting with faculty and their teaching. This idea that you might want to change the order of things or give students an experience first before you provide context and explanation, it’s a little non-intuitive for faculty.

I think we often want to start off and define the thing or provide the background and the context before we turn the students loose, or give the students all the information they need to solve a problem and then see if they can solve the problem. That makes a lot of intuitive sense. Sometimes if you give students a problem or an experience where they get stuck, where they get challenged, it’s going to challenge their mental models in a way that prepares them to change those mental models.

One of the stories I share in my book– I really love hearing about creative uses of technology by other faculty. It’s my thing. I talked with Kimberly Rogers who teaches sociology at Dartmouth, and her technology was low tech, it was analog. She had her students play this game called replay health. It’s a simulation and it involves some bin bag throwing. Students are in these groups and they throw bin bags at targets to try to earn money for their little fictional community, and they have a little profile that lists various health risk factors that they might have.

They don’t get enough sleep, they don’t exercise enough, they smoke and poor diet, these types of things. In every round, some of it happens randomly, you draw a deck of cards. If you have certain health risk factors, you get unhealthier. You have a little health meter in your wallet. The unhealthier you get, the further back you stand from the bin bag targets. You’re not able to contribute as much or earn as much money. In every few rounds, the town gets together and votes on a new policy.

This could be more healthcare providers, it could be insurance for everyone, it could be some new food bank or something, and then that affects the gameplay. It affects how the health risk factors play out. Students spend half an hour throwing bin bags and voting on healthcare policy and seeing how that affects the livelihood of the folks in their little fictional town. There’s this embodied learning that happens and the social learning that happens. Kimberly said that one time she played this and two of the towns made the same choice, the same policy decision in the first round.

They moved to universal health. The problem with universal healthcare apparently, I’m told is that if you really want to help people, you have to help the sickest people first. Both of these groups made the policy choice to make universal healthcare and, in both groups, the same character died in the next round because they didn’t get healthy enough fast enough. It’s all a game. It’s fun and there’s bin bags. It helped the students appreciate this phenomenon.

She had actually told her students in advance this is one of the drawbacks of universal healthcare that it doesn’t help the sickest people fast enough. When they actually played that through in a game, it set them up for this really great conversation after the fact when they debrief the game. Again, what I would call a time for telling, a time for the students, they have a mental model about how healthcare should work, and then they’re thrown into a situation where that mental model doesn’t help them find it doesn’t predict well.

When they’re confronted by that cognitive dissonance, it sets them up to reexamine that mental model and change it and make it more robust. I love that idea. I love finding ways to use technology to give students those type of experiences where they realize their mental models aren’t quite robust enough to actually solve the problem in front of them.

[00:09:17] Bonni: One of the benefits I would think also of her approach is that it helps give vocabulary both in the long-term sense of vocabulary around universal healthcare, but then also vocabulary that doesn’t have to put people on the defensive so quickly. We’re talking about using the specific character who died in the game that we could talk about that situation and then worry about extending it further and outside of the little case that she was using. I like that.

There’s actually two things I’m hearing you say. One is that we can think differently about times for telling that’s not always a video. This is not just let me just find a good video to show you but that there can be really interactive times for telling, in my experiences those are the most powerful. You used the word experience, which I think is helpful to us to think about what experience can we give them. Then last time when you were on the show, you really helped change my thinking about blended learning or the flipped classroom. You mentioned in this conversation today the order of things.

That it doesn’t need to be that I show a video on the part that they’re not in the class and then they come back and we talk about it. That sometimes those really, really powerful things that will evoke some emotion or really get us thinking so deeply can happen right in the classroom if we are teaching in a blended environment and that, that some of the things we can rethink that overly simplistic model of a flipped classroom. You’ve just been so transformative in my teaching around that.

[00:10:49] Derek: Well, thank you. Yes, my first book was about teaching with classroom response systems. That’s another way you can use technology to give students a question that they’re not quite ready for yet. When half the class gets it wrong and you see the bar graph, they all realize, “Oh, there’s something hard here.” It may be that sometimes you don’t give students all the resources up-front and then they come to class and you’d give them a problem that they can easily solve.

The thing about changing mental models is that it’s hard and so you have to be well motivated to do it right. Sometimes that experience of tackling a problem and not quite solving it is– if it’s too hard, it’s demoralizing but if it’s in that Goldilocks zone of challenge, it can help students see that “Yes, I do need to upgrade my mental model. I need to think more deeply about this issue.”

[00:11:37] Bonni: What are thin slices of learning?

[00:11:40] Derek: That is a phrase I borrowed from Randy Bass who’s at Georgetown University and has been really active in the scholarship of teaching and learning community and led their teaching center for years there. He actually talked about it in terms of learning that’s left on the cutting room floor. Like little bits of pieces of learning along the way. Our students start off as novices in our area and we help them move towards expertise.

As they’re doing that, there’s a lot of intermediate stuff that happens and not all of that is visible to us as instructors. This was the example I was thinking of when the metaphor came to me. My daughter, actually the same daughter at the preschool, a little bit later, she made a short film and internet on a film festival and I’m super proud because she actually got it shown and she won an award for best drama, which is great.

It’s this two-minute film, it’s called Sonder. It’s on the idea that everyone else has a rich interior life just like you do. Most of us at some point in adolescents start to realize that. She made this beautiful little short film and I asked her, “How much footage did you film for this?” She said, “It was about three hours of footage for a two-minute film.” The editing that she had to do.

She had this taken that taken and this scene and that scene and what characters to include and what not to include. There were a ton of decisions that she was making as an editor that aren’t necessarily visible in the final product. That’s true for our students often. They turn in some project to us, a paper or presentation or whatever it is. Often, there’s so much learning that went on behind the scenes that we’re not necessarily privy to.

I found that technology, one of the things that’s good for, it’s not good for everything. One of the things that’s good for is making visible these thin slices of student learning that happened along the way. This is what we call in the business formative assessment. You’re trying to figure out what and how your students are learning along the way so that you can provide them better feedback for their learning.

Technology can can do this. A classroom response system can do this. You ask one question in class and get an idea of where students are, but one of my favorite stories of using technology to make visible thin slices of student learning is Margaret Rubega is a professor of biology at the University of Connecticut and she teaches an ornithology class. One of her assignments is to have her students tweet about the birds that they see.

Margaret’s so intentional about this. I interviewed her a while back for a project and she said that her students come in to this ornithology class and they think all the cool birds are somewhere far away. They’re in the Amazon, they’re in Australia, they’re in Asia or wherever. She wants them to know that actually bird behavior and ecology is really interesting even in Connecticut.

She asked them, as they go about their day, they’re going to work, they’re going into their apartment, they’re going to school to tweet about birds that they see. It’s an assignment. It’s lightly graded, it doesn’t account for much but in the tweet, they have to record their observation. They have to say where they are and they have to connect it to course material. What she’s asking them to do is to practice transfer.

They’re taking what they’re learning in the classroom with her and they’re applying it in the outside world. In these new situations and looking for the things they’re learning about in class and the birds that they see. As an example, one of my favorite tweets is this student who was walking by a golf course and he observed in his tweet that there were different songs coming from different areas of the golf course that the songbirds were seeing.

He conjectured that the golf course itself, the fairways was dividing the birds into territories. I thought, I don’t know if he’s right, but that’s a really insightful piece of observation. He’s doing fieldwork right for this class. I love how Twitter here is the technology of choice. I think it’s great because it’s short, it’s sweet. You can include a photo if you can get a photo of the bird that you just saw, it’s right there on a student’s phone in their pocket, right when you’re walking around.

The presence of the phone in the pocket reminds them, “Oh, I need to be looking for birds for my class assignment.” Then they can share it and easily they use a hashtag bird class so they can find each other’s tweets really easily. What Margaret gets are these little snapshots of students applying what they’re learning in the field as they’re doing it. It’s not that they observe something and they come back later and they report on it, it’s in the moment learning and she gets to see it happening through Twitter.

I think that’s just a really clever match between the technology and the pedagogy. She wants them to practice transferring and small steps where they are and the technology, in this case, is the right match shell to do that.

[00:16:33] Bonni: One of the terms that I have found over time really can be offensive and probably not very helpful either, is this idea of we’re preparing students to go out into the real world. The critiques of that phrase will say, “Well, they’re already in the real world and trying to have a better understanding by faculty of just the challenges that our students face today and it’s not like once they go out and get a job, they already have a job or perhaps too and et cetera.”

I still think that we could get closer together those that use that phrase and those that are opposed to it to just seeing, wanting to help them work in different contexts. I’m also hearing from the story that you just shared as just igniting curiosity and when we learn the questions that are answered by different disciplines, that that’s probably going to be something a lot more valuable along the long run and even just learning to ask questions in general.

[00:17:31] Derek: Yes, I use this term transfer from the educational literature. It’s this idea of taking what you learn in the classroom and applying it to other– I’m not crazy about the real world cause yes, like we’re always in the real world. My classroom is the real world, but when we go into new contexts, it is hard to apply what we’ve learned to new situations.

Sometimes I’ll talk about in my workshops about my own use of photography. I love photography and I’ve learned a lot about photography but then every time I go somewhere new, I’ve got my camera, I’ve got whatever skills I have. I have ideas about composition and lighting and aperture and all this stuff. Then I try to take an interesting photo in this place. I’ve never been built before. Like it’s fun for me, but it also involves a lot of transfer. What we know from the education and literature is that this is hard.

This is one of the hardest things that we try to help our students do is to take what they’re learning and apply it to new contexts. I love the idea of using technology to give students a chance to practice that transfer regularly and in small ways where they can get some feedback on what’s closing or what’s not.

[00:18:37] Bonni: It sounds like what you were just describing might help us jump all the way down to chapter seven in your book, which is about authentic audiences and am I seeing a good connection there for us to go? Just share a little bit about that next.

[00:18:50] Derek: Yes, we’ll I might travel through the chapter and learning communities.

[00:18:54] Bonni: Yes, take us guide us. [chuckles]

[00:18:57] Derek: Well, and it’s like who’s looking at the student work. In the bird class example, there’s actually three levels of audience for the students and the tweaks that they make. One is their instructor, Margaret Rubega is looking at these and she’s giving them feedback and saying “That’s a good observation or I can’t believe you’ve got a photo of that bird or whatever.” There’s also their peers, they’re able to see each other’s work and learn from each other.

In one of the courses I teach, I use the platform called Diigo with my students. It’s a social bookmarking platform and it’s basically a place where we can share links and resources with each other and we can tag them and we can comment on them and search them. It’s pretty easy to use. I’ve been using it with this first-year writing seminar for years and it’s fun. It’s a seminar on cryptography.

The students are taking this course there. They may have some interest in codes and ciphers, but they come at it from a lot of different directions. I have a student who likes, mysteries and literature and so she’ll add resources around Sherlock Holmes or Edgar Allen Poe’s ciphers. Or have a students who’s really a World War II boss. Shell out a bunch of resources around military cryptography. I had a student who was really into Russia, she really likes, she was fascinated by Russian culture, she was learning the language, she was taking the Russian history course. She just had all of these great Cold War spy stories that she found and shared with the class.

The idea here is that I’m using technology to create this shared space where students can bring their personal interests and passions, their professional interests to the class space. All of a sudden, we’re not just learning from me or learning from the book, but we’re learning from each other. We’re learning from and with each other and that’s what I like to call a learning community. Technology can help do that. The bird class example, they’re doing that.

The students are going to see different birds because they have- they live in different places, they travel to different places, they observe things differently. By making their learning visible to each other, you’re creating this opportunity for students to start to learn from each other. Again, it’s something that technology can work well at.

Whether it’s Twitter, or social bookmarking site like Diigo, or course blogs, collaborative timelines, collaborative to Google Docs. Looking for ways to have students share their different perspectives on something with each other, to help clarify and learn from each other. I sometimes use the phrase teaching in stereo, I think about those old– Did you have a viewfinder when you were a kid?

[00:21:22] Bonni: Yes, absolutely.

[00:21:23] Derek: You wear it like goggles and there’s these 3D images that you can see inside. It’s because if you look at things from two different perspectives, you start to see some of the depth and dimensionality to it. I love the idea of using technology to help more students bring their unique perspectives and experiences to the conversation.

[00:21:43] Bonni: Now I’m trying to remember; I don’t think they were 3D images. When I was a kid, I think it was just 2Ds, as I remember. [chuckles] I have to ask my– [crosstalk]

[00:21:50] Derek: It’s a 3D effect. It’s two 2D images, but you see a little bit of three-dimensionality to it. These days, of course, you can take 4,000 photos of an object and feed it into a computer and have a 3D digital rendered model of it. It’s the same idea, you’re looking at this thing from multiple perspectives and having a better sense of what it is.

[00:22:12] Bonni: Absolutely. Also, I think you’re going to take us from learning communities to authentic audiences?

[00:22:18] Derek: Yes. This is another thing that technology can be good at, although there’s some risks, is like with the bird class example, we’re not in this class. We’re not taking an ornithology class at the University of Connecticut, but we can go on Twitter, and we can see what these students are observing because they’re tweeting in public. This was something that I learned a while ago can be really powerful for students is to produce some kind of work that is intended for and shared with a public audience, an authentic audience outside the course itself.

You have to be a little bit careful how you do this and sometimes the student work isn’t ready for sharing yet or they may need some more feedback or some more practice. Too often students, I think, I can’t remember which guests you’ve had on the past, but they’ve talked about disposable assignments. Student writes a paper and there’s one human being on the planet, whoever reads it. Sometimes that’s fine, sometimes they need to practice their skills, their argumentation skills, their writing skills, they need feedback on that.

You need a safe place to get that feedback, but there’s a whole different level of in student engagement that happens when students know that they’re writing or creating for the public, for a real audience outside of the course. In my own class, I had a moment of this a few years ago, where I posted my students papers on the course blog because I wanted them to read other stuff. I was thinking about the learning community level, but since I put them on an open blog, other people could find them and I had a student who came into my class the next day and he said, “Dr. Bruff, the dude for my footnotes, read my paper.”

Because he had cited a researcher and I’m sure that researcher had a Google Alert on his name or the topic for something. This guy found the paper and read it and left this 900-word comment on the blog, like really, really helpful, like filling in some of the gaps for the student. It was just like, all of a sudden, my student realized I’m not just turning this work into a professor, there’s a real audience out there. This is not busywork; this is really meaningful. One of the things in the second chapter of my book, I talk about using technology to connect students with authentic audiences and it’s something technology is good at.

It helps us connect across time and space, and distance. One of my favorite stories is we had a Vanderbilt professor, Jonathan Ratner, who was in our cinema and media arts program, and he had some student filmmakers who were making short experimental films, and he wanted them to have an audience for their work. He connected with a graduate school colleague of his, Bridget Draxler, who was, I think Monmouth College at the time. She was teaching a writing course and she wanted her students to critique created objects, and then have a conversation with the creators.

You can’t have students have a conversation with someone who wrote a poem in the 1800s. Bridget had her students, watch the videos that Jonathan’s students were creating, and then give them feedback, give them critique. Then they had these moments where they would talk together about the creative process and the technology was a course blog and a couple of Skype sessions. It wasn’t open to the world, Jonathan’s students weren’t ready to share their work publicly, so he created a space where they could share their work with another group of students at another institution and they call this a course exchange.

I think it’s a really clever way to find an audience for your students, that was meaningful. There was this kind of symmetry that was happening, his students needed an audience, her students needed creators to interact with, and they created a shared space where they could do that together.

[00:25:51] Bonni: I had an opportunity in the last year to get to speak to Harold Jarche and he’s really well known in the space of personal knowledge mastery. What an honor to get to speak to one of your heroes around a topic like that and I had really misunderstood his work, and his model for all the time I had been following his work. It’s that we go out and we seek information, we make sense of it, and then we share it.

He says, and you just said this word a moment ago, and in case it’s helpful to people listening, it isn’t that you have to share it has to be ready to be shared. We are going to come across people in our teaching who for– First of all, it’s legitimate if they just don’t want to, sometimes I tried to just ask a few more questions not to get into their personal lives, but to have a better appreciation.

Sometimes people think like, if they completely left themselves off the internet, then that’s better than anything they could ever put out there. We do talk a little bit about digital identities and how they actually can help people, but there are absolutely legitimate reasons why someone wouldn’t want to share their work in online spaces.

Having an option for people is something that’s been eye-opening, but having people be preparing work that is shareable, to me is the big takeaway that I’ve been really seeing so much in recent years.

[00:27:09] Derek: Yes, and sometimes, like I say, it’s either the students are ready, or there’s not a good way to connect them with an authentic audience. I like thinking about different kinds of audiences. Students in another course are one option, sometimes you just put stuff out there in the hopes that someone will find it. I have a class podcast, and my students produce their work for an audience out there. I know they’re downloaded and listened to. I don’t really know who’s listening to our class podcast, and that’s fine. Sometimes just a hypothetical audience is sufficient. I have a colleague here at Vanderbilt, who teaches a course on African American arts.

This is Rebecca VanDiver, she had her students create a museum acquisition proposal and this isn’t really technology. It was just a written assignment in this case, but she had folks from our art gallery on campus come and meet with her students and talk about their process for how they decide how to add something to a collection. Then her students then had to make a pitch, they had to identify a piece of African American art, and research it and learn about it, and then make a pitch for why a museum should add it. They didn’t actually share those pitches with our art gallery here, but they knew who their hypothetical audience was.

It was a particular genre of work that they were creating for a particular kind of audience. I think that does a lot to help students shape their work and refine it when they know who their actual audience is.

[00:28:30] Bonni: Before we go into their recommendation segment, I don’t want to miss out on getting to ask you about multimodal assignments. What can you tell us about those?

[00:28:39] Derek: This is another thing, again, my book is called Intentional Tech, because I’m trying to make the argument that our pedagogy needs to inform how we use our technology. That we’re not just using technology for technology’s sake, or because someone told us to, who but that we know why we’re using it and what we’re trying to accomplish with it. One of the things that we know from the literature is that learning styles as they’re often described, don’t really exist. This idea that I have verbal learners in my class and visual learners, and kinesthetic learners and somehow, I need to tailor my teaching modalities to those students.

There’s really not evidence for that in the research, but what is true is that we learn better when we encounter new things through multiple modalities. I think this is why learning styles seem popular because if I’m a teacher, and I’m trying to use a visual modality and a verbal modality, and some type of action embodied modality for the kinesthetic learners. If I’m doing all of that in the same class session, I’m actually hitting this multimodal piece, that we learn better when we encounter things in multiple ways and technology can be good for this. I have a chapter on thinking about moving away from traditional written assignments.

Which again, have their place and sometimes that’s the right moves that you want to make as an instructor, but sometimes it makes sense to engage students through multiple modalities at once for an assignment, words, pictures, audio, video. Again, this is something that technology can help us with. I talk with Tia Smith, who is a mass communications professor at Xavier University of Louisiana. Of course, she’s in communication studies, so she uses a lot of media as it is, but she talks about all of these creative multimedia projects that her students did. I’m thinking about a course on women in media and the actress Della Reese had just had recently passed, and she asked her students to create some multimodal object or story using Della Reese as an inspiration for superheroes and women and media.

They went in a lot of different directions. There was one group of students created an Instagram account that looked at images of women in media. My favorite example was a student group who made a short film about a superhero named Della who got her powers from her hair. There were multiple levels. It was interesting to see how they took some of the tropes of a modern-day Marvel superhero, but they use it to talk about African American women and their hair and how one might derive strength or not from one’s hair. It was nicely complex.

There were some cheesy moments, certainly, where she’s whipping someone with her braids. It was a really interesting exploration of how we think about hair and particularly African American hair. These are the types of things that I think tap into what’s called dual coding. The idea that we have these kinds of verbal channels in our brain and our visual channels, and when they work well together, it can create a really powerful learning experience.

It helps us remember, it helps us understand, and by giving students a chance to move into other modalities, we can often tap into this Dual-coding effect and help them think more deeply about what they’re doing. One other example I have to share is my colleague here at Vanderbilt, Kylie Korsnack who’s going to be teaching at Maria College in Kentucky soon, she was a grad student in our English department. She used something; she called the Digital Revision Assignment.

Students wrote a paper in the traditional sense and then later in the semester, they had to revise it in a different medium. One student made basically a chooser and adventure website out of his paper about Frankenstein. We had to think very carefully about how the ideas in his paper connected with each other because he had to represent it in this branching, you read a little bit and then you have a choice and you pick one choice and you see a different part of the story after that.

That medium shift required him to think really deeply about his transitions and how he connected ideas. She had a couple of students who made prezzies out of their arguments. Again, they had to create a visual map for the arguments that they were making and it helped them understand how those arguments fit together, how the pieces fit together. I love these ideas of taking what we’re doing in one medium and shifting it to another medium to help us re-see it. She called it a Digital Revision Project and it’s a revision.

She wanted them to re-see their own work. If you’ve taught student writing like I have, getting them to actually revise in a substantial way can be very hard. A lot of students were tempted to just fix a sentence or fix a word, but to have them explode their whole argument structure and put it back together again. That’s hard work. Using some technology, using some other media can help them do that in a way that sometimes just the straight text, it makes challenging.

[00:33:15] Bonni: That sounds amazing. Well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations and I thought I would take this perfect opportunity to recommend your podcast, which is the Leading Lines Podcast. I have recommended it or talked about it in prior shows but wanted to just bring it up again since I have the pleasure of getting to talk with you today. In addition to picking up your book, everyone should also head over and their podcast player and look up the Leading Lines Podcast.

Then another resource I came across, it has the acronym of TREAT, it’s Teachers Redesigning Educational Activities with Technology. I thought it fit pretty well with the show even though sometimes our recommend, often our recommendations don’t, but this one I thought I’d take the advantage that it was such low hanging fruit that it did and it was one of those things where I saved it.

Speaking of bookmarking tools, I use Pinboard for mine and it actually copies over to Diigo as well, but I sometimes put an H-T as an hat-tip and then where I found it from, but it looks like I didn’t have good discipline on this one, so I can’t say who my hat-tip is for, but it’s a great site to just go over and browse and if you want to have another look at just thinking about ways to bring technology into your teaching, it looks great. Teachers Redesigning Educational Activities with Technology. It’s a free online resource designed to help higher education teachers develop their teaching using technology. This is where I get to pass it over to you and we get to hear your recommendations.

[00:34:40] Derek: Sure. Thanks for the opportunity and thanks for letting folks know about Leading Lines. It’s a lot of fun to have a podcast. I think you agree with me on that.

[00:34:48] Bonni: Absolutely.

[00:34:49] Derek: I have to give a little credit. We’ve got a bunch of us here at Vanderbilt that helped produce Leading Lines and it’s fun to be a part of a podcast team too. My recommendation is also a podcast and I’m going to make the connection to the replay health simulation that I talked about earlier. I’m really fascinated by games in learning. I play a lot of board games at my house and I just think it’s really interesting how we learn through gaming and through simulations and things.

There’s a podcast called Immersed. It’s from this website called Cardboard Edison and it’s Chris and Suzanne Zinsli are the creators and it’s launched this year. It’s called Immersed. They look at those stories behind board games and board game design and they do this really fun thing where they’ll take a game like Pandemic, which is a board game you may have heard of. You can buy it at Target.

It’s a cooperative game about fighting viruses around the world, you’re the CDC and you’re trying to contain outbreaks, and in the podcast, they talked to someone who actually does that for a living. They’re looking at the connections between the game, the theme of the game, but also the mechanics of the game and how those do or don’t reflect what the actual is like in real life.

This virus researcher talked a lot about the ways that she collaborates with others in her field and how they share data and how they respond to emergencies. Then the podcast producers connect that over to the mechanics and the theme of the board game that they’re looking at. There are a lot of board game podcasts out there and a lot of them are just a couple of people that are microphones talking about games they played.

This one is really well produced; they do a lot of research. They talked to some really interesting experts. I’ve learned some things about history from this podcast. One of the episodes was about a game called Black Orchestra where you’re actually trying to take out Hitler during World War II and they talked to some historians about all these attempts at Hitler’s life during Nazi Germany and I had no idea there was that much that happened.

It’s in the style of some other kind of podcasts like 99% invisible or maybe radio lab that explores really good stories, but they connect it to the board game mechanics, which I think is really fascinating how you can take a game and some fun and some rules and you create these experiences for folks. Anyway, so that’s my recommendation. Immersed is the name of the podcast.

[00:37:04] Bonni: It looks really fascinating and I’m not even much of a board game player. I always enjoy them when I play, but it’s not something I do too often, but yes, that looks amazing. Thank you so much. Derek, thank you so much for coming on this podcast, coming back and I hope this is just the second of many times because any conversation that can have with you is always such a joy and thank you for writing this book. I know it took so much time and it’s going to be such a gift to all of us in higher education.

[00:37:30] Derek: Well, thank you Bonni. I’m excited to have it out there and to share ideas. It’s just so much fun to help faculty and other instructors think creatively about how they use technology in their teaching and I’m glad to be on the podcast today and share a little bit with you. Thanks for having me.

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[00:37:44] Bonni: Thanks once again to Derek Bruff for joining me on today’s episode number 277 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. If you’d like to get a look at the show notes and access the links that we included, you can go to teachingandhighered.com/277. I welcome you also to subscribe to the weekly update where you can get those show notes in your inbox along with an ed-tech essentials guide that comes when you subscribe to the newsletter.

If you’ve been listening for a while and have yet to rate the podcast or give it a review on whatever tool it is you use to listen, now’s the time to do that. It’s a great way to get more exposure to the podcast. I invite you to do that and just thank you so much for listening and being a part of this community. We’ll see you next time for 278.

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[00:38:38] [END OF AUDIO]

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.