Bonni [00:00:00] Today on episode number 260 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast Dr. Zoë Wood shares about a shipwreck, of Fakesbook, and a WISH.

Production Credit [00:00:14] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni [00:00:24] 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.

Bonni [00:00:52] Today’s guest is brought to me through my partnership with the California State University. We have partnered together to come up with a faculty innovation and leadership podcast series and this is a little bit like season two, although we’re not breaking them into seasons quite like that. But it’s just fun to have renewed this commitment to each other and to bring in these wonderful experts to you. The individuals who are featured in this series embody the California State University’s commitment to achieving their educational goals through innovation and leadership. .

Bonni [00:01:26] Today’s guest, Dr. Zoë Wood, is absolutely such an interesting person and has such interesting research and approaches to her pedagogy, whether it’s creating computer graphics, models of underwater shipwrecks, which you’re going to get to hear about, or using art and creativity to help students learn computational thinking, Professor Zoë Wood’s projects unite Visual Arts, Mathematics, and Computer Science.

Bonni [00:01:55] Zoë, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Zoë [00:01:58] Thank you, it’s great to be here.

Bonni [00:02:00] I have about 50 tabs open in Chrome right now and also open in my brain. There is so much we could talk about. Why don’t we start with you just going back to how did you find more of an interdisciplinary spirit in a world that seems very much to me to want to isolate disciplines as we move up in our academic work?

Zoë [00:02:26] Well like many women actually in computer science I had an untraditional path to the discipline. I actually did an undergraduate degree in liberal studies before I found computer science. And so I had completed a B.A. and was working in an office as a secretary and was finding I was really not fulfilled. And I thought well I’m just going to go back to school after work and take a programming class. And it turned out I loved it. And so I actually went back to school as an undergraduate. So I already had an interest in the liberal arts, but then while picking computer science classes I stumbled into a class on computer graphics which is primarily actually a math class. But using mathematics and computer programming you’re able to create visual assets, so programs that make pictures. And in that class I just realized that I could have both parts of my brain, the programming logic part which I love puzzles and love programming but I also love visual arts and I love liberal arts. I love the fact that we can think about the world from these two different parts. So from that one undergraduate class I went on to graduate study where I focused on computer graphics for my PhD.

Bonni [00:03:45] I don’t know if you have ever come across Lynda Barry’s work. She is a comic artist and she wrote a really wonderful book called Syllabus.

Zoë [00:03:57] I love Lynda Barry. Oh yes and I have read Syllabus and in fact I actually have taken some of the things that she suggests in Syllabus and applied them in my computer science classes, which my computer science students sort of hate and sort of love. She has some really short exercises on having students do drawings. And I actually do those weekly in my classes to have students like either draw them finding a bug in their program or draw me how they visualize their program or I tell them to draw themselves being the master of code because I think it’s really important for people to push themselves creatively and also it’s really important for students to visualize themselves being successful and their learning process. Those are shown to be really important educationally. So yes, I’m a weird computer scientist I love Lynda Barry and I make my students do drawings.

Bonni [00:04:51] Well I’m fascinated by this because as I was looking at your classes that you teach I started chuckling because I thought well could you just pick any more classes to teach where so many of us have these self limiting beliefs. “I can’t draw.”.

Zoë [00:05:05] Yeah.

Bonni [00:05:06] “I can’t do computer stuff. I’m not technical.” And so what are some of the ways that you have employed to try to overcome those self limiting beliefs?

Zoë [00:05:17] Yeah it is interesting both. I really encounter both people feeling really frustrated about programming and then certainly I get a lot of resistance when I am asking student computer scientists to draw. And I think part of it is myself, I’m willing to be vulnerable. Like on the board, I’ll draw for them I’m like “this is how I imagined this computer program.” So I think role modeling is important and I do try to also give them a little scaffolding like a there’s actually this cartoonist Brunetti who has really simple rules for how you can do drawing, which I talk to the computer scientists about. And with programming, when I have art students in my intro class, I really try to bring computing to things they know.

Zoë [00:06:00] Computing is something that is very formalized and automated but the general rules, the logic, the Boolean algebra is something that humans do all the time. I talk about if you wake up in the morning and it’s sunny you decide to wear your shorts, not your pants. Like that’s a simple logic decision. So everybody can access that part of their lives, the logic part. It’s just figuring out how to translate that life logic into this automated machine space.

Bonni [00:06:32] We hear stories often of faculty who really take advantage of their graduate students to extend their publication counts and whatnot. And you’re the exact opposite of that. One of the things I just see so clearly in your work is being able to foster the interests of your students and then help them connect that with their learning. You seem to do that with third graders and 30 year olds and I suspect well beyond that. Could you talk some about how you go about doing that? And also, was it something you were always naturally good at? Or did you have to make some mistakes along the way?

Zoë [00:07:09] Well I certainly made mistakes. That’s part of learning. But I do think I have always- at the heart, I feel it’s a privilege to teach being able to engage with students who are all such unique individuals is a privilege. You get to share a part of their life and their learning. And so I always love when students come and say “I want to do a project.” And I say “well I can say these are the projects I’m interested in working on. But what class have you loved the most?” I mean in working on projects with students I have the freedom to say “this is your chance to do anything you want to do. Your jobs are going to tell you what to do and most of your classes they’ve told you what to do. But let’s find something that you want to do.” And I certainly find that if students are engaged with something they’re more passionate about, they’ll actually do more work. It’s like secretly an academic trick to make them do more work. But it’s also the right thing to do because it’s good for people to explore their passions and I love having the opportunity to see what students create.

Bonni [00:08:13] I suspect that what I’m about to share is not a binary choice for you but I’m curious if you find it more helpful to more often of the time let them think first about their existing interests and passions and do more of a blank slate sort of thing or you mentioned Brunetti, he was also talked about and Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, I’m familiar those rules for drawing. And to me, as one who is apprehensive sometimes about drawing, I liked that I could take these rules and then see her examples. I actually drew on my iPad the cover of her Syllabus book and of course it doesn’t look exactly like hers, but I had something to model from. So I’m wondering as we as as educators better to show “here’s five samples of students who have done this in the past and ways that they engage their passions” or just that then narrows them down too much and they feel stuck.

Zoë [00:09:17] Well there is this great saying that “creativity loves constraints” and I have definitely found that to be true that it is easier for people to be creative when you do constrain them a little bit. And so I do a lot of showing people’s past projects or talking about things I’m interested in and a lot of times they’ll take it in a different direction than what I’ve pitched. But I think it does help to have some structure to say “it should be within this.”.

Zoë [00:09:47] But there’s always a rare student. I mean I had one senior project where the student was just completely adamant that he wanted to come up with a mathematical model for the way gophers dig their holes. Which I would have never thought of. So I was like Oh great, let’s do it! But that’s the rarer student, more often it is a process and a discussion and we look at examples and it’s a discussion. But sometimes sometimes people know exactly what they want to do.

Bonni [00:10:17] You have another way of sparking our imagination and that is by taking this to a context that’s very different from the one that we live in. Could you take us underwater and tell us a shipwreck discovery story?

Zoë [00:10:33] Absolutely. That’s been a part of my work with two fabulous colleagues one in robotics at Harvey Mudd. That’s Dr. Chris Clark. And one in Marine Archaeology, Dr. Timmy Gambin at University of Malta. And just the academic connections the three of us have spent seven years working together on mapping an underwater either on land or in the coastal waters of Malta. In the most recent projects was specifically three years focused on the intelligent search and mapping of shipwrecks. Dr. Gambin’s main focus as a marine archaeologist is finding and preserving these shipwrecks. Malta was heavily bombed in World War 2, so there’s actually a significant amount of World War 2 marine archaeology in the coastal waters of Malta. And so in this project, myself and Dr. Clark brought joint teams of students from Harvey Mudd and Cal Poly to Malta where we would spend the summers developing the algorithms and actually doing fieldwork looking for shipwrecks and working on acquiring data to model them as computer graphics models.

Zoë [00:11:40] During one of our days, we were doing field study in a region that Dr. Gambin thought might be of interest that hadn’t been scanned very well. And we came back and we’re looking at the sonar data and saw something that looked a little bit like maybe an airplane. So we were excited but we were like OK well you also see lots of sort of bumpy things on the sonar of the ocean bottom. When we went back, we actually had trouble finding the exact location because finding something on the ocean bottom, even with G.P.S. location, is difficult. We were deploying the AUV and deploying the AUV and finally in one of the scans, we were on a higher resolution scan we found and we saw the shape and we were like we really think this is something of interest. And so we shared the data with Dr. Gambin and he agreed with us that he thought it was something worth investigating. So he arranged for a dive team to go to the site and we were all super thrilled when he and the divers came back and confirmed that indeed we’d found a rare World War Two biplane that was used for torpedo bombing. It was actually a plane from the 1930s called a ferry swordfish. But it was used in World War 2 for torpedo bombing because torpedo bombing is quite difficult and these 1930s biplanes were actually quite good at it. So it was super exciting. Everybody, the whole team was just estatic that we’d actually not only been able to contribute to our fields of computer science and robotics but we also were able to contribute to marine archaeology in terms of the history of Malta. So it was a really exciting day.

Bonni [00:13:19] You mentioned about science being done as a team. And we recently in the news heard about the discovery or the ability to photograph the black hole for the first time, which was so exciting. You’re sharing this story. And if we were to try to describe in as precise means as possible, well maybe it’s not that precise, but I’m thinking about the parallels between what you just described and group projects which most students describe as “hell on earth” when they’re in college. Like there’s all these memes on Twitter about it. Of course now I can’t think of any of them. But what do you think about where do those parallels exist where you think yes we’re developing these abilities to collaborate how critical that is for science, yet how are you able to negate some of the just real flaws in the way most of us approach group projects in our classes?

Zoë [00:14:16] Yeah that’s definitely always an ongoing challenge with students. Certainly most scientific work is done in large teams. We’re stronger when we’re together working across institutions and across diverse teams. There’s lots of interesting research that shows that diverse teams actually produce better work than more homogenous teams. But it is difficult. I’m currently teaching a class where students are having to build large software projects and teams. And I had team meetings yesterday where three of my teams want to divorce each other. They’re really frustrated. But it’s a part of the learning process is learning how we can work to be stronger together, to focus on communication, to focus on establishing clear rules and communication standards and showing up. So it is difficult but it’s also a really important skill for all of us if we are going to move forward on some of the big problems our world is facing. Practicing to work in a team isn’t always comfortable for students, but it’s something we all need to do so we can help tackle these big problems.

Bonni [00:15:22] I think it’s fascinating because – and by the way – thank you for sharing that. You’re gonna make me. I might have to just have that on loop sometimes for myself to go, “We can be doing the best work where we’re really trying to do and still have those things emerge.” And sometimes those are actually, even though it’s hard to admit, they’re desirable difficulties because if they could have those kinds of experiences when they’re young, then maybe they’re going to be more equipped to be able to, as you said, produce greater findings for the world of science and make our world a better place. But I was also thinking about just how we have this like “students this” and “students that” and what about the rest of us? Because I don’t see the rest of us having this thing mastered either.

Zoë [00:16:02] Yes. We all could use more practice on good teamwork. But it’s worth it.

Bonni [00:16:08] One of the ways that you are making the world a better place is making STEM more hospitable to women and helping women thrive in it. Could you tell us about WISH?

Zoë [00:16:21] Yes. So WISH is fabulous student club. It was founded by 2 Cal Poly students who showed up in my office and they had just come from baking cookies with each other because they were feeling sad about how alone they are in their classes. And they came from their cookie baking session and said “we need a student club to help women have a sense of community so that we can feel better.” At that time in our department there was only 9% of the computer science majors were female. And it was very isolating. I typically would have either one or no female students in most of my classes. And so that was 12 years ago. WISH is now hundreds of students. And we have at our department increased the female participation to closer to 24%, which is much better. We still have work to do, but it’s fantastic to be seeing these groups of women coming through our curriculum. And WISH is really founded on the idea that for people to survive in sometimes a difficult computer science environment, they need community, they need a place where they feel a sense of belonging and support and WISH is open to male allies. We have some amazing male allies, students and faculty, that help with WISH but in general, it’s focused on helping women feel that sense of belonging in computer science so that they can contribute to these diverse teams solving big problems.

Bonni [00:17:46] I had a chance through this partnership with the California State University to talk to Karina Garbesi and Erik Helgren back on episode 246. And one of the things that both of them emphasized that they had observed about women in science is that there is a multiplier effect when you help young women see that their knowledge and skills can serve others. And this also came up for marginalized populations as well just the just how instead of it being about me and that more individualistic culture, than I can be about us. And you’ve already mentioned that as many themes during our conversation. I’m wondering if you’ve also seen this orientation towards service to help overcome some of these barriers?

Zoë [00:18:34] Yeah. That’s something that’s been established in computer science as one of the key factors for helping underserved populations feel more successful is for them to have a really good map of how what they’re doing in the classroom, which can be abstract, can be applied to the real world. And so that’s part of why I am really passionate about having undergraduate students participate in research because research does tend to have these broader applications where you can see where what you’re doing actually can be applied.

Zoë [00:19:04] Computer science can be quite abstract with some faculty designing curriculum like ” we are going to count how many times this letter shows up in this file.” Which is good practice for basic skills but students can get lost in “why does that matter?” So certainly having projects that can be applied to a real world setting is definitely more appealing for all students, but in particular if you’re an underserved student struggling to see how you fit in with the culture, it can be extra important to see what I’m doing will have an impact in the world. Absolutely.

Bonni [00:19:42] One of those things about the rote exercises like you just described and that comes up and discipline after discipline, whether you’re talking about teaching someone how to write, how to do math, how to be a computer scientist, is that not only do we not know why this matters but then we don’t build up the competencies to be able to solve the more complex problems because we’re just used to someone presenting us with a problem and not always formulating some questions of our own. Because then when you have the question it’s like oh wow, now that I have a question, I actually have to figure out how it might be answered. And that’s one of the ways I suspect your teaching really helps to contribute to building that critical thinking that helps us explore more of the mysteries we want to examine.

Zoë [00:20:25] That is certainly one of my goals in terms of good educational pedagogical practices. They talk about scaffolding. And one of the important parts in scaffolding is not only helping a student who couldn’t do it before but also fading. Fading is at the stage of scaffolding where you back off and let them do it themselves. And in almost all my classes there’s a final project of the students choosing and that final project is the student taking the concepts from the class and applying it to a new mostly computer graphics application that they have to build using what they’ve learned. And it is fantastic. I see the best work. But it does mean that I end up with 30 different projects I’m trying to advise and tell people “we’ll look at this reference, look at that reference.” Students are great at finding stuff on their own and it all works out, but it does definitely have the cost of the hard part about the fade is making sure that students are on the path to be successful without you telling them the recipe to get there.

Bonni [00:21:28] I find that fading part very challenging sometimes too because I want to be of service. I want to be helpful. And yet sometimes if I can find a way to not be helpful I’m actually going to help them learn more. But it’s very hard.

Zoë [00:21:43] Yes absolutely. Absolutely.

Bonni [00:21:46] When we talk about interdisciplinary work there are many challenges that any of us might encounter within our discipline and we’re trying to go out and collaborate with other disciplines. You have a new minor there, semi-new, called Computing for the Interactive Arts. And I’d love to have you share a little bit about the background of that but also some of the challenges you were able to overcome with doing such a complex thing.

Zoë [00:22:14] Yes. I love this little minor. It’s a cross disciplinary minor between computer science and the art and design department at Cal Poly. And it organically came from in the computer graphics courses students are developing these assets and they’ve learned to program very well. But when they would interview in industry I had industry tell me several times “your students are technically amazing but they don’t have an eye. They don’t have an eye.” And which I myself, as a primarily computer scientist, had to be like “what does that mean?” And through working with industrial advisors, they really said they need to know art and design principles. They have to be able to not only build a computer graphics program that has all the math to make these pictures but the picture has to look like something someone wants to look at. So via this amazing collaboration with my collaborator in art and design, Dr. Enrica Costello. She’s in digital media so she teaches some of the art classes that most closely touch computer science. It took us years to get these two departments to work together and to consider this minor that has classes both in art and design and in computer science.

Zoë [00:23:31] And certainly the interdisciplinary part was challenging. I was told by some of the people in the art department that what we were doing is not art and certainly the art in design students struggle with the difference in the culture and computer science. But what we’re seeing in the minor when we’ve looked at initial demographics is that the minor is attracting a fairly diverse student body and the students- this is in our third year, these art and design and computer science students are producing really interesting Capstone projects.

Zoë [00:24:05] For example, the most recent group designed a virtual reality experience to test biofeedback on anxiety and stress during completing a task in a virtual reality setting. So they made a virtual reality experience and they had a heart rate monitor attached to their users participating in the user study to try to figure out when the people were in this virtual reality experience, which was a broken shipwreck, and they had to complete tasks to fix the ship which tasks were most stressful. And the goal was to design an experience that then then you could then help people manage stress and anxiety during task completion if we could figure out which things were most stressful and how the system worked. So that’s just a great project. You wouldn’t think of art students and computer science students coming together and making a virtual reality experience about stress. But as students they all experience stress, so I think they wanted to find out like can we use this to practice managing stress? So that’s one example of the capstone project.

Bonni [00:25:09] Absolutely fascinating and I know I’ll be able to link to some of the other at least the master’s thesis that you supervised because it’s really fun to go explore. So I’ll put those in the show notes for sure along with every other link I can find for the show.

Bonni [00:25:24] Your work goes underwater. It’s above water. It’s interdisciplinary. It’s with partners in industry and in business. Well it also extends into K through 12. Talk about your work in that context.

Zoë [00:25:43] Yes. I’m super passionate about broadening participation in computer science. I feel so strongly that technology is just more and more a part of all of our daily lives and that for that technology to most reflect the needs and to help us solve the problems that the whole world faces, we really need the computer scientists and computer engineers to reflect the population of the world. And the way to have that happen is to make sure that the general public get a chance to experience what is computer science at an early age so they can demystify it and feel like “oh this is something I could do.”.

Zoë [00:26:23] So I’ve worked with both a high school and an elementary school on designing these yearlong curriculum to help broaden participation in computer science. And I’m most excited about the high school curriculum. It’s this year long introduction to computer science called computational art and it focuses on both art and design principles so that the course can actually fulfill the UC Fine Arts requirements. Because one of the challenges in high schools is it’s really hard for students to fit computer science into their very full high school schedules. So students can have a space to explore programming, but they’re simultaneously fulfilling their fine arts requirement because the projects require them to apply art and design principles to creating these computer program assets. And that class is in its fourth year and this year it’s taught by amazing high school teachers. It is so popular, there’s two sections of it. And of their intro courses, it has the highest percentage of female students. It has 37% female students. So I’m very excited to have the opportunity to have helped the high school develop that curriculum.

Zoë [00:27:35] I also love working with elementary schools. I work with the largest public charter in Santa Barbara and I have an amazing fifth grade teacher. He’s just been fantastic. Four years ago I modeled teaching the programming, I would do it in one lab and then he would teach it himself and the next lab. And from that he’s been doing it on his own for four years and he’s exposed hundreds of these fifth grade students to basic programming concepts. And it’s just so exciting for me to see that fifth graders can be doing some basic programming and just all of them participating. It’s not a special class. It’s not after school. It’s 100 kids every year get a chance to see it.

Bonni [00:28:24] Most of us know about Facebook, but maybe not quite as many of us know about Fakesbook. Would you tell us about this NSF funded research of yours?

Zoë [00:28:36] Yes. Fakesbook is one of my recent projects. And that is part of what I love about computer graphics is because visualizing data is important for all disciplines. This has been my chance to interact with a really great colleague in security, specifically focused on privacy. And this joint project came about exactly when my older son was starting in junior high so I was really becoming aware of young people’s exposure to social media and potentially the fact that they didn’t quite understand the extent of their social media connections. So Fakesbook is designed as a social media platform for teaching. It’s been used for two summers in a summer program focused on high school and middle schools teaching them computer security concepts. And the Fakesbook platform is a social media program that allows students to make a social media account with a very simple profile. But instead of just showing them profiles, it also shows them the social network graph of how they’re connected to everyone and specifically how different data in their profile can be seen by other people. So it’s a visualization to help the students see when I make this account and I friend this person and they friend that person and then I set my data to be seen by friends of friends. Exactly how many people that could actually turn out to be. And so it’s been used in this summer camp to introduce students to concepts of security and privacy and they use it- we encourage students to use it in this adversarial way so they can think they split into teams and try to market products to the other half of the team just based on using the social network craft information. So it gets you to think about editorial thinking is super important for computer security. It’s an important concept for computer science in general. But students really like that, they like to use the graph they’ve built and then figure out how they can get information about other students and figure out what they should try to sell them which is an exposure to much of what social media platforms are actually doing.

Bonni [00:30:50] Before we get to the recommendations segment, I want to thank today’s sponsor. Today’s sponsor is TextExpander. And as you may remember from past episodes, TextExpander is an essential tool for me to speed up repetitive typing tasks. It’s as easy as coming up with what they call a snippet, a few letters or a few characters, whatever suits your needs. And those shorter characters expand to either larger things like a letter of recommendation for a student where you fill in the details or something shorter but harder to remember for me. For me, some reason my work phone number. TextExpander lets us take control of our time and productivity and we can insert words, phrases, forms, templates, and more with just a couple of key clicks everywhere that we might type. This is including on our computers as well as on our other devices. If you’d like to learn more about TextExpander and get 20% off your first year, visit TextExpander.com/podcast. You won’t regret it for all the time that it will save you. There’s also a team addition so you can spread out the time saving and also the consistency and the quality of writing across an entire department. Again, that’s TextExpander.com/podcast and let him know that you heard about their service from Teaching in Higher Ed when you visit. Thanks again to TextExpander for sponsoring today’s episode.

Bonni [00:32:19] This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations and mine is pretty simple but I will tell you it saves me so much time and I think also helps respect other people and other languages. And that is to find a shortcut for accent characters that you use frequently. Most of us when we want to do some kind of special character if we’re in word or whatever we’re using we’ll go up and insert special character in you have to search all over for whatever is through all the various font types that they have and all this stuff. And instead, in the case of a Mac which I am on right now, you have a special character above the “E” in your name. So I didn’t have to go fumbling through any menus, I just hold down the letter E on my keyboard and then up pops the numbers 1 through 7 with all the different kinds of special characters that might be above an E and in your case, it’s 4. So then I press the number 4 and there is an E with a diaeresis, the special accent that’s supposed to go above your name. So when I emailed you and then when I have in the show notes, it’s your actual name not just the simplified version of it. And then I did find on Windows keyboard shortcuts for international characters on windows. I’m sorry to report to my windows friends that it isn’t quite as simple as holding down the letter like E or A or I but there is at least a keyboard shortcut you could have if there’s one that you use pretty frequently. So that’s my suggestion is to learn the shortcut for accent characters. If you’re on a Mac, you’re going to have a little easier time but that’s okay. There’s a lot of things PCs can do that Macs can’t do as well. And then I get to pass it over to you for your recommendations. I know you have some good ones.

Zoë [00:34:00] Well first I want to say that’s awesome. And thank you so much. I do actually appreciate that you took the time for that. It reallt means something so thank you.

Bonni [00:34:08] You’re welcome.

Zoë [00:34:09] So for recommendations, I would say my first one is a cultural recommendation. I have to say I am so excited about Spider Man: Into the Spiderverse. I want to recommend that everybody go see that movie if they haven’t. It’s for myself as a computer graphics nerd, it was so exciting to see the visuals in this movie where they’re taking 3-D computer models that they’re rendering them they’re drawing them with these amazing odes to much of the beautiful ways that comics and graphic novels render their scenes. And they did some really interesting animation work in terms of making things look more like a comic look, like not animating the main characters in every frame. And they did some amazing rendering styles. That movie has just unbelievably creative visuals from my perspective as a computer graphics researcher and it’s a really great story just about kids and diversity and heroism. So that’s my cultural plug. Everybody should see Into the Spiderverse.

Zoë [00:35:13] And I also have a recent research paper in computer science about metacognition and that one of the challenges early students have is actually understanding the problem prompt. So for me, it’s making me rethink about computer science education and when students are struggling, one of the things that’s hard for all of us is to figure out what is the problem? We sometimes as teachers focus on “they don’t understand the solution.” But the first part of solving any problem is really decomposing that problem into understanding what data is important. What is the input? What is the output? And when does this problem look like a past problem? So thinking about that actual formation of understanding the problem. So that research paper has been interesting in terms of really thinking when you’re teaching that is part of what you’re helping somebody understand is what are you actually asking them to do?

Bonni [00:36:12] Love it. And you have one more I think.

Zoë [00:36:15] I do. There’s actually two videos of two arts. One is a physical art installation that I have found really inspiring in terms of the visuals. And then the other is actually a computer graphics art video. Likewise it’s a really great representation of what happens when you have artists working in a digital space and that kind of really cool creative visuals they can create. So those are two cool little short videos I think that I’m finding inspiring in terms of thinking about cool visuals.

Bonni [00:36:49] Zoë, it’s been such a pleasure to be connected with you this way. I don’t even want to close down the 50 browser tabs I have open, I have to save them just to reminisce about getting ready to have this conversation and then you exceeded my expectations which were already very high for what I knew was going to be a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for your time and expertise.

Zoë [00:37:09] Well thank you it’s been super fun to talk. I love that you actually brought up Lynda Barry because she is someone who is very inspirational to me. So that was I feel really great about our connection. Thank you so much for the time.

Bonni [00:37:21] It’s been a pleasure.

Bonni [00:37:24] What a pleasure it was to speak with Dr. Zoë Wood as a part of the faculty innovation and leadership podcast series through my partnership with the California State University. Thank you so much for your time, Zoë. And I love the inspiration that you provide to all of us.

Bonni [00:37:42] Thanks to each one of you for listening. I would love to have you share the episode with one or more of your colleagues or get in touch with me if you’re on Twitter and want to connect, I am @Bonni208. The podcast is @TiHigherEd. We’d love to connect with you in either or both of those accounts. And thank you so much for listening and being a part of this community. It’s episode 260. Hard to believe. So much time has passed since June 2014 when it all started. I look forward to seeing you next time.

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.