Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 575 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Are we there Yet? Rebuilding Trust in the Value of Education with Rolin Moe.

Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning Maximizing Human Potential.

Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Hi, 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.

Rolin Moe is an education administrator with over a decade of experience leading people toward a shared vision across learning environments, specifically distance digital education and educational innovation. He has worked closely with formal and non formal learning institutions of all sizes and grade levels, conceptualizing and implementing programs and strategies to increase learning and improve teaching. Rolin Moe, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Rolin Moe [00:01:21]:

It’s a pleasure to be here.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:23]:

I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. And just like any good interview, I’ll start with a story about me and even better, me driving home after dropping the kids off from school today. It’s really starting well, isn’t it? I want to talk about just listening to different songs that come on our kids. Funny enough, Rolin, they don’t like listening to podcasts while we drive back and forth. So they always want to put music on. And sometimes I’ll listen to music they’d prefer to, but we can usually agree on some compilation of my most listened to songs from prior years. So that’s the playlist that our daughter put on this morning. And so I felt like I was visiting all these different places on the drive home.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:07]:

I was visiting Joshua Tree and I have this just vivid memory of driving there and then always as a kid, you know, when are we gonna get there? Are we there yet? You know, the classic kids stories and Steely Dan playing and Doobie Brothers playing. And so I had such a fun time preparing for today. You’ve been everywhere. Speaking of a song, what singer is that? I’ve been everywhere. Johnny Cash. There we go. You’ve been everywhere. So rather than me asking you to like, list off the 4,000 places you’ve been, I invite you to take us to three places that have informed your thinking about teaching and learning today.

Rolin Moe [00:02:51]:

I love this question and it’s interesting because the first one I want to go to is the first assignment that I ever gave as a formal teacher. So this was almost 20 years ago and I was working at a school for students with learning disabilities. And this Was a school for students in a traditional space, they were not successful. And so this was an opportunity to come to a space and really dive into what constituted their LD and how we could work with them on not only being able to mitigate that space space, but also to be able to advocate for themselves in the future so that by the time they get to high school, they could move into a standard high school or work in a particular school for students with ld. But they had the tools not only to be successful, but also to say what they needed and be able to go into that space. So I’m this young teacher, I’m brought in to teach media part time. And I thought, well, the first assignment I’m going to do with the 8th graders is we’re going to. I’m going to have them write their entrance music, kind of what is the theme music? If they’re going to walk into a room, what do they want to play? And geez, I wish I remembered the name of the song that I chose because I did what you’re supposed to do.

Rolin Moe [00:03:59]:

I had my lesson plan and I wrote up what my version was. And so I had like 500 words of what I was going to go through in this space. And I do this big speech in front of them and I hand them the pieces of paper and everybody looked at me like I was crazy. So I came in, coming out of graduate school, having been in private industry for a while, really wanting to make a stand as a teacher and totally misread the room and immediately on the fly had to adjust and say, okay, I’ve got 45 minutes with these kids. These kids aren’t used to writing in one day a 500 word essay. Even if it’s about the song that they want to walk into a room on. That’s not where their, their brain is, that’s not where they’re coming from. I need to coach this.

Rolin Moe [00:04:40]:

This is something that’s going to take weeks to get to, not something that I can get them to do in a day. And so very much on the fly. The ability to understand the room and come into that space and work with them. And I remember this was a, the school moved. This was in West Los Angeles, Santa Monica. Just basically a house that had been converted to be able to provide for at the time, 40 students. And it was fascinating just to experience the fear that they had, but then the fear that I had of oh my gosh, here I am. Everyone has entrusted me to be able to take care of these students and I’m creating a situation where they’re going to fail.

Rolin Moe [00:05:21]:

And it’s up to me to make sure that we all get to the same place. And I never did that assignment again. So every other year I taught there for six years. I never did that assignment again. But I did make sure to work with them on how we were going to go. And at that point, I never again had a static lesson plan. I was always very fluid in whatever I was going to be doing so that I knew where I wanted to get. But the road we could go could go in all sorts of different directions.

Rolin Moe [00:05:43]:

And that makes me think of a second story, which was, I had a great opportunity to be taught by Gary Stager during my doctoral program, one of the pioneers of one to one computing. And Gary talked about an experience. We’re in this office building. My doctorate’s at Pepperdine. So in this office building in West Los Angeles, you think of Pepperdine, you think of Malibu and the beautiful view of the ocean. We were an office building by the airport, but that’s okay. So we’re sitting in these desks and Gary comes in. And if you’ve seen Gary in media, you know he’s a force of nature, but it’s exemplified by the power of 10.

Rolin Moe [00:06:15]:

If he’s in person. So he’s owning this dead office building, talking through these stories. And he tells this story about when he was working in Maine with incarcerated youth. And what he said was, I just want you to do something. I don’t care what it is that you’re going to do, but put your time into an event, put your time into a topic. And this one student, who he had been told was basically illiterate, this one student continued to go to this computer and start to write. And after two or three days, Gary comes forward and says, what are you doing? And he’s got a chapter of a book. And Gary says, I thought you didn’t like to read.

Rolin Moe [00:06:52]:

I thought you didn’t like to write. And he said, who said that? I just don’t like the stuff that I have in front of me. I don’t like the choices we have here in this library. I don’t want to read about a dog named Spot. And thinking about that and recognizing all of the constrictions and all of the limits that we’re putting on people in terms of what it means to learn, was such a powerful space for me to come to and see that learning is a continuous activity in all sorts of areas and all sorts of places. And it’s the Restrictions that we have to put on in terms of formal education in order to be able to assess and measure and move forward in this space, we’re limiting. As instructors, our job is to limit. And we have to keep that in mind so that we can be certain to do as much cultivation and growing as possible.

Rolin Moe [00:07:40]:

The last one’s a personal one. What got me into teaching so I worked in my master’s is in film. And I moved out to Los Angeles and I became involved. I was a literary agent. I was on the pre production side of Hollywood and it was my job to do coverage for scripts. And what that means is people would send in these ideas or query letters. I’m sorry, I did coverage as well, but it was a query letter. People would send in a one page letter that said, this is who I am.

Rolin Moe [00:08:05]:

One paragraph, this is the script I want you to read. And then if we wanted to read it, we would send them a contract because you don’t want to get in a situation where a movie’s made and five years later somebody said, well, I sent you that idea, so now I’m going to sue you. So you would go into a contract in that space. It was my job to read the coverage. 99% of. I’m sorry, the query letters. 99% of query letters nobody responds to. But every once in a while you might find gold.

Rolin Moe [00:08:32]:

So I was reading the query letters and I found something that was really close to me wanting to read it. If it had just made a couple of changes, I would have read it. And that was. That never happened. So I was making notes on this person’s query letter and I was going to send it back to them and say, we’re a pass, but take these notes and send it back out and maybe somebody will read. My boss comes up and says, what are you doing? I explained this to him and he said, you’re not a teacher. Your job is to be here getting the query letters read and moving on to the next thing. And I thought, that’s odd because this is the one thing I’ve enjoyed in this work the whole time that I’ve been doing it.

Rolin Moe [00:09:08]:

Hollywood’s a wonderful place for all sorts of people, but everybody was miserable in the office. Everybody walked around miserable. And then my experience was that the clients even were miserable because everybody’s so nervous about when things are going to go forward. There weren’t smiles in the space. And I thought, this is what’s made me smile. This, this space here. And it was within two weeks of that, I Had that job that led me to that awful assignment telling a bunch of 8th graders to write a 500 word essay in one day about their theme song. So it was a two week transition for me from what I thought I was going to do, which was work in the film industry, into what’s now been a two decade career in teaching.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:45]:

It’s not an exaggeration but to say I have goosebumps right now and I’m just picturing this. You’re not a teacher and your brain going, yeah, I am. Yeah, I am.

Rolin Moe [00:09:56]:

Exactly. And literally so another guy in the office. Because I was a little shell shocked after that. And I go back, I had been in the bullpen area where people worked with headshots and sent stuff out. And I’d moved because I’d moved to the liter, I moved to the front desk. So it was also my job to be the receptionist because it was a very small agency. And so I went in the bullpen and this guy Josh Ornstein says, what’s going on? And I kind of explained the story to him and he said, my mom’s best friend runs a recruitment agency for teachers called Cal West. Can I put you in touch? And it just started at that point.

Rolin Moe [00:10:31]:

So in the morning I’m told you’re not a teacher. In the afternoon I’m put in touch with Cal West. The next day I meet Chris Fleischman. Within a week I have an interview and within two weeks I am no long in Hollywood. I’m a part time media teacher. And then I become a part time media teacher and a part time substitute. And I’m making $20,000 a year and it’s the happiest I’ve ever been. I meet my wife a week after that.

Rolin Moe [00:10:54]:

Like everything September 2006, everything just wow.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:10:59]:

Yeah, talk about change. You know, they have those scales which I really should actually find and cite my source more properly than this. But oftentimes it’s when change is happening in your life, whether it’s good change, bad change, there is still stress and how that stress can accumulate. So whether it’s a divorce or a marriage, those are still changes. So you get a certain number of points and then you know, you just realize like actually this, this I can better cite. Feel like it’s a more scholarly source, but after someone has a baby, then they’ll give you the postpartum depression scale. And I remember taking that with each, you know, after each of my pregnancies and had such different answers to those questions, you know, but, but anyway, I’M just fascinated by that, what that must have been like for you at that time. Stressful, despite the fact that you, you just exude right now as you’re telling these stories, hope and excitement.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:11:54]:

But it also has to have been incredibly stressful with all those things.

Rolin Moe [00:11:59]:

You know, I probably wasn’t nearly self aware enough to recognize that it was all just such a roller coaster and. But it. I kind of always knew I got the master’s in film and I reluctantly was going into that space and I don’t know what I was expecting to do before that, but it was. It all kind of coalesced and so I know those, those metrics that you’re talking about and I think they’re wonderful inventories and there’s so many of those different pieces that popped for me. Job change, moving, meaning the person that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with all really within three weeks of one another. But it’s fascinating to. Now I haven’t really thought about this in a long time. It’s fascinating to look back on that and see just how much of it was this large ball of energy.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:43]:

We’ve spent some time looking back and thank you for those memories and painting such a vivid picture for us. I want us to go forward. One of the things that’s weird about recording these is that I often record them far in advance. But I feel fairly certain that unless life takes a drastic change, then in sometime between July and August ish, my friend and I will be facilitating playing this game that’s called Go Somewhere. It is Go Somewhere specifically about artificial intelligence in higher education. And that regardless of your views, whether they tend to be more on the abstain from it for all you know. For lots of. There are lots of good reasons why one might abstain for it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:13:29]:

Lots of places to go there, or whether you’re going to use it hourly, minutely, you know, like any extreme stream. I don’t presume as we play the game that I know exactly where you need to go. That would be very arrogant of me, but I do fervently believe we all need to be going somewhere. Continuing to learn, grapple, wrestle, imagine in community. And you just said indeed and seemed like you agree. But what comes to mind for you in terms of that forward movement without precisely specifying what someone has to believe about it, is that. Is that an okay premise for you? That you also don’t know exactly where people should go with it either? And, but, but like what are some general categories of ideas that are coming to your mind for, like, if you didn’t know anything or, you know a lot, but like. Like, where are some of the avenues, the highways, if we will, to continue our metaphor, you know, it’s thinking about.

Rolin Moe [00:14:38]:

AI, and I don’t think we’re going to be moving away from that conversation for a very long time in higher education. And again, I mentioned in the stories that I told that I see teaching and the act of instructing as a limiting agent, that we’re in many ways closing doors to focus in particular spaces. What fascinates me about the opportunity around artificial intelligence is a chance to be able to open doors in that space. So if I’m looking at AI and utilizing a large language model to continue my cognitive dissonance and engage with metacognition and the aspect of transfer and do those deep dives, then I am opening more spaces to be able to channel my energy and my enthusiasm. And that’s remarkably counter to the way we talk about AI so often in mainstream media when it comes to education, which is that AI is going to write your essay. And so what I really want to be focused on is how do we help reset that conversation? And there’s so many elements that would have to go into that, but if the foundation of your work is going to be to be opening those doors, then the movements and the aspects that you work towards will in some way be imbued by that. So I work mostly as an administrator these days, and I have opportunities to get involved in education, but I’m largely on the administrative side. And so I think about, for example, what is the objective that we’re going to see with something? So often the objective is growth.

Rolin Moe [00:16:19]:

We’re looking to grow, but if you don’t know what you’re growing towards, then you are just running towards. It could be a cliff, it could be a chasm, it could be a finish line. We don’t necessarily know. I want to think about what we can do in terms of education in helping set that foundation and that guidance, so that as learners, as citizens, as humans, we’re able to have more opportunity to engage in the world around us.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:16:46]:

Oh, my gosh, what a powerful metaphor. Cause I didn’t want to talk about the game the whole time. I may actually, for listeners, I may even have a group of us play the game together and try to turn it into a podcast in the future, because I do think it’d be really interesting. But part of me wanting people to commit as they come in to play this game together is that they Commit that they will be making a commitment before they leave to people, in many cases, who are strangers to them at a table or in a Zoom breakout room. And that.

Rolin Moe [00:17:17]:

That’s.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:17:18]:

That for some people, that’s very uncomfortable. Wait, you’re gonna. You’re gonna make me do? Well, first of all, I’m not gonna make you do anything but just that idea. We can get really comfortable with our present paradigms and uncomfortable with people who see things so differently. But I did so appreciate this metaphor of, you know, growth being such a paradigm for so many administrators. I am also one. So it’s like, growth at what cost and in what direction? What are we trying to do here? And I’d love to have you sort of talk a little bit about then what I mean, and you’re mostly not talking to administrators. You’re mostly talking to teachers.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:17:59]:

But teachers should be participating in the dreaming, the collective dreaming toward these desires, toward the horizon. Where do you want us to be going in higher education? And specifically, how does that then inform what you’re experimenting with, thinking about, wrestling with in terms of AI?

Rolin Moe [00:18:20]:

I’m going to go all over the place with this answer, but I want to just kind of talk about games for just a second. I think that games are such a powerful space for us to engage with the world and games as a conduit for learning. I’ve taught in the past a graduate course at Pepperdine, Game Simulations and Virtual realities. And the final project of that was building a tabletop game. Because the mechanisms you have to engage to think about creating those structures and those rules and closing those doors. But then also, what is the lore of the space? What are people needing to learn? What are the doors you’re opening by engaging with that game? It’s a really powerful area to be. And I remember when I started to. When I took on that class, I was so nervous about the virtual reality aspect of it.

Rolin Moe [00:19:07]:

Do I need to prop up my own virtual space to be able to teach this course? And it was really. No. We’re understanding what is the foundational aspect of what we’re trying to accomplish here. So very excited to see how your game project goes over the summer. Where am I hoping that we gonna. I’m gonna speak real big picture here. I think we need to really do a better job in education, of helping people understand what the value of education is, and we need to do that together. So we are in a space right now where various.

Rolin Moe [00:19:41]:

So, Bonni, you and I are both in the state of California. And the state of California is Seeing budget cuts. And so I’ University of California system. And we do, we work really, really hard to be in concert with the California community colleges as well as the CSU system, so that as a public facing entity for the, for the state of California, we are in lockstep in regards to what it is that we’re trying to share out there. I think we need to be doing that at a national level. There has been a lot of literature since the MOOC age that not everybody needs to go to college. And I would agree that not everybody needs to go to college. But college as a dream, college as an opportunity, college as a way for upward mobility and an engagement of a greater society.

Rolin Moe [00:20:27]:

That process, you could even go back a thousand years. But definitely in the United States, that process is nearly 100 years old. You can even go back a little bit further and think about what Carnegie’s relationship to that would be. So we need to be able to help people see what that value can be and what it means to learn and what it means to learn in a context that helps create. George Siemens is the person who shared this with me. But I know the quote comes from somewhere else, but I cannot think of it at the moment, but publicly useful and privately content citizens, that is the long term goal of this space. And so if your role is as a teacher, a foreign language, then what is the relationship of the foreign language have to do with that particular space? And what does it mean to have foreign language in a broader capacity? If your work is to be teaching molecular biology, then what is that relationship? A lot of people are going to be going pre med in the higher education space, but there are plenty of people that are not. And so what does molecular biology mean in that particular context? So that’s what’s driving me again, I guess to answer the last part, which is how does AI relate into that space? If we continue to get focused on, is AI going to allow people to cheat? If cheating is the issue, not even academic integrity, but if we’re just focused on cheating, then we’re completely missing the transformation potential of what we can do by having an entity that can wrestle and engage and allow us to spitball in a way that wasn’t possible three years ago.

Rolin Moe [00:21:59]:

We can have conversations about what academic integrity means, and we should. But we need to get away from the fear that ChatGPT is going to be offering all of these credentials and instead think about what ChatGPT means for us as humans who are ideally consistently trying to better ourselves and better the environment around us.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:22]:

Very intrigued by your use of the word value and then immediately bringing this nuance in with the quote that George Siemens shared with you. So much of the time we end up really speaking of this in such a polarizing way, either as it’s purely a transactional capitalism, capitalistic exchange, money, time, you know, for some kind of a monetary value, when you ultimately boil it all down. And then on the other side of the debate, not really hopeful for recognizing the risks and sacrifices that families and people make that. I mean, at some point, yes, we do. That is an aspect of the decision. Yes. And if we only stay stuck in that binary way of thinking, I don’t know that we ever get to that, even defining what that horizon looks like for providing greater value. And then we complicate it by AI, which makes things seem easy, and we continue thinking in that binary way.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:23:30]:

I wanted to, just as we close this part of the conversation, then bring up the issue of trust. This has been coming up a lot in conversations. We did a book club, by the way, on John Warner’s More Than Words, how to Think about Writing in an Age of AI. And we’re already, many of us already finished, but excited about having some discussion around the opposite of cheating, which is looking more at academic integrity. And I cannot think, as I’m speaking, whether that episode will have already come out or. Or is coming in the queue. But it’s such a great conversation with the authors, but. So lots of conversations then, about trust.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:08]:

If we’re ever going to be able to communicate more effectively about the value of higher. And in our own classrooms, if we’re going to be able to communicate about the value of knowing molecular biology. I am someone who took a single biology class, Intro 101, and can’t remember being curious about anything other than the anecdotes that this man made about his father, which I will not be repeating because I’ll sound like I’m offending someone. But I’m not sure he had it all together. He was sharing, disclosing a lot of things in class that did not seem to me to have anything to do with biology. So. So how are you thinking about trust? Because sometimes we’re asking people whether it’s about, should you. Should you not use AI for this, that or thing, or should you invest in a, you know, a college degree? We’re asking people and groups to trust us in advance.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:25:09]:

Does that make sense in advance of really knowing the value of whatever it is When I come out the other.

Rolin Moe [00:25:15]:

Side, it’s such a powerful question. So many ways to go about answering. We’re in a place, we’re in a trust deficit right now in terms of education. And there’s always going to be a requirement for education to be upfront about what trust can be. I had a chance to, over a decade ago, meet with Michael Peter Edson, who at the time was the director of web and new media strategy for the Smithsonian. Since then, he’s. He’s gone on and he worked on a museum for the United nations and done a couple other wonderful things. But he noted that they had done some internal looking.

Rolin Moe [00:25:55]:

And the smithsonian, this was 2011, 2012. The Smithsonian, in terms of trust as far as a brand, was basically right in the middle of the 300 brands that the Smithsonian had looked at at that point. Brands right around it were brands like Harvard or the University of California. There weren’t institutions of education or knowledge that were in the top quartile. McDonald’s was in the top quartile. Nike was in the top quartile. These other brands. And so for whatever reason, it would be great to kind of explore that we are at a trust deficit in terms of education.

Rolin Moe [00:26:31]:

And I’m guessing that part of that is because all of us have been students and all of us have been children. And so we are experts in raising children and in teaching children because we’ve all been on the other side of that. And so, so we’re not upfront with people about what that relationship looks like. And I’m using the term upfront and not transparent. I’m doing that on purpose. And this is from Richard Edwards, who’s the director of the Excite center at the University of California, Riverside. There are spaces in our world we cannot be transparent. I have FERPA knowledge that I cannot share, so I cannot be transparent about particular things, but I can be upfront about what’s going on and where my ability to be transparent can start and can stop.

Rolin Moe [00:27:11]:

And so if we think about that framing, because transparency is going to be a fool’s errand in that space, if we think about being upfront and being willing to have those hard conversations, which is what higher education was founded on, the ability to go into a space and argue and debate and determine, but not have it about a piece of content, but have it about what it is to trust and what is our responsibility as educators, as whether that’s going to be faculty or administrators or staff, anybody who’s involved in the enterprise, what is our responsibility and what is our shared vision. I think if we, we could have gone a completely different direction with this and talked about what is the shared vision of education. You alluded to that and I drove in other directions. But I think that having that general space of we have invested, you know, there was a. At some point, and I’ll see if I can find this for your notes. But a sixth of all jobs in America involved educating people to some extent. So 17% of employees are expected to do some sort of education, lead some sort of education in their work. So it is incumbent upon us to understand, well, what is it that we’re trying to do? Are we just educating for the sake of education? Are we just trying to grow off of a cliff? Or are we really being thoughtful and deliberate about where that energy is headed so that we can thoughtfully engage, analyze and reflect?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:28:38]:

This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations and I would love for mine to be uncharacteristically interactive with you. So first off, allow me to share the recommendation for the listeners. This is a video by a guy who I was not familiar with. It’s called. The video is called How Van Gogh informs my AI course policy. The guy goes by Mr. Flex or Dr. Flex.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:29:04]:

I’ll put the link in the show notes. The only reason I’m familiar with his work is that Christopher Ott Castro, he came on teaching in Higher ed and shared about. He did essentially a literature review for us on AI detection tools. And then what really sparked people’s imagination and they wanted to hear even more from him was, wow, you mentioned a couple of practices about how you handle it when students are in your mind misusing it and people got really hungry. So anyway, he, I told him I was having trouble sleeping because he had ignited so much of my imagination. He goes, if you think you’re having trouble sleeping now, you need to see this guy’s work. And so there’s. I want to share why I’m recommending the video.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:29:49]:

And then, Rolin, I’d like to ask you a couple questions. Why I’m sharing his video is just the beauty that it was for me to see someone so succinctly. This is a 3 minute and 53 second video from the very first pain. He has delightful handlebar mustache. I was about to say mustaches. But it’s because there’s two sides to a mustache. And I mean, instantly I’m intrigued. Who is this guy? And he’s in some kind of a city.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:30:20]:

I can’t tell. And. And he’s taking us to different places. Then he’s Walking around. Then he’s going upstairs and. And he is taking us to look at a Van Gogh painting and he is describing how that informs his policies around artificial intelligence. So the reason I’m bringing this up is because of a number of things that  Rolin has shared today on air and also off the air and that I know about you from all my scheming and learning more to prepare for today’s conversation. If any of us were to try to go somewhere, to use my game vernacular and to want to create a video like this, this.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:00]:

But it’s newer to us beyond just the technological thing which listeners. I will just tell you that’s not the hard part here. The hard part is not how do I edit a video. I mean that. Trust me, please, if, if that’s a limitation for you, please allow yourself to release that. The hard part, Rolin, is what? And the hard part, how do we kind of think through creating a short video like this? What comes to mind for you? What advice would you have for us?

Rolin Moe [00:31:29]:

You know, we’re going to, I guess stick to the same theme. The hard part is understanding what is the objective. So at the end of this video, I want people to blank. I want people to feel this way. I want people to understand this. And you have to be able to answer that question. When I taught creative writing, folks could sit down and start writing and they’d start on page one, you know, interior bedroom, day, Thomas wakes up, he rubs his eyes so on, so forth and going forward. And their hope was by getting started, by getting the train wheels going, you’d hopefully find what your destination is going to be.

Rolin Moe [00:32:01]:

You’re not. Creativity in a void is a remarkably difficult thing to do. So I’m really excited to see the video that you’ve mentioned and then kind of like you said, think about what do those elements look like? How could you build something out like that? So knowing what it is that you want to do, then when you know that. But that’s a great space to incorporate AI. So go to AI and say, hey, I watched this video and always be nice. You know, hi, how are you doing today? Chad GPT I went and did this. I watched this video. This was very inspiring to me.

Rolin Moe [00:32:32]:

I know my objective for making a similar video is X. Do you have suggestions on the steps I need to take to be able to do that? And if it tells you editing, if there’s something that comes out that seems very technical, focus first on the creative and what they call the pre production side and then challenge ChatGPT thank you so much. Could you focus more on some of the creative elements? What do I need to do between this idea and when I want to start production? When I want to hit record on the camera and see where that goes? If you come up with an idea and you’re uncertain of where to take that, ask are there message boards or Reddit threads or areas in which I could talk to people about this work? Because I’m going to invest a part of myself and I’m going to invest a lot of my time in trying to build this artifact out and just go for it is the other thing that I would definitely do, you know, be in the space of creation and put beauty out in the world.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:33:28]:

I did very similar to what you were talking about and I didn’t even think about it until you shared it. We were redoing our website and we had been asked, I had been asked to present at our full faculty meeting. Not my favorite audience. And so, and especially like I, I can, I can talk for 20 minutes, I can talk for two. I just don’t do well with five. I don’t know what it is about five minutes, but it’s just not my favorite duration. So I thought, well, I’ll just make a quick video and it’d be something a little bit different, something novel that would, you know, get people’s attention. So I had my aim of what I wanted the video to do.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:06]:

And then I asked Chat GPT to help me do it. It was remarkably good at it and I just want to say to people, just to affirm what  Rolin just said. It at least for me, was a very partner. I do want to emphasize that I had then the step that’s really important, at least it was for me would be to test it then against those aims with a few people that might be representative. So I of course, representative to our faculty. I had our then 10 year old daughter watch it. I’m kidding. She just happened to be next to my husband when he watched it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:41]:

And it was interesting because he, the, the funniest thing happened and what we wanted to do was to say all these amazing things about this new website and what I had done. I picked a genre because I wanted to create this sort of sense of suspense. So I came. It was more like a detective like suspense kind of a feel. And then I got some B roll and everything I found on, I think it’s called Pixel Bay, some video clips and there was a super scary video of a. I forget what they’re called, a child’s Playground. You spin around, it’s a circle and then there’s like the handles that go down there. I forget what that thing’s called, but it was horrifying.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:23]:

But my daughter and my husband and a couple other people who saw it were like, oh, by the way, a friend also had given me an explosion scene so that it could be like, old website explosion and then new website. And you know what I ended up resulting in? People thought I insulted our old website, which they found so beautiful. It was an incredible website. It’s just that the name had changed so. And we would. We would not have had to change the website if we didn’t change the name. It was went from the Institute of Faculty Development to now it’s a division, Division of Teaching and Learning. So I literally offended people with this before, after kind of thing because they’re like, how dare you insult that perfectly beautiful video.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:06]:

What I want to say, and I want to go back to something that Rolin said. I didn’t have to scrap it. All the work that I had put in still paid off. I just had to change the proportions. So I just had to shorten these clips, shorten the buildup of this suspense. So my methods still worked, but I didn’t have to insult the old, you know, website as much. It was more like, did you want to show four pages of the old website? Just show one, you know, like really tighten that up. But I didn’t have to do really any extra work other than delete, delete, delete, crop, crop, crop, and everything else totally paid off.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:42]:

So this is really, really helpful.

Rolin Moe [00:36:44]:

And what you note there, that is that reflection piece that you were able to do, because you did set your guidance in the beginning, it allowed you to go in and edit and amend. Was it. I don’t think it was. T.S. eliot, Ezra Pound, E.E. cummings. I’m not a great author, but I’m an excellent editor. It was one of those three.

Rolin Moe [00:37:05]:

We’ll figure out which one. But if you have that space and you have that ability to reflect, if you just start, if you just went out there and shot and you got that feedback, well, what’s wrong? How do I fix that? But that you knew what you wanted to do, that feedback was constructive in that space, and then you had the thought partner with ChatGPT and you were able to come up with something, you didn’t waste any of that time. Because while it would have been great just as a learning exercise, when you have have objectives from your employer, you’ve got to deliver on the project.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:37:33]:

Yes. And I’m feeling a little bit spoiled because listeners would know that we don’t normally spend this much time on recommendations. But Rolin’s been working on some video with a LinkedIn course that he created. And so I know these are things that are so fresh in his mind from that creative endeavor. So thank you for spoiling me a little bit and spoiling all of us and giving us that advice. I want to pass it over to you now for whatever you’d like to.

Rolin Moe [00:37:56]:

Recommend based on the games conversation. I’m going to recommend a board game. I want to recommend the board game Wingspan. And if you are unaware of the board game Wingspan, it is by a designer named Elizabeth Hargrave. And what she wanted to do was create something that was beautiful, that allowed people to take a moment out of the hustle and bustle of life and build towards something that could be competitive, but by and large, was just an opportunity to express beauty in the space. And so you build a bird sanctuary. February. And what was fascinating, my wife got this for me for our anniversary a few years back.

Rolin Moe [00:38:32]:

And we had been to some wetland preserves when we lived up in the. In the Pacific Northwest. And we had engaged some things, but we weren’t birders at the time, but it seemed like the sort of thing we would be interested in. And the direction that we’ve gone since then has been remarkable. So as part of any trip we now take, we do a little bit of inventory. What sort of birds are going to be be in that space? What are we going to be able to run into? So on my phone, I have the Merlin app out of Cornell that allows me, oh, I hear birdsong. What is that going to be? We did a cruise and we ended up in the Bahamas. And literally, you know, can I get some cell reception so that I can figure out what this bird.

Rolin Moe [00:39:09]:

It’s a banana quit. Oh, my gosh. I didn’t even know this bird existed. But I love it now. And that’s my favorite thing about education. Education is the process of helping people find things that they don’t yet know they love. And that was the banana quit for me. I did not know I loved the banana quit, but it was because of Wingspan that I was able to that space.

Rolin Moe [00:39:26]:

So it’s a great example of a calm, fun game that’s really well designed, but for certain people, they’re going to click with it and they’re going to have a new love of ornithology. And for other people, it’s just a nice game. And Then they can move back to Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride or something.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:44]:

I have what my husband considers to be a little quirk where I don’t like to recommend the same thing twice, and I have accidentally done it once that I know of. But I love it when multiple people end up recommending the same thing. I feel the polar opposite. I want more of this, so I will share that. Wingspan has been recommended a couple of times in the past, and so much so that I purchased a copy of it and I made the birdhouse. And it was so satisfying. Put the little cart and then holding the little eggs in your hand, it’s just so precious. And it was a time when Dave was away, and we just never have spent the time to play it and learn it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:40:28]:

And it does feel like there’s a little bit of friction to learn it. So if we’re ever in the same place. Cause  Rolin and I, he mentioned us both being in California, and his job does allow, not allow, but actually require him to travel quite a bit. So we keep trying to figure out what’s gonna be a time where we can connect. So maybe wherever we end up connecting in person someday I can carry my Wingspan board game to us and allow you to introd me because I really want to get in there. But I have also gone on a similar, like, love of birds that you’re describing, including the Merlin app. What a absolute joy. And off air, I’m going to tell you about a forthcoming recommendation I’m going to make that I’m convinced that you will love.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:09]:

But I don’t want to do it twice for listeners. So I will. I will say quickly, though, I have recommended the game Watergate before the board game, and I feel like if you like Wingspan, you will love Watergate. And what I love about both of these examples is that that if you don’t get curious about birds or you don’t get curious about Watergate as a part of American history, that’s okay. They’re still fun games, right? That’s what you’re saying about Wingspan. But the Watergate has really gotten. I love that I could just start playing the game. And now after I think Dave and I have played it maybe eight or 10 times or something, now I go, oh, now who was this person again? And how did that.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:50]:

It’s just really fun to see learning experiences that will continue to cultivate curiosity in that way. I think there can be no better learning tool than something that continues to fuel that.

Rolin Moe [00:42:05]:

I’m very excited to look up Watergate and then just. Yeah. One last thing. For anybody who might be interested in wingspan, there is a learning curve. As Bonni was noting. They supply a pre pack of what a game is. And so you can put out either as an individual playing by yourself, which they call automobile, or with multiple people, where everybody gets certain things and your first five moves are done for you, and that allows you to catch up and get into the traffic lane with what the game looks like.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:42:33]:

I also think it’s so fun you. You had not. You didn’t say the word scaffolding today, but in our notes, back and forth, you use that word. And that’s sometimes like a curse word to some, some people in these spaces, as I’m sure you know, because it’s like overly prescribed and overly paternalistic and, and, and can you really ever plan it all out in that way? I think we need to keep having these debates, but to recognize these sort of onboarding, that’s a really delicate balance to be thinking about. How much would you need to know just to get in and start having a little bit of fun or even productive struggle? That’s not bad, right? Productive struggle. So we don’t want to smooth out everything, but at the same time, there’s got to be something just to kind of help people enter that world, which many educators call scaffolding.

Rolin Moe [00:43:22]:

Indeed.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:23]:

Yeah. Thank you so much for this conversation. I know we already have lots of future plans and scheming together. I look forward to the next time that our paths cross. And I so appreciate today’s talk.

Rolin Moe [00:43:34]:

Absolutely. Bonni, thank you for having me.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:38]:

Thanks once again to  Rolin Moe for joining me for today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. If you’ve been listening for a while and haven’t liked or rated or otherwise reviewed the podcast on whatever system tool, podcast catcher it is that you use to listen, it would be great if you would do that so that the word about the show could get out to more people. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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.