Personal Knowledge Management Reboot, with Dave Stachowiak

[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 445 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, PKM Reboot with Dave Stachowiak. 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.

Dave, thanks for joining me once again on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher ED and for those who have never heard of Dave before. Dave and I met, and I’m not going that deep here, but Dave and I met when we were in graduate schools.

[00:00:57] Dave Stachowiak: We did.

[00:00:57] Bonni: Starting our master’s program, actually fairly halfway through our master’s program, something like that.

[00:01:02] Dave: Something like that. Team building class.

[00:01:03] Bonni: Team building class. Of course, when you’re going through a program that, you do a lot of personal knowledge management, or in some cases mastery, that sense of personal vision and all of that. We’ve done a number of episodes on PKM in the past and we’re doing a reboot. What’s changed, although, we’ll still as we go, if you’ve never heard of PKM before, we’ll at least get you started with some of this terminology. The person I’ve learned the most about Personal Knowledge Mastery is Harold Jarche and I’ll link to–. Harold Jarche was on the show a couple years ago I believe that it was, and I just continue to get so much out of his work.

Of course, Dave and I teach each other a lot as well, and we geek out together on some technology tools that we can use to do what Harold Jarche’s definition of PKM is, which is to seek, to sense, and to share. Dave and I will be talking about some of the practices having to do with going out and seeking reliable, trustworthy, information that we can then transform into knowledge, making sense of that information and knowledge. Wrestling with it, growing a network of knowledge over time, and then sharing what are the different ways that we might share what it is that we’re learning and wrestling with over time. As always, we will end today’s episode with recommendations.

Let’s begin having a look at Seek. Dave, boy, we were talking about before we started recording, we’re going to mention Twitter, and then as soon as we stop recording something we’ll drastically change about Twitter. For those of you not aware, the social network was purchased by a billionaire and then all just burned to the ground. Not quite, but there’s been vacillations on almost a daily basis of this particular network. Dave, I know you were mentioning that things– you’ve even just noticed a little bit of a change in how things look every time you log into Twitter.

[00:03:06] Dave: Yes, and we’re recording this little bit before we air it, and so who knows what has happened in the news since then. Outside of the current stuff that’s going on at Twitter, which is way oversimplifying. Whenever something that happens major with any kind of platform you use, I think it’s natural to evaluate it in your learning and in the time and resources. I use Twitter very passively, as in, I use it to notice and see and capture information. I don’t post a lot on Twitter, unlike you Bonni, who use it much more actively than I do.

One of the things that all this change has caused me to do in the last few weeks, is to just reevaluate how I’m using Twitter and notice how I’m using it with a little more intentionality than I have in the past. One of the things I realized, if you had asked me a few weeks ago like, “How many things are you seeing on Twitter that are not things that you follow intentionally?” I would have said, “Maybe it’s 5% or 10%.” I’ve realized in recent weeks that that percentage is way higher than I thought it was. As I start to notice what gets surfaced to me. There’s so many things on Twitter that gets surfaced. I use the web app most oftenly for Twitter.

There’s so many things that get surfaced that are not people I follow, because it’s like, “Because you follow this person, you might be interested in this.” Most of the time I’m not, but that’s what gets put in my feed and the advertisements. I think that number is like 30% or 40% now it seems. I’ve realized that in recent weeks and thinking about, “Okay, do I continue to utilize Twitter? Do I potentially look at one of these other platforms?” I don’t know where I’m going to land on that yet. I think that it’s just helpful to think about where are you sourcing information from and where are you opening yourself up to the world and this is just me talking to myself, and are you willing to put up with all that noise?

The answer for me has been, yes, historically with Twitter, I’m willing to put up with the noise. I’m not sure I’m going to make that same choice going forward now that some of these other services are emerging and people maybe are going different directions. It’s an open question for me, but I think it’s just worth asking the question. I think for any of us noticing whether it is Twitter, or whether it is RSS, or whether it is Facebook or whatever, are the things that you’re seeing there regularly really adding value to your life, and is it worth whatever the trade off is. Because there’s always a trade off, either you’re paying something, or you’re seeing ads, or something is happening. Is it worth the trade off? Tthat’s where I’m at with Twitter at the moment and trying to make that decision and I haven’t made that decision yet.

[00:05:42] Bonni: There are a number of people who have started to navigate either away from Twitter and to a service called Mastodon, or they are recommending and deciding to live and use the affordances of both places. I have started to bookmark and collect information. I’ll put a couple of the most interesting or seemingly simple to use resources on Mastodon in case any of you are in a similar boat as Dave and I, thinking about moving over there or having that as another place that we go.

I just have found some, I’ve started bookmarking– by the way, the bookmarking service that I use is called Raindrop.io, we’ll talk about it a little bit more later on. How nice it is, we’re I don’t have to instantly decide, hey I’m bailing out of this thing after spending years to finetune a network that I really value a lot. I get a lot of good information while also the opportunity cost seems– the calculation on that seems to have changed rather drastically in recent weeks and months.

The other thing I wanted to mention is I use an RSS, that stands for a real simple syndication. It’s basically the dream, where you can create your own custom newsletter that gets exactly what sources you want and you can fine tune it. I continue to really like Inoreader. The thing I would like to do over the next couple months is to finetune Inoreader even more. A lot of times I’ll subscribe to an RSS feed that contains not just blog posts and articles, but it contains links to the entity’s podcasts, which I don’t want to listen to on my RSS. So I’d like to trip it out a little bit so that it automatically goes through and says, if it’s mentioning X podcast, just don’t include that.

There’s a lot more fancy stuff I could do with Inoreader that I haven’t even touched. I love tools where you can get started super simply and then over years, every little bit more that you learn, you can even maximize more value out of it.

[00:07:56] Dave: I have two other seek areas that are also big ways that I bring in information. One of them is reading of course, and the way that I typically do that is when I’m reading, I am highlighting. There are people that would say that that’s insufficient and not the best way to do it, and you should be jotting down notes, but it works for me. If I’m reading on a book that’s published, I often will read on Kindle and use their highlighting system and then that can be brought into other stuff, which we probably will talk about in a bit.

If I’m reading something that is not publicly available, I am sometimes reading reviews. I’m often reading review copies of books from my own podcast, and so I am most often actually reading things on PDF, which I realize isn’t typical but for others who are, I will highlight on PDF. I use a software on the Mac called DEVONthink to sync highlights and to be able to surface those later.

The other place where I take in a lot of information is through conversation, so my work in doing leadership development, is, I’m spending a lot of time in small group sessions with our clients. I often, the starting point for ideas for my work, for things I’m writing, for podcast episodes I’m thinking about, are personal conversations that I’m having in client interactions.

I have a checklist at the end of every client meeting that I run, and one of the items on that checklist is to capture any ideas that came out of that conversation that might be future places to explore in an article, in a podcast episode, or whatever the medium is. It’s a very simple thing. I already have a dedicated practice to run a checklist after every session, so I recently added that in. Then I capture ideas that have come out of those conversations that in the future might be things that would be helpful to other people, so that’s a big part of my seeking out information.

[00:09:54] Bonni: The next component of Harold Jarche’s definition of PKM is sense. I believe both of us are either starting to or have moved away from an application or a service that we’ve recommended in the past called Readwise. That takes all of those highlights from PDFs or from your Kindle books or other types of sources, and then essentially does a form of retrieval practice for you, if that’s how you would like to use it. Where it’ll pull up your quotes. You can assign favorite highlights and quotes to various things that pop up.

It will also provide you with a beautiful graphic that you could post on a social media that has the quote in a graphic. It change the colors and the background and all that stuff. I think ultimately, we’re not going to spend too much time talking about it today because things do change pretty quickly. Just the value for us overall, not quite equating to the cost that they’re charging and feeling like there may be other avenues that are working better.

[00:10:55] Dave: Well, and maybe I could say a little more about that because I didn’t know you weren’t using it as much. The reason I moved away from it actually has nothing to do with the service at all. I think it’s an amazing service, I recommend it all the time. In fact, I’ve thought about keeping it myself. I read so many review copies of books, and so I actually can’t read on kindle often. My life is so hard, right? I get to review copies of books, but Readwise really works with those existing ecosystems. There are ways you can do it with PDFs, but it starts to get a lot more cumbersome.

I’ve just decided I want to have control and ownership over my files and materials, and I want to upload them somewhere. That just for me personally, Readwise hasn’t been as useful as it was originally when I set it up. I think for the typical person who’s doing a lot more reading of published books, which almost everyone is, I think Readwise is an amazing service to look at.

[00:11:45] Bonni: Raindrop is a digital bookmarking service and I use it all the time, every single day. Whether I am looking at something on my phone or my tablet or on the computer on a web browser of any kind, how easy it is to just say, save this thing and give it the following tags. Sometimes those tags are related to classes that I teach the class name and number, or oftentimes they’re class names and also topics.

I like to include in the notes what’s called H/T otherwise known as hat tip. “Where did I hear about this from?” Because that’s often — Dave, you were talking about those conversations and those connections as far as seek. I like to remember that, “Oh, I heard about that from this person.” Because those might come up in future conversations too. Dave, I know we’ve talked about this before on the show, but I just love that we have a kids’ queue on Raindrop.

Anything that we see that the kids might benefit from reading or watching, then whoever it is that goes through the kids’ queue on them, it’s pretty, pretty nice and easy to be able to do that with Raindrop. Anything else you’d like to add about the value of Raindrop?

[00:12:57] Dave: It’s really a powerful service and I think I underutilize it, although I do use a lot of things with it and I use this both for seek and sense. I used to have two separate services. I used to have a place where I captured stuff when I was looking at things online, I would capture it into Instapaper I used for years. Then when I processed it there, once a week I’d go through and I’d look at all the articles and I’d pass along some to clients in a weekly guide update, which we’ll talk about more in a bit. I decided I didn’t need separate services and then I would put it in a bookmarking service. I’ve just decided like that should all just be in the same place. Raindrop is really great of having little web clipper icons and applets that you can use in different places to capture stuff easily.

The way I do it now is as I’m finding stuff online regularly, I just capture it into Raindrop, and it captures it into one list. Then once a week I go in and I look through that whole list and I look at what I’ve captured in the last week. I will delete things out of there cause I’m like, ah, I saw this online, I didn’t have a chance to read it. Then I started reading it and I got a few paragraphs into it and I’m like, “This isn’t relevant for whatever reason, so I’ll delete it.”

Or I’ll see something like, “Ooh, that would be really good for me to include in one of my client update messages that I send out with resources every week.” Then if I do that, then I tag it, then I put it into my public list and you can, if you want to, on Raindrop, make a list that’s available publicly. I have decided to do this, so the people who follow my work can access my own personal library and I have a couple of thousand things in there that I’ve tagged, and that once I’ve processed it, then show up there and Raindrop and I can do that all in the same place. For me, that’s been worth it just to have that one system where I can capture things easily.

[00:14:47] Bonni: It can be just a portion of your bookmark, so you don’t have to share the kids’ queue, if you didn’t want to share it with the world, you can.

[00:14:54] Dave: Oh, yes.

[00:14:54] Bonni: Just have different collections they call them, and say, I just want to share this collection publicly, or these three collections publicly, but I don’t want to share these other things. It’s pretty flexible that way. They recently came out with the ability to do highlights somewhat over top of your articles as you read them. I was trying to show someone that I work with how to do it and I couldn’t even remember how to do it. I find that I tend to highlight a lot when I’m reading books like you were talking about Dave, but not as much when I am highlighting online materials. Maybe someday I’ll decide I want to get better at that, but so far, I haven’t really used that feature, but it’s cool that they’re constantly updating it, making it better without making it overly cumbersome or complex.

[00:15:40] Dave: I don’t know about you, but I only highlight in books. I don’t have the practice of highlighting articles, which maybe I should, and I’m not reading peer reviewed primary research articles in my work most of the time anyway. I would have a really different practice if I was a tenured professor doing a lot of research on this. I would have a much different system than I do now.

[00:16:00] Bonni: Well, and for me, if it’s going to be some researched writing, then that’s going to take place in Zotero, so that I can have the highlights in there and I can then properly cite. We’ve got shows that we’ve done previously on Zotero, I still think it’s a great great service. If it’s going to require citing, then scholarly research is not going to be in Raindrop for sure.

Alright, so another thing, you were talking about the sense making and the seeking taking place a lot in conversation, and I find that to be the same as well. What I think is fascinating is that a lot of my conversation in recent years tends to take place a little bit more asynchronously. I had Karen Caldwell on the show in the last month or so, and I love how we had the conversation that day, but then we’ve just kept going back and forth to some new ideas that came and emerged out of that and things that we were thinking about it. She recorded a video for me that extended some of what we were talking about.

Then I used a service, which I’ve talked about previously called Loom, that it’s just so nice to have a service where you record and this is where you can record your screen, your webcam or both. Then literally as soon as you stop recording you hear a little beep, and that’s symbolic of you now have a link to that video in your clipboard. That’s how easy it is to capture. My colleague David Rhodes and I go back and forth a lot too with screen casted videos. Just here’s what I’m talking about over here and just being able to point it out. It’s just really nice. A lot of that sense making to me is in collaboration with people and sometimes just for necessity, time zone differences or what have you, it happens more asynchronously.

[00:17:49] Dave: Does Loom still have a reduced price or free plan for academics?

[00:17:54] Bonni: It does, yes, and I’ll put a link to that. You sign up for the service and then you apply to get approved for their education plan. If you’ve got an EDU then they send it on through.

[00:18:05] Dave: That’s awesome. It’s a very inexpensive service even if you pay for it. I think for educators it’s absolutely worth looking at if you’ve not used a screen sharing or a quick video service like that before. It’s really essential to my workflow as well.

[00:18:17] Bonni: You talked earlier Dave, about DEVONthink and how it’s helping you with seek. How is that helping you with the sense making process?

[00:18:24] Dave: I think the thing that I really like about DEVONthink, which I won’t spend too much time on, because it’s a Mac only app and it’s a little bit more of a power user thing. It’s you can pull up a PDF in DEVONthink, and one thing I like to do is I can just open a pane and it says, show me just the highlights. I can look through and I can click through really easily and just see the highlights and the thing that I’ve read. That for me is a starting point of thinking about what are the key points that I might want to ask an author about when I’m interviewing them. That’s a big part of my workflow with it.

The other thing that I like about DEVONthink, is it makes it really easy to search for not only ideas, but also specific mentions. If I think to myself, oh I know this mention was somewhere in this book, but where am I going to find it in 275 pages. If I can do a quick search for it, then that’s really easy to track down, and so all of that’s in one place. The other piece of it that’s nice about it, is it has a reading component to it as well. For me it’s really easy because it has an iPad app, it’s really easy to read on the iPad at night when I’m reading. It all syncs across, which makes it super easy.

[00:19:29] Bonni: The final component of Harold Jarche’s definition of Personal Knowledge Mastery is share. When he came on the podcast a while back, he had nuance that I hadn’t really had as profound or pronounced in the past for me. That is that we don’t always have to go public with our sharing. It’s that what we’re doing as we’re wrestling through that sense making process, is having things that are shareable. Then you can make that decision as to whether or not you share it, but things that could potentially be shareable. Although you and I, Dave, tend to be pretty public with how we share, so we each have podcasts. Yes, we had podcast before, it was quite as much of a cliche as it is today. [laughs] It’s so funny. Everyone has one today. Your podcast, when did you start?

[00:20:20] Dave: 2011.

[00:20:21] Bonni: Yes, 2014 for me, so we’ve been at this for a while. Then we also share on a weekly, you call yours a weekly leadership guide, and I call mine a weekly update. That is one way for me that I do my sense making and sharing then in a public scale. We both use a service called Convertkit, and I like it a lot. You switched me over somewhat recently, when we finally decided that it’s going to be worth the money, it was hard to make that switch because it’s not the cheapest email service out there, but I really, really enjoy it.

Dave is so kind and gracious that even without me asking, he will go in and make sure I have a clean list of emails. By that, he’ll take people out where maybe they subscribed, but they never even actually confirmed that subscription coming in and stuff. It’s better for you if you have a clean email list. The thing I thought was so funny is I had been experimenting with their feature called tagging, you can set it up in Convertkit. I think other email services do this as well.

Where if someone clicks on your link, let’s say that you send out an email to people that are interested in your writing, and then you had a link to a book that you wrote. You could tag it, anyone who’s clicked this link, give them the tag, my book about whatever the topic is. So that you could have like — instead of emailing your entire email list, you could email just the people who have been interested enough in that one book that you wrote to have clicked on a link at some point. I have not gotten anywhere as fancy as you have Dave on tagging, you’ve got it decked up and dialed in.

I’ve done nothing, so I just was going to try to experiment with it once. I had sent out a humorous video about something called Rickrolling. Which is where you get someone to inadvertently click on a link that will take them to Rick Astley song called Never Gonna Give You Up. My colleagues and I are constantly playing tricks on each other with somehow the Rickroll, little meme and little playful teasing with each other.

[00:22:27] Dave: Apparently you’ve triggered a resurgence of this because —

[00:22:30] Bonni: Oh, it’s all on me.

[00:22:31] Dave: –now, I see it everywhere. It was clearly you, and your team.

[00:22:34] Bonni: It was me, just my team, just us. Yes. You were up there cleaning out my Convertkit email list, and the only tag– well someone has a tag, I think maybe tag for some like media kit or something like this, but really the only one that was like a custom one was Rickroll.

[00:22:50] Dave: For people who clicked on the Rickroll … 

[00:22:52] Bonni: Those of you that clicked on the Rickroll, I hope I don’t feel like I’ve totally invaded your privacy I’ve never used that information. I forgot that I even did it but kind of —

[00:22:59] Dave: That’s really funny.

[00:22:59] Bonni: — tickled me a little bit.

[00:23:01] Dave: Yes. By the way, we were talking about Convertkit, MailChimp is the one that people will know and recognize, these are email service providers. The reason that’s important, is, say you’re doing some speaking, or you’re an author, and you are creating a bit of your own marketing platform, which is really smart, if you’re doing those kinds of things. Unless you are emailing only 10 or 15 people, you want to have that on a service that sends out emails on your behalf if you’re sending out a newsletter or an update, or keep me informed that kind of a thing.

Whatever service you’re using, you can’t send, you’re going to end up going into people’s spam folders, and there’s not a way that you can easily make sure that people don’t all see each other on the distribution. It’s one thing if you’re just emailing to your department or your team and your organization, but if you’re getting to any size beyond probably 15 or 20 people you want to be using an email service provider. The reason we hesitated on moving to Convertkit for Bonni for a number of years is there was not a free tier. It was an expense to pay for it. There now is a free tier.

I think the wonderful thing about Convertkit is unlike MailChimp, that’s targeted more toward small and medium sized businesses and has lots of features that I think the average academic is probably never going to use or want. Convertkit is really built for independent creators, and I think academics would fall into that category of being probably the best option for an email service provider. They have a free plan, so you can use it for a long time and if you get past the free plan that is a really good problem for you to have because it means you have a lot of people following your work.

[00:24:44] Bonni: The other service that is kind of like an email service, but a little bit more geared toward having people who financially support your work through your writing is Substack. A number of people in higher education are using Substack and seem to be really liking it. I tend to prefer all other things being equal, a platform that I can easily move people back and forth between. When I did move from MailChimp over to Convertkit, that was a pretty seamless process. Convertkit was more than happy to help facilitate that and provide an efficient way of doing that.

Substack it’s kind of a little bit more feels like a locked in. It’s designed from the ground up to allow independent writers and podcasters to publish directly to their audience and get paid through subscriptions. That’s really what its main niche is. It doesn’t feel as friendly about moving people out of it, it doesn’t feel like I own that, as much as some of these other services, the transportability I’m just not as confident about. A lot of people are doing it, I’ve recommended a lot of Subtacks to people over time, and I follow many of them.

Circling all the way back by the way to seek and all of that, I will subscribe to other people’s Substacks instead of on my email address. On an email address that gets specifically generated by Inoreader, my RSS client, so that I don’t have to have all those things coming into email. When I’m sitting down to consume my RSS feeds on Inoreader. All of those Substack and other kinds of email updates are all coming in to specialized email addresses that put them in the correct folders of the different types of categories of things that I like to read.

[00:26:29] Dave: Of course, we share on our podcasts, Bonni, so we’re doing that right now and I do that on my podcast as well. To your point, sharing with yourself, I love that point from Harold Jarche, I hadn’t heard that before, I think that’s a wonderful way to think about it as well too. What do I create just for me, or maybe for a very small number of people if I share it at all, but that’s useful to me in synthesizing what I’ve taken it in some way.

[00:26:50] Bonni: Dave, before we get to the recommendations segment, we each get the pleasure of thinking today’s sponsor, and that is TextExpander. Dave, we have been using TextExpander forever and a day.

[00:27:03] Dave: A lot of years.

[00:27:04] Bonni: What TextExpander does is allows you to easily create what they call snippets. Little short series of texts that you set up very easily that then expand hence the name TextExpander. They expand out to things that are either hard for you to remember like a telephone number, or things that are long. You can also use TextExpander across teams and get greater consistency where you’re all using the same verbiage. What I think is really great is you can also have fillable fields.

At it’s most basic level you could do something like, “Dear so and so,” and then have that so and so pop up a window that has you type in the name of the person, and other ways that you might wish to customize things like you might do for a letter of recommendation. I even have things set up where it’ll type in the name of a subject line in an email, and then press tab so that it’s now in the body of an email text. There’s all kinds of things you can do with TextExpander. I’m a huge fan, and Dave is too.

[00:28:09] Dave: I am, we’ve both used them for a long time. I had heard TextExpander on actually, ironically, advertisements on podcasts before we used it. I heard about the snippets and all that, but I never really conceptually put my mind around it. I don’t know about you, but I just I couldn’t understand like, what is everyone so excited about with like this text expansion thing.

Then it’s a super, super fancy copy and paste, but it’s so smart about it. Because speaking of how I use it every week, when we get down to sharing what we were just talking about, I have one time listed out the template that I use for my weekly guides that I send out to all of our followers each week. I type in ZCFL, Coaching for Leaders Guide, onto the template and it automatically pastes in the entire template each week. It puts all my headers in, it puts in all of the quote, it puts in all the formatting.

Anytime I’m updating that, or I need to change format, whatever reason, I go into TextExpander, I change the format and then the next time I type in that little snippet, then it automatically has updated it. You can go in and you can see how much time it saved you every month. It’s always remarkable to me when I get the emails like how many hours of time it saved.

One of the things that we’ve said before, is that it’s really helpful to automate the things that are just not good uses of time. Like for example, you sent out a template of something a month ago to your department or whatever, and you have to go back and find the old email and track it down and then copy and paste. Why not automate that piece of it, so you could then spend more time really finding, doing the sense making, really finding the right resource? I know you use it for letters of recommendation for students. There’s what? 30 or 40% of every letter of recommendation that’s pretty much the same, or there’s a format that you’re going to say very similar things. You’re really going to spend your time on the things that are really personal, the couple paragraphs that really speak specifically that student.

You use TextExpander to automate the part that’s going to be very similar. Then that allows you, I think, to spend more time on really creating the personal aspect of each letter that is really meaningful to the students and is going to hopefully be helpful to them. It’s a wonderful service and we both recommend it really strongly.

[00:30:38] Bonni: Thanks so much to TextExpander for sponsoring today’s episode. I encourage all of you to head over to textexpander.com/podcasts and you can learn more about the service and take advantage of a special deal for Teaching in Higher Ed listeners. This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. I have one television series and I have one movie that I would like to recommend. I don’t know, are we seeking, sensing or sharing at this point? Maybe all three.

The first one I want to recommend, a friend from college, she has never let me down. I have known her for decades now. She’s never let me down. Once again, her recommendation held up. It is for a television series called Bad Sisters. It plays on the Apple TV+ service. I want to let people know you could just sign up for a single month and you don’t even have to have like a MacBook or anything like that, or Apple TV. You can just sign up for the service and it’s only $5 a month. You could take care of your Ted Lasso, which I’ve recommended on past episodes, I still hold to that. Then you could also check out Bad Sisters.

I’m reading now from the description. The series follows the Garvey sisters who are bound together by the death of their parents, and a promise to always protect each other. Such good acting. It’s at times funny, it’s at times a drama, it’s satirical, it’s wonderful. The sisters are so close. It totally captured me and it was a very binge-worthy experience. Highly recommend Bad Sisters on the Apple TV service. Then also on the Apple TV service. I didn’t plan this, but hey, if you’re going to spend your $5,

and here you’re going to maximize it. My second and final recommendation is a movie that is a Christmas movie.

I’m not really even that big on Christmas movies, but I saw it and I saw the preview and I thought, okay, well I’m going to check this out and I’m super glad that I did. The movie is called Spirited and it Stars Will Ferrell, and it is also not like one of my favorite things a Christmas Carol. It is a modern take on a Christmas Carol, by the way, has great music. It’s kind of like a musical, and it’s just delightful. I watched it and just found it captivating, even though I’m not a huge fan of the Ghost of Christmas, past, present, future kind of thing, it feels like it’s been done a lot. It was done in a fresh new way, and I loved it and I highly recommend it. The songs have still been playing on the soundtrack in my mind since I watched it four or five or six days ago or something like that.

Those are my two recommendations. Dave, I will pass it over to you for yours.

[00:33:25] Dave: Well, since you have said the word Christmas and it being around the holidays, I will recommend trying out a smart home plug. Many of us have smartphones now that have home automation things built in, whether you use an Android or iPhone. There is a really cool company called Meross, and it is spelled M-E-R-O-S-S, I believe. I’m looking it up here to make sure I’m saying that right. Yes. M-E-R-O-S-S.

You can buy these little smart switches, they’re fairly inexpensive, and you can plug them in around your home and then connect them with whatever home service you’re using. Check when you buy it to make sure it supports whatever you’re using Amazon, or, Apple or Google or whatever. Then you can with your phone, say to whatever smart device you use, if it’s Apples, I won’t say the name so it doesn’t trigger people things.

[00:34:24] Bonni: Don’t do it.

[00:34:26] Dave: Or whatever. The home device you have that you may talk to. Then you could say, hey, turn on the Christmas tree, or turn on the outside lights or whatever you’ve plugged that plug into and it automatically goes on, it automatically goes off. You can even go as far as to set it like we have in our house to automatically turn on the exterior lights at sunset every night. Because it’s all automated, it adjusts as sunset adjusts every day to turn off and turn on and it is super fun to just see that all work magically. The devices have become much more stable and usable and user friendly and inexpensive in recent years than they were several years ago. If you haven’t played around with that a bit, it’s a fun stocking stuffer or some other holiday gift.

[00:35:17] Bonni: Dave, thank you for coming to Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m curious how many total episodes you have been on now. Quite a few.

[00:35:23] Dave: A lot.

[00:35:23] Bonni: Quite a few. I know-

[00:35:24] Dave: Many dozens over the years. Many.

[00:35:26] Bonni: I know we’ll be having you back again. 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 Smith. Thanks to each of you for listening. If you have yet to subscribe to the weekly update, which I mentioned earlier, head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You won’t regret it.

[00:35:55] Bonni: You’ll see sharing as it’s happening because you are putting together all of this each week in real-time on great links and resources, so there you go. There’s your inspiration.

[00:36:05] Dave: Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:36:16] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning.

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.