Bonni [00:00:00] Today on episode number 261 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast Dave Stachowiak and I talk about productive travel.

Production Credit [00:00:11] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni [00:00:21] Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak.

Dave [00:00:27] And I’m Dave Stachowiak.

Bonni [00:00:29] And this is the space where we explored 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 [00:00:48] Dave is back on today’s episode. Dave, welcome back and for those who have never met you, why does your name sound familiar to them? At least your last name.

Dave [00:00:57] Well we happen to be married so there is that piece.

Bonni [00:01:01] It’s one nugget though, there’s many nuggets.

Dave [00:01:03] I wish I had met so many of the people you’ve had on this show on the various episodes. Every time you have somebody on I just feel like there’s something that I’m using in my own work as a facilitator and coach and it’s so much fun to learn. I love it. I love it every every single time.

Bonni [00:01:22] Well I feel the same way in the sense of I do feel such a special connection to people that come on and I try not to vocalize it all because I don’t want to scare people. That’s never good.

Bonni [00:01:33] Yeah.

Dave [00:01:34] Yeah. I am jealous that you get to go to conferences and meet a whole bunch of people. I don’t get to meet a lot of the guests that come on our show. And it’s really fun to see just what a great community emerged here of learning and growth together.

Bonni [00:01:47] Well I know that you have a couple of questions for me but that you’ll probably be chiming in as we go because actually I didn’t even tell you this before we started recording this episode, I consider you to be a more productive traveler than me. You certainly seem calmer doing it. Sometimes I I feel a little bit like I may get lost at some point and not know what to do. It’s funny just thinking back to my early days of traveling in my early 20s and just what a difference and how much more is available to us today and yet I still somehow always feel like I’m forgetting something really important.

Dave [00:02:19] I am a calmer traveler than you are. And I would also add you are really more effective and calmer than you used to be traveling I would say in the last few years.

Bonni [00:02:30] There is nowhere to go but up.

Dave [00:02:33] Maybe. But especially as you have been doing all the speaking and going out to conferences, you are a regular traveller ninja these days on a whole bunch of things which I think we’re going to dive into a bit today. But it is summertime. So do you have going for the summer?

Bonni [00:02:48] Yeah Dave there are really three things coming up that are travel related for me in the summer. The first one is I’ll be attending the Instructure conference. And people listening may not be familiar with that name, but they are the makers of the Canvas learning management system. And this will be my third year that I’m able to attend that conference. And I learned so much- one of the things they are very good at doing is telling such compelling stories about the various ways that people use learning management systems. Last year, for example, they had a story of how Canvas was being used to teach people who are incarcerated. And one of the technological complications with that was that Internet access was not allowed so they had created a whole network and some nodes. And it was just really interesting to listen to. And then of course pull out the tissues because a couple of people who had graduated from that program were no longer incarcerated and were on to other things in their lives were there and came up on stage. It was really a moving thing. And that is just one example of many. They tell wonderful stories we get to learn so much about the learning management system. And the other thing they’re really good at doing is really understanding the people who use their products. I’m excited to go and that’s actually here locally for us. But I don’t spend a lot of time in Long Beach, so I will be enjoying in the evenings- I know one of the evenings they have an event that will actually be held in the aquarium there in Long Beach so that’s going to be really fun.

Dave [00:04:15] Yeah and we’re all we’re all going to get to come as a family so I’m excited.

Bonni [00:04:19] We’ll have fun. We’ll have a good time.

Dave [00:04:21] Yeah. Me too.

Bonni [00:04:22] And then the other place I’m going that is training and learning related. Is at ESCALA, which is an organization that I’ve talked about previously on the podcast. I am earning a certificate in college teaching and learning in Hispanic serving institutions. So I’ll be going to Salinas, California which is right up by Monterrey Bay and I’ll be participating in a week long series of workshops with them. But then that certification will also continue into the fall, I’ve had some pre work and I’ll have some post work. They’re very rigorous and what they do and want to make sure that that people are able to live up to the values and also the practices that have been shown to be most effective in serving Hispanic students. I’m very much looking forward to that.

Bonni [00:05:08] And another opportunity to travel will be right as my summer is ending and that is I get to go back to Texas and visit Sam Houston State University. They have invited me to be a part of their teaching and learning conference. I will be giving a keynote entitled Igniting Our Collective Imagination. And also a workshop, speaking of productivity about productive productivity. A little redundant title there but I was being a little bit playful. But I’m very much looking forward to spending time out there with them and learning from them and getting to experience that as well.

Bonni [00:05:42] And then you and I have some staycations planned. And the kids have all kinds of fun stuff planned. So it’s going to be a great summer. And as we travel, I know we’ll have some productive approaches we get to use as well.

Dave [00:05:54] As you think about the trips upcoming, what are some of the productivity approaches you’re planning for already?

Bonni [00:06:01] Well I know you use some of these too so feel free to chime in. I went back and referenced a blog post I wrote a while ago about travel to put together the outline for this show and one of the pieces that is so central to my own travel is an app, a service called TripIt. And TripIt lives on my smartphone. TripIt also lives in the browser, I can log into the service on the browser. And whenever I get any kind of an email that is related to my travel, so if we book the airfare, if we book a hotel, we book a rental car, I just forwarded each one of those emails to my special TripIt email address and they automatically get parsed out, it is so smart, so that everything is going in to be really easy to see the information that I need all in a single place. And I will say- you said that I am less anxious than I used to be with  travel. It’s kind of one of those things if I could count the number of times that I open that app because I’ll be on the plane like “okay well we’re about to land. I guess you should look in TripIt and see what you’re going to do next. Are you taking a rental car? Are you taking a lift? What what’s going to be your mode of travel?”.

Bonni [00:07:10] And so that’s just my regular central hub. I can also add notes up there. I can make people have edit access, so Dave you could go up there and you can add information into it as well. If there is a map that I need to get me somewhere, then I can put a map up there with directions. It’s really an amazing service. And we did decide I lived with the free version for what something like eight years or something I might be off by a year or two. But then just recently in the last year since I have been doing so much travel we decided to upgrade to their paid plan. And that offers things like it will automatically give me a notification if there’s a gate change or something like that. Little things that to me have seemed to be worth it.

Dave [00:07:52] I think that allowed me to view it to now because I remember at some point I had a hard time. I don’t remember what their system is but it’s nice to be able to share it with your spouse or significant other where people are and flights and all that kind of thing.

Bonni [00:08:06] Yeah I have my assistant up there too. She always knows where I am and when I’m going to be leaving, even if I forget to tell her. Although I usually don’t forget to tell her.

Bonni [00:08:15] The next thing that is really useful to me in terms of travel is packing cubes. And Dave, at first you were not really sold on the packing cubes. We ended up buying  different colors for each one of us in the family. And they have different sizes. And essentially a packing cube you can sort by outfit or you can sort by type of clothes. So I usually put all my socks and underwear in one of them and pants in another. And you can really have everything inside your suitcase tucked away in another little suitcase which seems kind of silly but I’ll tell you what, talk about packing and making sure I don’t forget things. I think it helps me with that. It makes it easier for me to get things into the suitcase and just keeps everything together.

Bonni [00:08:56] And related to that is a dirty clothes bag, which I got one for each of us. Dave, I don’t think you’ve used yours. And I’m not blaming you. No judging here but- .

Dave [00:09:06] I was cracking up because when you said “we bought a case of the bags brightly colored,” I was like well if by we, you mean you. And I will admit I was not- I didn’t have anything against the packing cubes but I was not as excited as you were about using them. And I will also say now having used them on a couple of trips, that I see the benefit of doing it. And it actually has been really helpful to keep closed organized, especially when we’re traveling as a family or there’s two or three of us going somewhere that’s been super helpful to figure out like who stuff is what. We’re at the stage of family life right now where we don’t need four large suitcases, so we usually end up with like two or two and a half or three. So people’s clothes get mixed up quite a bit in different bags and so having the color coded packing cubes has actually been super helpful.

Bonni [00:09:56] And then the dirty clothes bag I just like it because when we get home from the trip, unpacking those suitcases become super easy. The clean clothes, if there are any, can go back into our closets. And if there are dirty clothes, which of course there always are, the dirty clothes bag go straight into the laundry room. Everything’s all contained into one. If it is just me traveling, that makes it that much easier for me to get settled back. And if it’s all four of us, oh my goodness that really helps to have everything going back and not having to sort through. Or you end up with clean clothes that don’t seem so clean anymore. So I like that too.

Bonni [00:10:27] And I would say that of that packing post that I first posted up, it’s an example to me of the power of blogging because I finished off that post and a few days later Robert Talbert, who’s been on this show many times and has a great blog of his own, he added into the comments that he recommended that we add to the list that people go to get a known traveler number. And this is a U.S. specific one so I won’t go into too much detail but it does allow us to go into shorter lines through customs and makes that travel really really shaves off a lot of time at the airport to not have to wait in such long lines. So thanks to Robert Talbert for mentioning that.

Bonni [00:11:12] And I think Dave and I loved- I guess there’s other things to where you don’t have to take off- I’ve already forgotten how good we have it. You don’t have to take your shoes off at the-.

Dave [00:11:22] Yeah and known traveler number is not actually the name of the program that’s what you get and I can’t remember the name of the program. And there’s two tiers of it here in the States. A less expensive and a more expensive tier. And the more expensive tier is like 15 dollars more and then you get to use it internationally, so I think it probably makes sense to do the more expensive one. And it’s certainly a privilege thing to spend 80 or 90 or hundred dollars or whatever it is for four or five years of access to this. At the same time, I think about all the fees we pay for airline travel now on just things like bags on one particular trip. And when you add up the amount of time that a lot of us spend in security lines, I don’t know how we missed this for the last few years, but once we’ve started using it. And if you have a family, your kids get it automatically to when you get it if you’re traveling with them. It has saved us hours and hours of time over the last couple of years since we started doing it. So if you’re in the States, it’s certainly worth looking at.

Bonni [00:12:12] Robert called it and I’m assuming that’s what it’s called a TSA pre check membership.

Dave [00:12:17] That’s it. Yeah. Well that’s the lower tier one, yeah.

Bonni [00:12:19] I’ll put a link in the show notes. And as Dave said, go for the higher one if you’re going to be doing international travel for sure.

Bonni [00:12:25] And then the last one I want to mention as far as my parts of it is a packing list app called PackPoint, which I have mentioned previously on the podcast. But between that coupled with TripIt I really feel like technology is making things a lot easier. What I like about PackPoint, as I mentioned before, is that I can set it up for different kinds of a trip. So if it’s something I’m going to be traveling to do some speaking or I’m going to be dressing more in business dress then it will have a template specific to that and that’s really helped organize me and bring a lot of peace of mind that I won’t be forgetting things. And then Dave also brings peace of mind because he reminds me there are stores where I travel. They actually- it’s amazing, they have stores there.

Dave [00:13:13] Yes, curiously everywhere you’ve ever gone there’s been a store and they take credit cards.

Bonni [00:13:18] It’s really nice.

Dave [00:13:19] Just in case.

Bonni [00:13:21] Anything you would like to add Dave about your advice on travel and how to make things go smoother?

Dave [00:13:28] Yeah I think just not stressing out about it too much. It’s always interesting to me like to see how many people run up and want to get on the plane the fastest. And fight to get off the plane, that’s the other thing that’s interesting to me. Like I often sit there especially the kids and I are traveling together, we will just sit there like hang out for five or 10 minutes and talk while everyone gets off the plane. And then we’re the last ones off then. We get to say hi to everyone. And a couple times we’ve gotten to go up into the cockpit because we’re the last ones off the plane. And I don’t know. It’s just I don’t know why everyone gets so uptight about- I mean I know why but I just invite to just take it easy a little bit when you’re traveling.

Bonni [00:14:02] That part I’m really good at because I always have a backpack that goes under the seat in front of me so don’t have to worry about getting anything overhead. On a rare occasion I might have to but very very rarely. And it’s it so peaceful not to have to worry about getting on and getting off.

Bonni [00:14:16] This is the part in the show where we each get to give our recommendations and I have occasionally when I mentioned Mac related things, then people get mad. So I’m evening it out today Dave, I’ve got a Mac one and I’ve got a P.C. one.

Dave [00:14:31] Oh very nice.

Bonni [00:14:32] So no one can complain. I mean you still can.

Dave [00:14:35] Well you could still complain.

Bonni [00:14:38] So the first one is an app that I have had on my computer for a while but really wasn’t able to see the vision for how it can help me. Well now I have a tool for how it can help me. So the app is called Keyboard Maestro. Keyboard Maestro is a way of automating different kinds of things on your computer. And like you may have heard about if you know even a little bit about automation, everything starts with some kind of a trigger, when this thing happens followed by some kind of an action then do this thing or these things. And so David Sparks is a very well-known person in the Mac World. He is one of the co-hosts of the Mac Power Users and he recently came out with the Keyboard Maestro field guide. It’s a video field guide. And I have watched the whole thing and not only does he do such a good job of breaking down the possibilities in how you take these actions and how you take these triggers and put them together like little Lego pieces, little Lego blocks. Then he also gives lots of examples of how he has used it to become more productive in his work. And those examples really really helped me conceptualize that.

Bonni [00:15:50] My one for Windows is there is a post about the Windows 10 updates and there were a number of keyboard shortcuts that are similar to ones I’ve talked about in the past. I just think it’ll be a great article for people who use Windows 10 to be able to find out a little bit more about some new features and how to be a little bit more productive on your P.C.

Bonni [00:16:12] And then I have got two more, they’re fast. I have read Seth Godin’s blog posts before on the podcast and this is just a really good one. And Dave, I think I’ll ask if you have anything to share after this. So this post from Seth Godin is called The Second Bowl. “I broke two bowls today. I was emptying the dishwasher holding both small clean bowls in one hand. One of them slipped and I watched aghast as it started to fall in slow motion toward the hard kitchen floor. In a valiant but vain attempt to miraculously catch the bowl, I dropped the second one as well. Now both were gone. Often the best thing to do with a lost cause is to let it go because pursuing it gets in the way of the causes you haven’t lost yet.”.

Bonni [00:17:08] Such good wisdom from Seth. And to me this was- I don’t know why, I can’t really explain it Dave so maybe you can explain me to me. But I somehow connected what he was talking with this being willing to let that first bowl go with getting more equipped to say no to things in very professional in positive ways but so that we can really be up for those things that will have the greatest impact on our organizations and in our lives. And I don’t know does that make sense to you that I would connect that say no with that first bowl?

Dave [00:17:42] Yeah. There’s the tendency for a lot of us who are part of this community who want a lot for others and learning and growth and a lot for ourselves and have really high expectations of ourselves and of others to take on too much. And I think for me that’s a great reminder of sometimes the best way to make an impact in the world as an individual and also in working in community with others is to decide that this isn’t the thing that I can handle right now- or not so much I can’t handle, but I could I could do these eight things sorta well or I could do three things really well. And you and I are certainly with the philosophy to try to do those three things really well. And I know I fall short of that often. I need to do less and make better choices on that so that’s a great reminder though.

Bonni [00:18:38] My last recommendation is this wonderful new podcast called Dave’s Journal.

Dave [00:18:44] Oh, I’ve heard of that podcast.

Bonni [00:18:45] I was going to say the name might sound familiar. Weird. So Dave did does come out with a new podcast. For now, he has it coming out once a week but he has not committed that that’s going to be for the next 10 years or anything so we can enjoy it while it’s on at least that frequency. Perhaps it becomes more, perhaps it becomes less. But it’s really a delightful way of looking at different leadership- this sounds condescending but the only word I can think of is nuggets. Little leadership nuggets. Every episode is less than five minutes and you always wrap it around a story that’s compelling and memorable. And I really enjoyed listening to the episodes. I think it brings out your great leadership skills and helps make them real tangible so we can take them away without seeming really overwhelming.

Bonni [00:19:31] Well thank you for mentioning that. You had said something similar to me in person a couple of days ago and I was thinking that that’s actually how you and I met originally as I was doing this little tiny email. This was back before the days there was even things like email marketing services, I had like a distribution list on outlook of 30 people. And you and I met and you got on that list and I was writing like a weekly article at the time and I don’t even remember what it was called but that’s how you and I started talking originally.

Bonni [00:19:56] Was it really 30 people?

Dave [00:19:58] 30 or 40. It was not like a large number of people. It was back in the day where I sent everyone a blind carbon copy so that people didn’t get each other’s addresses. But I don’t recommend that by the way. Don’t do that today.

Bonni [00:20:11] Don’t do that.

Dave [00:20:11] It’s a different time today. Yeah but interesting. So well thanks for mentioning it. So my recommendation is a book that I don’t think has come up on the show, Bonni, before. I know there’s a lot of conversation that’s been that you’ve had about pedagogy. And one of the books that we were both introduced to in our doctoral program in education is a book called The Adult Learner by Malcolm Knowles. And it is in its I think eighth edition now. Knowles has passed away a number of years ago I believe. This book to me has been so helpful in so many of the learning environments I’ve been in, especially the last 10 to 15 years where I’ve almost exclusively been focused on adult learning. And having taught and worked in learning environments both at the ages of four all the way up now to people at the mid to end level of their careers, there are certainly things in the learning process that are similar across ages. There are also a number of things that are different contextually in how you approach learning environments. And Knowles’ model on androgogy has been extremely helpful to me and was also extremely helpful in my work at Carnegie of thinking about how an adult learner with agency shows up for a learning experience and how as a facilitator, Professor, instructor, coach, insert title here depending on the situation you’re in, shows up and honors that for someone who’s showing up with that level of readiness to learn and also at very different stages of learning. And so if you are in a place where you are working with a lot of folks who have- especially experience in their careers, if you’re working with adult learners I think Malcolm Knowles’ book is a great resource. And particularly just the six core elements of the androgogical model I think are worth looking at and have been wonderful inspirations for me.

Bonni [00:22:11] I did what I mentioned because this certainly comes up in higher education discussions a lot is that both Dave and I believe that our students who come to college as 18 year olds, we consider them to be adults. And yes there’s some distinction between someone who’s 30 and has some years of career experience under them, they’re able to bring more prior learning. But this would be something that is not- we’re saying probably not how to teach four year olds but definitely anyone who teaches in college and beyond.

Dave [00:22:41] Yeah indeed. And one of the things that he talks about in the book is just the spectrum of adolescence, child all the way up to adulthood and to your point it is very much a spectrum and it’s different with each person. But some of the core principles have been really helpful especially with the very experienced learners that have shown up in the spaces I’ve been in. I think it’s worth a look.

Bonni [00:23:04] Dave, I’ve been so glad to have you on the podcast today and thanks for joining me.

Dave [00:23:11] Thanks for inviting me to be here. It was fun to be back. I just feel so privileged to get to be part of the show.

Bonni [00:23:17] I know that as I close out each show you always wait for me to see if I’m going to do the one thing you always want to make sure that I do. Would you like to do it for me this time?

Dave [00:23:27] Sure. I will invite everyone to jump in on your weekly article that you send out. So if you would like to get a copy of the show notes in your inbox every week and also most of the time an article by Bonni on teaching or learning or productivity just go over to teachinginhighered.com. You can subscribe on the main page there or there’s a direct link, teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

Bonni [00:23:48] That is it.

Dave [00:23:49] There we go. So hop on over there if you haven’t already. And thanks again.

Bonni [00:23:54] Thanks so much for listening everyone, we’ll see 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.