Steve Wheeler talks Learning with ‘e’s

Bonni [00:00:00] Today on Teaching in Higher Ed episode 38, Steve Wheeler joins me to share about learning with ease.

Production Credit [00:00:08] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni [00:00:17] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni [00:00:43] I’m so pleased to welcome Steve Wheeler to the show today. He’s an associate professor of learning technology in the Plymouth Institute of Education at Plymouth University. He serves on the editorial board of dozens of international journals and is the author of four books one of which we’re going to be focusing on in today’s episode, Learning with ease and his research interests include teaching technology, cyber cultures, creativity and social media. And Steve welcome to the show.

Steve [00:01:14] Thank you Bonni and I’m from Plymouth where it’s been really sunny and warm here today. Funnily enough in the middle of winter so was catering for you.

Bonni [00:01:22] It’s a nice surprise for you I bet. Well thanks for being on the show.

Steve [00:01:27] I’m looking through the weather reports and it says over on your side of the pond up in the northeast at least I was in the summer. Washington D.C. and New York and Philly and all those places it’s freezing over there we’ve got the best of everything.

Bonni [00:01:40] Yes. Shout out to our folks who are freezing. I’m in Southern California nice and warm I think it is 75 or 80 degrees outside. We live in paradise.

Steve [00:01:48] San Diego is one of my favorite places in the world.

Steve [00:01:53] If you knew that and that’s a great place to be.

Bonni [00:01:55] That’s where I grew up and we’re just about an hour north of there. Yeah. Well tell me a little bit first about why did you decide to write this book and how did the title come about.

Steve [00:02:07] Well the title in the book and the blog are all wrapped up together. People will probably know if they read the blog I originally started writing the blog back in probably about 2007.

Steve [00:02:21] So seven or eight years now. It’s been it’s been there. And I originally thought it was about names to call it something and I came up with learning with ease because it’s a play on words.

Steve [00:02:33] But it’s also it’s very what it does on the job. You know it’s about learning using digital technologies and the book actually came from the blog.

Steve [00:02:45] So anybody who’s read the blog will probably maybe recognize some of the chapters. What I have taken a prominent blog post ones that have been quite popular.

Steve [00:02:55] And what I’ve done is I’ve written the narrative around and extended it and enlarged it if you like to some 14 chapters in the book dealing with some various aspects of learning with technology.

Steve [00:03:08] And the other thing I’ve done which I think is fairly unique is to try and incorporate comments from people who are interacting with on Twitter and on the blog. And so the balance is as well. So in that sense I suppose it’s fairly unique.

Bonni [00:03:24] Did you also have the intent on the word ease itself E A S E in terms of maybe inspiring us that we can do this too or is that just my projecting myself on to you.

Steve [00:03:36] Well you know not all learning is easy and some learning should be a struggle. I think I was at a conference sepaking I think it was somewhat like Spain last year. Someone said to me shouldn’t all learning be fun I think not all learning should be fun. Some learning should be fun especially for kids but I think some learning should also be difficult it should be a struggle because you know what we struggle for things we value them more.

Steve [00:03:59] And for people to value learning I think sometimes it has to be some kind angst, working your way through it, you value the learning more. So learning with ease but also learning. Sometimes with a struggle.

Bonni [00:04:17] I think I was protecting myself and my kids because I we talked a lot about on the show previously about the idea of not to shy away from learning being a struggle and that that actually is such a good sign.

Bonni [00:04:30] And yet I teach so much now I’m my primary discipline it’s business and management. But I have a couple of times a year I teach for a doctoral program over here with educators and I’m noticing so much that with some of them they just decide going into the classical classes. Technology and leadership.

Bonni [00:04:48] They decided in advance. This is not for me. There is such obstinance against it so I think I’m projecting where I think if we go in with the mindset that these tools are not helpful they’re too hard. I can’t do this it’s back to the research that’s been done on mindset.

Bonni [00:05:05] So I guess I guess I was projecting but I can certainly see the importance of going through the struggle. That’s what’s been rewarding to us I’ve done it more. I go OK they’re going to struggle. I didn’t get angry with you. And at the end of it they’re going to be thanking you or even if they don’t that might not be the end of their learning journey.

Steve [00:05:22] I remember when I first got into education I used to train teachers in the 16 to which we were called compulsory education over here in the UK and I’ve only been teaching for about three years since I qualified.

Steve [00:05:39] And I was quite young at the time and there were a lot of the students were older than me because they’re all coming in as seasoned educators and professionals wanting to gain a qualification and then days you could walk in to college and teach without without a teaching qualification to have a degree maybe that teaching qualification or not.

Steve [00:05:59] I am practicing my particular style of progressive and you know education which was very Socratic very kind of asking questions rather than giving answers. And there was one Scott  [? ]in the in my group a profile of Scott he was quite a rough looking guy and he was he was an engineer.

Steve [00:06:19] And he got really angry of me in the first session and said you know you’re supposed to be telling us the answers we’re supposed to be asking the questions you are our lecturer or your are you sure you’re supposed to be telling us you know some really bad.

Steve [00:06:32] But that is what he was saying and I said No no no I’m going to keep asking you questions and get you thinking Are you struggling. He said But that’s not what we’re here to do we’re here to learn from you. And they got really annoyed with me.

Steve [00:06:46] And every week he would confront with the same kind of kind of complaint and every week I’d say to him go away and study more and come back and answer the questions I’m asking you. And you know at the end of his 10 weeks of that module.

Steve [00:07:01] He came and shook my hand and said to me Steve I’d like to thank you very much for turning my mind around and giving me a new perspective on teaching. So I’m going to go away you know and teach my engineering students the same way I’m going to ask them questions from now on and not give allowances to make them struggle. And so I saw well results in that.

Bonni [00:07:22] Wonderful.

Bonni [00:07:24] Speaking of these progressions one of the things you describe in your blog and in the book is this progression between Web 1.0 the right way to go into 2.0 the Read Write Web Talk to us about e-learning 3.0 and how we’ve progressed from.

Steve [00:07:41] Those of you are familiar with 1.0, 2.0, 3.0.

Steve [00:07:46] That kind of stuff came from the ideas of Tim O’Reilly original Reilly O’Reilly media and what Tim was trying to do the show. Not that there are in fact compartments into which point zero 2.0 fit really is kind of a more like a progression or evolution of the Web into where it is now.

Steve [00:08:04] And Web 1.0. If there was such a thing would it be what we call the sticky web which is a web which you couldn’t do much with. It was really controlled by the masters and they would push content to you and you had to accept what was there and really you couldn’t change much and you couldn’t participate much either.

Steve [00:08:22] But then with the advent of social media with things like blogs and wikis and social networks and the like.

Steve [00:08:30] What happened was suddenly the Web became very participating. And you could actually create your own content and share it to larger audiences and that’s really why it became known as the read write web or Web 2.0 as Tim O’Reilly called the Web 3.0.

Steve [00:08:46] Essentially the the read write web but with machine intelligence combined into it. So it effects I mean you can go to Amazon for instance to see the examples of the early examples of this kind of semantic web as we call it whereby it protects what you want by examining your previous behavior it takes that big data either a view or a community of use.

Steve [00:09:11] And what it does is it predicts what you need to sell on Amazon if you buy a book and say Oh did you know 23 people they bought this but also bought these. And you go oh I didn’t realize those existed and suddenly you’re interested in content that was there.

Steve [00:09:26] And so what it’s done is it’s taken your previous behavior and purchasing and so on and it’s predicted what you might want next based on what you know what it’s seen the other people buy who bought the same things.

Steve [00:09:41] And what you’ve also bought previously and not really if you start pushing that into the context of learning you know whether it’s learning management systems or the flipped classroom or nukes or any type of digital delivery.

Steve [00:09:54] Because he had thought that might allow you to start creating your own personal pathways through large quantities of content to get to the point where you need to quicker and maybe in some cases easier.

Bonni [00:10:08] Explain the theory of digital natives and what are your thoughts on the paradigm.

Steve [00:10:14] Digital natives and immigrants. This is a theory by one of your countrymen. Mark Frensky you know I have spoken to him a few times and Mark came up with this idea probably around 2000 2001 and published in the journal called Horizon I believe.

Steve [00:10:32] And what he was trying to say was that digital natives are the younger generation who are so immersed in the world of technology that they take like ducks to water they naturally adapt. According to him using technology.

Steve [00:10:48] So therefore they are digital natives. Digital immigrants like me and like people my age weren’t born in the age of technology. It crept up upon us in the 80s and 90s and then we had to learn it very quickly. And of course we can speak terminology but we speak with a bit of an accent because we’ve had to learn it hard the hard way.

Steve [00:11:11] And so what he’s done really has shown a generational divide. They’re a bit like I suppose Scott Williams with that you know in that generation or Diana Oberlin. You know screen ages and all these kind of terms that we use to try and differentiate between what young people or older people do.

Steve [00:11:28] I have to say that for me that’s a load of rubbish. And for a lot of other people there are a lot of fearless out there who are examining what is actually going on in the schools and in the universities.

Steve [00:11:41] Older people and younger people both tend to use technology very much the same way they use it to try and do things as tools to try and accomplish tasks or whatever and they will make some able select is not about age but context.

Steve [00:11:56] And I always point people at this point to another theory theory by a couple of colleagues of mine in the UK. David White and Alison Le Cornu who were at Oxford University when they wrote this and they talk about residents and visitors instead. Now this is a bet it’s very different for a number of reasons. But let me just give you one reason why I think this is better.

Steve [00:12:15] The residents of those who are people of any age group who have been to late into the use of a particular set of tools or technologies. They become very familiar with the tools and therefore they become resident within those to whom they can use it for any purpose.

Steve [00:12:32] The visitors are those who may be the same people who use other sets of tools casually and they’ll use them in ways that are only when they need them occasionally.

Steve [00:12:42] And of course they’re not as familiar with those tools as the ones that they are resident within and therefore they still go with them. And that for me is a much better contextually laden explanation than the digital natives and immigrants.

Bonni [00:12:55] For my first job out of college I was teaching computer classes and that’s how I really started with my passion for technology. I used to actually teach six different levels of Microsoft Excel. You talked about people using 2 percent of features in robust word processor and applications such as a spreadsheet.

Bonni [00:13:15] And I do I have such mixed feelings about this because as you say it does seem like a bit of rubbish to me we’ve actually in the past had colleagues this is many years ago but that suggests that we should not teach a class on computer applications for our majors.

Bonni [00:13:31] Because they all know the stuff already in. I wish I would have had your expression of a load of rubbish because that was more polite than what I spent half the time.

Steve [00:13:39] That’s the problem with the theory first it is garnering emperical evidence to support it it’s all anecdotal. It sounds nice it sounds like it’s intuitive that when you get down to it people use technology because they want to know not because they have to. Some people obviously get forced into using it in their job but then they get trained and then they read the rest of it.

Steve [00:13:59] The problem with it is that when you get into a school school stuff it will be the fact that the teachers when they’re talking you will actually hear the digital natives see more theory emerge almost take an excuse.

Steve [00:14:13] Well I’m not going to go in and use computers with these kids because they all know it already and I’ll be like you are like an idiot because I don’t know.

Steve [00:14:21] We know that is just an excuse I think to disengage from using technology. The kids are used technology anyway but I think it’s still going to teach to scuffle the use of it into the rich and true pedagogical applications in other words children know how to use technology to play games.

Steve [00:14:43] We can use it to connect with each other and you know and use that as a social network when it comes to hard learning and serious pedagogy. They’ve got no clue.

Steve [00:14:54] And this is where teachers come in. Teachers are not only content experts they should also be pedagogy experts scholars and show students how to use technology in the appropriate ways. And that also includes I suppose avoiding or the dangerous and difficult things that kids might get into if they don’t know what the dangers are.

Bonni [00:15:13] When Cathy Davidson was on the show she and I spoke about a tool that helps assess for digital literacy that MOZILLA has put out. Are there any other tools that you find helpful frameworks or models for assessing whether it’s the teacher or the students levels of digital literacy.

Steve [00:15:34] I admire Kathy’s work you know know I correspond with a lot actually but I’m not sure whether to further use it because every individual’s context is unique and these tools tend to end up measuring people against each other which I don’t think is what we’re going to do.

Steve [00:15:55] I think what we’re going to do is to learn as well as we can teachers and also to teach as well as we can. And you know for me to measure your level of digital literacy don’t have much meaning or value.

Steve [00:16:11] So for me I know what I need to do with the tools I’ve got available to me and said to my students and if they don’t then I will scuff with them into the proceedings. So my colleagues I don’t need to measure my level of digital literacy I just need to know personally where the gaps are and then find out how to reach those gaps if you like.

Bonni [00:16:33] I’m hearing a theme from what you’re saying to that that’s part of the problem solving itself. So the whole context of your teaching is to engage them and problem solving and asking those important questions. And of course technology is going to be a part of that problem solving too.

Steve [00:16:47] We learned that from a curious we’ve become curious when we don’t know the answer to something and we don’t know the answer to so when we get challenged easily with the problem.

Bonni [00:16:55] Yeah.

Steve [00:16:56] So the problem based learning challenge based learning for me is probably the most powerful method for us to use.

Bonni [00:17:03] How did you first get started on Twitter and what are the most higher ed educators missing about the power of this social network.

Steve [00:17:12] Well I first got involved with Twitter when I when I saw it being used at a conference. So it is a back channel and must find out what people are saying behind the behind the screen if you like the aim of the speaker’s image and the tragedy in the country was to Steve Wheeler which very rarely used. The Steve Wheeler account it is the first account that I created and then I thought let me try an experiment here so I created the thing that keeps account which was this silly. I know that it’s the name that stuck as a brand.

Steve [00:17:52] I created an avatar for. The astronaut from 2001 A Space Odyssey. We are a kid. We play Dave and I put shades on and I told him blue and that was my avatar. That was my kind of presence on Twitter.

Steve [00:18:08] And I did that as kind of a social experiment to see who would follow it and not knowing who was behind that. And of course after a while it got lots of followers and then suddenly became quite quite a channel for communication.

Steve [00:18:25] And I might use it along with my older Avatar who was the widow and three other accounts which I won’t talk about because people don’t know who’s is behind them.

Steve [00:18:39] All of these kinds accounts I’m using I suppose as a kind of a psychological experiment to see how people communicate with each other and how we connect in this new learning ecology that we would call the Twitter verse I suppose.

Steve [00:18:51] And Twitter for me is probably the most powerful tool for communicating I’ve ever used and I’ve used lots of different tools over the years. I’ve been in the business nearly 40 years. And I remember the age before the internet I remember the age for personal computers and mobile phones.

Steve [00:19:08] Remember when we first put the satellites up and started using them all those years ago and I remember using closed circuit television video and all that kind of stuff has been kind of leading up to this point where we’re able to connect with each other instantly around the world and share content and repurpose content and discuss and discover together.

Steve [00:19:30] For me this is probably the most exciting period in my history in the history of my my career as a country. The time is more exciting than this. It’s challenging it’s exhilarating. It’s got so many facets to it that that kind of excites me and hopefully make me a better educator as a result of that because I’m learning from people all the time. So that’s why that’s why I got into Twitter.

Bonni [00:19:56] And what are we. What are some common themes that you see people missing about it that they might even join it. Because they come here you speak or read your book and they say OK I’m going to give this thing a try I believe him. And then they don’t have that experience. What are they missing.

Steve [00:20:13] What they are missing is persistence, they lack persistence. I will say this anybody who gets onto Twitter you need to give it time to give it time you need to start following people and getting them to follow you back because if you don’t get a critical mass you are going to miss the point of Twitter.

Steve [00:20:30] Twitter is not about the content. Twitter is about the conversation and you can’t have conversations with people if you don’t follow them or if they don’t follow you. So you really need to connect with people. It’s all about that.

Steve [00:20:42] He would connect word when you can converse and. Have that kind of exchange of ideas. That is the most powerful aspect of Twitter and always has been always will be and people who don’t persist. People who do fall out and then drop out and there are hundreds or thousands of them.

Steve [00:21:00] And some people I know in my old workplace who have tried it and it still doesn’t work for me. And the reason it doesn’t work my dear is because you haven’t insisted that you need to give it time and build up a kind of repertoire of connections and then you start to see the power of that.

Bonni [00:21:17] Why should professors blog and who are a few examples of bloggers that you read and follow who are living out those reasons.

Steve [00:21:25] Why should professors blog. Because if they don’t how are they going to express themselves in the ways that professors usually express themselves and their ideas is through closed academic journals peer reviewed journals.

Steve [00:21:40] And this is the kind of the the kind of academic capital if you like that. Most universities currently subscribe to it. That’s going to change because more and more of us are now blogging as a means of expression.

Steve [00:21:55] I’ll give you an example of why I know that blogging is much more effective at spreading your message than a closed academic journal. I am. I wrote an article back about 2006 or 2005 I think it was and it wasn’t published for nearly three years because it went through a whole process of peer review.

Steve [00:22:18] They couldn’t find enough peer review. They sent it back to me. I revised the cover and sent it back to them again and then there was a huge backlog for the paper copy came out because at the time there were loads of people sending in articles and so I had to wait nearly three years for my article to be published.

Steve [00:22:34] At the same time as that was published there was another article sent it into an open access journal which you could call a blog if you like but this was peer reviewed author.

Steve [00:22:44] This is peer reviewed by five people instead of two and the five reviewers were hoping the viewers they could do it. I knew their name. They knew my name. Not only did they publish my articles within six weeks of me submitted after the revisions.

Steve [00:23:00] They also published their review comments and they published by revised copy as well as my initial copy. In fact it was an open audit process.

Steve [00:23:09] And so this is the kind of thing you can do on blogs as well but open access journals and blogs are the way forward for disseminating content and I’ll give you one final comparison that the articles that I published in the closed paper review journal.

Steve [00:23:22] I don’t know how many people have read it but I do know that it’s had 36 academic citations since 2007. That the open access journal article I wrote I know that it’s had something like 550000 views since it was published and it’s had almost a thousand academic citations there is no comparison.

Steve [00:23:42] And when you come to blogging this is even more open because what you’re doing is you are entering into a bear pit. People are actually reading stuff and commenting on it. So you get a different type of peer review that you’re going to peer review with either which which is pretty much harsher of fight and often often is that it makes you think harder.

Steve [00:24:00] It makes you reflect on your practice more deeply. It makes you more critically aware of all that all the different conflicting opinions that are out there that gets you more deeply engaged in the discourse of your field and ultimately allows you a huge audience an instant audience.

Steve [00:24:18] I can put out a blog post and then get a couple of thousand 3000 views in a day on it. How did the hierarchy possibly do that with publishing in journals. So that’s why I think professors should publish the ideas in blogs and also open access journals.

Steve [00:24:37] Those I think are the two main channels for the future and they will emerge in popularity as the years go by as the closed journals starts to fade into the background and become irrelevant. That’s my personal opinion. You asked me for my favorite blog blogs and other very well. I read a number of blogs on both sides of the Atlantic and let me tell you from Jim Groom his work is fabulous.

Steve [00:25:07] Also I read the work of George Siemens work. I read the work of Steven Anderson. He’s got a blog called Web 2.0 classroom. His work is absolutely fabulous.

Steve [00:25:20] Sherry Terrell’s a good friend of mine I read her work a lot on my side of the channel on the my side of the pond. There are people like I’m thinking of Martin Weller and David Hopkins who’s got a blog wonderful blog called Don’t waste your time which is a tech blog.

Steve [00:25:42] And various relatives are over on your side again is Amy Burvall who’s actually in Hawaii. Amy Burvall of our history Peaches channel on YouTube. And that is an absolute hoops to watch honestly. But it gets its message across in a historical format using content preachiness.

Steve [00:26:03] So many people out there now. Audrey Waters is another one that I had there are so many Alan Levine top dog on Twitter. I’ll give the name checked because they are such great people. Helen Keegan on this side of the Atlantic I could go on and on that there are literally dozens of people that follow and read the content from there. There is a kind of a huge amount of blog post coming out of the club that is really really worth reading and you’ll learn something from each of them believe me.

Bonni [00:26:36] I knew it wasn’t a fair question but I couldn’t resist because you just named a number of names that I am aware of but also because once.

Bonni [00:26:46] You have limited me. Oh I feel as long as I said.

Bonni [00:26:49] Oh it’s I mean it’s brilliant it’s fun to see someone I recognize and and some that are totally new. So I’m glad that I asked. And speaking of Audrey Watters as we look to close or at least transition into the recommendations piece she was on the show.

Bonni [00:27:03] And one of the things that has really stuck with me was this idea of privacy with regard to big data and I won’t do justice to her words but if anyone hasn’t listened I’d suggest go back to 2000 and hire a red dot com slash 15 15 or 18 I shouldn’t do this off the cuff.

Bonni [00:27:25] At any rate. She talked about just this idea that even as young children it used to look like we’d have our cardboard box and the cardboard box would have our report cards and mementos such as that.

Bonni [00:27:37] But that today with big data and especially with the big publishing and testing companies are every click of the mouse is being tracked and you mentioned Amazon of course I mean wonderful that we can be marketed to so well.

Bonni [00:27:49] But a little scary thinking about young children and even says adults not being afforded as much the opportunities to fail. And thinking about all of that being tracked. Do you have any thoughts or about that aspect of it sort of the fear side of that. You spoke so eloquently about the opportunity but I wondered your thoughts on that.

Steve [00:28:10] The way that makes them think within the next person making their money by selling data separately to them. People have to have their eyes open and they go into these kind of things when it comes to school when it comes to compulsory education nothing is a different matter. But I mean I could answer very tritely and say this is has seen as privacy anymore.

Steve [00:28:33] And to a certain extent the data privacy has happened because you know we all surveilled now. We all monitored. People know where we are by just following the positioning on mobile phones or cell phones.

Steve [00:28:48] You know it’s very difficult to be a private citizen these days. I think you’d have to have no electronic devices or tools on you your all anywhere to be kind of unknown in the world. It’s a difficult question to answer because I mean there are issues over data protection of privacy which you know still I think being formulated.

Steve [00:29:13] I think the law is running to catch up with the rapid advance of technology and how it’s influencing our society. So I think it’s a difficult question to answer.

Steve [00:29:23] Because school systems differ and social context differ on cultural norms differ across the world. What is privacy for one person is not privacy for another person. So you know I’m going to demur at that point so that’s what I can say on that issue.

Bonni [00:29:41] It’s certainly a complex one.

Bonni [00:29:43] Before we go to recommendations what have I not asked you that I should have asked.

Steve [00:29:57] ?

Bonni [00:29:57] I don’t think there was telling you before I record that I just finished reading your book. And there’s so much there had it was difficult to even pick out the questions that I did so I thought I’d just leave a little room for you to share anything else you’d like to. Before we go into recommendations.

Steve [00:30:12] Do you know what floats my boat at the moment you know expression of American will.

Steve [00:30:17] Yes yes.

Steve [00:30:18] What floats my boat at the moment. Oh yeah I was I had my eye open open last year I knew they existed before that I went to school in New Zealand in Aukland Taupaki school. Here’s another guy the father of Steven Lethbridge who’s the principal of that school told the school have a look at it. The most fabulous schools you’ll ever get if you get there I’m and it’s what we call a primary school so that children started the age of five and they get to the age of 13.

Steve [00:30:53] So it’s almost like a kind of a bit of a high school in there as well. And that’s quite a time to have those kids. And you could walk into any classroom in that school and you see making spaces.

Steve [00:31:03] So in one corner they’ll be doing things like making robots and problem solving how to get a robot over a barrier or through a pilot of a puddle of water or something or they’ll be in that space they’ll be creating a kind of digital tools and technology.

Steve [00:31:21] I even saw somebody using soft materials and conductive said that E.T. that they were creating pencil cases which mix up with you when you spoke to them lies on the dog top as you know the realities and so the kids are doing all this themselves and some of them are no more than you know 7 or 8 years old.

Steve [00:31:41] They’re learning all of the subjects through problem solving through making things. This goes back to the work of simple fact that this is a constructionist theory of the 60s.

Steve [00:31:53] So whether that coding or whether you know programming computers or whether they’re measuring school event recreating me on minecraft or whether they’re doing something else what they’re doing is learning the curriculum subjects.

Steve [00:32:06] But they’re doing it a very fun way very engaging way and they’re doing it using challenge based on problem based learning and that to me is the most heavy powerful mix of pedagogy that I’ve ever seen in my life anywhere in the world. When I do get around.

Steve [00:32:22] So that’s happening now in other schools in other parts of the world. So schools are buying into other things the Arduino and making Meki whereas the pies and banana pies and various other technologies are starting to see the power of making is really what’s exciting here.

Bonni [00:32:43] You’re making me so glad I asked and I will put links to every single thing I can find throughout the show. This is the point in the show where we transitions to recommendations and I’m going to make a quick one first and then welcome you to make one or a few if you’d like.

Bonni [00:32:59] And mine as the last guest that we had on the show. His name is Doug McKee and he’s out of Yale. He teaches economics there and statistics and he recommended some kid’s books and actually followed up with an e-mail with a link to his blog where he blogs more on the personal level and I’ll link to that in the show because if you liked his kids book recommendations you’ll like his blog where he looks more at that type of thing.

Bonni [00:33:24] And I wanted to go back and recommend a book from my childhood actually that stayed with me all these years and it’s called Hope for the Flowers and it on its basis is an allegory it’s a story about a caterpillar.

Bonni [00:33:36] And this is a quote from the description of the book partly about life partly about revolution and lots of hope for adults and others including cow caterpillars who can read and it’s just a delightful book to help so many of the students I work with are 18 to 22 and they’re convinced they have to have it all figured out. It causes great anxiety for them that they can’t answer the question what did they going to do when they graduate which is really one of the worst questions you can ask young people today.

Bonni [00:34:07] And I just love because I won’t give too much away. But the caterpillar just struggles to get to the top of this giant pile of caterpillars. They’re all just reaching up into the clouds to try to get to the top and make it as a caterpillar.

Bonni [00:34:24] So he joins in this big messy physically violent at times stacks of it’s a silo that’s what it is of caterpillars. And when he gets to the top his question is is this all there is. And so it’s just a wonderful book that I think helps just kind of think a little bit about our careers and it’s just it’s a great story. So what is your recommendation for us today.

Steve [00:34:47] Oh well I I’ve got so many recommendations. I’ll be here until tomorrow morning. But I’ll tell you one book that I think people should read. It comes from the same stable that my bunk sisters and brothers and the current are publishing which is the Welsh company. And it’s a book that’s curated not written but curated by Rachel Jones. And it’s called Don’t Change the Light Bulbs.

Steve [00:35:10] And basically what Rachael has done is taken a whole bunch of British educators who are the most connected. That she believes in the UK and what she’s doing she’s taken the best of all the blog posts and put them together into a compendium of about 50 ideas for the classroom and anything you want to teach you’ll find an idea that just about it. It’s a real recipe book for all educators.

Bonni [00:35:38] Thanks for that recommendation and I’ll put a link to it in the show notes and I just want to thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all of these ideas for how to make us be more effective and learning with ease.

Steve [00:35:53] Great. Thank you so much. I am going to go and walk the dog now.

Bonni [00:35:58] That was episode 38 with Steve Wheeler who has given me so much to think about and go and check out my head feels like it’s going to explode in the best way possible.

Bonni [00:36:09] Thanks again to Steve for joining me for this energizing and interesting and really made me curious kind of conversation if you’d like to comment on today’s episode. That’s a teachinginhighered.com/38.

Bonni [00:36:24] If you’d like to give feedback on the podcast as a whole that’s at teachinginhighered.com/feedback. And as always I welcome you to subscribe to the weekly update which will give you a blog post once a week about teaching or productivity and also in that email we’ll include the show notes to episodes like the one you just listen to and that’s it teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks for listening. And Steve thank you again.

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