Bonni [00:00:00] Today on episode number 254 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath shares about his book Stop Talking, Start Influencing: 12 Insights from Brain Science to Make Your Message Stick.

Production Credit [00:00:18] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni [00:00:27] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonnie Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni [00:00:55] Today I am welcoming to the show Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath. He’s a neuroscientist, educator, and author of the new book Stop Talking, Start Influencing: 12 Insights from Bran Science to Make Your Message Stick. He has conducted research and lectured at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, the University of Melbourne, and over 150 schools internationally. He currently serves as Director of LME Global, a team dedicated to bring in the best brain and behavioral research to teachers, students, and parents alike.

Bonni [00:01:31] Jared, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Jared [00:01:33] Thank you so much for having me on.

Bonni [00:01:35] It’s been fun getting to talk to you a little bit today and getting to know you and especially because I feel like both of us share this real sense of surprise about how little our faculty in higher education actually have been taught about how to teach. And I’d love to hear from you, when you first discovered this and what that was like for you?

Jared [00:01:58] Oh my goodness. I couldn’t agree more. It was funny. So I started as a classroom teacher before I went back into higher ed. So I just assumed that “yeah when you go get your PhD and become a Uni teacher there’s going to be a year or two on how to teach. Let’s go into pedagogy. Let’s go into learning.” And nope, you do your research, you get your degree, and then you become the next trainer of the next generation without any clue what’s going on. Yeah. It kind of feels like this every man for himself, do whatever you feel context. Which to be fair, might work in some fields. Like I don’t know. I’ve never actually been in say a business school where that might be just fine. But now I work in an ed school where when you think about it all the professors teaching the next generation of teachers how to teach have never stepped foot in a classroom and have no idea about pedagogy. So now not only are we kind of sapping our abilities at uni but I don’t even know how we’re training schoolroom teachers. Like what?! It seems like we’re now trickling down to the point where no one’s ever going to have learned how to teach and that’s a little scary to think about.

Bonni [00:03:10] This morning on Twitter I was seeing an exchange with a member of the Teaching in Higher Ed and higher ed community Isabeau and Derek Bruff. And Derek Bruff was tweeting about historians and they have particularly high DFW rates so that people who have gotten a D in the class and F in the class or who withdrew. And just how we’re discovering whether it’s business, whether it’s history, whether it’s STEM, that when we don’t know how to teach, not only is that hard on students but there’s a disproportionate negative effect on marginalized students. Which we want to be expanding opportunities for education that’s so important. And so it just compounds the issue of a lack of training on how to teach.

Bonni [00:03:54] How much were you able to take then what you learned teaching in a K through 12 classroom then and then sort of weave this? And I’m sure you’re also weaving it with your background as a neuroscientist as well.

Jared [00:04:07] It’s been thank goodness- So I work at the University of Melbourne now and for the last about four or five years I’ve been doing nothing but that is how do I build some sort of system or program to help the other university teachers? And I’ve gotten a lot of support over the last two years now I’ve been running a program helping new PhD graduates and acting professors, if you can ever get them, most of them never leave their office. So if I can get them out of their office, talking nothing more than teaching and pedagogy, teaching and pedagogy. Can we boost our skills in these?

Jared [00:04:41] And so I’ve of I’ve lucked out in that I’ve had this perfect storm of classroom practice with now what I call science learning research. Well I’ve studied the brain but we’ve done psychology, we do economics, we do AI, any place where there’s learning research. How do people learn? Guam all that together. Combine that with pedagogy knowledge and all of a sudden we’ve got this beautiful sweet spot of we know here is how people think, we know here’s how people learn, and we know here’s how teaching works best, let’s just implement these. Let’s just put all the pieces together and do it. And all of a suddent, like you said, rather than blaming the students for not working hard enough, we can start to say “well maybe we can actually work better with them,” get fewer withdrawals, get fewer fails because of that.

Bonni [00:05:33] One of the areas I know you’ve explored is around the issue when we try to get our brains to do things that they weren’t designed to do. And specifically it comes up a lot in terms of PowerPoint. And I’ve had professors who when we teach workshops on how to design PowerPoints, not just but in terms of like making them look good but actually making them support learning, and I get the response like “that sounds really hard,” is one I get really frustrated by. And the other thing is “well I need my notes,” well they don’t all need your notes and first of all you don’t need notes as much as you think you do.  So talk about what the problem there is.

Jared [00:06:12] Ah, you just ,you nailed it. There is so much perfect in what you just said. So a fun thing your listeners can try right now- So right now they’re listening to us. If you’re listening to us on a podcast, try to turn on a TV or radio that also has a talking head and try to listen to us and TV at the same time. And what you’ll notice is you can hear both of us but you can only pay attention to one at a time, either speaking or the person of the TV. And the reason for this is we just have limited neural real estate. There’s only one spot in the brain that processes voices. So if you’re listening two, bad news, it bottlenecks you get one or the other.

Jared [00:06:53] Why does this matter when it comes to PowerPoint? Because it turns out when we read or are doing silent reading what we hear is our own voice reading the words and as far as the brain is concerned that’s processed exactly the same as if you were speaking out loud. So if I’m trying to listen to a lecturer speak while trying to read words on a PowerPoint slide, I get that same exact bottleneck. I literally cannot do it. It’s not a “oh it’s hard. Oh I’m getting some information.” It’s one or the other. It’s the voice or the PowerPoint slides. And any student who tries to jump back and forth starts to lose information from both. So it’s not that they get half of each, they really start to drop in their comprehension and understanding.

Jared [00:07:38] So if you’ve got PowerPoint slides with words, that alone. I don’t even care what you’re teaching, in that moment you have just said to your audience or to your students, “I’m going to confuse you. I’m not here to teach you. I’m not here to help you learn. I’m here to confuse you.” But it’s such an easy fix too. How hard is it to take words off the PowerPoint slide. And like you just said, “well I need my notes.” Cool, if you need notes, put it on a note card. Don’t force anyone else to read it. You don’t have to look them in the eyes 24/7. Feel free to use notes as you need. Don’t force your audience to try and choose between you or your notes.

Bonni [00:08:15] Not to mention the fact that every slide deck program I’ve ever used has the little spot for notes and then it can be showing on your screen at the front but not on the projector, imagine that.

Bonni [00:08:24] I actually used to teach this workshop on deep listening skills, it was more than 20 years ago. And it’s one of those prepackaged ones that come at the CD-ROM I’m sort of laughing, it feels like it came with an eight track tape but it wasn’t that long ago. But a little CD-ROM and then the little booklet and we’d buy a bunch of them and teach about listening. And it had a a CD recording of a restaurant and so you’d hear the servers and then you’d hear that there were three different conversations going on. And then there’s also just the ambient noise. It was like a cafe in some sort of a town that had those kinds of outdoor eateries or whatever. And as soon as you learned the trick, the first time you play you’re like “oh my gosh. What? I don’t have any idea what’s going on.” Then you break the people in the group and say “I just want you to listen to this man the woman who are talking about soccer,” and “I want you to listen to just this conversation about this.” And then as soon as you had that trick, you could tell each group “okay what was happening with this group of people? And then what was happening with this story?” But the thing is that first of all none of us knew that trick in the very beginning. And so many times our students don’t know.

Bonni [00:09:32] So we’re asking them to be able to know about the science of learning when we don’t even know what the science of learning to know enough that like they can’t pay attention to both of these things. And sometimes students do figure that out. But sadly what I think often happens is they become disengaged because they’re just thinking well this is more time I need to be working outside this classroom anyway so I will be doing something more pleasurable I’m sitting here like looking at Instagram or whatever the case may be because I’m going to get this person’s PowerPoint later on and I can just read it anyway and like I can’t process everything that’s happening here.

Jared [00:10:08] That’s it. And you just nailed it too. We take a look at students who start surveying and doing research here. If a student knows about this, most of the time they’ll listen to the presenter. So they’ll block out the powerpoint slide and just say I’m going to listen to you, good. But since most people don’t know it, 90 percent of your students, if you’ve got a PowerPoint slide words behind you, they choose pay attention to those words. So they know that they get confused real quickly and the thing they choose to block out then is you. And once they choose to block you out, they quickly realize “oh well if all I’m going to do is read words, I can print those out at home.” And if you ever wondered why lecture attendance drops so dramatically after about two to three weeks, it’s not because the students are lazy it’s because you the way inside your PowerPoint slides with words, you’ve told them “if you come here and listen to me. If you want to read the words, stay home.” And 90 percent of them will choose to stay home and just read your words.

Jared [00:11:09] And the easiest fix for attendance lecture is fix your slides. You have to go to a lecture if all the slides have are images which require you as a lecturer to speak about to walk through with them, then they’re going to start coming to your lecture again. So I’m not just saying this, literally this is the research we’ve been doing. A lot of the lack of attendance was being driven by our lack of understanding how people learn and forcing too much out of our students.

Bonni [00:11:38] I’ve known about this issue for two decades now. But I will say that there was one thing that I miss understood for a long time that I just want to mention because I’m so mindful these days of accessibility. And one thing I want to say is that when I used to design a lot of e-learning, this was even before being in the higher education context, I was aware that I didn’t want a lot of words on the PowerPoint slide as I spoke something different over them. But captions are an entirely different thing. And I used to believe that the only time you would ever need captions is if you were hearing impaired, that would be the only person who would find use for that. And that I should kind of make it- not make it hard but that’s something that I perceived as well “they can click on that button but let’s not call a lot of attention.” And now I’m learning more about different kinds of learning disabilities where it’s not just an issue of hearing but that there are other reasons why those are really valuable assets. But that captions are not the same thing that you’re talking about here. In that case they’re a good thing.

Bonni [00:12:41] And I did want to mention that now it is incredible to me that in Google Slides and in Office 365 while you’re presenting- and I just tried this the other day, I have not experimented extensively- but you can be showing your Google Slides slides and you’re talking outloud and if you have allowed it to access your microphone, it can be putting captions as you’re talking in a classroom along with your slides which as you said are based primarily on images or know things that will help facilitate that learning. So I mean, it is just remarkable. The Office 365 they have ways they cascade their updates so I’m not sure if the cascading of that particular feature in PowerPoint has gone all the way to the higher education market. But if it’s not here by the time you listen to it, it’s probably going to be tomorrow. Or maybe two days. But I mean it is there on Google Slides I tried it. And of course Google Slides, they own YouTube the kinds of transcription technology that they use, it is not 100 percent yet but going to be way better than if that’s not there at all.

Jared [00:13:45] And if you’re going to use that- because I’m already thinking about playing with it myself. Give yourself a good week.

Bonni [00:13:51] Yes.

Jared [00:13:52] I guarantee you the first thing I’m going to do is try and break it.

Bonni [00:13:55] Yeah.

Jared [00:13:55] I’m going to I’m going to find what words I can say that it can’t translate I’m going to- So when you’re playing, probably give it some time. Allow yourself a week to play with it before you start using it live.

Bonni [00:14:06] That is good advice. That is really good advice. I actually had a hearing impaired student who was in my class once and so I’d play podcasts on YouTube that they would have the built in automatic transcription. And it was super distracting to the class because it was so bad, it was just awful and so they would just start laughing. So yes I think your advice is really really good. Let’s play with it a little before we’re actually in front of a live audience.

Jared [00:14:32] That’s actually a good point because if you think back in the day when we used to read out loud so this would have been us when we were in high school or middle school when maybe you are in English class and some kid has to read the chapter out loud while we all follow along in our books. This is one of those moments where you come to realize that you remember what you pay attention to. So when we’re doing this, I always remember only paying attention to whether or not that kid was going to screw up, which words did he mispronounce? Where did he stutter? Which sentences couldn’t he finish? And you’d get to the end of the chapter and you realize you didn’t pay attention to anything that happened other then how did this kid sound when he was reading. So it’s becoming a real kind of tricky. I know they’re starting to weed this practice out of middle schools and high schools because that very thing. So if I’m using my google translate and it’s slightly wonky, I can assume my audience is going to be paying more attention to the wonkiness of it than to any message I’m trying to give them, in which case I might just have to turn it off and say “all right let’s focus back in on the meaning and leave those crazy misspelled words out of our heads.”

Bonni [00:15:40] I am excited about this next topic because we have in a very good way talked extensively on past podcasts about retrieval practice, which is a part of recall, we’ve talked about spacing and how important that is and recall, and interleaving. But you’ve got one that I’m fairly sure has not been discussed and that has to be around issues of false memories. And I’m so excited to learn from you about this one.

Jared [00:16:06] Yeah. So it turns out whenever you access a memory- so think about what you just had for dinner last night. Now that you’re thinking about it, when you access memory what you’re doing is you reconstitute it. So wherever that memory is stored in your brain.  And we don’t know where memories are at but I imagine it’s in a storage cabinet. We hold it up when we’re actively thinking about it in that moment, that memory is on our working memory bench and it’s now gone from our brain essentially. And we can change it, we can tweak it, whatever we do to it in this moment when we restore it, it goes back different. It goes back with how we changed it. And for all intents and purposes, the old memory is gone. And this is where false memories really start to come in when you realize that every time you recall a memory, you can slightly tweak it. You will adjust it. You’ll make it suit your current story and then it goes back different.

Jared [00:17:02] So this is why I remember I was- this is kind of an interesting story- this was last Thanksgiving, my brother was telling a story about how when he was really young he was at the mall and we all hid from him and made him think she was lost and he got really scared was crying and then he saw us just hiding behind a door. And he’s like “man that really hurt my feelings that you guys did that to me.” At which point I chimed in and said “that’s a great story Joe. Too bad it happened to me.” I was the one that you guys hid and made think was lost. My dad said “no it was your brother.” My mom thought “no it was you.” None of us know what happened anymore. We just kept tweaking the story.

Jared [00:17:41] So in our personal lives you can see take it or leave it, this kind of matters. But it might not at times. But when it comes to education, if we’re going to be doing retrieval practice, if we’re going to be doing recall to help boost memory, we have to recognize that recall needs to be supported with some sort of feedback so that the memory goes back accurate. If I’m having my students recall information and they’re recalling it incorrectly or they’re recalling it out of order and I don’t somehow correct them or give them something to balance that against, it will go back wrong. And a year later when we’re taking our test they’ll swear you said this and you’ll say ‘no I never said that, I said this.” And you are both right because you’ve created two very different memories of the event of the teacher.

Jared [00:18:29] So if you’re going to be doing ritual practice, which you should be doing, I mean as you just said I’m sure your listeners know recall leads to deep memories. It’s always good to have some sort of feedback, some sort of mechanism by which as I recall it, I can check my answers. I can check to make sure that they are accurate. So when they go back they go back right.

Bonni [00:18:50] You are talking in you’re sharing about the personal side of things and it reminded me just of a wonderful woman who taught me so much about leadership and in specific instances about truth. And how you have your truth and then your brother had his truth. And that we can spend so much of our- and I’m calling it personal but we have interpersonal relationships in our classrooms and in our workplaces as well and so we have this like friction between being right versus coming up with a shared truth.

Jared [00:19:21] Yeah.

Bonni [00:19:21] And just how that shift that some of us have been able to make in our lives, I’m not going to say all of us, but powerful that can be. It’s like oh wow I do need to be able to name my truth because that’s an important part of this relationship and building this kind of trust and I need to listen deeply to the other person’s truth. But really the goal would be to be coming up with that shared truth. And so anyway it was reminding me of the personal. And then also in learning and terms of the importance of that feedback. But then also I’m thinking about other kinds of learning. I was just talking to a colleague of mine, he had one of our leaders sat in his class and just we know how nervous- I was empathizing with him. Oh my gosh, even though I generally get really good evaluations, I know it’s not like I have something to be nervous about for the person to come sit in. But boy, if you want to get nervous come sit in one of my classes and you know you just- ah that feeling.

Bonni [00:20:13] But then anyway he was talking about that he discovered he says the word “um” a lot. And I say “man if I could get 15 minutes with you, I can get rid of 80 percent of those in 15 minutes.” And it’s all about ringing the hotel service bell and it really creates this form of punishment where the “um” is followed by the negative feedback. Yep. And because I was trained this with this old Toastmasters thing although I’ve never studied to see if they were actually the originators of it. But anyone who ever went to Toastmasters to learn how to speak- that’s a public speaking organization. I think it’s worldwide. But yes it was the old technique that they used to use or probably still do use. And just that conditioning of “um,” ding and it works if you do it. You try to time it so that the bell is almost ringing as the word “um” is been uttered. And it’s literally, you don’t have to do anything else other than just tell the person to keep going. Like it’s not going to work if they don’t keep going.

Jared [00:21:14] They become so adverse to it that sooner or later it’s gone.

Bonni [00:21:18] Well and then you have to give them a replacement behavior. Early on I used to tell them to pause. Well pause is not a behavior. So the behavior to- when you feel yourself and wanting to say the “um”,  take a deep deep breath as we’re thinking what we’re going to say. And then you know how powerful pauses are in public speaking and they actually draw in the attention. I mean not 100 percent of the cases but it can be an attention grabber.

Jared [00:21:45] Absolutely. And if you’re doing it to think that’s usually when people will get drawn in. If you’re doing it because you’re just kind of zoning out, that’s probably not great. But if you do that breathe in instead of say “um” it’s probably going to pull people in. Oh, that’s interesting. I’ve not thought about that one but I am going to play with it now.

Bonni [00:22:02] I went on a whole rabbit trail there and I think you had something else to say.

Jared [00:22:10] So that’s about changing behaviors, it’s bring something up, tweak it, put it back differently. And eventually you no longer have to think about it because now it’s that new thing that you just tweaked it into.

Bonni [00:22:20] But also just the importance of feedback. That none of this works without feedback.

Jared [00:22:25] Yeah. It’s one of the oldest techniques. It’s still the best. Those kind of pop quizzes or flash cards where it’s here’s a question flip it over, Hhere’s the answer. That’s why that works so dang well is you have to do recall when you read the question which deepens that memory. And then you get that feedback which is here’s the correct answer, the accurate answer. So it goes back deeper and sharper. So it’s just like that perfect storm of how we think and learn. But it’s kind of I think everyone still hates flashcards because it feels like they should be bad but they’re still the creme de la creme in my book.

Bonni [00:23:01] The other thing I know you’re passionate about too though is not just here’s the right answer but why.

Jared [00:23:08] Huge. I feel like we kind of bounce back and forth. My big thing that I always do is I say “look I can give you recipes. I could tell you do X Y Z.” And I think a lot of teaching resources that do this. In the States, I don’t know if John Haddie is a big enough guy over there and education yet. Down here in Australia, he is huge. I think Robert Marzano is kind of his counterpart in the U.S. And they come out with these “here’s your top 10 tips of things to do.” And I always say that’s great, but if I don’t know why they work, if I don’t know what it’s tapping into, then I’m really not doing anything other than following instructions. And as soon as something doesn’t work, I’m totally derailed. I don’t know what to do anymore. So I always say, I like I don’t cook, but if you gave me a recipe for a cake, yeah I could follow the steps. But if I didn’t have an egg or I lost my ingredient, I’m done. I really didn’t know what the heck I was doing. But if you tell me why that ingredient works, why does this recipe work. The reason I say do this is because the brain works like this. Learning happens like this. Now I can start to own that technique. If I know the function then when I lose an egg or I don’t have an ingredient for my cake. Cool. The function was this. I can just substitute. I can adapt. I can make it fit my context.

Jared [00:24:25] So rather than just- so if you go back to my book, it’s not just “here’s 12 tips,” it’s here’s why each concept works so you can start to personalize and contextualize it for yourself. So you can own those strategies. You’re not left just listening to someone tell you how to do it. You’re now owning it andoing it the way you want to because you get why it works.

Bonni [00:24:46] Before we get to the recommendations segment, another big important part of learning has to do with stress. And we tend to think of stress as all bad and you’re going to set us straight if we do. Stress can be good. Stress can be bad. How do we distinguish?

Jared [00:25:02] We’ve got that kind of inverted U we call it where if you have no stress you learn nothing, if you’ve got wildly high stress, you learn nothing. But if you want to learn anything, you’ve got to be in that sweet spot of stress. What happens is whenever you get a stress response- and so it doesn’t have to be highly stressful where I’m scared. Any swing in emotion will generate a stress response. So from normal to happy, from happy to very happy, to sad. This is why movies work so well, they just keep pushing our emotions. And each time our emotions shift, we get a stress response. During these many stress responses, you get this chemical cascade that goes essentially through the memory networks in your brain and says if you’re getting this response chances are something important is happening, remember this event. And in the book I go into that cascade. It’s probably too dull for a podcast. But so it says- during the small stress response, the chemicals will physically start to attack and change your brain so you remember that moment. Problem is when you have that stress response for too long a period of time or they’re happening too frequently, you get that chemical cascade but the longer that’s going on the more it starts to damage your brain and you can’t quite cheap up with all these changes. So if you have a stress response the lasts two or three days, all of a sudden you stop remembering stuff and you actually start killing parts of your brain that deal with memory. It’s like the system goes haywire.

Jared [00:26:34] So you can see it kind of makes sense. The brain is just waiting for these little jolts and it uses those jolts as a signature to say remember this moment. But once that jolt becomes a long shock the brain doesn’t know to shut down and it just starts essentially eating its own self, it starts killing itself until you can stop that. This is essential what engagement is with hooks and curiosities. You’re giving these little short jolts. Oh I failed. I made a mistake. Well what can I do? And those are all good. That’s what you want from your students. These momentary jolts to get them learning.

Jared [00:27:10] Unfortunately you have one of those students that due to life circumstances are stuck in a prolonged stress response. And it’s really hard in higher ed because we have so many students to deal with at times. But if you can ever find those students and get one on one with them, the key there is need to abate the stress response before you start teaching them. If you know they’re in prolonged stress, you have to do something to calm them down, to relax them, to normalize them. The best ways to do this are, human touch, believe it or not. Which as a teacher and a student becomes really tricky so I don’t know how often you can hug a student. We can do it in families. Probably not there. But if you can’t do physical touch then physical conversation, connection. Deep breathing with them. Discussion. That’s how you get them to feel safe around you. So anytime they step into your classroom, into your tutorial, they can get that safe response and activate learning. Come back in. Maybe back in the real world they re kick in that stress response. If you can get them to abate it in your classroom and feel safe, then you can help them learn with you.

Bonni [00:28:18] I’ve done a few things like that even including in the middle of a test that was approximately 50 minutes, having a stretch break and inviting everyone in the room to stand up and do some stretches together. And even I would say “Turn to your neighbor and say you can do it!” and generate a little bit of laughter so there’s that relaxing of the body. Sitting like that just more and more and more tense and everything but then also getting some chuckles. And then it really did sort of reset- I could see the expressions on their faces, reset things for them. And then also that’s going to be a longer class, having maybe a 5 minute or 3 minute stretch video in the beginning or  part way through. And even just getting people out of their seats and “go put the sticky notes up on that thing” or “go put a tick mark where you fit on the white board,” whatever it is just to get people moving that make such a difference to those stress levels.

Jared [00:29:05] That’s good too for attention. So we have this thing called a threshold where if I want to pay attention to anything, that has to be stronger than my threshold. And for the most part it’s fine. Right now my voice is louder than your threshold so you can hear me great. But after 10 to 15 minutes of being in one context, your threshold starts to go up and it starts to become harder and harder to pay attention. So you can assume once your students are in your room for about 15 minutes, they get used to the seats, they get used to the lights. It’s becoming harder and harder for them to focus. So you need to do something to reset their threshold and buy another 10 to 15 minutes. So like you said, anything that’s kind of out of the ordinary get up, turn to your neighbor, high five them, go put something on the wall. Just change the context then when they come back you just buy yourself from 15 minutes to teach and learn with them. And then when the threshold starts rise up, get them to go play game, go take a note, go write something, tell a joke, watch a video real quick. Come back. We got another 10 15. So essentially yeah what you’re doing is a perfect example playing with people’s attentional thresholds.

Bonni [00:30:08] I love that love that connection too. This is the point in the show where we each get to give our recommendations. I have a couple of articles on two totally different spectrums that have had my attention in recent weeks. One is a former Teaching in Higher Ed guest Scott Self, I’ve just enjoyed knowing him now for years. He wrote such a beautiful blog post called I Promise. And he starts out by saying that one of his students came to him and said something about “oh I didn’t get this and on time. I’m sorry, I promise I’m not a bad student.” And he just goes through and really reflects about just the power dynamics that are there and why you have to explain to me that you’re not a bad student. And so I am really just articulating for himself and for all of us that get the joy of reading it of like I promise you, I’m not going to expect you to tell me I’m not a bad student. It’s really hard to explain because I just it really just touched my heart and I just really recommend people go and read it. And Scott I’m so glad to have you now back blogging more often because I know you were working on some school stuff and some transitions in your life so it’s so fun to now see your post coming back into my RSS reader. That’s been fun.

Bonni [00:31:16] And the other thing is on a totally different part of the spectrum, but there is a report called The Horizon Report and it recently in the last year or two now is a part of the organization called EDUCAUSE. And what it is for people who aren’t familiar with it is just a really look at far out and then mid-term stuff and then shorter term stuff of what’s happening in terms of higher education and technology and learning. And I always just think it’s sometimes people think oh it’s too- it’s been criticized in years past of just making a lot of predictions that don’t end up coming to fruition. And now it’s under new leadership and I think there’s this reinvigorated sense that it’s got some important- I mean I’ve always found them valuable to read. But I just think even you don’t agree with it, just get together with some colleagues and they don’t even have to read the whole thing. You don’t have to read the whole thing because they have just a one pager that outlines these different horizons of where things are headed in the short term mid-term and where they predict it going. And just even have the conversations, debate with others and see where it will be particularly relevant for your students in your institution. And then even just for yourself, where do you think this might be telling you for your own teaching?

Jared [00:32:30] And that’s got to be what it’s tried- if it’s sparking discussion and debate, cool. Who cares if it’s accurate. If it got us thinking about things then that’s a successful article in my book. And predictions don’t have to be accurate, they just get us thinking about things.

Bonni [00:32:44] And this definitely did. And so the preview is out as of this recording and I’m not sure their timeframe for when the full thing will be out. But for me, that also made it nice because I feel like I should read the whole thing. It’s nice and digestible the preview I’m going to send.  It does explain its terms I think it would make for a great discussion piece and with fellow faculty. And Jared, I’m going to hand it over to you for anything you have to recommend.

Jared [00:33:08] Oh my goodness. I’ve been letting things percolate. And one thing keeps popping to the front of my brain. So that’s what I’m going to do. So here we go. My recommendation Frank Herbert’s Dune. I have been getting so into Sci-Fi books in last five years because I think I got so exhausted with academic reading and writing and research. I said “wait, I need something different.” And I started reading Sci-Fi and last year I finally got around to reading Dune, which is like the grandfather’s Sci-Fi book. And oh my gosh, it was incredible. And now my wife is reading it. She doesn’t like it near as much as I do but I love it. And they’re making a new movie, they’re casting a new version of the film right now. So my recommendation if you haven’t read it and you care at all about Sci-Fi, Dune. I know you might feel because it’s old it’s corny. No. It is as good as people say it is.

Bonni [00:34:05] So I am not a big fan of science fiction and what that usually translates to is not being able to relate to when people make recommendations like that. I read this book as a child. But no I totally remember reading it and now that I’ve retrieved the memory from my mind and I’m looking at it, it’s going to go back different. But I mean I could just remember being totally enthralled by it. I mean completely enthralled. And you’re telling me it’s going to hold up. So if I go back and reread it, it will be like reading it for the first time because all I can remember is something about a hand and a ball or being trapped or something like.

Jared [00:34:40] That is a good memory! Yes! That’s just towards the beginning of the book. I’m impressed.

Bonni [00:34:46] I hope I didn’t give like a spoiler alert.

Jared [00:34:53] No, it starts with that so it’s ok. It’s such a dense deep world but it’s so compelling. Like you read most books and it’s kind of cool but he’s created a whole different universe and the rules are very- what I like about Sci-Fi is you have to learn the rules of that universe. And he’s got such a unique rule set but it holds together so well and he goes into the different religions and the different philosophies. Ah.  It was so good.

Bonni [00:35:21] As you’re talking- and somebody recently called in for episode 250 to share about their one in a million episode and they were talking about another Sci Fi book that the guests had recommended that’s name has not come into my mind for me to retrieve. But when I was listening to her message I thought “well maybe I just think I don’t like science fiction,” so maybe I actually like it, maybe I need to stop telling myself that I didn’t change my paradigm entirely. Maybe I really do love it.

Jared [00:35:47] It’s good. I always growing up I thought there’s no way, Sci Fi is corny, I’ll never get into it. And the last five years man I am hooked. I’m so hooked on it.

Bonni [00:35:58] Well as soon as we stop recording so that we don’t bore the listeners I’ll go and look at what the book was that she loved so much from that. So then you can go have it when you’re done exploring his books too.

Jared [00:36:09] Done. You know what, can I say another one?

Bonni [00:36:11] Sure, absolutely.

Jared [00:36:12] I don’t mean to bore you guys but Hyperion. There’s two books in the Hyperion chronicles, well there are 4 but the last 2 are horrible. The first two are great. Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion are two of the smartest books I have ever touched. The guy who wrote it, Dan Simons, is he’s now super popular because he wrote The Terror which is now a TV show. And he’s written all these other types of books. But those two in terms of side by similar to Dune are just so well put together. And it’s one of those where you’re reading it you just know the author is a million times smarter than you are and not in a smarmy way, in a really good way where you are like “I wish I knew you,” like I just want to sit at a table and just pick your brain for a while. So good.

Bonni [00:37:00] It must have been such a letdown for books 3 and 4.

Jared [00:37:05] I don’t know what happened. He took his big break like 10 years came back and did the next two. Oh my. I got halfway through the third and I was just so angry. Started the fourth like I can’t do this, this is just crap. So I don’t know what happened, maybe he became too cool but the original two, totally worth it.

Bonni [00:37:23] But you said you didn’t want to bore people and I want to say you just saved them. Think of the hours you just saved everyone. You’ve given a gift.

Jared [00:37:31] Becaiuse those first two, you’re going to want to read the next two. Don’t just don’t touch it. Just trust me, love the first two, pretend the second two don’t even exist.

Bonni [00:37:45] You have helped people today. And in all seriousness, you really have. I am so glad to be connected with you and I hope this is not just the first time our paths crossed. It’s been a delight getting to know you a little. And I’d love to have you back and looking forward to hearing as your work continues.

Jared [00:38:01] You too. Thank you for having me on. I actually really enjoyed this, this was really fun and we will definitely keep in touch. There’s more to more to come.

Bonni [00:38:11] It was such a pleasure having the honor of speaking to Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath. I’m smiling from ear to ear, looking forward to rethinking of myself as to perhaps I really do like science fiction. I guess I won’t know until I try and see if that mindset works. And I’m just so appreciative of all of you for listening. It’s Episode 254 it’s just so hard to believe back in June 14 but this whole thing just got started.

Bonni [00:38:38] So if it’s been a while since you have been listening to the show and you haven’t shared it yet with any colleagues just tell them about Teaching in Higher Ed and help show them how to subscribe to it on their podcast player and share the word about the show. And I really appreciate this community and just so grateful for you and look forward to next time for episode number two fifty five.

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.