The intersections between play, games, and learning, with Nicholas Holt

Bonni: [00:00:00] Today on episode number 198 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Nicholas Holt joins me to talk about the intersections between play, games, and learning.

Production Credit: [00:00:15] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:24] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating and 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: [00:00:52] Before I introduce today’s guest, I wanted to give you a quick update. Starting on episode 200, I’ve got some exciting news and that is that they’re coming, transcripts that is- they’re coming to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Bonni: [00:01:07] A number of us have been busily working on this project for at least nine months now and I’m excited to say that we’re going to have transcripts available for all 200 episodes of Teaching in Higher Ed as we complete this project together in the hopes of having it for episode number 200.

Bonni: [00:01:25] But since I’m recording this episode before then, just in case there’s any glitches just know that at least by episode 200 we’ll be well on our way to having all of those available to you.

Bonni: [00:01:35] And I’m so excited that as I started to share that I was working on this project a sponsor for the transcripts emerged and that is- a financial contribution has been made by the Teaching and Learning and Higher Education book series from the West Virginia University Press edited by James Lang.

Bonni: [00:01:55] The series offers compact books from great writers who provide you with practical guidance you need to help students learn and succeed and you’ll be seeing many of the authors from that book series showing up in upcoming episodes and you’ll also see a link to West Virginia University Press’s book series in those first 200 episodes as a sponsor of those transcripts. Thanks so much for your financial support and keep your eyes on Teaching in Higher Ed for the availability of those in the coming weeks and months.

Bonni: [00:02:29] I’m thrilled this week to be welcoming Nicholas A. Holt to the show. And usually when I read people’s bios they’re not online but Nick, you have such an incredible, eclectic bio that you are right here with me as I go through this so feel free to interject any additional cinematic things that you’d like to as they go through.

Bonni: [00:02:50] You are the Director of Innovation for the College of Education at the University of Georgia, chair of the Innovation in Teaching Conference and adjunct faculty in the Department of Counseling and Human Development.

Bonni: [00:03:04] And Nick you serve at the college as both liaison and sherpa (first time I’ve ever seen sherpa used in a bio by the way) bringing the pedagogical with the technological in a uniquely positive and playful way- I can attest to that- your research focuses on designing live action problem solving games that get communities involved in civic engagement and volunteerism.

Bonni: [00:03:29] Nicks scholarship and personal philosophies situate at the intersections between play, games, and learning. Nick, you consulted with the Walt Disney Company on educational game development and supported the technology needs for the band R.E.M.

Bonni: [00:03:44] You have practiced and directed an international film festival with the Independent Film Channel and a musical and a music video showcase with MTV and that’s not even all of it. What did we leave out? Do you have any interests that didn’t come up in the bio that you enjoy or any thing that you do outside of work that takes up time there?

Nicholas: [00:04:10] Sure, I love gaming. I really ask a lot of questions of people about their hobbies. I’m really interested in what we learn from our hobbies and that sort of deep intrinsic motivation. But you did a really good job and yes it’s really eclectic. My background is equally eclectic with a bachelor’s in classics, a masters in instructional technology and a Ph.D. in leisure studies.

Nicholas: [00:04:34] But all of those tie together for me in the way I try to help faculty at our college get their heads around new technologies and again how they weave their own pedagogies around those technologies to make engaging experiences for their students.

Bonni: [00:04:50] And what did you learn from your consulting with the Walt Disney Company on educational game development that might inform our work in higher education?

Nicholas: [00:05:00] Well, I worked on a game called Club Penguin and what we were really doing is trying to insert these learning opportunities for students we were really careful with that language that we call these learning exposures. And so they had really mapped everything is was a fascinating diagram everything our kids should know from kindergarten to fifth grade. And then as we looked in Club Penguin we tried to find the places that we could insert the inner nodes of that network.

Nicholas: [00:05:30] So if you were talking about music we might actually talk about vibrations we might actually talk about some mathematical principles or physics principles. And again, all of these the kids as they played the game they weren’t- this wasn’t overt instruction it was very what I might call invisible instruction.

Nicholas: [00:05:48] And so one of the things I really look at is where it is prior knowledge come from? We ask our teachers to lean on it all the time. But a lot of the things that I’ve engaged in around education are always about sort of that first step, we gave them those seeds of that prior knowledge that hopefully a teacher later on in their academic career can sort of pick up and run with.

Bonni: [00:06:12] We were sitting- my two kids and I were sitting in one of our favorite Chicago pizza shops out here and my son said, “Is that the Beatles?” And there’s music playing. And I believe it was The Who and so I said, “No actually, it’s kind of like rock music but has a little different beat than the Beatles do…” and he goes “No. Is *that* the Beatles?” And he pointed to a TV screen and the Beatles were playing.

Bonni: [00:06:37] You know how a lot of times something will be on the TV but something different is playing in your ear. And I thought Oh my goodness so Mr. Hanna is his music teacher. And I just love him. And the other day [our son] came home and had a worksheet that drew what different kinds of music look like.

Bonni: [00:06:54] So what does rock music look like? What does classical music look like? And it was if you could picture you know some of it has a more predictable beat and then rocks will have more you know- I can’t even explain it very well.

Bonni: [00:07:05] But I thought that is exactly what that kind of music looks like if you were to draw it in a linear line sort of with squiggles and stuff. Anyway, I just get amazed by what kids are learning today but so much of it, as you said, is thinking about prior knowledge and so much criticism comes in around over testing our kids and some of the curriculum decisions that have come to mind.

Bonni: [00:07:30] But at the same time being able to know what prior knowledge should be there in order to- I mean it’s just it’s fascinating to think about how hard the work is of doing this right.

Bonni: [00:07:42] And then of course making it exciting and engaging for students and Club Penguin sounds delightful. I just want to play it right now.

Nicholas: [00:07:49] So on that note you know I had done a talk recently where I was trying to put leisure professionals- Parks and Recreations folks- in touch with science educators and social studies teachers and talking about this idea of collateral learning so in those pairings what you would do is seed an environment with all the possible, again learning exposures, and then in a more Montessori sort of style you can let kids or adults sort of go through and discover the pieces that they need.

Nicholas: [00:08:23] So I’m always trying to create those cross silo engagements where I get you know the math ed teacher working with the social studies teacher and that’s really been my role in the college for the last few years. And it’s a position that I really like to be in.

Bonni: [00:08:41] Oh I just think it’s fascinating. I’m hearing two things from you one is the cross disciplinary and then also just the idea of learning as exploration. And I know you really build so much of your teaching around three intersections play, games, and learning.

Bonni: [00:08:59] And I’d just love to hear a story about a time that you remember when the connection between those three things just really stood out to you in a really strong way. So that would be play, games, and learning.

Nicholas: [00:09:11] Yeah. So for me, that’s a quite personal story in fact. As I said my parents were both educators here at the University of Georgia and my mother’s field was in adult education. So as a young kid she really strongly believed anything I read was good, right. The more I could read was good. So any trip to the grocery store- I mean my parents were were very we were not wealthy by any means, we were poor graduate students eating a lot of tuna noodle casseroles.

Nicholas: [00:09:39] But so my mother would always say pick out a magazine or a comic book or a mad magazine or anything. She didn’t care. So a few years later the game you know- I’ll really date myself here- the game Dungeons and Dragons came out and there were some older kids playing it and I was really captivated by that.

Nicholas: [00:09:55] And so long story short my parents would buy me the books which were rather expensive and I would read and read and read them and so years later as I sort of put together the classics, the instructional technology, and the leisure theory. This is where they all come together.

Nicholas: [00:10:09] What I realized that happened was I wasn’t all that interested in the lessons that my teachers were giving me but I was learning so much about reading, storytelling, interpreting charts and graphs, things that would really help me out later. So that is where – it wasn’t until I was an adult that I could really see where that connection between games, learning, and really the desire to learn more. Right.

Nicholas: [00:10:36] That sense of progression. Like I want more and more and more and more and the more I study gameplay, I see that.. you know almost as a universal… That the player wants to progress in some way. And so I look for a way to pull that sense of fun failure, of progression into the kind of activities we bring into our teaching.

Bonni: [00:11:00] When I think about those three things together play, games, and learning I think I’m too quick sometimes to just assume that learning isn’t there because at the forefront is the play and the games

Bonni: [00:11:13] So I’ll give you an example. My brother was or possibly still is – I don’t know, I haven’t actually asked him in a while. But he was really into that game called World of Warcraft.

Nicholas: [00:11:23] Yes that’s what I did my dissertation [on].

Bonni: [00:11:25] Oh my gosh I was just going to tell you a friend of mine did her dissertation on it as well it was leadership skills that get built within that community. And I remember at the time just being astounded thinking I would see a game – Of course I didn’t play it – But I would just see the title and kind of get the general gist of what it’s about and think well that’s what you do if you want to escape and you want to play and do a game but you’re not really going to learn.

Nicholas: [00:11:48] So let me. Yeah I love this so so let me tap one really specific that I track while I’m in those spaces. So my my stepfather is Greek. He’s 83 years old now and I talk to him about how he learned English and he said I learned English from watching these old cowboy movies, right?

Nicholas: [00:12:08] And then he went off to Germany and he got his master’s and then came here and got his Ph.D. in business – we’ll come back to him, that’s important.

Nicholas: [00:12:16] But my wife is… I met her in the college she was. She’s from Thailand she was an international student working on a degree in science education. Now, she’s here and working on her second degree, a Ph.D. in chemistry.

Nicholas: [00:12:30] But she and I would play the game and we would talk about language acquisition. And so really one of the places where you really can see learning – like you notice it right away is in somebody trying to learn English as a second language.

Nicholas: [00:12:46] And so whether they’re typing it or speaking it. These games are really fostering that kind of learning. And at least the conversational English level. I know there are some studies around that as well but we could also talk about the math. And in my dissertation what really teased out is something I’m calling amateur scholarship.

Nicholas: [00:13:07] And so when we see the same patterns when somebody makes a walkthrough of a game, they write the instructions of how to do it or how to be successful in it and then others come in and they kind of do a peer review they’re like, “No that’s a bunch of nonsense.”

Nicholas: [00:13:21] I mean some of them can be equally as mean as a real peer reviewed paper. And so you’ll get this new feedback but you’re really seeing some high mathematic skills or you know the sort of best practice kind of stuff on how to how to progress as quickly as you can. So I see a really interesting analog in this amateur scholarship.

Nicholas: [00:13:42] And I say amateur for a really important reason. And again my background and classics so amateur is is is from amāre. To love, right? So it is to be an amateur is to do something for the love of that thing as opposed for the extrinsic reward of money or fame or whatever.

Nicholas: [00:14:03] And so in some ways I find this a more beautiful kind of scholarship than some of the more heady academic scholarship that I have to encounter on a day to day basis.

Bonni: [00:14:14] That is so much of what we want as teachers, that we might have students who did it for the love of learning.

Nicholas: [00:14:22] Yeah.

Bonni: [00:14:23] Yet the structures that we build are so much about building a structure of accountability and…

Nicholas: Or the test.

Bonni: [00:14:32] Yes. Yes.

Nicholas: [00:14:33] Right?

Bonni: [00:14:34] Scoring and grading.

Nicholas: [00:14:35] There’s a great a great word for this and it comes out a Csikszentmihalyi’s work around flow. I’m sure it dates further than that but that’s where I was first exposed to it but it’s autotelic and it means to do something for the sake of itself.

Bonni: [00:14:51] Oh. Yeah. What are some ways we can in our teaching- small ways- we might be able to just start to wander in this area and have ways for students to do something just because? I realize that’s not what you said- just because.

Nicholas: [00:15:06] I guess I’ll use that as a sort of segue to talk about one of the activities. So a course that I teach here in the college is called games, culture, and human development. And we really do a wide look at games, the negatives around games, the conversations even right now around the “is there a correlation with violence and games? Is there a correlation with obesity or bad health practices and games?”.

Nicholas: [00:15:33] But there are also all of these positives. Certainly there’s a lot of work around serious games and I won’t go into all that here but one of the things I want my students to do in the course is an activity I call community quest and that is the building of a game that gets citizens in our community or in your community to participate in volunteerism.

Nicholas: [00:15:59] And so what we do is we create a series, a sort of spice theme over top of it so you can think sort of James Bond, and we will use Facebook and send you a little secret mission and that secret mission may send you to Habitat for Humanity or the Humane Society or the Athens food bank and a host of others.

Nicholas: [00:16:20] And there you’ll do a volunteer task and then you’ll you’ll take a photo of yourself there with our little sign and that’ll score some some points at the end when all these points and different groups have done all these tasks. We all as a community meet back and we give out a super Citizen Award.

Nicholas: [00:16:39] So that’s the general gist of what community quest as a game would look like. So each semester the first time I did it my students didn’t get very far- it is a very complex thing right. They didn’t get very far in developing that game but they did a great job.

Nicholas: [00:16:56] And so the second time I was going to teach the class I was like oh I felt a little a little despair like oh we’re just going to start this over again and we’re not going to get very far.

Nicholas: [00:17:04] So I had this idea to give them the work of the students who had come before them and said let’s pick up here- Is there anything good we can work with that we can build from?

Nicholas: [00:17:17] And they got really excited about this that now they were engaged in this activity that was not only good for civic and community engagement and volunteerism, but it was also meaningful and purposeful for them because they weren’t starting from scratch.

Nicholas: [00:17:34] And so then the third time that got even more refined and now we actually had a small class that was an event planning class of undergrads go out into the community and set up those relationships and started to run some of the beta testing of the game

Nicholas: [00:17:49] The next time I teach the class they will actually start to develop an app for cell phones that really allows all of those quests and clues to come to you a lot quicker. And I’ll sort of leader board how many points so it’s really fun but what I learned was again just having the students start at the beginning again wasn’t going to inspire them or me in some certain way.

Nicholas: [00:18:15] So one of the things I did want to bring to your listeners today is from that experience, I’m starting- this is very nascent- but starting to consider something that I’m calling “legacy pedagogy.”

Nicholas: [00:18:29] And I’m finding other faculty who aren’t doing obviously the same thing as me but they do have a task or an activity in their class that subsequent students will build off of.

Nicholas: [00:18:42] So one example using this really cool software and I know you love hearing about these things. Tiki- Toki is a collaborative timeline building piece of software, it’s very cool, it’s very beautiful and so Bonnie Cramond who is a creativity professor here, she was the director of the Torrance Center for a number of years she had her students develop a timeline around the scholarship of creativity.

Nicholas: [00:19:10] So the next time she taught the class she asked the students, she gave them an option. She said “You can either make a new card for the timeline, a new entry on the timeline or you can extend or expand on an entry that was already there”.

Nicholas: [00:19:25] So I know when you and I met some of the things we were talking about was the throwaway assignments, meaningfulness, authenticity, all of those kind of things. And so this starts to look a little more to me like what are real lives, what our real work looks like. That we pick up on the work of others. We we try to make something of that. There is a kind of continuity in our lives that is not represented well in the school.

Nicholas: [00:19:53] And so I’m looking for those places where I believe, you know that this kind of continuity adds a deeper sort of meaning that some will come after you and what have you left behind to help them? And some have come before you and what can you pick up from them that you can learn from?

Nicholas: [00:20:10] So I think we talk about student centered learning and and this gives students a lot of agency. So I think it fits that. But it’s also a little instructor centered, that as I get bored with my own project this is a way to sort of breathe some new life in it. And then finally I’ll say, maybe it’s almost an object oriented kind of directional piece where this thing might be- I might call it an heirloom right.

Nicholas: [00:20:38] So community quest for me is this heirloom assignment that I’m going to hand on or the timeline that Bonnie Cramond uses or I’ve got a number of other examples around these and again I think you’ll post my e-mail so if any of your listeners are doing things like this that they let one group of students work off another group of students work, I’d love to hear about those as I start to kind of compile all this into this idea of legacy pedagogy

Bonni: [00:21:08] You’re also reminded me of the creative work some are doing with having students go in and edit Wikipedia entries.

Nicholas: [00:21:15] Sure absolutely. That’s certainly a legacy activity. You know we run into difficulties here where it’s you know permissions of the students and all of that. But I think these are all solvable problems.

Bonni: [00:21:29] I was also thinking I don’t use a ton of discussion boards in my teaching. I find them to be problematic speaking and having to unlearn things. But the ones that I do they do tend to carry value and why don’t I carry those over. But of course it’s again, you’d have to get permission and things like that. But it’s intriguing just to think about that.

Bonni: [00:21:46] Also I really liked what you said about there some that’ll come before you, some will come after you. And then also thinking about really how are learning management systems are not designed at all to have a feeling of heirloom assignments or a feeling of legacy.

Nicholas: [00:22:02] Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s so true and so I’ve actually been working with a couple of third party companies to look at this. One of them is this really cool group of folks in Chicago doing a product called Packback and basically they it’s it’s a slightly gamified discussion tool- they may get angry at me if I talk about it wrong but it gives it gives curiosity points.

Nicholas: [00:22:26] And again this is such a magic word for me. Curiosity- can I make you more curious? Well maybe I can pique your curiosity so I’m thinking a lot about that but maybe an external tool to our LMS because you know the LMS is protecting FERPA and all the things that it should do. And I feel really strongly about those things.

Nicholas: [00:22:46] But yeah what happens when we do want to create a continuity? You know the students last semester said something really interesting or really powerful and I want to make sure that that makes it to the next group, right?

Nicholas: [00:22:59] So my motto in the college is “we are smarter than me” and I really believe we are smarter than me whether I’m working with groups of faculty or I’m working with students or I’m working with my community here in Athens, artists, musicians, poets and whatnot. But you know that’s the push that I always have. And I’m reminded you know we have to remember at the core before we can all learn together we have to be nice and good to one another. And so I really pushed the- that’s where the play component and again the positivity is really important.

Bonni: [00:23:32] One of the things I find myself really struggling with because I’m not necessarily a gamer is just how to get started. And do you have any advice for us as far as if we’d like to add some play into our courses or we’d like to look at adding a game of some kind of ways of starting small?

Nicholas: [00:23:52] Yeah I never want to be too artificial with this stuff but you let me give you a couple. So if you have a new piece of technology in your class, right? I always say let everybody play with it.

Nicholas: [00:24:05] So for example one we have here, we’re really experimenting with a whole number of different digital whiteboards that let us preserve in some way the content of that digital whiteboard although just taking a picture of it seems to work pretty good most of the time.

Nicholas: [00:24:19] But I always say you know if you’re if you’re teaching your online class and there’s an online whiteboard don’t just start using it as that learning tool, let all of the students come in there and draw a little smiley faces. And not only are they getting that out of their system. They’re learning the tool in a way that they’re not nervous or scared.

Nicholas: [00:24:41] So it almost serves in that same way we’ve been taught about icebreakers and just so you know I I really hate icebreakers, those usually seem so artificial to me. So that’s what I mean about play or playfulness that it isn’t frivolous. It is going to, I’m going to intentionally insert some play because I want people to become comfortable with something or gain some degree of comfort around something they may not be comfortable with at first. This works really well with faculty by the way.

Nicholas: [00:25:13] The second part- so with the legacy pedagogy thing- to get started with something like that you don’t have to start something from scratch. I think you just look at the syllabus you have and you pick one activity that piques your own curiosity and you say “how do I get this one to roll over? How do I get the benefit of telling my next students what these students currently did with it?”

Nicholas: [00:25:36] And so pretty easy, pretty low level as an entry point but you could see where- I mean when I think about this I think about why somebody might get excited about working with the yearbook right. The yearbook is a perfect example of that legacy thing where you have some people that have worked on it for a few years. And so we have that real apprenticeship model kind of happening. And so it doesn’t have to be an heirloom object it could also be an heirloom person.

Nicholas: [00:26:05] So in another example, Corey Johnson and Gwen Powell did this integrated curriculum. And this is when I was a doc student I was teaching their event planning class because of my film festival background and all of that. And they would- there were 100 students in there. And so they would have four students from the last year’s cohort that could serve as sherpas- I’ll throw that one in again- or mentors to the new students who were kind of not understanding how quickly you’ve got to get things up and moving to put on an event by the end of the semester.

Nicholas: [00:26:39] So the legacy component can also be a person as well as that object activity idea. So a number of ways that again we just want to create that constant stream, we want to have a way that we’re representing time as a whole that we fit into something bigger than the artificial temporal structure of our courses.

Bonni: [00:27:02] You made me think of two things. One is, I’m chuckling because as much of a tech geek as I am, I have never really found any use for digital whiteboards at all. But I’m wondering if part of it is because I’m just not entering into this space of play involving the students like, “Come up and let’s do this together,” and finding ways to create more opportunities for play using a digital whiteboard. Now that I could get excited about.

Bonni: [00:27:26] And then I was also thinking about my difficulties with badges I really am intrigued by badges and I think some of the gamification of classes and things like that and I wanted to start out with I was teaching a class that involved using Stephen Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Nicholas: [00:27:44] Yeah. Yeah.

Bonni: [00:27:45] And so I created this beautiful badges. I’m very proud of how beautiful it turned out. I would love to share them. And I never did anything with them because once I got the badges made then it was, “Oh I got to figure out in my LMS how to make it work. And there’s an LTI,” and then it didn’t work the way I thought it would. And then it turns out that actually you have to put the badges in on their system not yours just this whole mess. And I thought what if I had just had a curiosity badge? One badge.

Nicholas: [00:28:13] Right.

Bonni: [00:28:14] Nothing with how points are going to add up and all these things. What if there was just one badge? Start with a single badge?

Nicholas: [00:28:19] I’m so glad that you say that because I’ve become really bored with the gamification and its current incarnations because it’s usually just skinning our class with new points and levels that is very artificial. Where you think about getting a grade or a number is already a point or a score or so in a way it’s already gamified which is when I think about how do you really do this.

Nicholas: [00:28:46] I might recommend that there’s a really great French sociologist His name is Roger Caillois and he breaks games into these four categories. One is agon and that’s the notion of competitive games. But another one is mimicry and that’s us maybe roleplaying or dressed up. So you can gamify a party or class or whatever through role play, right?

Nicholas: [00:29:08] So again Bonnie Cramond one of my heroes has her students dress up as famous philosophers and come and debate one another. And so they’re from different times. And they have different ideas but what a deep way, a playful way, a gamified way, to get people to really understand who these influential characters were in creativity, scholarship, or beyond.

Nicholas: [00:29:32] And so mimicry was the second one the third one is ilinix and it is about the whirlwind and so nobody ever thinks about this one. But it’s about spinning or the equilibrium being off. So it’s always hard to get my students heads around this idea but maybe a car racing game or when you watch those movies of a roller coaster in first person that feeling that you have that would be ilinix. That one doesn’t apply quite as much for obvious reasons.

Nicholas: [00:30:01] The last one is paidia and it’s randomness and we’ve been doing this and classrooms for a long time right. So how do you select people? How do you group people? And so how do you add a little bit of randomness into what you’re doing?

Nicholas: [00:30:17] So those are all four different kinds of games and what Roger Caillois did so well, the book goes a man, play, and games. So I think it dates back to the 70s. I’m sorry I don’t have that on the tip of my tongue. But obviously before the Internet and before computers and all of that. And so what he gets out is how games really can fit into more than one of those four things.

Nicholas: [00:30:42] So if I look at like the World of Warcraft it has it has the randomness in terms of what kind of gear drops for you. It has the competition if you’re into PVP or achievements or whatever. It has the ilinix in the sense of the Vertigo if you’re flying or running and the sort of virtual reality notion of it all and and I’m finding the games with the most power are the ones that that tap more than one of those boxes.

Nicholas: [00:31:12] And so a place to start is you know that I really try to point people away from agon- the points, the the competitive kind of idea and more toward the mimicry- what can you do with with acting things out or taking on other other personas or perspectives? Because it seems so important to me right now that to learn to take another person’s perspective is something that’ll transcend whatever content you’re trying to teach them at the moment.

Bonni: [00:31:41] Oh wow and just building and infusing more empathy into our teaching as well.

Nicholas: [00:31:44] Exactly. Exactly.

Bonni: [00:31:46] Oh I love that. Well I can talk to you as you already have evidence of since I have visited your institution. I could talk to you for hours but I’m afraid we’re going to have to go to recommend- actually I’m not afraid of it. I’m excited that we now get to give our recommendations.

Bonni: [00:32:01] And the one that I’d like to give today is a TV show that I sadly they are on hiatus now but I have just been enjoying so much and look forward to when a new season comes out it’s called The Good Place

Bonni: [00:32:15] And The Good Place is with Kristen Bell and William Jackson Harper and a bunch of other great cast of characters and the description in the Internet Movie Database says it’s a woman’s struggle with what it means to be good. And I’m going to play just a brief clip of the trailer from the Internet Movie Database

The Good Place: [00:32:36] *Clip from The Good Place plays*

Bonni: [00:33:18] The whole premise is that she winds up in what is called The Good Place. Only it was a mistake and she doesn’t actually belong there. The show is full of all sorts of things surrounding the topic of moral philosophy, including the trolley problem Kant, utilitarianism, Aristotle’s self egoism, ontology, rights and virtues, and the veil of ignorance. And that’s probably even just in one single episode but it doesn’t feel at all like a boring textbook.

Bonni: [00:33:46] It feels like just a very humorous way of looking at what it means to be good, what it means to have an idea of what is right and what is wrong and the complexities there in. It’s a great, fun show. And I think four seasons so far – but don’t quote me on that. Nic what do you have to recommend today?

Nicholas: [00:34:04] Well let’s see. So first of all I wanted to just say again thank you so much for being the keynote at our Innovation and Teaching Conference last year, you were superb, you’re a big thinker and I look forward to having more years of big thinkers around me.

Nicholas: [00:34:20] My recommendation today ties to the legacy pedagogy idea and also my new exploration of augmented reality. So I found this free tool out there. It was called a Aurasma. It’s a free augmented reality tool. It’s recently changed its name to HP Reveal. I think they got bought by Hewlett-Packard but the product is just the same.

Nicholas: [00:34:54] And so the concept with this is you take a picture of something that means something to you and then you can make the AR overlay. So when someone holds their camera up to that object or heirloom object, as the case may be, they are given some new information either a video or a Web site or something that you’ve created, a digital artifact you’ve created on your own.

Nicholas: [00:35:17] So a great way to start tagging the things around us that are important and I am trying to use that, get that started here in the college to get different departments to tag objects that might be important to social studies or objects that are important to science educators. But the idea is really to get those folks to think about what are the objects in their environment that are important and worth preserving at a kind of historical context. So HP Reveal.

Bonni: [00:35:48] A lot of people may be familiar with the old school way of kind of doing this called QR codes where they really ugly codes and so it’s sometimes people would take their students on scavenger hunts but then it’s really not visually pleasing. And this kind of technology- my colleague where I work they had a big communication awards show that they do every year and so last year she tried- I don’t know if it was the same tool or something like it but essentially picture a movie poster. But it was a movie poster to advertise their communication awards.

Bonni: [00:36:22] And then when people would use this app, instead of scanning an ugly QR code they would scan this communication awards movie poster looking thing and it would I think it brought up like a video or- I don’t remember exactly what it was – but what a neat way to integrate… And talk about curiosity. It does so much align with your teaching philosophy and how inspiring you are. Because I’m curious like what could I capture and what would you know what would happen if I put this- I could picture like sort of whether it’s an art gallery or even my friend Doug McKee has big poster sessions for his economics students every year, it doesn’t have to be in art or music it can be in the STEM fields and just peaking that curiosity even more I love it. I can’t wait to experiment.

Nicholas: [00:37:09] I just walk around and I look at all these bulletin boards and so all the faculty and students have put their their papers up, their published papers, and obviously I don’t have time to read them right there. But once we tag them and you hold your phone up to it that person then can give you the abstract in person.

Nicholas: [00:37:27] So again there’s lots of neat stuff. Fun stuff we can do with this learning is fun. How do we make kids curious? How do we make adults curious and nicer to one another? So I think these are really fun technologies with a lot of promise.

Bonni: [00:37:43] Well right back to you in terms of I was so honored to be able to be a keynote for you at your conference and to get to spend time with you and your colleagues in person was truly a treasured experience from last year. And I’m so glad we’re still connected. This is just the beginning.

Nicholas: [00:37:56] Just the beginning.

Bonni: [00:37:58] Yeah I’d love to have you back again because every time we speak I always get so many good things out of the experience. Thank you so much.

Nicholas: [00:38:04] Same. Same, Bonni. You’re the best. Keep doing what you’re doing.

Bonni: [00:38:07] Thanks once again to Nicholas A Holt for joining me on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. He did want me to make you all aware that you’re invited to the conference that he mentioned that I spoke at last year. That’s the University of Georgia College of Education Innovation and Teaching Conference, it’s happening on October 19th this year in 2018 in Georgia and it’s a wonderful conference. It’s a day long event focused on innovation and technology in our teaching. And I’d highly encourage that you check it out.

Bonni: [00:38:41] I’m linking to the page that they’ve got about the conference and he says lots more be added to it in the coming weeks. You can find it on the show notes at teachinginhighered.com/198.

Bonni: [00:38:55] Thanks to all of you for listening. And I’ll see you next time.

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