Time, Space, and Place, with Sheila MacNeill

[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 329, Sheila MacNeill joins me to discuss time, space, and place.

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

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[00:00:21] Bonni: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives, and be even more present for our students.

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[00:00:51] Bonni: Joining me on today’s episode is Sheila MacNeill. She’s an independent consultant, open educator, writer, keynote speaker, and artist specializing in all aspects of supporting digital learning, and teaching primarily within the UK higher education sector. She has over 20 years experience with education, working in a range of national and institutional roles covering curriculum design, assessment and feedback, learning analytics, developing digital capabilities, learning spaces, and almost everything else in between. From September 2017 until June 2020, she was the Chair of the Association for Learning Technology, the UK’s largest membership organization supporting the effective use of learning technology. She’s active on a range of social media and has been blogging for over 15 years on her experiences and thoughts around various aspects of digital teaching and learning. Sheila, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:02] Sheila MacNeill: Hi, glad to be here, Bonni. Thanks for asking me.

[00:02:05] Bonni: It’s an honor to have you on the show. I’m excited about this discussion of time, spaces, and places. I’d love to begin just with this idea of how do you create a distinction between spaces and places?

[00:02:21] Sheila: That’s a really good question to start with, a really tricky one to start with too.

[laughter]

[00:02:26] Bonni: It wasn’t on purpose. I had some thoughts in my head of like, I think this is where I distinguish them. I had a whole good conversation with myself about it.

[00:02:34] Sheila: It’s something over the last six months I’ve been thinking a lot more because it’s been forced upon us because our notions of time, our notions of space, our notions of place have been evolving so quickly with the pandemic situation. The spaces and places that we’ve been very familiar with, not only in education, but in all of our lives have suddenly been taken away from us, or have been transformed into quite different spaces and places in our houses, in our schools, everywhere. I think that’s why we need to really rethink and consider when and how, and why we’re in different places at different times. I think there’s a bit of a cognitive shift that needs to happen for us to really understand what’s happening.

I think we did things very, very quickly because we had to, but now we’re living with some of the consequences of that. We’re actually understanding what that has meant, those shifts have meant to us. I think that’s why I started thinking about that, and particularly in relation to education, why it’s so important because people aren’t going to necessarily be at one collective face to face place, which is what we’re all so familiar with. That’s just not happening and that’s not going to happen in the same way as it has for quite some time yet with physical and social distancing. We’ve got a long way to go before we go back to what our old normal was.

[00:04:04] Bonni: When I think of it, I tend to think of places as a place you would go visit, somewhere you could stand in a place. Then spaces, I tend to think of both as digital spaces or I might think of a generic space, like a classroom space. I wouldn’t say a classroom place unless I meant a specific Heath 108. That’s a place, you know what I mean? I was thinking about that.

[00:04:29] Sheila: I know what you mean. A lot of people think like that. Myself, I still think like that a lot. I think there’s been much more fluidity and the notion porosity of porous boundaries between spaces and places, digital and physical, are becoming much more obvious now and they’re changing so that the space and the place where you are, is digital, but it could be like a fixed place now. I think we’re getting more used to that. It also could be a bit more of a chancy in space as well, somewhere that you’re just using just now because it’s a temporary measure. I think these notions are changing and I did some work with some colleagues, a couple of years ago, building on some research that was done at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Glasgow School of Art, where they were talking about the notion of leaky spaces.

These things that come out of, I suppose, our formal education system, or formal places of work, or study that leak into the community. I think we’re seeing that happening just now there’s been a leakiness of lots of things and lots of places and spaces just now.

[00:05:37] Bonni: Oh, I’m fascinated by that. That’s the first I’ve ever heard that phrase, and it’s so compelling and descriptive.

[00:05:44] Sheila: It’s just that idea, the things that drift out of academia, I guess, most of my work is done in higher education. It’s been interesting, I think the last six months, about that notion of leakiness, because there’s a tiny, tiny little bit that drifts away and some things have a great big splash, are jumped on by the media, usually, the scary things. The things about, “Oh, my God, online education is terrible. We don’t know how to do this,” not the good stuff. This stuff that people have been doing for many, many years, particularly around online and digital education. It is quite an interesting notion, I think. I think it’s a really nice metaphor as well, high knowledge, I suppose, permeates different levels of society in different layers of society.

[00:06:32] Bonni: Part of what you were describing was also reminding me of the inclusiveness and exclusiveness that’s happening all at the same time, where when we meet in digital spaces, the fluidity of that, and just are we doing Teams, are we doing Zoom. The comfort level that some of us have, and the ability for us just to be able to get through what we’re doing now but at the same time, we realize people are being left out. I try really hard never to take it for granted that I have a husband who finds Wi-Fi very, very important to him, but it’s how we both make our livelihoods but it’s also just important to him as a value. We have it in the front yard, in the backyard [laughs] but so many people just to even show up is a challenge.

[00:07:21] Sheila: Absolutely, and I think certainly in the UK, and I think globally, it may be this structural inequality around access to technology, not just to technology, but to data. The cost of that, it’s been brought to the floor through the pandemic because people have been forced– they can’t go into spaces so they wade– You’re talking about access to spaces. I think a lot of people forget that for our students, our universities and colleges and schools, they’re very digitally rich spaces and a place, particularly for our university-level students. They can go and they can tap into that, they can find quiet places or communal spaces they’ve got free Wi-Fi. There’s been consistently just in the UK do a survey of students on digital capabilities and that’s the thing is most important to the students is Wi-Fi, stable Wi-Fi for many, many reasons.

That’s been taken away from people and then everyone’s been in the house. How good is your Wi-Fi connection? I’ve had real problems with my Wi-Fi connection, there’s only two people in my house, and we’re not hammering it that much. How many devices have you got in the house? Then people have been doing quite a lot to get laptops and devices to people but we just weren’t prepared for this. I think a lot of solutions people presume. There’s this presumption about so many things to do with it. We just presume that people will have access. I think is an online conference where we’re talking about some academic staff might not have the same equipment at home as they had in the office. There is one person in the chat, he just couldn’t comprehend why someone would not want to have a nice computer at home and it was like, “Some people might not want to have a computer in their home.”

That’s their choice that you are allowed to live offline, although it’s increasingly difficult to do that. I think there’s lots of things around that about inequality that is good that we’re talking about that now more and actually realizing we can’t just assume that everyone has access to technology, they can afford to do that. I think some of the things that maybe the press are picking up around about online education, and support quite a lot of that when you start digging into it. It’s not the education that’s being offered that’s a problem, it’s actually everything surrounding that as access to the technology to data that actually is at the heart of a lot problem.

[00:09:59] Bonni: You begin your exploration of time spaces and places with the idea of time. One thing that really resonated with me is just this conversation that’s been going on quite a long time and that is, I don’t have enough time to learn or I don’t have enough time for school or I don’t have enough time. You’ve seen this shift a little bit lately with the pandemic, yes?

[00:10:21] Sheila: Yes, I think our notions of time have changed quite a lot. I think there’s never enough time, we always want more time but actually, I think maybe we’re looking at time in a different way. I don’t know about you but for me, March sometimes feels like six years ago– No, six months, other times it feels like six minutes ago and I think we’ve gone through a very up and down time. This is a slight digression but one of the things I was listening to over the BBC on a series of plays partly to help some theaters across the country. There was one from the Pitlochry festival theater in Scotland and it was called Among The Painted People. It was set in Roman times and it’s basically a two-hander between a Pictish witch and a Roman centurion. They have this fascinating conversation about time and it really stuck with me, she wants to find out about Roman culture and Roman ways so he starts explaining time which is quite an alien concept to her.

He draws something, it’s a straight line, it’s a timeline. He goes, “When we start here, we do that.” She said to him, “No, time moves like this.” He says to her, “That’s an asterix.” I think that was a really nice way. For her, time was shifting because she could move in amongst her dream world, her culture, that kind of thing. That really stuck with me when I heard that. I think we need to rethink our notion of time and certainly 9:00 to 5:00, that’s gone out the window, we have to be much more flexible about doing things, we don’t always need to be places at fixed times. I think we do need to really rethink what time means, time on task, engagement time, all our ways of how we manage time I think needs to be changed as well. We need to examine that.

I think again, it’s being forced upon us but I know somebody who said there’s never enough time to do anything but if you want to do something, you will make time which is true to an extent but I think there’s been some of the things I think maybe just now we’ve had to focus on the things that we really want to prioritize. Let’s try and keep that and not lose that when we go back into our old timekeeping ways if you like.

[00:12:45] Bonni: What you just said really resonates with me. I’m really not that interested in conversations about, “I want to learn this technology but I don’t have enough time. I want to do this.” I think I get that Yoda quote in my mind a lot of do or do not, there is no try. Then I realize that can be harsh and people are dealing with realities but I have not had a single conversation with anyone to say like, “I really want to do this but I don’t have enough time.” It’s like, “I need to do this.” The prioritization is just inherent in the getting through this that it’s no longer just, “No, we don’t have enough time but here’s something that is important to me,” and then it comes up so much with what do we need to do to equip ourselves for our teaching.

Again, I don’t want to sound harsh. I worry a little bit. Our kids, we’ve got a six-year-old and an eight-year-old and when they just first started adjusting to going back to school with remote learning, there was this whole thing of– My husband and I, we both work and so there’s lovely opportunities to interview people like you for podcasts and podcasting isn’t super good if you’re interrupted a bunch so it’s like how do we teach them to do transitions at that young of an age? I said to my daughter as we’re talking through it, I said, “How will you know when it’s time to get back on the next session?” She says, “Mommy, I’ll look at a clock.” She looked at me like I was an idiot. [laughs] By the way, is just absolutely stellar at that and she really is conscious of time and has been making it to all her sessions.

You think sometimes, “Oh, what are we training them to do? What is being unlearned in the process of learning how to be ‘on time’ at the age of six?” I don’t know, I’m a very time-oriented person so I don’t think that’s a devastating lesson to learn, it’s the heartache where you want them still to be able to be kids.

[00:14:48] Sheila: It’s difficult. I think that’s that kind of management of– Now we’re having a bit of a flip, if you are doing something online synchronously like we’re having this conversation, you’ll come to that on time, you don’t have the excuse of, “Oh, I missed the bus,” and was chatting in the corridor because it’s really up to you to get from whatever part of the house or whatever part of the room you were to get online. Again, I suppose that’s more social conventions and I think there’s something about our conventions and about our– I suppose maybe our cultural structures that we need to maybe be reexamining just now. Obviously, there’s pressure for people to go back to “normal” but we’re not going to be able to do that for a while though.

[00:15:37] Bonni: I was chuckling while you’re sharing that example because I think, yes, we don’t have an excuse that we missed the bus but it’s a very believable excuse that we just had no notion of what day it was. You could totally see, “Oh, I’m so sorry I missed it. I thought it was Thursday.” [laughs] Yet in my mind, I just completely had no idea what time or day it was.

[00:15:57] Sheila: I got mixed, I was supposed to join a webinar yesterday, it was just in the audience but I got my different time zone and I got completely– I looked up the wrong time. I don’t know how and I just missed it and I was like, “You know what–” Dismissed it but yes, there are those things and it’s just getting used to different things. I suppose different contexts which it comes down to and I think just reminding ourselves that we are in a different context now so we have to be cognizant about that and everything that we do.

[00:16:29] Bonni: Another big shift that’s happening around space is that we are having to discover, maybe rediscover new ways of being and belonging, that’s such an essential part of just what being at college is all about. We know through all the research that belonging is something that will help students thrive in their academics and be able to persist through graduation. What are you seeing about new ways of being and belonging?

[00:17:01] Sheila: I think that’s such a good point. I think this whole notion of being a student and being a lecturer, actually just being at university or college just now, it’s changing because it’s going to be really different because there are going to be some limited face to face opportunities there, not just formal but informal, that’s gone. I think it’s possible, but how we are and how we can be and how we will be in our rules is changing. Again, this goes back to time, I think we’re going to have to take a bit more time to do things, particularly those kinds of socialization things and allowing our students a bit more time to get comfortable with this new way of being a student. Particularly for new students, for first years, it’s going to be their first time that they’ve been at universities, a very, very different experience.

They can speak to some of their peers but they just went through this emergency situation in the last six months. That’s not normalized yet. Again, for returning students, they’re going to have to learn new ways of being at university as well. I think we just need to take a bit more time, step back maybe a bit from maybe slight obsession with curriculum and discipline and actually take a more holistic view of community and how we interact and how we can be together and how we can be apart because obviously, you need that space apart as well but how we can do that and different times and spaces and places that work for all of us. That’s going to take quite a while to figure out, you have to be constantly talking about that. We have to find out what works for our students and why.

Yes, things are going to be challenging but there’s enough experience within the education sector, within different disciplines. There’s some great ways to teach online, there really are. I think it’s going to be quite exciting as well but we have to maybe just not expect everything to follow the same timelines, if you like, as before. To go back to that story, I think it is going to be more like the asterix, I think there’s going to be a lot more backwards and forwards and up and down and roundabout and that’s okay, that’s really okay.

[00:19:35] Bonni: When you talk about a different notion of time and when we show up, I think I know what you mean but I want to break it down for listeners because you’re not meaning that sometimes we’re going to show up on Thursdays at 4:00 and sometimes we’re going to show up on Tuesdays at 4:00 but to take away the privileging of synchronous scheduled things that occur at a given time, which by the way, I think we both would argue are wonderful experiences, but they’re not the only way to experience. I know for yourself, just in your own personal learning and your own journey, your commitment to blogging is such a good example of this. I’ll be sharing actually about one of your posts, later on, I don’t want to give too much away, but I think about, here I am, able to read a post that you wrote, I can’t remember how long ago, but it wasn’t today and it wasn’t this noon here in California, and just the ways in which we can connect in that community, somewhat out of sync with each other.

[00:20:39] Sheila: Yes. Absolutely. I think that’s, again, going back to that time thing that absolutely going back to that time thing. I think you just pick up that so well, that privilege of– I think there’s been an assumption that face-to-face synchronous is best. I think we’ve seen that particularly through the media in terms of– Well, certainly in the UK I’m sure it’s probably the same in the States as well, it’s all this, “Oh, but you’ve got to pay full fees,” and you’re only getting online. That’s probably might actually be a better education than your educational experience. I think we’ve got to get away from those assumptions about, “Yes, you have to be there on Thursday.” I think it goes back I’m quite passionate about curriculum design and designing learning experiences.

If there’s one good thing to come out of this whole horrible time, is that this kind of refocus on design and actually thinking and planning what you’re doing in terms of your teaching, which I think everyone needs to be doing anyway. That’s good. Absolutely, you can do things at different times, but you do need to have structure for students and as teaching staff, you need to have that structure as well. There’s got to be flexibility of course, but having a structure, being much more open about what we’re expecting from students in terms of how we’re assessing them, I think we have to get rid of exams. Particularly final exams, should be much more a continuous process of sharing, of reflecting. That takes time because that’s a big change for a lot of people but I think that can be ultimately much more rewarding for students because they can have something that they can be proud of, that they can show to other people that starts opening up the whole educational experience as well.

I think going back to my blogging, I’ve been blogging for about 14 years now, which I’m still quite astounded, but I started– it was quite interesting because I was actually made to blog. I worked for a national support service and we changed our website and then we basically, a memorandum almost came from on high, that we had to start blogging and I was like, “Oh that’s really odd.” It was a very difficult thing to do, it’s like, “How do you find your tone? How do you find your voice?” I actually I got quite into it, and it actually made me write and I quite liked the freedom of writing a blog as opposed to an academic paper, because basically, I’m a bit lazy. I don’t know how to reference things properly, but also at that point I was going to a lot of international–

The days when we traveled, I was going to conferences, I was doing things and I find this a really good way for me to, instead of maybe doing what you’d call, maybe a road trip summary report that maybe would have been e-mailed to people or put on a mailing list. I keep it on my blog and it got a bigger audience. Actually, I started to realize that my blog was actually my professional memory, if you like, as well as my portfolio, because if something was significant, I tend to blog. Still, if something is significant, I tend to write blog posts about it. It’s worked for me, but it did take a while to do that, but I’m glad I’ve done it because I can’t remember a thing anymore, it’s quite useful to have that, to look back on.

[00:23:56] Bonni: Another thing that you stress that we should be doing more of, or maybe rethinking entirely is digital capabilities. Talk first about the distinction that you make between focusing on our personal digital capabilities as well as at the institutional level?

[00:24:15] Sheila: This goes back to what we were talking about, about being at university. I think, certainly over the last six months I’ve been having thoughts about, particularly the first-year experience that maybe what we need to do is take a step back from the discipline focus. I’m not saying that you forget about your discipline, I’m not saying that at all, but maybe, concentrate on wider digital capabilities, so research, licensing, working together, finding out how to work online using the different systems. Just actually using Zoom, using Teams, using Collaborate Ultra, whatever conference exists at the university, but doing it in, I suppose, a less risky way. Maybe something that can take people through the process of how you post something, how you share your screen, how you share a picture, getting people comfortable with having a conversation in a synchronous environment.

Sometimes you forget that, particularly if you’re in a lecture, not many people are going to speak in a lecture and ask questions in the lecture, but how can we get people comfortable with this new environment? There’s these things we do face-to-face to get people comfortable with group working, in breakout groups, getting staff comfortable with doing those kind of things. I think there’s a tendency sometimes where people think, “Well, all these ‘young people’, they’re always on their phone, they’re TikToking, they’re doing everything.” That’s completely different because the motivation and the risks there are different than doing something for your friends and family. Running a Zoom quiz for your family, which was hugely popular here over lockdown is completely different than actually one of your first assignments in university or colleges, “Can you develop a quiz for this class?” It’s going to be assessed and it’s going to be marked.

That’s quite a good activity, but you can introduce it in a much more low stakes way for people to get more comfortable with it. There’s research, we know that actually, there’s an assumption about, I suppose, younger people’s comfort and capabilities arraigned about using technology in an educational context, they still need that scaffolding, they need that kind of educational support to do that, to understand what they’re doing. Also, quite a lot of the time they’ll be using systems that they haven’t used before or using them in a way that they haven’t used before. Having a quiz night with your family and your friends is completely different than doing it in your class, especially if it’s a new group of peers. I think we need to look at that and help develop– I think capabilities and confidence go hand-in-hand, so building people’s confidence.

Also, I think the context is really important just now because there is no discipline that COVID-19 doesn’t impact on. There’s things that we need to be questioning, we are living in such a hugely political time, there are so many things happening just now, and we need to ensure that our students have the information, literacy skills to be assessing information, to be questioning data, to be finding the truth. There are so many things just now that we– it’s incumbent on us as educators to try and make sure that we have critically engaged students who can question why decisions are being made. We can have an informed debate, not black and white arguments that we’re seeing at certain levels because the world is not black and white.

We need to ensure that we’re equipping our young people to do that because it’s a really scary world that we’re living in just now, we need to make sure that people have the skills to critique what’s happening and understand their context and understand history, and to be able to question and research and get people engaged with our scholarly activity.

[00:28:25] Bonni: I realize what I’m about to ask is in no way, shape or form the most important thing you just shared, but I’m discovering a cultural difference possibly that I really want to learn more about. What are these zoom quizzes? I want to hear about this because they sound like fun. [laughs]

[00:28:40] Sheila: Yes. Well, during lockdown here in the UK or anyway, maybe it’s just a Scotlands thing. Lots of families– and particularly because we can travel more than five miles, lots of families we’re having– certainly extended families and friends were having extended quizzes, zoom quizzes, they were having a quiz night on Zoom. Basically, one person in the family would develop a quiz and everybody else had to do it. It was a bit fun for people, it was quite a thing for a bit. I think depending on your family and friend circle, some people would have taken it much more seriously than others. I know there were some paps here that normally would do weekly pop quiz, did them online, there was a bit of like they rely on you to mark your own things and be honest about it. It was just, I suppose, a thing that people were doing, and again, it was that communicating with family and friends.

[00:29:43] Bonni: This is reminding me of one of my daughter’s teachers, in the summer they were doing this “get ready for school” little program. They had them take out a deck of cards and they were teaching or reviewing math skills by, “Oh, what card did you draw? What card did you draw?” I’m fascinated by these ways people are being so creative to come up with rather than trying to pull you into a screen as a passive participant to actually draw people into your context and your experience where you are. I find what’s happening there to be just so beautiful and innovative and just so fun to see.

[00:30:25] Sheila: I think that’s an extension of things. A good friend of mine, her daughter’s eight, and she loves art, about every eight year old loves art. I’m an artist as well. I’m sending her a few video art lessons, just very simple things. I’d be like, “Can you draw this?” I got her to– Just explain, “Draw a tea–” because she has a lovely little teapot that we talk about every time I go into her house. I was like, “Well, what need to do is for a minute, I want you to draw the teapot. Then, I want you to move it and then, draw it. You do that for five minutes. You almost get a moving picture.” We did that. I got her to do without actually looking at the same thing, with her actually looking at the teapot, so you have these …

I sent her a little video. She made me a little video and sent it back to me. Those things are great. I think that’s again building up digital capabilities in a different way. She was also doing something quite active. It wasn’t just we were talking earlier before we started about notions of screen time and how that’s changing. This is much more active, so things like that. There’s a huge amount that you can do that are quite creative. I think that we’ve been doing for years and years. It’s just a different medium. They’re just being delivered in a different medium.

[00:31:43] Bonni: As an artist, you’re illustrating right now this idea that constraints can really enhance creativity.

[00:31:50] Sheila: Yes, absolutely.

[00:31:52] Bonni: It is stuff we’ve been doing, but yet we’re just finding even more different ways of thinking about that.

[00:31:58] Sheila: I think as well that’s why this notion of time and being, needs to change. We need to give ourselves some time to be and to be a bit more comfortable and not just assume that if you’re going to be teaching that everything has to be online and asynchronous, you have to do everything. It’s like, “No, you don’t have to do everything.” Join your students, there’s lots of things that you will know as a teacher. It’s having that time to just be able to translate that into something that might work and is going to be effective with your group of students. That takes time. It’s not always going to work. We have to build in that time for actually learning from each other and finding out why things don’t work. It might be just something quite simple in that you’ve maybe got too many people trying to do something or is maybe just a bit too complicated or equally actually, you thought something was maybe going to take half an hour, and it took five minutes.

We have to talk about these things. We all have to be sharing. That’s again, the more open we can be about that, and that goes back to blogging and reflective practice. It’s one of the things I just keep saying this all the time, it’s been wonderful to see the sharing of practice across the sector internationally that’s been happening. That’s been a fantastic thing, people really helping each other. We need to keep that going and share what works and what doesn’t.

[00:33:20] Bonni: This is the point in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. You just provided me with the perfect segue into the first thing that I’d like to recommend. That is a post that you wrote called “The upside down and in-between: The uncertainty of where I am right now”. It feels to me like more than ever just to have other people naming their experience in very transparent, raw, vulnerable ways, it just makes me breathe a sigh of relief to know, “Oh, I’m not alone.” I just thank you for your transparency in this post. I thank you for naming so many of the feelings that so many of us are having but also, of course, your own unique experience and what you’ve been going through.

I just want to recommend that everyone head over and read your post. While you’re there over on the right-hand side, you’ll see a list of recent posts. Before you know it, you’ll be enveloped in such a wealth of 15 years of blogging extravagance. I just thank you for your generosity. Again, it takes courage, it takes vulnerability to do what you do on your blog. It’s just a delight to have been introduced to it. Thank you for all of that. My second one, I’m actually going to play it. It’s a video clip. You’ll get the gist of it because it’s from a movie, I believe, back in the ’80s called The Jerk. It was with Steve Martin.

In this particular scene, Steve Martin’s character is in bed with Bernadette Peters’ character. It’s not that clip, by the way, it’s a very innocent clip. She’s asleep in this clip. It’s so classic for what you were talking about with time because every time when you go like, “I think we last got connected possibly 62 years ago or 6 minutes ago. I don’t know which it was.” Every time someone says something like that, it reminds me of this clip. I’m going to let it play a minute or something. Steve Martin is in bed with Bernadette Peters. Her character is asleep. Here’s what he has to say since he met her, what’s happened and how it relates to time.

[00:35:24] Steve: I know we’ve only known each other for four weeks and three days, but to me, it seems like nine weeks and five days. First day seemed like a week. The second day seemed like five days. The third day seemed like a week again. The fourth day seemed like eight days. The fifth day, you went to see your mother and that seemed just like a day. Then, you came back. Later, on the sixth day, in the evening when we saw each other that started seeming like two days. In the evening, it seemed like two days spilling over into the next day and that started seeming like four days. At the end of the sixth day into the seventh day, it seemed like a total of five days. The sixth day seemed like a week and a half.

[00:36:17] Bonni: That is a clip from The Jerk. I think everyone should go and click and have a watch. What an amazing at least parallel for me and how [laughs] I’ve been thinking about time because time is not thought of in days anymore. At least, it’s a little more complicated than that for me. Sheila, I’m going to pass it over to you for your recommendations. By the way, have you ever seen that movie? It’s from a long while back.

[00:36:41] Sheila: I recognize it, but I’m going to have to watch it again. Now, I think I might have a long time ago. That’s great. Thank you so much for the recommendation.

[00:36:52] Bonni: Of course, I loved that post. I loved all the other ones I read when I was up there.

[00:36:57] Sheila: My first recommendation is something that I watched earlier this week on Netflix. It’s called John Was Looking For Aliens. It’s 15 minutes. I’m not going to say anything else about it. It’s just a lovely story on many, many levels this mini-documentary. The other thing that I wanted to recommend and you probably know about this as well is that there’s been a set of online teaching resources that have been created and shared through Equity Unbound- OneHE, a community building resources for online teaching. It’s just a fantastic set of open resources. Many people that I usually admire like Maha Bali and Catherine Cronin and Mia Zamora, they’ve just got these videos. The great thing about it is they’re actually going through their activities.

There’s icebreakers and things you can do for synchronous online teaching. Fantastic set of resources. I think that’s well worth everyone looking at. That’s my main two recommendations.

[00:37:55] Bonni: Sheila, it’s been such a joy to be connected with you. I’m so glad for today’s conversation. I feel like it’s going to continue in one way or the other whether it’s me keeping subscribing to your blog and also following you on social media. I just thank you so much for your time and sharing your wisdom today.

[00:38:11] Sheila: No, thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. It’s been great. Thank you so much.

[music]

[00:38:19] Bonni: I was so glad to have been connected with Sheila MacNeill by a former podcast guest, Deb Baff. It took me a while to catch up with her on my end of things, but I was so glad for this conversation. If you’d like to check out the show notes for today’s episode, they’re over at teachinginhighered.com/329. You’re also welcome to sign up for our occasional updates over at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. When you do, you’ll get a free ebook with 19 tools that will help you with both teaching as well as productivity. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:39:13] [END OF AUDIO]

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

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.