Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Today on episode number 560 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, equip students to dialogue across differences using an AI guide with Simon Cullen and Nicholas DiBella.Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:26]:
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. I've been so excited about airing today's episode ever since I first heard about swaybeta.ai. And I'm gonna warn you that I might sound like I'm making a commercial for it, but this is not a commercial other than sharing a project that I'm incredibly intrigued by and excited for you to hear about. Even beyond that, though, I'm excited for you to hear about Simon Cullen's work and his teaching and Nicholas DiBella's research as well. And so let me tell you a bit about each of them and about Sway. Simon Cullen is a faculty member and artificial intelligence and education fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:36]:
He developed the award winning dangerous ideas in science and society course at CMU, helping students to explore diverse viewpoints on polarizing topics by teaching them the art of constructive disagreement. His research combines philosophy, cognitive science, and educational technology to improve reasoning, communication, and understanding across moral divides. And also joining us today is Nicholas DiBella. He's an intelligence community post doctoral research fellow based in the department of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. His research spans epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of probability with a focus on developing methods to improve reasoning and communication in context involving uncertainty. And I became first intrigued by their work learning about Sway. And I'm gonna read from their website because I think they say it so succinctly, and I'm just excited for us to get to today's conversation. So I'm reading from swaybeta.ai about this particular tool.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:55]:
Quote, talk more, fight less. Sway connects students with differing perspectives into one on one chats and facilitates better discussions between them. Inspired by John Stuart Mill's radical view that engaging with opposing perspectives is an essential tool for improving reasoning and solving complex problems, Sway aims to create online environments where students can discuss controversial issues more openly and constructively. Simon Cullen and Nicholas DiBella, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Nicholas Dibella [00:03:34]:
Thanks so much for having me here.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:03:36]:
So glad to be having this conversation with both of you. Simon, I first have to ask, please tell us about your course. I'm so intrigued. Tell us about dangerous ideas at Carnegie Mellon.

Simon Cullen [00:03:49]:
Sure. Carnegie

Simon Cullen [00:03:56]:
Yes. So this is a course that I started to think about in 2020, and everyone's familiar with how what the nation was like at that time. It was, obviously this was sort of the peak of the racial reckoning. But I had been feeling for quite a long time that the speech culture on campus was challenging. There are a lot of important topics that I felt like I wanted to discuss, and I couldn't. And I was also wondering whether or not my students felt that way. So I started a survey, a speech survey, where I had CMU students anonymously respond to a bunch of questions, many of them from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or adapted from the big survey they do every year. And I just what I what I found was so striking and so sad as an educator.

Simon Cullen [00:04:41]:
You know, I'm I mean, there are so many of these comments, but some of them really just stand out. I remember one student wrote, when my parents sent me to CMU, they told me to stay quiet about controversial topics. Now the student said, I know that I can never voice an opinion right of center or even centrist unless I'm prepared to be called, you know, whatever nasty words. And this was just so common. It became really obvious students were missing some key intellectual developmental milestones surrounding disagreement. I'm sure we're gonna talk a lot more about disagreement and why why we think that's so important and so valuable. But they just didn't seem to have a space on campus or in their personal lives to have these challenging discussions, to have that space to to be themselves, to try out ideas, to admit when they're not sure, and to learn from each other. That just wasn't happening.

Simon Cullen [00:05:31]:
And so I decided I would build a class that was entirely devoted to that. So every lecture was about, you know, some some controversial topics we would cover for multiple lectures. But, you know, we would start off talking about the campus speech culture itself and and also liberal arts education. What are we all doing here? What's the point of it? That's an important thing to think about at the beginning of your education, and I do try to teach mostly freshmen. So we also talk about abortion. Most of my students have not heard cogent arguments on the other side of whatever they whatever their own position is because they've been so siloed. We also then talk about things like genetic engineering, medical assistance in dying for psychiatric patients. We talk about gun rights, whether or not you have a right to own a gun, affirmative action.

Simon Cullen [00:06:17]:
One of the, spiciest topics was for students at least is transracialism, whether we whether or not it's possible for a person to transition to a different race than the I don't have a great term for it, the race assigned at birth or the ancestral race. So and then, you know, all the way through to the existence of God and the problem of evil. And in every one of these classes, the point is to really just try and confront students with the strongest arguments I can find, ideally for the thing they don't believe. So that was the that was really the beginning of it. I offered it for the first time in 2021. And the response from students was just extraordinary. They were they were really game. And most of the anxieties people have about talking to students about these sorts of topics, telling students all perspectives are really welcome here as long as they're argued for.

Simon Cullen [00:07:07]:
And the fact that you don't like something or the fact that something makes you feel uncomfortable, that is not an argument against it. They responded really well. And it just exploded from there. So within a few years, it was, you know, the biggest, hall on campus would fill that up and then still have hundreds more on the waiting list. So it's just an extraordinary an extraordinary demonstration, I think, of this hunger to have a place to to have these discussions.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:07:32]:
When I was listening to your sharing, I kept thinking about in my own teaching. This has not been a centerpiece, by the way, of my teaching, your your work, which is why it's so fascinating to me, but the idea of facilitating these difficult conversations. But I even just feel it's so challenging just to build up trust that you'll be living out a set of values because there's so much trust. And what I often will refer to is unlearning, that it's actually harder if you're wanting to facilitate some kind of new set of skills, a new approach, that it becomes more difficult. We have to unlearn things. So I wanna bring up one other thing, and that is you mentioned personal. So you're talking about an educational context, which you you just lightly sort of skimmed over personal. And as somebody who's dealing with the sandwich generation who was raised by parents with very different views, I know it got ingrained in me.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:08:31]:
I think it was like I was born, and two seconds later, I began my learning process that you just don't talk about these things. I'd love to hear your reflections on this idea of unlearning and if you have found that to be the case in in your work. And then, also, how do you what are some approaches that you use early, early on to help with that unlearning and to establish the kind of trust that is essential in order for me to respect you enough to start to play with these things that I've been taught not to do?

Simon Cullen [00:09:04]:
Yeah. That's an amazing question. I think unlearning is the right term, and there's a lot of things to unlearn. Basically I mean, it's not just unlearning the the way that people interact on social media where you take the, like, least charitable, most toxic possible interpretation of whatever anyone has said and use that to oppose them. It's the and and also, actually, I think in in a lot of contemporary humanities often a very critic a way a very critical way of looking at the authors of the past, you know, perhaps because of the because they didn't live up to the moral standards of today. It's very opposite of that. You need to take an approach of deep charity where you're really going to try, first of all, to recognize your own fallibility. That's the most important first thing to to do.

Simon Cullen [00:09:52]:
And then you might actually have something to learn, from this other person. So how do we do it? Well, before they even arrive on campus, I send them a video, and and they get the survey, over the summer. And I tell them the first thing they hear from me is if you wish to avoid the risk of being offended, then you should probably not be taking this class. And that the the norms that make this class possible actually require us to be very not just brave and sort of our our true selves, but also humble and willing to listen and learn from others. How do you change norms? I think at a lot of schools, especially like CMU, students are kind of they want to please the teachers that they're they're sort of people pleasers at many, many schools, and they they will go along with a lot of things. So if you tell them the aim is to ridicule and give the least charitable possible interpretation of this they'll go along with that. They'll really get into it. But if you present a different vision of intellectual life where we're going to be grateful for our opponents and really try and charitably interpret their arguments and be open to revising our views in light of them, skin's gone with that too.

Simon Cullen [00:11:09]:
And, actually, I think it's it's a very attractive vision of intellectual life. It's a freeing vision, and a lot of students quickly realize that. So it turns out, at least in my experience, that their students have been pretty happy to go along with this, and many of them do do say, just like what you said, that they've had many, many years of learning that you ought not to talk about these matters.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:11:29]:
Mhmm. Would each of you share about a time when you personally experienced in some visceral way why it is important for us to do this work both for our students, but also within ourselves to be able to have dialogue across difference. Nick, do you have a story that's coming to your mind as you think about this?

Nicholas DiBella [00:11:50]:
Yeah. So I grew up in a big Italian family. I'm a middle child of five kids. It was a very chaotic household, a lot of yelling, a lot of fighting. I saw this, and I asked myself, what's happening here? We're not talking to each other. There are all these problems. How can we fix it? So as a, I don't know, I guess, a nine or 10 year old, I I instituted family meetings in our in our family, and we would just go around the table and talk about how we're feeling and, you know, why what you did made me upset, how did that make you feel, and try to get to the bottom of issues. Look.

Nicholas DiBella [00:12:26]:
Part of it also is as a middle child, I'd like the attention, you know, moderating these, these family meetings. But, yeah, ever since I was a kid, I was just really just really struck by the importance of communication and how things go wrong when we're not communicating, when we're not listening to the other person or even caring about what the other person thinks. So, yeah, throughout my life, I've been a kind of peacekeeper in various contexts for better or worse. But, definitely, yeah, definitely as a kid, the importance of communication across difference has been important to me.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:13:00]:
Simon, what's coming to mind for you?

Simon Cullen [00:13:03]:
So I think my early religious education, probably the first thing. But I rather than give an autobiographical, explanation, I I think there's a really strong empirical case for this. So, you know, I on your podcast, you've had many people who talk about a lot of findings from psychology and behavioral economics that suggest humans are kind of stupid. You know, we're biased. We attend selectively tend to create arguments that oppose them. And this raises a really big mystery, which is if we're individually also stupid, how is it that collectively we managed to do so many remarkable things that require true problem solving, ingenuity, and intelligence? And and I think that we have now, you know, sixty or seventy years of of evidence of how that works, and I wish it I wish it was more popular in psychology today. But disagreement is a key part of that, and view having a diverse range of viewpoints and a process for extracting the best parts of each of them seems to be really core to our collective intelligence. So I just think the empirical grounds are are really strong.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:14:13]:
You know I wanna dig into that religious education story, but that that being said, I I also want us to hear about your project. So I'll just save that for the next time we get to talk. How about that? We'll dive deep into that. Nick, you've got something to you've got something to add, though.

Nicholas DiBella [00:14:29]:
Yeah. Yeah. I was just gonna say, so Simon and I are both philosophers. And in philosophy, we always embrace disagreement. Like, the the most impactful conversations I've had in philosophy have been vehement disagreements with with other philosophers. And this is, you know, just that's completely essential to the to the field of philosophy. So it's just natural. I think it's it's just part of Simon and my instincts to just really embrace disagreement when done in a respectful way, when done in a way that is reasoned, in a way that places an emphasis on clarity, an emphasis on understanding.

Nicholas DiBella [00:15:07]:
So

Simon Cullen [00:15:09]:
I wanted to add, to that, Nick. I thought, no. You're, like, you're exactly right to go to that path. In philosophy, it is a deep honor to have someone criticize your work. Like, that that is what we go for. So if someone comes to your school and gives a talk where they really engage deeply and make a lot of trouble for your views, that is the highest honor you can receive because that's how we improve our views. At least that's the that's the idea. And I think that this is a truth for for everyone.

Simon Cullen [00:15:38]:
You know, if we're in mathematics or maybe some areas of hard science, we've got something approaching, proof or a demonstration. But if we're trying to figure out how to live together, what do we owe each other? What do we owe nonhuman animals? Well, there's not going to be any proof for those sorts of beliefs. And the best thing I can say on behalf of my philosophical and my normative beliefs is that so far, I haven't found anyone who convinced me otherwise, and I've tried to be receptive to their arguments. I think that's the best any of us ever has to go on.

Nicholas DiBella [00:16:13]:
And I might argue that, there might be proofs in some of these cases, but we don't have to disagree about whether it's possible to prove any of these.

Simon Cullen [00:16:20]:
Mhmm.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:16:21]:
Well, I don't wanna let too much more time go by without the whole reason why I was so excited to speak with you both. And that is this project that you've introduced in the past year or at least introduced in a public way called Sway. This is a chat app that uses AI to help people understand each other. So you've talked about some of the benefits of us understanding each other better, some of the ways that we might think of honoring one another in our humanness. How did AI ever come up as a possible way to build some of these skill sets?

Nicholas DiBella [00:16:56]:
Yeah. So a few things happened. So one, we saw the enormous success of Simon's course and and how helpful it was to getting students to talk to each other about difficult issues, students talking about how valuable it was for them. But Simon's course required a lot of teaching staff. So not only Simon, the lecturer, but also a bunch of teaching staff that he trained to moderate discussion sections among students, and that's a lot of resources. So we asked ourselves, well, how can we take the lessons learned from Simon's class and somehow implement them at scale without involving a huge amount of resources? So it would be ideal if we could plant 10,000 Simon Cullens across the country, if we could clone him somehow. We looked into it. It's not possible.

Nicholas DiBella [00:17:42]:
It's not feasible at the moment. But, the next best thing that we thought of was to use the cutting edge AI that was coming out to create, basically, the AI equivalent of an experienced human teacher to guide discussions, to enable students to have constructive disagreements with each other, to enable students to hear each other better, to, to think more clearly, to to push them in ways where they might be implicitly assuming things that they don't realize. And, so that's that was really the genesis of of Sway. It was both a recognition of the enormous successes of Simon's Chorus. And two, all these AI tools were coming out, and we thought, well, we gotta use it in some way. Are they powerful enough? Are they intelligent enough? Are they emphatic enough to be useful for doing something like Simon did, Endangerous Ideas, but at a massive scale?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:18:40]:
Now since you both have taught me what an honor it will be to disagree with you, I don't normally disagree on this podcast, but I'm actually gonna first share with you a quick anecdote, and then I'm gonna disagree. So brace yourselves. The anecdote I wanted to share is on a past episode, and I will put a link to this in the show notes for anyone who missed this one. I had people come on and tell me about or tell the listeners what what were considered dirty words throughout the peak of the COVID nineteen pandemic that just they themselves and their colleagues had such a visual reaction to. And scale is one of those words that shows up as really, like, for some people, just like, don't tell me I need to scale your breaking education. So I would pause it to you that even if we could have clones of Simon or if it was scalable in the way you describe, that from my very, very limited understanding of your work, you're actually getting some benefits from it not being Simon. Because as much as you try to introduce people to your values, introduce people to your teaching principles, You're still gonna be you. And if I was a student at Carnegie Mellon, I would be very intimidated by you, and I would be tempted to remain in my current state, which would to be very small and intimidated by you and intimidated by the school, you know, in in terms of all the things I've learned prior to meeting you, even if you were more scalable, if your teaching assistants were more scalable, I think there's something about it being an AI.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:15]:
What's your response to that? Or do we need to debate more, or or are you are you buying that there there's something about it not being this authority figure, not being even a human?

Simon Cullen [00:20:25]:
I really think you're on to something interesting, and I've I've been thinking about it myself. So I spend a lot of time trying to get the student, yeah, to see. I'm not there with any agenda other than to help them think things through in a much deeper way than they're used to. So if they start out pro choice and end up pro life or vice versa, I don't care. All I care about is whether they hold their views more rationally at the end, but I have to work to convince them of that. You know? It probably helps that I'm I I don't sound American. That's probably probably a benefit. But I look at the way people respond to Sway and the AI guide on Sway.

Simon Cullen [00:21:05]:
I think about that guide, and I think it actually has some real advantages over me exactly for the reason that that you mentioned are not just students also in our empirical studies, just regular folks seem to be quite happy deferring to it when it corrects factual errors or points out an assumption. They never think it's, you know, this is this this thing's got an agenda. So in a way, I aspire to be as neutral as as or to be perceived at least as as neutral as a students and folks seem to perceive the AI. So, yeah, I I I actually agree that there there are certain advantages to to having it not be a human being.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:44]:
And I would also say that you use the word neutral. I I guess I've been now ingrained through all the conversations over this decade plus of podcasting that there isn't really such a thing. I mean, you do have it's it's constrained with the values that you wanted to have. So this would be a perfect time for you to just kinda talk us through. What what is this AI guide? How is it constrained? What's how how does this all work in order to live out these values that you espouse?

Nicholas DiBella [00:22:10]:
Yeah. So what we the the way that we have designed the guide is is to be as neutral as possible. Yeah. So perfect neutrality, who knows whether that's even a coherent concept, but we try to make it as neutral and unbiased as possible. Really, what that amounts to is giving each student a platform to express their ideas, express their arguments. So provided that the students are engaging in discussion in good faith and sincerely hold the view that they're trying to trying to to argue for, Guide will just guide them along. Guide isn't going to criticize their views. That's a very important value that we've distilled in Guide.

Nicholas DiBella [00:22:52]:
We've made guide as unjudgmental as possible. We've made guide a very welcoming presence. And, I mean, so thus far, we haven't actually received any complaints from students saying that guide is unfair or biased towards them or has a liberal agenda or has a a right wing agenda. I'm sure eventually that will happen, but it hasn't happened thus far. And when when it does happen, we're going to make modifications as we always do. Anytime there are issues with the AI, we make modifications. We're very receptive to to student feedback. But thus far, we've just tried to instill the values of being a a good teacher and to guide and being an unbiased and welcoming presence.

Simon Cullen [00:23:33]:
And, just to add one thing on that. So in our empirical studies, we have people talk about all sorts of topics, and we really are interested in people who disagree. So we try to pair our participants into groups where we're going to maximize the distance between their opinions. So when we have them talk about things like, the Israel Palestine conflict, trans women in women's sports, January 6, the twenty twenty election was stolen. I mean, really toxic stuff. Right? I remember it so I want just to put a slight modification on something Nick said. So it's true it won't the guide won't criticize you, but guide will criticize errors in your reasoning or will point out when you're assuming something substantive that maybe shouldn't just be taken for granted in the context of this. But the way we actually get it to be more neutral is we've sort of operationalized it.

Simon Cullen [00:24:29]:
So if we have a discussion on January 6 or funding for Ukraine, and we get an expert who's on one side of this debate and an expert who's on the other side of this debate, and they both read the transcript and agree that our AI wasn't favoring the other side, That's it's not perhaps knocked down proof, but it's a pretty good way for us to get a sense just in practice of what this kind of neutrality amounts to. I'll say, you know, one more example. If a student asks a guide, hey, guide. I'm kinda struggling with this. Can you can you help me develop this argument? Guide, hopefully, will say, absolutely. Let me help you. But at the end of that comment, it'll say, and since I've helped you on this, I'm gonna make some suggestions for your partner as well. Really simple thing.

Simon Cullen [00:25:14]:
A human teacher should probably do the same thing depending on your aim, certainly, if you have my aims. But this is these are the kinds of just practical ways in which we try to promote this sense that guide isn't stacked against anyone. It it it isn't this it isn't the sage on the stage. It's not trying to direct you. It's the guide on the side. It's just trying to be there to support the discussion, to deepen the discussion, and to help with those moments where it can get really difficult.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:25:41]:
Nick had mentioned when he was commenting, he used the phrase, as long as you're making the argument in good faith. And that is something else I noticed through reviewing student comments and reviewing some of the sample. I don't know if you call them transcripts. I can't recall. Is it a transcript I'm looking at on the website? Absolutely. I'm seeing as if I'm in there making my impassioned argument, I I can do that. But if I make a personal attack on the other person, that message isn't going through. Would you talk a little bit about how it would moderate if I were to break one of the norms you're trying to help me be able to establish? Talk about how that process might look like where I where I to go make a personal attack or any other things that come to mind where it would go, woah.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:27]:
Woah. Woah. How about we before that message goes through to the other side, let's let's think about that for a bit. Nick, do you wanna talk about what that process looks like?

Nicholas DiBella [00:26:35]:
Yeah. So something that we're always doing is anytime a student sends a message, we first check to see whether it's sufficiently constructive and respectful to send through as is. But if a student tries to send a message that is potentially unconstructive, uncivil, making a clear personal attack on the other person, then we actually suggest a rephrasing of that message. So so, you know, after half a second, the student will get a rephrasing, and it'll try to capture the the point that the student was trying to make, but in a more constructive, more respectful way. And then the student has the opportunity to either accept that suggestion or generate a new one or just dismiss it and send it as is. And and in that sort of case, then guide will come in and say, hey. It's not cool to just level personal attacks on the other person. Let's actually focus on the issues.

Nicholas DiBella [00:27:28]:
Let's keep the focus on the issues, on the reasons involved, and let's try to play nice. And depending on how how well the students respond to that, if they don't respond well, then, guide will get increasingly more assertive.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:45]:
Yeah. And before we talk more in-depth about this, there's something that happens after the conversation then concludes. So I'm having this conversation with someone who sees this issue differently than I do. I can be coached along the way from guide where I to start to break some of these norms. You want me to create habits around good healthy discussion, develop my arguments. I'm really intrigued by what happens next. So once the conversation has concluded, first, I'd love to have you just comment on what's considered concluded, and then tell us what happens next as learners.

Nicholas DiBella [00:28:18]:
So at the end of each Sway chat, students take what we call an understanding quiz, where what what happens is it's an automatically generated quiz that asks each student a question or or series of questions about the other students' views and their reasons. So it's not just what did this person say, but we're really trying to test them to see how well they've understood what exactly was the other students viewed. So it's really about seeing how well each students have understood the other students' reasoning process and and mind, really. So that happens. And, really, this is really just to test how well the students have been hearing each other, how well they've been understanding each other, how well they've been reasoning. And we think it's a very valuable thing to do after the conversation.

Simon Cullen [00:29:07]:
I just put a, another point on there. We can do a lot of analysis. So what we have at the end of this discussion between the students and the way we reach it is somewhat arbitrary. The instructor gets to specify not only the topics of the discussion, but also the approximate length. So once we reach that approximate length, we now have a transcript that we're not going to allow the instructors to read because we want the students to have that private space where they can try out ideas without fear. That's also another reason why we only do one on one. Very occasionally, if we have to an odd number of students, then we'll have to create a group of three. But almost all of our discussions are in pairs.

Simon Cullen [00:29:47]:
That's to try and help students overcome the pressure towards self censorship, which has been such a big problem in regular classrooms. But, anyway, we end up with this transcript now. We're not gonna let the instructor read it, but we can read it it with our AI and try to get as much insight into how the students are thinking, how are they engaging with the material, what course materials are they drawing on in their discussions. We can provide those kinds of summaries in a de identified way so the instructor gets this hopefully pretty deep insight into where their class is at, but without ever invading the students' privacy by actually listening in to their discussions.

Nicholas DiBella [00:30:28]:
And just to clarify, we only ever do analysis of student transcripts when they consent to provide those messages with us. So we ask all the students before they use Sway whether they consent to share their message transcripts, their chat transcripts with us so that we can improve Sway and do educational research. So something that we're able to do with the de identified transcripts is to is to really cross reference all these different things, cross reference the understanding scores, the understanding quiz scores, along with a bunch of the other post discussion survey questions we ask. We ask questions like, I found it valuable to engage with somebody who disagreed with me, or I felt comfortable having such a discussion, or I changed my mind about something during this discussion. And so what we're able to do with with these students who consent to share their data with us is we we we have this big dataset to learn how to improve Sway and and learn how to modify, guide, and really have make make the discussions as good as possible and eventually share this research with other educational researchers.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:36]:
Another aspect that hasn't come up yet I mean, it's implied in everything that you've just said, but I found it fascinating that these conversations take place over a lot longer span of time than if I were sitting in your lecture hall turning to the person to the side of me. I find this fascinating for a number of reasons. For myself, as I think about my own weaknesses over more than two decades of teaching, where I've not been at the best I see failures in myself, it's because I tried to speed up. Something uncomfortable happened. If I think about those critical incidents, which are often that's what it's referred to in the literature, my weakness, my temptation, that everything I have to fight against is to speed up, when in fact, the best things can happen when I slow myself down. I wouldn't have to worry about that this way because either either as someone participating in a difficult conversation as a learner or as an educator, if that is a temptation that I have, if it's difficult for me to slow down. So I'd be really interested in if this just organically happened because of the nature of the way that the tools are structured, or if you saw the benefit to that in advance and it was designed for that very purpose.

Simon Cullen [00:32:48]:
It it actually is a deliberate design choice. So we've also tried to build notifications that make it quite easy for students to notice when they have a message waiting for them and to respond in the little spare moments that they get. Partly, that's a recognition of the fact that students can be very busy, but it's also something that we want to we want to achieve the sense that constructive disagreement is totally ordinary. It takes place on the bus on the way to campus. It takes place in your dorm room at the end of the day. It should be something which is weaved through your scholarly life, which is the the life you're beginning, of course, in a college. So the idea of making them these discussions transpire over days, even for some people weeks, is a really deliberate design choice. And we don't know, whether or not those intuitions of ours are accurate, but it would be really fascinating to test.

Nicholas DiBella [00:33:42]:
Yeah. And and, Bonni, I think another really important value in doing things this way is that it gives you time to to really marinate over what your discussion partner has said. So maybe you said something that I found pretty upsetting. Maybe you said something that I found intriguing. Maybe you said something that I found confusing, and I don't know exactly how to respond right now. Let me mull it over and see see how I'm feeling and thinking about things in a few hours, and then and then respond when I'm when I'm ready to. It's kind of like, I guess people don't really do this anymore, but it's kind of like the difference between correspondence chess and just speeches. So, you know, I guess in the past, people would, you know, send letters about their chess moves, and they people will play chess games over a course of weeks or months.

Nicholas DiBella [00:34:26]:
Or you can just meet up with somebody and engage in speed chess, which would be like a, you know, a synchronous one on one discussion like we're having right now. And I think there's value to both of those. And but I think especially when you're talking about difficult issues, it's important to give yourself time to think and just to let your feelings settle before you say something rash, before you say something that you're gonna regret later, and also just to collect your thoughts and be able to to say to to to express your thoughts in a in a more organized fashion.

Simon Cullen [00:34:58]:
Nick, you just reminded me of, we've had quite a lot of comments, but there's one on our website that I remember. This was a student who just we asked for feedback. It's optional at the end of each chat. The student wrote, I love talking on Sway because I have more time to compose my opinions in an organized and articulate way than if we were talking in class. We have a a bunch of students sort of reflecting on that. Another one wrote, Sway makes it much easier because it's not face to face, and so it's easier to express your opinion. It's kind of, interesting how the text based discussion might actually provide all of these really useful opportunities.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:33]:
Before we get to the recommendations segment, which we'll get to here momentarily, I wanna ask the real big question. I'm sure these people listening have some real curiosity about Sway. How do people learn more about it? And there's they could do even something more than learning more about it. Would you make an invitation to educators who might want to learn more? And then also just any advice as we close this part of the episode just in general about equipping ourselves and others to have these kinds of conversations in constructive ways.

Simon Cullen [00:36:08]:
Well, I'm happy to start where we are really thrilled to be here partly because so many educators will listen to this. So Sway is a funded research project. Although, as Nick mentioned in passing earlier, students don't have to consent to participate in our research. They can use Sway whether they consent or not. It's quite independent. And if they're 18, then they're not even capable of, participating in research for us. But this is funded research that has been supported by, for example, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, the Omidyar Network via the Open Forum for AI, and a number of other generous donors. And that means we can give this to as many educators as and until we really run out of funds there.

Simon Cullen [00:36:51]:
So we want to try and make it easy for educators everywhere to offer their students a place where they can have these challenging discussions in a respectful, safe, and reasonable way. So absolutely to everyone listening, if you're interested in giving your students these kinds of opportunities, whether your class is controversial or not, actually, check out our website, swaybeta.ai. There's tons of resources on there, including a demo of the platform in action and as well as some information from our research studies involving our empiric empirical studies involving participants we recruit online as well as students from our full rollout. And there's a actual transcripts there so you can read through and see what actually happens in these discussions. There's There's some pretty spicy topics, so hopefully that will be interesting. And there's also all the instructions you need there to register and get started with this pretty, I hope, transformative and amazing thing.

Nicholas DiBella [00:37:47]:
Yeah. And just to add to that, yeah, we've tried to make this easy as possible for instructors to use. So you'll find a video about two minutes just showing how you set a Sway discussion up for your class. We recognize that instructors don't like using new tools, period. So it's gotta be easy to use, and it's gotta be easy to just put into your workflow. So we've we've really tried to do that. And, also, after each set of Sway discussions for your students, we send instructors a report of some interesting info that happened. So we don't share the transcripts, of course, but we share, you know, the distribution of opinions.

Nicholas DiBella [00:38:20]:
We we share what kinds of discussion groups were created. The majority of them will tend to be students who disagree with each other, but sometimes students, are unsure what to think and students who are unsure get matched with other students who are unsure. And occasionally, there is an imbalance of students who maybe agree with some topics versus disagreeing with them. And so in in some cases, we'll actually pair students who agree with each other, but then we just randomly choose one of the students who'll play devil's advocate. And in that case, a guide guides them towards playing this devil's advocate role, which can be quite difficult for well, really, for anybody to do. So, yeah, we try to give interesting insights to instructors after the discussions and as easy we try to make it as easy as possible to use as well. And just to clarify, it is free. That's what we mean by giving it to to instructors.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:07]:
This question didn't occur to me before, but now I now I can't resist because, Nick, what you said just piqued my curiosity. Mike Caulfield, if you're not familiar with his work, he's a expert in information literacy, and I'll he he deals a lot with very polarizing topics and wanting to have students get practice at evidence based explorations of the things. Anyway, he's been on the show many times, and one of the things he really stresses and how he teaches students how to do this is it starts with something noncontroversial. So I'm already planning with my business ethics students as we embark in that upcoming module that they're gonna research whether or not the toilet paper roll should have the toilet paper coming over the top or over the bottom. And that's not con I mean, it is controversial in our household, but in most households, this is not something that, you know, super contra controversial such that you'd have those really strong emotions attached to and part of your identity gets bumped up against. I'm curious if when I'm, as a student, learning how to use Sway, if there's any similar warm up activity, cats or dogs or whatever might be, you know, you're you're a a good way kind of of practicing. And I I didn't see that in my, review of your materials, although I did spend quite a bit of time preparing for today because it was so much fun.

Simon Cullen [00:40:27]:
That's awesome. Well, so guide will often, you know, just follow the student's lead. Some students like to start with a a warm up where they'll share, you know, some friendly chitchat. Others just dive right in with, I totally disagree with you, and here's why. And guide will really take follow follow their lead. It isn't, at this point, programmed to try and do any sort of pre controversial discussion that might help to but that that's certainly something we've actually discussed and are interested in in researching whether those sorts of interventions might be more useful. I will say just more generally, if you're teaching a class which is uncontroversial topics, then it's very sensible to begin your class with the less polarized and less politically valenced topics. And then only after you've established trust and shown people how to do this, then you can start to move on to the real spicy stuff.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:16]:
And I will be putting a link to Mike Caulfield's episode where this debate gets settled once and for all, I say somewhat sarcastically. But, Nick, also, you have something that I mean, apparently, you're an expert in this as well. Before we get to the recommendations, do you wanna just share about your

Nicholas DiBella [00:41:31]:
opponent being quoted on the matter? Yes. So several years ago, I, was interviewed for this Vice article precisely about this debate, the world's great toilet paper debate. Is it better to to, pull it from above or from below? And, well, the answer, of course, is from above.

Simon Cullen [00:41:52]:
Thank god you said that.

Nicholas DiBella [00:41:54]:
Yes. I mean,

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:55]:
I already disagreed with you once episode. I I wasn't prepared to do it again, so thank goodness. One of our family members will be very disappointed in you, but one of those the same family member probably won't ever listen to this. So there we go.

Simon Cullen [00:42:07]:
But, Nick, our collaboration will survive another day thanks to the agreement on this.

Nicholas DiBella [00:42:12]:
Yes. Yes.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:42:13]:
This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations, and I wanted to share two things. One is in the spirit of how important the disagreeing is, there's been a lot of debate, broadly speaking, about even using artificial intelligence or not. And I heard a couple people having some really good healthy debates around this, and Mark Watkins wrote a piece where he helps us to distinguish thinking about AI as unavoidable versus AI as inevitable. And so he writes that he recently had the privilege of moderating a discussion between Josh Eiler and Robert Cummings about the future of AI in education. And he says that Josh Eiler's position sparked a lot of debate on social media. And he just goes in to share some of the things that he believes in and the importance of just us distinguishing between unavoidable versus inevitable. So it's a wonderful piece. If we had more time, I would share more about it, but I also think I need to just get, Mark on the show.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:25]:
He's been suggested so many times to come on, and this is kind of my thing. So maybe I'll save it up for if he's able to spend time coming on the show. And then the second thing I wanted to recommend is just about a different but certainly related topic, and that is our attention and where we focus our attention on. And I thought there was a really good article by Chris Hayes. It's entitled, I want your attention. I need your attention. Here is how I mastered my own. And he just reflects and there the link in the show notes will be a link to his article on the New York Times, but it's a gift article, so you don't have to subscribe in order to read it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:44:02]:
But I think we're all gonna really need to continue to reflect on and practice nourishing attention and and thinking about the longer term benefits of that. So as as you'll be hearing in recent episodes, I'm doing a lot of thinking about with intentionality, where do I wanna focus my attention, and I found Chris Hayes' reflections here to be really helpful to me. So, Nick, now I get to pass it over to you for whatever you'd like to recommend.

Nicholas DiBella [00:44:29]:
Yes. So I'd like to recommend a couple of things that are not AI related or particularly intellectual, music and chocolate. Not, I mean, in general, of course. Music is great and as is chocolate. I I hope people enjoy chocolate. But I'd like to recommend, a band that I recently learned that I absolutely love. Their name is the Lemon Twigs. They're I guess I guess you would call them an indie rock band.

Nicholas DiBella [00:44:54]:
For people like myself who love the Beatles and Beach Boys, some groups from the sixties, sixties pop, they're very much in that spirit. So I I recently heard their album, Everything Harmony. It's amazing. Check it out. That's recommendation one. The second one is a brand of chocolate that I recently came across that was, it was amazing. So I'm always looking for for nondairy chocolates, and I I really love white chocolate, but normally, you have to put milk to make that. And I came across this brand called Evolved Chocolate.

Nicholas DiBella [00:45:29]:
They have a flavor called Simply White. It didn't taste like white chocolate if you're looking for that, but it tasted completely different and amazing. And what was in it? I guess there was cashew butter. There was Jerusalem artichoke fiber. There was monk fruit. It tasted so different. I loved it. I don't know if you can still get it.

Nicholas DiBella [00:45:54]:
I tried I tried ordering from their website, but they seem to be out of stock now. I hope the company is still in business, but if you find it, try it out. It's evolved chocolate. It's really good.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:46:04]:
I feel like chocolate could be a topic that really brings people together. I really do. Yeah. Now my mouth is watering. Alright, Simon. What do you have to recommend for us today?

Simon Cullen [00:46:13]:
Well, I'll I'll recommend, Hedgehogs Academy. That's a it's a membership organization for faculty, staff, and students, which really tries to promote intellectual diversity, constructive disagreement, and open inquiry on American college campuses. They also have, a podcast that your listeners might also enjoy, Heterodox Out Loud, which is the interviews with the president of Heterodox Academy, John Tomasi, lots of fascinating people. So I think your listeners could really enjoy that. And and if if any listeners are are concerned about promoting intellectual diversity on campus, promoting constructive disagreement with their students, obviously, check out Sway, but I can't recommend Heterodox Academy enough. I also have a book to recommend, a couple, but I I guess I'll say I'll just go with one. A book by Joe Henrich called The Secret of Our Success. And it is basically about the co evolution of genes and culture, and how human culture allows us to have these sort of tremendous technological and cultural innovations, which none of us might actually understand independently, individually, but function in extraordinarily important ways in the course of human evolution collectively.

Simon Cullen [00:47:26]:
It's a wonderful book. It's very engaging. It's full of great evocative examples that you will not forget. And I really it's one one of my favorites from the last ten years or so.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:47:36]:
I have a very funny thing to share and then we'll close. I'm sort of laughing because I I as you already know, I type while you're talking so that, you know, if we have any glitches, I can remind you what you were just saying. And I'm sort of chuckling. I spelled the word jeans, j e a n s, and then I thought, you know what? I bet he's talking about the other kind of jeans. Although, the the book on jeans and culture would have also been an interesting.

Simon Cullen [00:48:00]:
I was gonna say they both seem like they're related to culture.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:48:03]:
But, yeah, my brain had to kinda do a whole evolution. We came back, oh, a different kind of jeans, a different kind of jeans. I think I guess I was still stuck on lemon twigs and what we might wear to their concert or something like that. I love it. Well, you both have sparked so much curiosity in me. Thank you for your work and for this invitation to those of us who wanna have more difficult conversations in our various disciplines and in our courses. It's it's exciting to think about where you are now and where you're headed next. Thank you so much for taking time out of your days to have this conversation with me.

Nicholas DiBella [00:48:38]:
Thanks for having us. 

Bonni Stachowiak [00:48:43]:
That was such an enriching conversation. Thanks once again to Simon Cullen and Nicholas DiBella for joining me for today's conversation. Today's episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. I'm grateful to each of you for listening. And if you could take a moment to rate or review the podcast on whatever service it is you use to listen, it will help more people become aware of the podcast and start listening themselves. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.