Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Welcome to EdTech examined, a series about educational technology and what you need to know. I'm Eric Christiansen.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: And I'm Chris Hans.
All right. Welcome to EdTech Examined.
How are you doing, Eric?
[00:00:34] Speaker A: I'm doing well.
How was your holiday break?
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Not bad, not bad.
It's been a little bit.
I think everybody's just a lot of people that I'm talking to, they're, I think, a little bit overwhelmed.
I don't know. The breaks usually never long enough.
So.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I.
I probably did a little bit less over the break than I usually do. Typically, I.
Especially over Christmas. I don't know about you, but I try to really put work stuff aside. I'll occasionally work on like a. I'm not on the research track at my institution, so I typically work on a research project or, you know, read a book that's maybe partly relevant to work, and that's fine. I don't find that to be draining. But even this holiday break, I didn't do as much of that. I was pretty tired. I had plans to do that because that's typically what I do on my summer holidays. In the winter, I'll work on a research paper. But I did very minimal. I think I got in a few days into the break and I was chipping away at it and then I just kind of gave up.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I think this is one of the first times in a long time I haven't really worked over. You know, especially we had to prepare for the semester because we were going to be online for a bit and. Sure, that doesn't help when it's online, you know, face to face, then you. You're back online.
It's a lot of uncertainty these days.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: But yeah, yeah, I think it's part of the issue is that the workload for people doesn't seem to go down, just tends to go up.
Is typical for educators K to 12 and higher education, particularly right now. But that fits well into what we're going to talk about today.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Yeah, so today I think I'll kick it off with. Over the holidays, I have been able to go and listen to some books and some of them, I have read them before and it was just kind of. I got in this zone of productivity and what are some things, some tactics that I can kind of employ.
So the ones that I've listened to over the last few weeks, there's Tim Ferriss, the Four Hour Work Week. And this was something that was written quite a bit a long, long time ago where it was essentially talking about how you could work remotely. And you know, it's one of the things that a lot of times we always talk about retirement and then traveling the world and you know, now with the technology that's available and it's, I mean even though there's a lot of things that are still pretty relevant, but it's a little bit dated. I think Tim Ferriss should probably maybe update it. Although I guess he prob does it with his podcast. And I mean he's written other books like the Tool of Titans and so on. But it was interesting just even outsourcing work and other things, having virtual assistants, figuring out, you know, what time that you can allocate and outsource and make the most out of your time and you know, generating other income.
Another one was Jake Knapp and John Zaratsky or as he refers to himself as Jay Z Make Time. And so I've one of their they're probably more more famous book is the Sprint.
And so both of them, they worked at Google Ventures and worked with a whole variety of companies like Slack. And even if you look at Google Meet a lot of the Google apps, they were basically developed using the Sprint methodology.
And so they, you know, Knapp and Zaroski, they developed this book on just making time and so on and sort of their process.
They tell you to go and figure out some highlights something that you want to go and accomplish for that day.
So choosing that having your kind of to do list. They have various tactics of when to maybe answer your email. Same thing. Actually there's some commonality even amongst like Tim Ferriss as well.
But you know, figuring out that highlight getting into laser like focus.
You know, there is. They describe these infinity pools which is like social media, email notifications and stuff. And so one of the things that I've actually done since reading that or listening to that book, you know, I've toyed with it before but I've just turned off most of my notifications on my iPhone and so everything from Slack to all my, you know, signal and any kind of instant messaging. And I've also informed people, especially those that are close to me that I'm not going to get back to you right away because I find especially on signal sometimes my, my friends, they start messaging away and all of a sudden, you know, I think people underestimate. It takes you probably even one of the things that Nap and Zoraski they, they mentioned. But there was a study that was done about getting into the zone and it takes you probably about 24, 25 minutes just to get in the zone of focusing in on one, you know, activity. And with all these interruptions, it's gonna, you know, then you reset and you have to get back into it.
They also talk about just, you know, how to energize your body and, you know, doing things like exercise, you know, even just moderating how you're going to go and take your caffeine and break it out in the. It's pretty simple actually. One of the, the rules, I mean, it's going to be different. Everybody's biology and body is, you know, what they're suggesting is maybe doing a caffeine hit in the morning, mid morning, let's say about 10:30 and then another one at 1:30.
But everybody's going to be a little bit different.
They also recommended taking a coffee.
So drinking some coffee or taking in caffeine and then going for a nap because it takes a little while for that caffeine to kick in. And so by doing that you actually, you know, energize yourself more and then just reflecting and, you know, on what you accomplished through the day. So, you know, those are just some basic things.
They also have certain tools as well.
So like they, they have their own app, which is the Make Time app. You know, they have certain things that they've recommended in terms of having like password managers. They have this physical time timer and so where you can go and allocate, maybe it's an hour, but it's like physically there and you can see it count and just focusing in on that time and then other things from a mental health aspect, having meditation apps and just taking daily notes and so on.
So those are some of the things. And then the third book that I was a refresher was Jason Fried and David heinenmaier Hanson Remote. And so they originally their company was called 37signals. They eventually changed that to Basecamp. And so Basecamp is a project manager management tool.
You know, it's been written quite a bit while ago from what I recall. And I mean, they even mention in the book. But if you remember Yahoo, back in the day when Melissa Mayer, when she took over, the employees were actually asked to get back to the office. And so it came at a time where, you know, there was a lot of controversy.
They were probably ahead of their time. Their company is fully remote. And so, you know, David, he actually, he's the creator of Ruby on Rails, which is a programming language powering many of the, you know, web apps that web applications that have been developed. And it's an open source. There's something like 3,000 developers that have contributed to Ruby on Rails and the development of that programming language. But he was a freelancer in Europe and you know, Jason freed 37 signals they were a web design company and they would go and provide, I mean some of their clientele included, you know, people like FedEx.
And so David was just hired as a freelancer. I believe he solved some issue or something and then they just hit it off. But they've been remote for a long time and so they included a lot of their best practices. They do talk about some tools as well and even things about like, you know, security.
But I think the gist of it is a lot of they're talking about is just change management and just getting people to wrap their heads around. I mean this, this whole notion, I mean we look at it here, we're both connecting here in Alberta from Calgary and in Calgary right now a third of downtown is empty.
And who knows, in the future we may even, you know, let's say 30, 50 years from now people might look back at this and you, Jason and David actually mentioned this, this whole idea of having these towers and the central place and the commuting and you know, thinking that's the only way that we're going to go and do business and you know, innovate. It has to be in face to face. But really at the end of the day a lot of that it's, it comes from back, you know, in terms of that industrial revolution and even just looking at managing and your workflow and so on. And so I think people have to kind of make that adjustment. In fact some of the things that they mentioned like IBM, I mean they're probably one of the biggest, the bluest of the blue chip companies but many of their office spaces they've actually sold for like you know, over a billion dollars and they've saved so much money because now people are working remotely and some of the biggest companies are working remotely. And I think the pandemic has actually accelerated a lot of that. You people are rethinking, do we really need that office?
You know, maybe there's some other ways Even one of the things that they mentioned is meetings. They talk about The M&Ms, which are managers and meetings and you know, really when we're getting together with somebody, let's say there's six of us. It isn't just a one hour meeting, it's you know, six hour meeting because now you have six individuals. And what is the return that you're getting from that time that you're putting together.
Obviously you have to rethink your workflow and.
But a lot of it, it comes down to having good written communication skills and communicating, explaining a lot of the work that you're doing. And really, if anything that we've seen from the pandemic, it's your actual output. That's what's going to demonstrate things. It isn't going to be creating this busy work. And just because somebody's clocking in nine to five and there's a nice person around and friendly and so on, that's not a good indicator of productivity and output.
[00:12:02] Speaker A: Well, and it's also, it's difficult because it's. How do people manage?
How do you measure productivity is very difficult. Right. So I think with the pandemic stuff, it's interesting. It's accelerated a lot of trends that were happening.
I really liked their work. I thought rework was great because it talked about how to rethink work, but it didn't advocate to throw everything that we already do out the window, which I liked.
In fact, although the people that you've mentioned talk about the balance, the only thing I would say is what I'm seeing now is that those books are being. Some of the things that are suggested in those books are now being taken and people are running with them to the extreme in the other direction.
There are times when I. It's very, very effective for me to go to the university and get something done in my office. Like, I'm there. I need to talk to somebody I'm going to meet in the class. So let's say. Let's say there's two or three days a week where I get a lot done by going into the office. But then there's a maybe two, three days a week on the other end. Depending on the week, it would fluctuate where I really have to focus on something where I don't want to be interrupted.
Coming in the commute time is a waste of time maybe because especially if you like doing what you say you want to block larger sections of time for that kind of deep work, then working from home makes sense. So I hope that companies and higher education included, stick allow people to kind of develop that flexibility as they see fit, rather than to start to. Like they used to mandate coming into the office, mandate the opposite. Right. Because sometimes it's very helpful to meet in person as a group. There's something about when I was at the faculty association, I used to be on that Mount Royals pd Committee and we were planning the retreat and the PD day for faculty, which is like teaching pd. And it just. We're in a room, you have these objectives you're trying to discuss openly for quite a few hours how we're going to plan the day once a semester. It was very effective to meet in person and get it all done. I think that an online meeting is very effective for short meetings, quick things.
But a lot of times if I'm online in a meeting, I'll just start to drift. Reddit will be open, you know, I'll just, I don't. There's nothing, there's no boundary in the technology. It's kind of like I was, I saw a thing recently, it was joking about online learning for kids and I was talking about Zoom school and there was somebody on some news network said they were surprised that online learning through Zoom didn't work well. And a comedian I think it was Jim Gaffigan said that. Yeah, of course a distance learning doesn't work because we're getting them to learn on the same device that they play Minecraft on. You know, it doesn't. There is no separation.
So I hope that there's a more flexibility. I think shared offices or shared spaces, that's probably a good idea so you can have some space to save money.
Yeah, certainly there's a way around this. And every company, you know, some companies may require more face to face for good reason. Right. I know people who work in engineering firms where you really have to be there for a lot of it. Some of that stuff doesn't work well. Remote. Yeah, well.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: And Eric, I mean, even like in this remote book by Jason Fried and David Heinmeier Hanson, I mean they, they don't advocate like they're saying that, sure, with regards to remote, it is going to probably be the future, but there's also.
They talk about having co working spaces or maybe having maybe you go and rent some. And this is something that they did during 37 signals. They had some desks that they shared with another company and you know, so that could be a way to do it.
[00:15:56] Speaker A: Yeah. They don't advocate to throw everything out.
David doesn't say that.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: But I think the managers, the managers he's talking about need something to do. So they've used that thesis to run into the other direction. You know what I mean? Like it's become a project for someone else to do now. It's kind of been taken out of their context, is my point.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: Yeah. And I, I think, you know, to your point about, you know, just going to those extremes.
People probably just pick and choose and the, you know, they just go and focus in on those aspects. But yeah, I mean, they, they talk about even going to maybe like a coffee shop. It doesn't necessarily have to be at home, but you could go to a coffee shop, you could go to the park. I, I mean, when they wrote the book, we didn't even have 5G right at that time.
I think we had LTE starting to come in. But now you have that flexibility. And even another kind of good idea that I liked, just listening to remote. But they suggested maybe even having, if you can afford it, having different devices for different things. So for example, having a physical desktop computer for your actual work, so it's hard for you to go and unplug and, you know, take it up into your bedroom or something and just having those kind of physical boundaries. And maybe your iPad is for your, you know, checking out like social media or whatever and responding to your personal emails and so having different devices. I mean, we probably all these days have, you know, smartphones, you have laptops, you got these desktops. And you know, in a subsequent episode, we're actually going to go and maybe do a bit of a deep dive into this where I talk about how I've set up my workstation now and changed it as of November with the desktop. But yeah, so, I mean, I just, it was a good, like refresher getting some different perspectives and you know, obviously you got to go and pick and choose what's the best use of, you know, some of these ideas. But we'll include these links in our show notes and, you know, definitely feel free to read them and, or listen to them.
[00:18:07] Speaker A: One of the things I think about with remote work too, in a company or even at a university, because we're talking educators and students have probably listened to this a lot, but the idea of training and mentorship, I don't know. So I'm not proposing a hypothesis, but I wonder how that works in an online environment.
One of the things that companies have done a terrible job of, big corporations in particular, in fact, students who graduated from Mount Royal and then reached out to me later very kindly to say, thanks for showing me all the research things he showed me over the years. I'm using that at mbridge or wherever I'm working now.
What they're saying though is that they're not getting a lot of on the job training. It's kind of up to them to train themselves.
I wonder sometimes if companies, yes, People like the remote. But then the benefit to the company is that along with closing the spaces, which is probably a good money saver, they're also going to close at the same time.
You know, maybe some of the middle managers that did a lot of the mentorship to groom people to new positions, those people get laid off, you know, their team training lunch and learns those go away. So I don't trust I like again, David Hymaner Hanson and his colleague are excellent. I really like what they do and they don't run their company like that. But I suspect other companies will use the closing of offices to close other things while people aren't paying attention. Because I'm seeing now that there's higher. You know, industry always has critiques of higher education and some of them are valid. But one of the things I noticed is that they also spend $0 on their own training for their own people. Right. They've kind of outsourced that. I wonder if, if that'll continue that trend.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And even to that point, you know, Eric, if you look at what Jason and David, you have to kind of reimagine some of that like even what you're talking about for like that mentorship or like they, they've created.
It's a very simple kind of tactic. But you know how one of the things, one of the arguments for having face to face is that water cooler, like just meeting somebody or what have.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: You and then, well, the new serendipitous ideas, like research ideas have come out of random conversations. So how do you recreate that online and stay innovative? Right.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: Yeah. And so what they've done at basecamp is basically they have the, you know, they set aside, I believe it's Friday, where they just have random, you know, zoom video conference connections with various people within the organization and they just get together and connect. And they also, by the way, they do meet in person too. It's not that they do completely gone to remote, but then it's kind of like almost. And I mean it's funny because they even Jake Knapp and John Zareski kind of talk about this too, but it becomes a bit of a treat right. When you are meeting then it's, you know, everybody's still, you know, it's not like, you know, you're spending that mind numbing kind of time in a meeting. Like you're actually finding it a lot more useful. So they, with basecamp, they get together about three times a year, all in the Chicago office or sometimes they've gone elsewhere. But Again, I mean, I think those are times where maybe you can go and look at those kind of strategic things. And then the other counter argument that they present is that as much as everybody thinks that they're going to come up with these brilliant ideas, really what you should be maybe doing is focusing in on the stuff that you've already committed to and executing on that.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: And executing it.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Well, yeah, exactly. Instead of just throwing it.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: I have something to say about that later, so I won't say anymore.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: But yes, and then just kind of like throwing it out the window and then focusing on this new bright and shiny thing, the idea that they've come up with. So I think that's why, like you look at Basecamp, I mean, they've been highly successful.
You know, they've never gone public. The only to get some liquidity for themselves, I believe, you know, like they've gone Jeff Bezos as an investor, which, you know, so that's, that's pretty good, you know, but other than that, they've never gone public. Nobody knows how much money they make or not, but they have like thousands of customers right across the world and their entire company is remote, which is impressive.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: And so if I own my own company like that, I would never take it public. I would take it private and keep it like that because the shareholders have no idea how a company should be run. They're only interested in their dividend rate.
[00:22:39] Speaker B: Totally. Right.
[00:22:40] Speaker A: And I mean, I'm not to say that public companies are bad, but like, you know, I'm sure that there's decisions made that are bad for the long term life of a company, that they're made to satisfy quarterly profits or something like that. I'm sure that's common. Well, but that's probably. Yeah, but I'm sure that could be the case for higher education institutions too. I'm sure you can lay that at any organization.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: And maybe the other thing to build on your point about like mentorship and stuff, I'll tell you, like, I, I'm probably one of the longest, I might even be the longest serving mentor at the U of C through the Haskayne School of Business, their student mentorship program.
And you know, these past few years, obviously because of the, the pandemic, it's been all virtual.
But even when it was in person, I always put the onus on the, the student they have to go and I'm, I'm a busy.
Is instill in them that they have to reach out to me, schedule time and you know, we typically would only get together like maybe once a month. And whether that's by phone, whether it's by email, whether it's, you know, video conference, I mean usually pre pandemic we would get together like at a coffee shop or maybe I'd invite them to some event that I'm going to be attending and so on.
[00:23:55] Speaker A: The event is a good idea. I never thought about that.
[00:23:57] Speaker B: Yeah, but you know, that way, you know, they get to go and experience something as well as maybe expand their network. But again, I think you just gotta kind of reimagine that. And it goes the same for whether you're in higher education or any organization. You gotta go and think about how are you gonna go and instill those values and build up your workforce. And especially for students, I mean, maybe we'll touch on it in another episode. But I find it really interesting the dynamics and just especially the comfort level with regards to video conference. I mean, I think it's here day. I don't see myself in the future. I've done it in the past where you know, let's say people think it's all like glamorous or something like working and you know, flying to some place to do work here. I'll give you an example. I might have mentioned this in the past but like I remember this was right before the pandemic. I had to go to Vancouver for the day, got up in the morning at like 5am, went to the airport, flew in, you know, got to the hotel, had the meetings, this and that. That same day I had to back and I was tired. I mean I had to. The reason why I came back was I had to teach the next day and so I couldn't afford. Imagine something happens and I'm stuck in Vancouver and I don't know why we would put ourselves through that, that we have this kind of, you know, I don't know, this notion in our head that air flight travel is awesome, but it's, it's probably the worst experience ever. And especially if you have to go for work, work. It's not like you're enjoying the actual, you know, place. Like I literally only thing I saw was a hotel lobby and you know, just some of the conference rooms, office spaces and that's about it.
[00:25:49] Speaker A: I agree. I mean like I've flown to conferences. I do see value in face to face conferences because that's actually a place where I can put my laptop, I can leave it in the hotel. I show up, I have my phone in my backpack, it's turned off and I Come up with a notebook and I just talk to people for the few days that I'm at a conference. It's very focused. But I agree traveling for work is highly overrated. It's funny. One of the better things, one of the. I haven't been obviously because of COVID Why there's been international conferences that have been face to face. I just haven't gone.
But one of the things I sometimes prefer is that when there's like a local conference, I mean it's unfortunately been canceled this year. I don't know if it's.
But I used to go to some of the local conferences in Edmonton. The Alberta Library Conference was always held at Jasper Park Lodge, which is a beautiful location and it's expensive to go, but you don't have to fly. So yeah, it's expensive to stay there, but you can drive or take a really nice. There's actually a really nice bus tour that goes through the ice fields on the way there if you want to have a nice view of things.
And it was a, you know, I got to meet colleagues and talk about ideas, talk about, you know, what we're doing in this province for education. And I. It's funny when I think back to those events, I actually remember them were these fast moving, got to get on a plane, got to do this, got to run here. I don't remember that. That's all a blur. Same with the online conferences. Those are also just a blur.
The more deliberate, intentional, focused events I remember and got something out of. But a lot of them were kind of forgotten quickly. I don't know if that's your experience.
[00:27:23] Speaker B: Yeah, no, for sure.
So I think this is a nice little segue into.
We're going to kick off the year with a little bit of maybe some. You could call them New Year's resolutions or reflections or whatever you want or goals for the year. But we're just going to talk about some of the things that we're coming up with. I mean, for myself, maybe I'll just start off building upon the original discussion of these books. But one of the things I'm just trying to cut back on on the. My technological. Like this we're describing as digital detox and you know, from just to have a little bit more focused and stop getting all interrupted by various notifications and things like that. So that's one thing that I'm trying to be mindful of.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: Yeah. I have a. Are we alternating. Are you going to go through all of yours?
[00:28:18] Speaker B: Let's alternate. You can do. I'LL do that.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: And so one of mine. One of my. So I have a few. So I. The way I did this is that I wrote some for our show notes and Apple notes. I basically make goals. The way I do goals is very similar to what our friend Cal Newport talks about. I make quarterly goals. I don't think weekly or monthly are very helpful other than like, you know, weekly tasks and things that I have that I have to get done. I don't think. I think that's too. So quarterly goals. And then I have annual.
And annual. I do at the beginning of the year just because it's easier to counter month one. Right. So I took those goals and I guess I transformed them kind of into resolutions that would be maybe interesting to our particular audience. So one of mine, Chris, is quite similar.
I called it just simplification.
So you could think about it like the digital minimalism or digital detox.
And I have a few bullet points under each of these for specific examples. So I haven't set goalposts to measure.
I guess these examples that I'm giving you are implementation for the broader picture, I guess is how I would talk about it. So simplify.
So I've been trying to get away from, in general, spreading myself too thin. That's common theme. So digitally, how do you do that?
So here's some bullet points. So the first thing is that I'm not on social media that much.
I don't have a Facebook account anymore.
I have an Instagram that was deactivated. I recently logged in to look at a picture that I posted I couldn't find in my album. I don't use that anymore because I couldn't find the original.
I don't go on Twitter. In fact, if you go to my Twitter, you'll notice that there's a pinned tweet that says I've kind of checked out if you want to talk to me. Twitter's not the place to do that.
My tweets are largely automated, so it just auto posts from pinboard.
As you know, I'm trying to automate some things.
Basically, I've gotten rid of social media or a large proportion of it. For the things that I do use that are social networks, I'm also going to kind of lean them out.
So I've unfollowed a lot of people.
Sorry, folks, I don't interested in all the things that you post. And it's clogging up the things that I want to see. It doesn't mean I don't like people. It just means I've unfollowed. Just to simplify, especially if I keep in contact with those people on other means. I just don't need to see a laundry list to things.
I use Reddit for keeping up with hobbies. I follow a lot of subreddits for hobbies. I noticed that I was subscribed to so many subreddits that I wasn't seeing anything I wanted to see, which is just a totally reverse chronological timeline or up rank, depending on how you want to view it. So I again unfollowed a bunch of subreddits just to the things that I'm interested in. So a little bit more deliberate.
I'm kind of interested in building different communities or alternate communities. I think the problem with social media is that it's a totally toxic dumpster fire. At least that's my experience.
I'm going to try to experiment with either face to face or digital communities that are built around one thing. A friend of mine, for example in Edmonton has a philosophy book called Club, so they read Philosophy Classics. I think that's a really interesting. That's very specific to what he's interested in. Yeah, but it's very fulfilling because it doesn't divulge into political arguments, which I think people are getting sick of.
So that's interesting. I'm interested in Mastodon and these kind of decentralized social networks where you can just follow a group about one thing and, and kind of make your own thing.
I'm also going to try to automate tasks wherever possible. So I can use shortcuts or automator or ifttt. I'm gonna try to use those to automate things.
And as part of the, that's the social media side. I also wanna get rid of just the number of apps I use. I, I test things because we have this podcast, but I find I, I end up collecting all these tools and most of them I don't return to. I mean I, I test them out, out to talk about them and to alert people to options. But personally, my advice to people is actually to focus on mastery of tools over kind of using them at the surface level. So, and sticking to the systems that I have in place. I have a new system for note taking. I talked about that I could switch tools, I could invest. There's always a, you can be a tool collector or you can actually do something with these tools. So I've just said, oh, forget it. This is the tool I'm going to use. And like there might be something Better, but you have to just call it what it is. Right? It's like you don't trade in your car every time a new model comes out. You're not going to trade in my tool every time. There's a slightly different user interface. So I think reducing the number of apps I use, I did a big sweep of my iPad on my iPhone. There's very, very few apps on there now because I just don't open them, I don't use them. They're just collecting space.
So kind of these things are great, these tools, but I'm just going to focus on kind of mastery, that quality over quantity, that kind of intentional use.
Yeah, it's kind of a winded answer.
[00:33:39] Speaker B: We haven't really talked much about this, and I don't know what your resolutions or goals are, and you don't know mine, but I've already been doing the same kind of thing. I mean, I, I just found myself this past semester just so busy and so I weaned myself off social media. I think I told, we discussed this in the past, like the last year I actually deleted. Like I still have my accounts, I just never go into them and I, I never, I sometimes get like notification emails about it, you know, like, oh, somebody's birthday or they posted something on Facebook. But honestly I haven't logged in, if any. Those that are close to me, they know how to get a hold of me. And with everybody else, I mean, you know, again, how much if somebody really needs something thing, I'm sure they'll figure it out. How to get a hold of you.
[00:34:31] Speaker A: Well, like that's the difference between general networks and specific networks. So on Reddit I really like office setups and how people organize their office and living spaces. I find that very interesting. Not feng shui. I mean, just functionally, you know, how do people build a built in bookshelf? So there's these communities, these subreddits on Reddit where people post kind of before and after of how they've done their workspace. And I find it really inspiring because there's things that I would like to do and it's helpful to see what other people do. That's very useful.
I don't need to see the politics subreddit. I just don't want to see it. I don't want it mixed in with the rest of it. Right. So I think those things are very valuable if you have an intentional community. So it's like there's a really great subreddit for philosophy where people post articles about ethics and morality by philosophers. And there's philosophy blogs. It's very interesting.
It doesn't divulge, like I said, into party politics.
And I think after a year of people being stuck on the devices, we're all kind of like, we're done with that.
[00:35:34] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, and even some of the things, like going back to the books that I talked about, like one of the things that Jake Knapp and John Zareski talk about in Make Time is one of the things I would always start off every day was reading the news and just, you know, certain publications and stuff. And coincidentally, I. I just stopped doing it. Not because, I mean, I had that habit, but a lot of these websites these days, they're trying to monetize things. And so right off the bat, like, before, I would have been able to, they would send me their newsletters. I could click on the articles and I could read them. But now, without having that login, I can't. And so, for example, one of them is Fast Company. I would. I would always go and, you know, take a look at some articles related to, let's say, innovation or creativity or what have you.
[00:36:26] Speaker A: And.
[00:36:26] Speaker B: And now they've put up these paywalls. And so I don't. And I don't think I've missed much.
So that's what they talk about as well, is that we think that we need to go and just stay on top of things, and we're going to miss out if we don't. And so again, kind of like what you talked about is that quality over quantity. And there are other ways. I forget which one of these books, maybe it was the Tim Ferriss one.
But even, let's say if you need to go and figure out how to vote, which it can in the US especially, is pretty complicated. Right? But one of the things that I believe he suggested is just talk to a couple of people that you trust, let them go, and you can catch up with them. Plus, you can, you know, let them do all the homework and figure out all the various issues and stuff. And now you've just saved yourself time in that. But, yeah, I mean, I think ultimately we kind of. One thing that we did talk about before starting this recording is just, you know, doing more with less. And so I think your simplification idea is a good one.
[00:37:29] Speaker A: I guess I could break that into being more intentional. I mean, I kind of. Those are. I. So I write in a journal app called Day One, which I pay for. So I kind of. Every January, I write this stuff out, be more intentional and simplify. I actually listed as two things, but I think for the people listening here, you could make it one.
I want, I do. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I did want to say one thing of context about the simplification.
I think as part of that, so simplifying for simplifying sake to avoid the headache of just using digital tools as a distraction.
It's also kind of taking pride in doing things for their own sake too. So if you have a community or something that you're using a tool for, you're doing it to theoretically accomplish something. Something. And as part of that, I'm not trying to do that thing, you know, to get a promotion or to get social credibility. I'm taking pride in doing it for its own sake. So if I follow, I found, by the way, I found an EdTech subreddit which I didn't know existed. So that's helpful for this podcast. So now if I follow some more intentional groups, we do the podcast. Hey, we want to get more listeners, but we, I, if I, if I free up that time, then when we're doing the podcast, I can say, but, you know, I just want the podcast to be as good as it can be just for the sake of doing the podcast. Right. Like, or the blog, if you write a blog article, if you write a research paper. Just things for its own sake, if that makes sense. I think a lot of things that we do, we tend to kind of over advertise. I noticed that I've actually done that. There's nothing wrong with showing our work to people, but there's something about doing a lot of things badly and then advertising them that sells. That's I, I find kind of interesting. So kind of just taking pride and having done it well, even if nobody's watching, so to speak.
[00:39:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, we've kind of, I think that's probably both of ours, like, kind of philosophy, even with this podcast. I mean, who even knew what was going to come out of this originally? Right.
[00:39:28] Speaker A: We have 11, 000 downloads though. That's pretty good.
[00:39:31] Speaker B: Yeah, so, but I mean, that wasn't the reason why we did it. We just thought it would be good and we've learned a lot along the way. And I mean, I've been able to apply even a lot of these things, even in terms of like aud and just our approach and stuff and other aspects of my life when it comes to like teaching and, you know, just doing work. So.
[00:39:51] Speaker A: But it's A Zen. It's a Zen pursuit, right?
[00:39:54] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
I think the, maybe the second thing that from my side, what I, I can say is I figured, you know, we kept talking about like doing like we just being thrown into this with the pandemic and especially from the teaching perspective. And you know, I talk about, we' about this before just in terms of like the emergency remote and we're kind of in it again. Right. There's a lot of uncertainty and I've decided enough is enough and I'm not going to just be reactive and I'm going to try to do things closer to what I originally back, you know, pre pandemic, just in terms of how I would do things. And even in the classroom this past semester, I found it very interesting. There was many students and for this one course that I teach, we actually have a class where I set up actually all of us as instructors. So it's business communications and so it's, you know, there's multi sections, it's course coordinated, and we have a class where we actually set aside appointment time to go over the, the draft reports that the students are putting together and then provide them feedback so that they can improve upon them. And it was, it was very baff and kind of, I was a little bit amazed by it. But these students, even though they were physically in the classroom, they did not know their own group members. They did not know what they look like. And I guess partly it was because of the mass. Partly it was, you know, when they're going and collaborating, they weren't doing it on campus, they were doing it on Google Meet and using video conference and other things. So they literally did not know what their group members looked like. And I think that's one of the things that, especially when we think about from teaching, teaching in academia and what is that value that people are getting and why are you paying all this tuition? One of the things is, you know, developing that network and building these relationships and so on. And so I've gone back to it. Like last semester I didn't do introductions. I didn't have students do introductions. I figured, you know, everybody's a little bit apprehensive about this, the social distancing and all this kind of stuff. And so this semester, because we were put on all online, I'm like, let's just go and do it. You know, it may seem a bit of a waste of time and other people may think of doing like asynchronous, you know, introductions, but I decided to go and create a Google Slide deck, have students go and I put them into breakout rooms.
It was interesting even that too the, the MRU students, many of them, they didn't turn on their cameras and I don't know, it seems it's a bit of behavior thing and I would highly advocate. I think in the future again this remote side of things is probably here. Many people will have to go and collaborate with others from around the world. And there is something to be said about that body language, that digital body language. And for example, I had a student, Eric, somebody asked me a question. They're like, you know how some people will say, hey, can I ask you a question? And so I just responded no and started laughing. But imagine if I didn't have. Have my video on. And I said that and I didn't laugh.
They may think I'm a total jerk. Right. So again I think that's. They say about what like 80, 90% of your body language is just that that's most of what communication is about is that that body language.
[00:43:33] Speaker A: And that's why social so bad. That's why Twitter is such a crap platform for having a discussion. Yeah. Because it sounds like the person on the other end is a real person, but you're getting kind of sound by.
[00:43:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I guess anyways, I'm just going and trying to get back to the roots and being true to myself and my kind of approach and not letting this.
This pandemic and being online or face to face or whatever is just getting back to how I want to deliver and instill whatever, you know, learnings and material. So that's. That's one thing that I've been doing this semester. Semester so far.
We'll see if it lasts because we're back to remote for who knows. I will find out soon with mru, but I know U of C is it's remote until the end of February.
[00:44:25] Speaker A: Because why even bother then? Yeah, yeah, it'll be interesting to see.
Hopefully we don't have a mass exodus from burnout.
I guess so. I have a. I have a bunch of sections in my kind of goals for the year that I put together. So again, like I said, I'm trying to combine them.
I have a bunch of personal projects.
I have this every year. You know, I didn't really blog that much last year. I did one post on my tech blog in 2021. I just didn't really. I actually took an intentional sabbatical from it. I just, I didn't want to focus on it. Um, I have Some ideas for books and articles that I want to write. Some of them are research. Some of them are essays. I do do research for those listening. Uh, you know, I like to play with my Raspberry PI computer. I have these tech projects, so every year I have these personal projects. But one of the things.
Every year I have goals, you know, for books that I want to read, things that I want to learn.
One of the things that I want to do this year, though, as part of a. As an. As a new resolution that may be useful for.
I think it may be useful for both students and educators is documentation of what I've actually accomplished. I think one of the problems with New Year's resolutions isn't so much. Yes, there's all these studies that suggest that you don't actually accomplish them. Most people quit after so many days. I want to lose 25 pounds or something.
I think a lot of people are discouraged because they don't actually document what they've accomplished. So they have no idea. So if you don't have a target and you don't measure how close you got, you really can't judge if you've made any progress. And I think that's discerning for people. And unfortunately, documentation takes time.
So documenting what I've done, what I'm doing, and what I've actually accomplished from these things is something that I'm going to do.
So last year, for instance, I started documenting. I kind of did it retroactively.
I was documenting books that I've read. So when I tell people I'm an academic librarian, they always, like, you must love books. That's like, the first thing I get. It's like, oh, it's like, well, I do like books, but I'd be surprised how that's not the majority of my job. But I read, you know, 30, between 35 and 40 books last year. So it's quite a few.
So I document them. Documenting projects I've done documenting.
Well, I don't have to put them all. I use spreadsheets. But I don't have to do this. You know, I'm. I play games with my colleagues, video games. And I do actually some research around gaming culture, too. So, you know, documenting what I've done there, that way you can kind of reflect on it at the end of this year and use that as a basis to create more goals. Because otherwise the goals are the same every year.
Yeah.
[00:47:16] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. And so when you say, like, documenting, is that just like, you know, like, reflective journaling, or is it.
[00:47:22] Speaker A: I Do journal. Like, I try to journal daily or every other day. And that's been a long standing thing, especially if I'm pissed off because it prevents me from saying something that I probably shouldn't because I've had to kind of written it down. I think that's actually a good practice for everybody. It's not like I'm some rageaholic. It's just that, you know, we get frustrated because we're trying to solve problems in life. And if you can work through them by writing. I don't typically return to a lot of my writing. Sometimes I do.
But it's a good practice. I do. Some people don't find value in it, and I get that. But for me, it's always been. Journaling has been valuable because it helps me work through problems, it helps me see things.
Just kind of. If I was to talk to my folks about a problem and they see it from a different perspective, it's similar. But when I mean documenting, I mean that in the most technocratic or technical way possible. So I literally have a spreadsheet with the book titles, publication years, and authors of all the things I've completed. I have. If I play games, if I played video games, which is a hobby of mine, fine. Not all the time. I have a spreadsheet of the things I've done. I knock them off if I have projects that I want to complete. So I bought a Raspberry PI 4 computer. I have some projects I want to play with. I have. Every time I complete a project, I'm going to document that in a hobby spreadsheet. So I literally am counting and quantifying.
Because If I've read 36 books this last year, then maybe the goal is to read 4.
[00:48:46] Speaker B: 40.
[00:48:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I can beat that. Just like if you go to the gym and you want to do repetition. So I think quantification is important.
So I'm gonna. I'm gonna do more of that.
Cool.
[00:48:59] Speaker B: Yeah. No, that makes sense.
[00:49:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:49:01] Speaker B: I thought maybe you were just gonna be summarizing your books or maybe blogging, like doing book reviews or something.
[00:49:06] Speaker A: It's true. I mean, in a way, I am summarizing using that note taking, the Zettelkast and note taking system with that Obsidian app that I started using. Yeah, right. So I.
I have been doing that.
Yeah. So, you know, summarizing books that I've read and ideas that I find interesting. I mark pages with sticky tabs. I go back through the book through the sticky tabs, read those sections, and try to summarize in my own words and document it. So I have now this monster library of notes I took out of Apple Notes because they're a more universal format for internal linking and all that stuff. So I do do that, but that's not what I'm quantifying.
[00:49:54] Speaker B: All right, cool. I think the. The last thing on my side I. One of the things I wanted to do last year, which I didn't, I just got so busy between all the, you know, teaching and work and other things, I'm going to try to make a. An effort of just writing more.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: More.
[00:50:11] Speaker B: And especially my plan was to actually write a book this past year and get it published. And so I'm hoping to get it done this year. I might even get more than one, but I'm hoping to do at least the one.
And I got a couple of others that are, like, in progress, but just focusing in on that. And I might even try some of your, you know, like that, the Zettelkasten and other things. Because I find sometimes, like, even these books that I just mentioned to you, like, I've. I've read them before, and sometimes you just forget a lot of the stuff and some of the pointers and, you know, you only pick and remember certain things, some highlights. But I think just capturing some of that and then, you know, distilling it and hopefully I'll be able to produce something for. That can be actually used for my students next fall or this fall. This upcoming fall semester.
[00:51:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Writing is a good practice. That's part of my. One of my personal goals is to be. Make that more of a habit. And again, that's something I'm going to try to quantify as well.
I guess I have to do my last one.
I don't. This isn't really related to our audience listeners. I guess the last two are probably more relevant. The next one is probably I have some more education, personal education goals.
So for many years I've had a variety of jobs and my goal was to get my master's degree, get my position. I had a bunch of possible goals for librarianship. I ended up in higher education university.
I like instructional librarianships, so I've done that and I still do that.
So I've accomplished a lot of those goals. I would say I've had accomplished them several years ago. Go. And that's fine. And I've been focusing on craft and mastery and trying to get really good at the things that I wanted to accomplish.
And I'm at the point where I've done those.
So Now I have to think of something else to accomplish. So I have some courses on udemy I'd like to return to programming. It's a long time hobby, something I've deliberately put off because I didn't really have anything I want to build. So I put that off for a while because it wasn't really a part of my job. And then I, you know, every so often I, you know I do consider the possibility of potentially pursuing a very, very part time another graduate degree because there's some research topics I'd like to investigate and they're very difficult to do without that. So maybe a thesis that's very, very broad. So the year these, this year is more. The goal is to start with some online learning. I have an open education course that's free that I'm doing through ubc.
But yeah kind of planning what are the next skills that I want to get and what I want to do with them.
[00:53:12] Speaker B: What do you want to build if you with the programming?
[00:53:16] Speaker A: There's some interesting, there's some automation tools I would like to do. There's some additions I'd like to put into websites code blocks for a lot of it is visual formatting using JavaScript. So there's just some things that I can kind of chop together but I don't really understand how it works. So just to kind of augment some of the web work that I do.
[00:53:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's, it's interesting because now one of the things that I've been teaching is just you know, the technological tools and especially over these last probably I would say about 4 to 5 especially in these last couple of years with the pandemic but there's.
I would argue in the future that there, you may not even need to know how to code and there's a.
[00:54:01] Speaker A: Probably for most things.
[00:54:02] Speaker B: Yeah there's an advent of a lot of no code or low code type of tools but especially like you look at like app development there's a program called Bubble where you literally, I mean there's a little bit of a learning curve but at the end of the day you can build an app yourself and in the past you would have had to have, you know, programmers and hire these developers and it would have cost you a lot of money and there's others as well. But I think even that automation side of things, I'm going to investigate some more of that because if there is a way that we can automate and cut down because a lot of what we think is artificial intelligence, I mean we probably are envisioning like, you know, Skynet, Terminator, so on, but really it's, it's more machine learning with, you know, algorithms and just having that data and push things through. But I think we should look into even what you mentioned about automating some of those social media posts, because I, I think there's probably still some value to getting some of those posts done. But at the same time, honestly, I don't know if you got to kind of think about and reflect. And that's why I look at it for myself. Like, how much gain did you really get out of it? And how many hours are being spent on that?
[00:55:17] Speaker A: Yeah. So like I can tell you from an automation standpoint. So I used to tweet interesting articles. So I save online sources to a service that I pay for. It's very, very inexpensive, even though it's paid, called Pinboard. I've talked about it before.
I'm sorry to folks out there. I really don't know off the top of my head what the cost is.
I think it's maybe $15 a year.
[00:55:43] Speaker B: Oh, that's pretty good.
[00:55:45] Speaker A: It's very, very inexpensive. I joined 2019 and I paid for two years. I paid 35 bucks U.S.
so it's, it's very cheap. So what I do though is I do save articles. Most of them are private, but occasionally I'll save them and they'll be public and then I'll.
I tweet them publicly and it's set up to automatically post those public pinboard articles to Twitter.
[00:56:29] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:56:30] Speaker A: So I don't have to go in and make a tweet. So I mean, there's something. If you want to do social for this podcast, I could launch the website on Kastos. I could pin the episode episode and then I could just pinboard it and that would auto tweet it. Now we might want to do something a bit nicer looking than that. It doesn't really give us a lot of formatting options. But the point is, is that that would save me having to go to a website, log in, those kinds of things, right?
[00:56:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, maybe we should even investigate things like hootsuite or what have you and see. Yeah, we can look at.
[00:57:03] Speaker A: Yeah. Every time. If this happens every time this is posted to rss, tweet it in this format. It's a very easy automation. For example, another example of an autom I use, I've used Automator on the Mac.
Unfortunately, I don't have a Windows equivalent for people. If you Use Windows. I'm sorry, I have no tips for you. You could use if this, then that which is a web platform. But for desktop automation.
And regrettably on the Mac, automator is going to be replaced with shortcuts, which I think is a terrible.
At least on the Mac alternative right now. It just doesn't work very well from what I can tell. But Automator works great and it uses AppleScript. So a lot of the times what I would do, Chris, is that I'm working on a project and I would say, okay, well, I want this project to be opened and I want all the docs associated with it. You can basically build an app, an automator, that says open all these five documents when you double click this one thing and that's all the documents for your project. So that just saves me time having to go through folders and open things manually.
Little things like that are helpful.
[00:58:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Actually, you know, one thing that I've been doing with my Mac, now that I've gone On to that M1, is I basically have. And I mean, we'll talk about it probably in another episode, but with my Firefox browser. Browser, I keep all my various windows. Like I have one for school, one for work, one personal.
And I just keep them logged in. And then the first thing that I do is just open up the history again.
And yeah, just because of that, that processor, it really. Nothing happens to it. Like you can be running all sorts of applications. I really haven't had any issues from a runtime side of things, but.
[00:58:59] Speaker A: Well, like, you talk about separation too. Like, I. For personal stuff, I use Safari because I use that on my mobile devices.
Firefox, I use. That's my work account. And I have a totally different set of bookmarks in Firefox, so I'm not distracted and things like that.
[00:59:16] Speaker B: Yeah, that is a good idea.
Did you have more of that you wanted to talk about in terms of your resolutions or you kind of almost said that they had like two more.
[00:59:26] Speaker A: I have many. I have many. I chose some.
Yeah, I think there's some personal growth stuff, but some of it's quite personal, so I probably won't bring it up. Our audience doesn't need to know.
[00:59:39] Speaker B: All right.
All right, sounds good. Well, it's been nice just going through all this and hopefully for our audience and, you know, whether you're students or educators, but maybe it might be a good time to reflect and just think about what are things that you can maybe simplify or cut back on. And I really think that the, you know, especially just being a little bit more present is maybe one of the things that I'm going to try to do. Because you know this as these guys from Make Time talk about, there's these infinity pools which your phone is one of those with all these various apps and these gizmos and stuff. And I think we're. A lot of times we're missing out on other things in our life that are probably much more meaningful. Meaningful.
So anyways, we'll wrap it up there. So if, if anybody wants to get a hold of me, you can visit my website. I. I don't know how much I'm going to be checking out my social media, but maybe once in a while I will. But my website is Chris Hans with a K so K R I S H A N S CA and Eric, how can people get a hold of you?
[01:00:52] Speaker A: You.
Well, clearly they shouldn't be getting a hold of me on Twitter since I have detoxed myself from it and all other social media. So it is. You can contact me that way. Basically you can find contact information on my website, which is Eric, which is Eric Christiansen.net I also maintain a tech blog, tech tech- bytes techbytes.net that I haven't written on for some time, though I will write more, even if it's shorter stuff, more regularly because I really enjoy that. It's made me very sad that I haven't been writing on it. So you can follow that. I have a newsletter automatically emails out for that site. I do have a Twitter account at EG Christensen, though I won't check it, but you can kind of see some of the automated things that I post.
And if you Google my name with Mount Royal University beside it, you'll find my faculty profile.
All right, perfect.
[01:01:53] Speaker B: Well, as always, it's a pleasure.
[01:01:56] Speaker A: Likewise.
Take care. Thanks.
[01:01:59] Speaker B: Yeah, bye.
[01:02:06] Speaker A: You can learn more about EdTech examined by going to our website edtechexamine.com there you'll find ways to subscribe as well as host information, our social media accounts and our blog posts.
Our blog posts are also published through medium on the EdTech examine publication.
You can contact EdTech examined by emailing us at heyedtechexamine.com if you have an EdTech question you'd like us to answer on a future episode, you can email us or reach us through Twitter using the hashtag edtechofficehours.
You can find edtech examined on Twitter and Instagram with the handle techexamined. And we also have a LinkedIn page you can follow until next time.
[01:03:04] Speaker B: And I'm Chris Hong, the audio producer for EdTech examined.
[01:03:08] Speaker A: You can get in touch with me.
[01:03:09] Speaker B: And contact me through all of my social media at my website, which is Chrishong ca. That's C h r I s h o a n g ca.
