AI Can Build the Syllabus, Not the Journey: Course Design in the Age of AI
Full transcript
Sean: And...
Andrew: Welcome back to Studio Maynard.
Sean: And this time with a fully cleared audio deck.
Andrew: Yes, for anybody that listened to the end of last week's... Wonderful episode. I love the fact that you had your future hat on last week and you preempted what was going to happen at the end. This is what happens when you're a professional futurist.
Sean: That's right. You just need to learn to listen to what you actually say. You gotta practice what you preach, right? We were like, and all the signals were like, what could happen here? The chances of this going up. And I will say, like, I'm just looking now, we have, it only goes to 12. It says like 12 hours plus. But even with their math, it said we had four and we made it one. So, but this time,
Andrew: Rest assured that red light will stay on the whole time. So if you're wondering what we're talking about, you need to go back and listen to the previous episode.
Sean: That's right.
Andrew: Right to the end.
Sean: Go check out the Megatrends episode because, well, one, it was a great episode. I was. And it's still, a lot of people have, like, it was fun because that sort of episode, I feel like a lot of people came out of the woodwork and were like, want to talk about it. So I'm like, I'm tempted to just continue... Right, right, right. But, you know, but yeah, go back and listen to the, if nothing else. And I think it's like, it's like a one hour and like four minutes.
Andrew: I think everything collapses, that whole edifice, that whole pack of cards.
Sean: And what's not captured on there, thankfully, which I do have. So like, at some point there could, we, at some point we need to open it up for like donations or something. And whoever, if we get a certain amount, I'll release the panic because the cameras have it. The downside is, is their audio is not that good. But there is a few moments of that pure panic when I realized the light. So on the recording deck, the light is red, means everything is fine and it's recording. And we had gotten, we had basically like wrapped up the whole show and I look and it was green, which means it's like ready to record. And, but I had no idea how long that had been off.
Andrew: My fear was it had been green all the time. We put together that whole fantastic one hour episode with nothing recording at all. And that immediate thought of, can we repeat this? There's no way we can repeat this.
Sean: Nope, nope. Even if you tried a hundred times, you can never capture that genuine conversation again. But because I remember, because I look from time to time and people, if people are watching the video really carefully, you probably can tell that I might, I glanced down over here from time to time, just as, because I have had, you know, in a, in a career of media, I have had those things where it luckily hasn't happened to me personally as being the one at fault, but have been in a situation where it was like, did we capture that? And it was like, we sure did. And then when the person at the end, when the video was over is when the person hit the button and it started recording. And it was like, oh no! So those live, those moments of panic and fear live and haunt me.
Andrew: If it makes you feel any better, this is just such small beans in comparison. So before we recorded last week, I was on vacation for a couple of days and I fly kites. And I quite like taking video. There's a way of using a phone to fly a sort of two-line kite and actually hold the camera. And it's pretty cool when it works.
Sean: So does it like shoot up into it so you can see?
Andrew: Yeah, so you hold it parallel with the strings so you can actually sort of see the car. And I thought I got a beautiful sequence. Out on the Puget Sound, you had sort of mist and water and sort of a lighthouse is in the background. I look at it. It's a picture of my feet. I did the classic thing. When I thought I was stopping it, I was starting it.
Sean: And it happens. It's legit. And it's funny, too, because, like, I mean, all the cameras, this is a fear that I've lived with. And people know, if you're a longtime listener, or you know that you've heard Sean's fears before is we, because we leverage iPhones as cameras. They have no external indicator light. Most cameras do. They'll have some kind of indicator light. And I'm sure there's probably a thing we could get to rig up to it to do it, but whatever. So you just trust that they're running. And, you know, we have the fallback. If it ever goes completely, we've got the audio only. We've got the audio, yes. But that was the thing. That was, so it was quite funny last week. Thankfully, it had only cut off. That was like the biggest relief ever was reviewing what we had captured and realizing it had only cut off the last couple of minutes. Yeah. So, yeah.
Andrew: But go listen.
Sean: Oh, yes. Anyway, yes. You know, hey, whoever said podcasting wasn't a, you know, seat of your pants thrilling adventure. You know, they clearly have never been behind the microphone. But, yeah. Okay. So, I say I've got a couple of things to talk about. Yep. Somewhat sadly, it's a return to AI, I think, unfortunately. But also, again, it's sort of... It's the web of AI. It is. You cannot escape it. The crushing boulder that is encompassing all, I don't know. But I thought we could just, we'll take a break. Maybe we'll just jump in. And I got one thing, because I do want to talk about, just to foreshadow a little bit, is to celebrate a little bit of Modem Futura crossing the two-year mark. But then also something that's kind of hot on my mind right now is around the use of artificial intelligence in building like university-level courses.
Andrew: Yeah, we have some stories.
Sean: We've got some stories and I've got some thoughts. And so, yeah, so why don't we take a quick break and then we'll just jump right back in. Sounds good.
Announcer: Initializing waveform. Modulating signals for transmission. Exploring the possible, probable, and preferable futures. Welcome to Modem Futura.
Andrew: Oh, I could... You know, I'm sure one of these days you're going to make that link so short that you're not going to be able to splice it.
Sean: That one is going to be a test, I can tell right now. Thankfully, I can zoom into the millisecond to find the split. So anyway, I'm Sean Leahy, joined by my amazing two-year-running co-host, Andrew Maynard, and that means you're listening to Modem Futura, the show that explores the intersection of technology, society, and the possible, probable, and preferable futures, asking deep questions like, what will it mean to be human in the future? Which we've now been asking for two years, and we still don't know.
Andrew: We still have no idea.
Sean: We still have no idea. So we're going to be asking that for, you know, two more years.
Andrew: No, no, no, no. Modeling it. I get it, right? Put your teacher's hat on. We're modeling being human.
Sean: Or we, or I should.
Andrew: With all our flaws and foibles.
Sean: Or the business hat I don't have. I should put it on and say, we do know the answer. You have to subscribe or whatever. To find out.
Andrew: Somehow exchange value to get it. Yeah. When we hit that 100,000 subscriber mark, we might tell you the answer.
Sean: Yeah, there you go. That's it, right? We either need 100,000 subscribers or the first person to, you know, fund us with a million dollars. We'll tell you. That would do it. Yeah, we'll tell you what it is. So, no, I want to take a quick minute because we talked about it. I forget which. So what was weird is we talked about our two-year sort of anniversary for the podcast. Yes. Before, and then just the production schedule and the way things landed, we actually like, our actual anniversary was like in between episodes and stuff like that. So, but so roughly speaking, we've been our two-year, October is the, you know, I call it October 1st, but I think it's actually the 8th or something.
Andrew: It is the 8th. That first episode went out.
Sean: Yeah, that first episode went out. But I thought it's always, you know, I've made a habit of doing this around the end of the year December timeframe when all the sort of popular platform-based year-in-review stuff comes out. But hey, our anniversary is on October. It's not in December. So I figured this would also be a good time to kind of revisit. Because I will say, you know, again, I'm the worst at self-promoting and I'm terrible. So bear with me on this. But it is, I like to celebrate with some milestones that are, you know, humble brag, whatever, but also taken with a very big grain of salt because the world of podcasting is weird.
Andrew: So you're already undermining yourself. You can't help it. Because I know what I mean. I'm going to tell you some really cool stuff, but actually it's not really that cool. And actually I'm a bit embarrassed about it.
Sean: I can't help it. I can't help it. Because also I don't want to ever be seen as being like, oh, he's bragging about it. I know. But the reason it's cool is because, again, I think about like the, and as I was just talking about this this morning on a little talk I was giving, was the reason for this is bringing all of these conversations that typically, I mean, part of going back to the origins of like, why a podcast? The landscape, certainly there's no one out there going, God, we just need one more podcast. If only there was one more podcast out there. But really this idea of how do we take this amazing amount of work, the things that excite us academically, intellectually, whatever. Again, in institutions of higher education and scholarship, these things tend to live locked up, even professionally. They live locked up in whether you want to call it an ivory tower or a subscription model or in some other industry. Inaccessible. Inaccessible to most people. And this exact topic about talking about what does it mean to be human in the future is probably one of those questions that, of any question, should not be inaccessible. And that was part of the main driver of how do we take this work, the concepts, the ideas, and bring that, hopefully, to everyone, to the public, inviting the listener to our table to have a conversation with us, to catalyze these into the cafes, bars, whatever.
Andrew: Pulling the veil apart so you can actually see inside. Although actually, if anybody thinks that this is what academia is like, we don't have quite as much fun every day. But it is, I mean, because as we talk, we're actually thinking and generating ideas. And we've said this before, but I'm not sure how clear it is that the work that we do outside of the podcast actually depends fairly critically on the conversations we have here. This is real-time scholarship. It is, if you were to like... Even as I say that, I'm thinking, you know, there are going to be people scratching their heads. Someone's going to yell at us.
Sean: That's what I was like. Take it with a grain of salt. But if we were to put it into some kind of farming analogy or whatever, right? This is where you drill the fields. This is where you plant the seeds.
Andrew: This is the messiness.
Sean: This is the messiness. But also, it is the intellectual stimulation that we all... Well, I shouldn't say we all. That's a broad brush.
Andrew: As you're saying this, I'm imagining. So for the podcast-only audio people, fine, but the people watching the video thinking: "He's got Lego on there, he's got a kid's book, he's got..." Oh my god, I know. "Is this really what we're paying people in academia to do?"
Sean: Yes, yes, because we need... The imagination is part of the creativity, is a critical part of new and innovative ways of thinking and ideas. And play, that willingness to explore and play.
Andrew: I mean, I can't sort of overemphasize enough how critical this is to actually making new discoveries.
Sean: Absolutely. And I feel like this is a thing that, you know, going back like 20 some years, right? I think, or maybe it's longer, when like Google, for example, when Google was Google and not Alphabet owning Google, whatever, when Google was Google. When Google was good. When doing good or do no evil was part of their charter, which it no longer is, by the way. When that was still there, I remember there being this massive, like news coverage and splash about like, oh, working at Google, you can bring your dog to work. And we have slides and ball pits. And they were intentionally bringing back play.
Andrew: And they still, many of these companies still do this thing.
Sean: But I think that also spawned this thing that has, I think, lived primarily in, you know, startup culture in Silicon Valley, or at least initially there of really broadcasting like, yes, well, there's the darker side too, which is like, well, we'll just let you do everything so you can't leave. But there's that. But I think it was one of those things where it was like color TV versus black and white, where suddenly it was like these big companies doing big, amazing, crazy things, but allowing people to have fun and express themselves while doing that. And I feel like today we've lost a lot of that and it's kind of returned to this like, no, no, no, for it to be legitimate and worth money, it must be in this little silver box.
Andrew: It's business formal.
Sean: Yeah. And I'm like, well, yes, that's fine to an extent. But also like you want those innovative, transformative, disruptive ideas and things where that comes out of some form of play. Whether that be external or just completely mental and internal. Yeah. So it's one of those things. So I would say, so yes to Lego. And always, and I was just talking about that last episode. I still will defend it. Best toy ever made, ever will be made. You can have others. I'm not saying it's Lego or nothing.
Andrew: It's a yes and, but Lego.
Sean: But I'm just saying, Lego... Lego ride or die. Lego for the win. But anyway, back to the... Yes, we've already diverged. Yes. Also, sorry, what were we talking about?
Andrew: I don't even know. Also a perfect... Yes. No, your humble brag's also a perfect example of how these conversations, you just never know where you're going to end up.
Sean: But so, okay, so looking back over the two years, I had... And this will bleed into conversation about some of the things that AI struggles with a little bit, too. So again, looking back, one of the humble brags that I'll put out there is one of the sort of aggregate organizations that looks at, ranks, podcast visibility. Because again, if I won't get into the weeds of like podcast metrics, but it's very, it's difficult. It's messy. It's very similar to putting in like print ads because you can get impressions, but you have no idea how many people actually, and there's this whole concept of de-duping and all this kind of stuff. And that is basically just a product of the technology, how, you know, how it is distributed and things like that. But there's a company called PodSEO. So they sort of rank the visibility, if you will, of the podcast. And thank you to all of you, our listeners and viewers. Those rankings have been on this like almost alarming uptick, which has been great to the point where I'm getting suspicious. Why alarming? I don't know. Maybe I should save this for, you know, a therapy session because I'm like, Why does success make me feel uncomfortable?
Andrew: Funny you should say that. I feel exactly the same. So this is my life, the public-facing stuff. And I get really worried when I get successful and I have posts that take off. Because I think there's a responsibility that comes with that. Do I really want responsibility? People reading my stuff? I know.
Sean: And also, am I getting played here? To then be like, I am so successful and important. And then you're like, actually, that was just a bot and it's all fake. Well, I'd say you're being very British at this point.
Andrew: It's that sort of two-sided view. I want to be successful, but actually I'm a bit scared of it.
Sean: It's like the poppy syndrome. Is that like, if your poppies are too tall, they're going to get chopped off. So, you know.
Andrew: I want to be mediocrely successful.
Sean: Just enough. You don't want to be recognized in the grocery store, but, you know, at the airport once in a while would be fun. But so anyway, so PodSEO, you know, our metrics on that have been going on the rise to the point which I'm tempted. I even checked this morning. And there's a part at which, like normally when you check these things, the normal ebb and flow is they go up, they go down. And sometimes they go way down. And then they go up. But it's been on a steady increase for a while.
Andrew: And I'm looking over, I can see that little sort of exponential.
Sean: Yeah, this little uptick. And so we've had, I think we've reported on this for a while. So Modem Futura for a long time has been in this like top 5% of podcasts, which sounds, that's one of those things where like, it sounds amazing. But one of the things when you realize that and it's out of, so this index is out of 4 million podcasts that it recognizes, which also, again, there's a lot of podcasts out there, people. But what's interesting about it is it basically is looking at the visibility. How visible is your podcast and where does it rank amongst all the others that it's tracking? And this is just one. So there are many other ways of doing this and whatever. But we've been in this top five, which it sounds great, but also the top 50... Top 5%. The bottom 50% is very easy to jump. I mean, because most of those 4 million podcasts are like one or two episodes that are 25 years old. And well, not 10 years old. Yes, and they've never gone anywhere. But so we've been in the top five, but we've been, so even within there, so as our ranking of today, we are now in the top 1.265%. If we want to go to the...
Andrew: That 265 is important.
Sean: That's right. We don't go to the 10s or the 100s. We would have the thousands, maybe. Because, you know...
Andrew: We're going to have a campaign around this. Sides of buses. Top 1.265%. And we calculated down to, you know, the smallest degree. And if you know anything about ASU, you're allowed a little smile at that point.
Sean: That's right. We can wrap a bus or maybe if we can't get a bus, maybe we can get a Waymo. Maybe we can wrap a Waymo. 1.25% of the podcast. But it's been incredible because I've been watching it. And it's been funny because in my little notebook, I have all these scratchings where it's like 1.78%, 1.65%, 1.5%. And I'm like, wow, this is great. But anyway, that's just to say, again, thank you to all of our listeners. And for those of you who are having those conversations, as we hope, and then sharing them and kind of moving those on.
Andrew: And I would, I mean, we've said this again repeatedly, but it can be lonely doing a podcast because you broadcast it and you've no idea who's listening. And that is where it is so valuable when people drop us a line or leave us a rating or review or anything. It makes us realize we're not just talking to ourselves. We may be. Well, we've still got the receipts in front of us. At least somebody is listening to us.
Sean: And boy, I have the receipts too, because I went and looked. So one thing that's really interesting as well, and just to reiterate on that, there is a, I mean, besides sometimes when you get a message that people are cranky and yelling at you about thing. The best ever is when we put out these open challenges, use beinghuman.fyi in your AI. And then people do, and they share, and they say what they're finding and what they're doing. It is just like, I mean, I cannot tell you how you're just like, there is someone out there, you know?
Andrew: Thank you, that fan.
Sean: That's right. And my mom, of course, you know, who's a devoted listener, but you know.
Andrew: Who is not that fan. We have at least two.
Sean: That's right. So, you know, it's plural. We have fans, you know? But it is interesting. So, so looking back over these two years too, I just did a quick piece because I was like, okay, let's pull up like a little dashboard kind of a thing. This will also tie into the AI conversation. So I had a very couple simple questions. I'm like, okay, so if I look at our publication, we have, according to Simplecast, who is our content delivery network, we have published officially as of this morning, 110 episodes. By the time you hear this, it'll be 111. Of which of those, 106 are like proper episodes. The other ones are like the trailer and some bonus episodes that we've sort of peppered in there. And so I had some very simple dashboard-y questions. I'm like, okay, so we've got 110 episodes. How many minutes of audio is that? Can you, like, what are we talking about? And I broke Claude trying to figure this out.
Andrew: So you went to Claude and you asked, do the analytics.
Sean: Do the analytics. And in the end, I got what I was looking for. But when I was watching this transpire in front of me, in terms of like what you're allowed to see. It was the most, and it highlights something that I've heard before too, which is like, there are moments when we're using tools like, you know, LLMs and like AI platforms like this, where it is the most inefficient use of potentially that technology. Where, cause I'm sitting here going, okay, if I were to get, this would be the worst and most boring podcast to do. So we're not, this is a thought experiment. We'll do it. Is if I had said, Andrew, let's calculate quickly how many minutes of published podcasts have we done? It would be super simple. It would take me 10 seconds to open up, you know, Excel or Numbers, a spreadsheet. Just put those times down and then...
Andrew: Tally them up.
Sean: And you could sit there and go, episode one, 40 minutes, 60 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever. And I could sit there and go, do-do-do-do, and then just do a quick sum. It took Fable... or no, not Fable, it was Opus 5.5...
Andrew: Yes.
Sean: ...25 minutes, right, to come back and say, "I could only get 60 out of the 110 episodes." And so then I had to go...
Andrew: Did you give it any clues on where to look?
Sean: I gave it everything, including the RSS feed, right?
Andrew: Yes. Because the RSS feed has everything.
Sean: Everything. Yeah, everything. And it's just an XML file.
Andrew: Yes.
Sean: In the end, it gave... Of course, what it does brilliantly is, once it has the information, it gave me the assembled dashboard quickly. And that it does very well because everything code related, it snaps. Right. But it was something. And I said, well, wait a minute. It started making it up. It goes, well, here are the episodes I've counted. And there's, you know, again, it only got about 60% of them. And so it's like, I've just estimated what the other ones would be. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. If I gave this as a, if I published this, where it was like, you know, stick your finger in the air and go, well, I think, you know. No, I said, just tally this as a simple task. Take the number. They're all published. It's all freely available. Look at it and just tally it up. It literally struggled to do it.
Andrew: But this is important. And I think people forget this, because this makes sense when you know how large language models work. They're not analytic machines like a calculator. They are next word generators, next token generators, which means that they give the illusion of being able to do this. And sometimes they do amazing things, but in other cases. So they can solve the world's most complex mathematical challenges, but they can't add up a stream of numbers.
Sean: Can't add up 110 numbers together.
Andrew: And people forget this. They assume because they're brilliant in one area, they're brilliant in every other area.
Sean: And so in total, it finally was able to get it, because what I had to do...
Andrew: So what are the error bars on these numbers now?
Sean: Well, now they should be accurate, but also my confidence is shaken on it. Because what I had to do was I was like, okay, let me just open up the XML file, which you can just do with the RSS feed. Save it as an XML file and give that to Claude and say, from this file, now go do your thing. And it finally did it. But it reminded me, it was like, I heard this somewhere, another podcast somewhere. I forget where, so forgive me for stealing it. But it was like this comparison of AI being the most inefficient way of getting some things done, which would be like asking a person to be like, "Can I have a glass of water?" And instead of just getting up and going to the sink and grabbing the glass of water and coming back, we'll be like, "Get up, run three miles around the house for a while, then go get the water and bring back..."
Andrew: Well, I was actually going to say, with my experience, you ask it for a glass of water, it says, "Water, that's hydrogen and that's oxygen. Let me do some research. Oh, it's two hydrogens and two oxygens. Now, how do you form that? You combust something." And we're at the end of this long process. First of all, first, yeah.
Sean: And then we're like, "Are you sure you don't want... Isn't H3O hydrogen peroxide?" Or whatever, it's like...
Andrew: And then the sort of chain of thought, "No, we don't want that. Or do we? Let me check that."
Sean: Do you want to live after you consume this liquid?
Andrew: Maybe we should try carbon and nitrogen.
Sean: Yeah,
Andrew: No, maybe not.
Sean: Oh my gosh, yeah. But it's exactly like that. Cause I'm sitting here going like, this would have taken me, you know, I don't know, five minutes maximum to do this. And that would even include probably another pass of double checking. And it took, and I'm watching it. So just again, going back to just calculating minutes of runtime, it spun up, I think I counted 12 agents to do the work. All this kind of stuff. And I'm sitting here going, how much energy and tokens and all this other stuff is it going when I'm like... And then I start feeling guilty.
Andrew: There's another brownout somewhere. That's Sean asking another question. Well, actually, if your light's dim. We have got to go to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy here. The scene, and most people won't know this or remember it, but the scene where Arthur Dent asks the ship, the Heart of Gold, for a cup of tea. A cup of tea. And he basically crashes the whole system as it tries to work out how to make a cup of tea. The perfect cup of tea. The perfect cup of tea. This is exactly where we are with AI at the moment. You ask it a seemingly simple question and you crash the system. Life imitating art. You know...
Sean: Douglas Adams was a hundred percent so far ahead of his time. Like it is prescient. But yeah, because that's exactly and I'm sitting here and now not only is it doing this, it's wasting my time. I'm getting irritated. I'm all... And then now I'm like, well, do I trust these values? Because it was showing me before, it was just going to make it all up. But then on top of I'm going, well, now I feel a little guilty for having even done it when I should have just done it myself. Right.
Andrew: Right, yes.
Sean: But that being said, we'll hold that for a second, because we'll come back to that. But I do want to share what it came up with.
Andrew: Okay. But despite all that, this is what Claude said.
Sean: Yeah, so after two years, 110 published episodes, 6,605 minutes of runtime, if you will. So 110.1 hours. Yes. So if you do the math, it looks like it does break out to basically be 60, 60 minutes, 60.6 minutes average per episode. And yeah, it's, you know, this was interesting too. Our guest conversations run longer, no surprise. But markedly too, like the average with guests is over 70 minutes and we're under an hour when it's just the two of us, which we try hard to do, by the way, you know, we're bad at it.
Andrew: Nobody believes you there.
Sean: I mean, that's the goal. The goal is 45. And usually what happens is I see 45 tick by on the thing.
Andrew: So actually, also what people will not know, the number of weeks where we say, you know, let's do two short episodes this week. And then an hour later, we say, "God..."
Sean: "Our brains are dead. Can't do it. Not doing it." Yep. That's almost weekly that happens. We're always like, let's do, yeah, we'll get two in. We'll get two in.
Andrew: Just to remind you, this was supposed to be another short episode. And I know it's not going to be.
Sean: Yeah, because I'm looking at the clock already. We're already deep. We're already deep into our typical 60-minute average. But it was really encouraging to look at this. But then also I pull the numbers. I like to see the numbers on like our distribution, where we go. So one of the things, let me jump back to it because it changed. So as of mid-October, so we're recording this episode on October 15th, so literally the midway of the month. Currently, over, I would say over because I expect another one to add here, 144 countries worldwide tune in to Modem Futura. Which is not bad. And I am quite proud of that because that is quite the global reach. And it has grown...
Andrew: And this is hard data?
Sean: This is hard data. Yep, this is directly the analytic, which is not, it's overly conservative, this information. The geographic one is usually more accurate because it takes aggregates from basically like those major nodes from those geographical locations. And so what you lose is any granularity inside. Sometimes you can get citywide stuff, but for the most part, it's sort of like sort of bounded by the country or region of where it's basically coming from on the pipes, on the internet. But yeah, and it's grown significantly. So when we had originally started the episode, we were in like 70-ish countries. So over that, and those are kind of like the normal 70, if you're thinking of countries and you would try to name as many as you can. Yeah, that's those ones. And then, but over the last two years, it's incredible to see the list and how it has just spread across. It's basically doubled in geographical reach over those two years. And that's incredibly cool.
Andrew: It is. When you think about that, in terms of what we're doing here at a university in Phoenix, Arizona, and yet our reach, our public, freely accessible reach, now goes out to over 140 countries. Talk about being global.
Sean: Talk about being global. And it's, and there was one that stood out to me because I, I was scanning through the list and I was like, that is just cool. Someone's listening to us in the Seychelles. And I'm like, so I'm just imagining them on the most pristine, beautiful white sand beach. Right. And what's in their ears? Yes. Modem Futura, baby. Sorry to ruin your vacation, but you know, it's just cool. Cause you see these places too, where you're like, wow, that's a really remote place or whatever, or you don't, you know? And yeah, so, so pretty cool. Yep. And yeah, like I said, two years running, and it's exciting to see where it's going to continue to grow.
Andrew: We're doing okay. The mission is working.
Sean: And then the sort of the backside of that is also like, but it's never enough.
Andrew: Of course it isn't. But we should talk about that, because I think that's one of the challenges with anybody who decides that they have a public obligation as an academic to make their work accessible, which is exactly what we're doing. If you're not getting those signals, it is very, very hard to keep on the momentum. And even when you get them, you're never sure what's enough. And it's easy. If you're writing a paper and submitting it, it's the fact that you've had a paper published. That's N of one, which actually matters more than anything. And then, of course, the citations matter, but not as much as getting it out there. Or getting a grant. It's the fact that you can say on your CV you've got a grant. But when you're looking at people engaging with your work, what's enough? Is it 10? Is it 100? Is it 1,000? Is it 100,000? And with my own writing, with my Substack, I have angst over this every day. I have a Substack that goes out to 5,000 people. And there are days that I think that's not bad for a little academic and other days that I think that's a drop in the ocean. Is this really worth my time for just 5,000 people reading what I write? And I don't know the answer to that.
Sean: Yeah, no, it's tough because, I mean, I think that the... And I don't... Clearly, I don't know the answer. But it is tough because, I mean, with all those kind of outputs, I mean, there's so much in anybody who is making something, right? If you're making podcasts yourself, if you're writing, if you have your own blog or Substack or your own YouTube channel, you know, the biggest mistake is to think about like, oh, anyone can whip up a thing and put it out there. And there is some truth to that. Yeah, you can slop your way to somewhere. But when you actually are putting your energy and thought and your expertise into it, it is a grind.
Andrew: It is. And actually, there's another side of this. So I'm experimenting with this now. And I probably mentioned this on a previous podcast. I have this covert project that I'm working on where nobody knows about it, apart from the fact I keep on talking about it. But I have a separate persona, totally separate from my sort of professional academic persona, where I'm trying to get traction. I'm writing stuff, and I'm just seeing how easy or how hard it is. And the reality is, you can get traction on social media, on the internet, if you are polarizing, if you are opinionated, if you are a jerk. So I'm summarizing here, but you look at all of the advice. This is what you have to do. You have to grab people's attention. It's nothing to do about what you have to say, what expertise you have, and what nuance you bring. If that actually nuance is bad, that doesn't get your attention. And so I'm finding, I can't get any traction whatsoever because my name is not associated with what I'm putting out there.
Sean: Which is a good thing, but like it's working against. Well, and that's something, I mean, I think we, I can remember, we talked, we touched on that a little bit before, but that is one of those challenges with, and I think, and again, tying it back into the conversation we can use with AI, is that signal is also coming back full circle. I think we were talking about this a little bit with like the mic drop moments and a lot of these like CEO billionaire manifestos. But like, yeah, if you aren't providing basically the equivalent of like that fast food, junk food, richness, like delicious thing to consume, you're the vegetable next to the chocolate cake. And it's like, which one do people reach for? You want the broccoli?
Andrew: Sean, we've got to transform you from the broccoli into the chocolate cake. Although I love broccoli. Actually, not the chocolate cake. It's the salty, sweet, sugary. Right, it's all of them at the same time.
Sean: Or what is it? Because what was it like? I think it was the Doritos, right? The snack chip.
Andrew: Fine-tuned to be irresistible.
Sean: Yeah, and I remember reading this. I think this goes back to a shout out to Stuff You Should Know podcast, which was one of the sort of big heavyweights that has always kind of been out there as these mainstream. And they had done this episode that I still remember talking about how they, basically the food scientists had figured out how to manipulate the spice. So that because our tongues and our brains have a natural filter to signal, we've had enough, stop. We're full. We're going to get sick from this. And they figured out a way where if you have it be this certain chemical makeup, you can confuse that signal so that you never have enough. And so I'm like, oh my God, that's brilliant and awful all at the same time.
Andrew: And the worrying thing is you can see exactly how that applies to social media with doom scrolling, how it applies to AI, how it keeps you going. And this actually, this is important because this is stuff we know from different areas, especially with food and addiction. So much of that prior knowledge applies to what's happening now with digital platforms.
Sean: Yeah. And I think, I mean, I come back to this a lot and recently I've been coming back to this point quite a bit, actually, I feel like just even the last couple of days is like, is this reminder, right? That when we're talking about tech, you know, technological or digital transformation, we're not really talking about the tech. I mean, we are, of course, at a surface level. I mean, you have the things that do the stuff. But ultimately, what we're talking about is the change in human behavior, right? The change...
Andrew: The transformation is human habits.
Sean: Yeah, exactly. Speaking of...
Andrew: The digital in digital transformation is how we transform in order to fit into this digital world.
Sean: 100%. It's the things that catalyze the need to change. Where were the changes coming from? Like the technology itself very rarely is alone the thing that causes that, right? And so even just coming back, like the use of AI tools, the use of these other things. Yeah, it is the change. I mean, again, going back to these, you know, going back to these phrases, right? It's like we create these tools and these systems and these machines. And then by us using them, they change us and create new versions of human behavior.
Andrew: Which is exactly what I've written about. And I would argue that AI is doing that faster and in more complex ways than other technologies. But absolutely you have that two-way transformation. And it's messy because it's not just bad or not just good. Because as humans, we're incredibly adaptable. This is what we do. You put a new thing in front of someone and they work out how to leverage and utilize it, but they're changed in the process. And so you can never separate out good from bad with that.
Sean: Yeah, and I think, I mean, just to use that as a transition, you know, in our conversation too, is pulling that same challenge of where, like under the guise of using artificial intelligence to create new courses. So I want to go there.
Andrew: We want to shift it. Yes, after dissing Claude for doing such a bad job, but you still used it. You couldn't divorce yourself. You couldn't pull yourself away from using it. But then you apply it to what's happening in universities with courses. Because I've just had a really interesting experience there.
Sean: And I've been using either whatever, and again, I can't remember the models change so frequently. I've been using a version of ChatGPT or Claude for over a year now as using it as a basically a privatized instructional designer to help me build some courses and stuff. So I've been using it for a while now in there. And boy, do I have feelings about it because I feel this, I feel this simultaneous duality of this is an amazing 10x booster for things that I otherwise that would take me a long, long time to do. But on the other hand, it's like working with the biggest idiot ever.
Andrew: You ask it for a syllabus, and 20 hours later and several hundred dollars later, it grins at you and says, "Here's your new car. There it is. I built this for you. I did it."
Sean: What are you doing?
Andrew: Right. Go back and do it again.
Sean: And I'm like, "At what point do you get a refund? Can I refund those tokens? Because this sucks."
Andrew: But the stupid thing is we're so sort of sucked into this that we then try again. Our first thing is, well, that didn't work. Let me go back to it. So I've got to tell you my experience and then we'll get onto yours because you've probably sort of used these platforms more than I have, although it's now, what, three years ago that I put together the prompt engineering course at ASU? God, it's been three years? I think it is ASU's first sort of AI course. And I did all of that with AI. I think it was ChatGPT 3.5 or 4. And it was a good experience back then. And I felt that I was working very effectively with AI. But now, at the moment, I'm finding myself where I'm having to sort of think about and plan out three or four new courses with our move to the Thunderbird School of Global Management. And the thing is, when I teach, it takes time and effort to really think critically about what it is that I want to teach, what I'm going to draw on, how I'm going to design and craft that class. This is not a five minute job. This is a month's job. And anybody, I know some people can put together a course really fast, but to most people who take this seriously, it's more like an architect building a really sort of novel sort of building. Anyway, so I was looking at the time I had, because I'm on the sabbatical, so I'm not really supposed to be doing this. And I thought I would use Claude Code using Opus 5.5 in UltraCode, which is the one where you ask it a question and it spawns off 100 agents that do it. And it started off being fantastic. And I built this up brick by brick. I said, first of all, do a deep dive into who I am, my research, how I approach things, how I think, my mindset and everything. That took a day. And it did this incredible job, sort of several hundred pages of text that captured parts of me I didn't even know existed. I thought, this is great. And then I said, so now do a deep dive into Thunderbird and what our students here sort of need, what they're looking for, what will prepare them for the future. And that was great. And we did two or three other sort of exercises like this, sort of building the foundations. And then I said, well, now let's start sort of ideating these courses and pulling them together. I gave it some ideas. And what it came back with was slop.
Sean: So at this point, we've had... There's a sad trombone sound effect here somewhere that's like...
Andrew: I know. At this point, we've had sort of two or three days working intimately together, umpteen billion tokens burnt, no idea how much money had been spent on this. God, I know. Gigabytes of files. And then it comes back with something. I look at it and think, I could have put that together in a couple of hours. And it left me feeling utterly deflated.
Sean: Yeah, no, it's, and I will say this, it's gotten worse. Right. So like I said, so about, more than a year ago, I guess more than a year, I've been using it for more than a year probably. It's gotten worse because originally, sort of the normal cadence of how you would approach this, right, is, or at least I should say like my original approach didn't change how I would normally approach building a course. The addition was, is I had this great filter to run things through, check stuff, validate stuff, find those missing connections. What readings might go here that I didn't, here's what I'm, here's what I've pulled. What am I missing? Right. Because now these tools have the advantage of, they can mine so much more of the knowledge that I could ever sift through or find in any university, you know, catalog, what have you. And originally it was great. I mean, I was flying because it would be like this month. And I will, so massive shout out to one of our repeat guests, Punya Mishra.
Andrew: Yes.
Sean: Long story. Punya and I have been connected for, God...
Andrew: He must have been on one of the 75-minute ones.
Sean: Yeah, for sure. 20, God, 20 years. Right. Because Punya was a former instructor of mine, a professor of mine back at Michigan State. And I still remember taking one of his classes in a master's program. And it was the first time as a student I had this like aha moment where it was like, this wasn't a course. This was an experience that had been tailored and designed, and it wasn't put in my face. And it was one of those things where it was at the end that it was like, you look back and you're like, I just went on this very intentional journey that I was going through, not knowing I was going on this journey and was just, you know, tackling it as you do as a student tackling any course. You're like, you got the mechanics, you got the rhythms, you got the whatever. But then it was like this moment where I still remember my mind being blown at the end of this course being like, that was, I mean, the course material and all the normal mechanism, the learning outcomes, all that thing. Yep, great. But what was most impactful was the recognition that I went on a journey that was intentionally designed for me to go on. And that journey is what stuck and what was so powerful. And so even from that, so from that being sort of instilled in me at a young age, if you will, my own course development journey, I've always taken that forward, building on that idea. So like you, the courses I build, they are a representation. And yes, anyone can go, yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's the top things you need to know. Here's what we're going to do. And you can do a back of the envelope version.
Andrew: And if you want to do a boring course, you can say, here are the five learning objectives. Here are the 50 readings.
Sean: There you go.
Andrew: There you go.
Sean: And if you're a student, you've probably gone through those and you know what those are. And you can probably remember who taught those.
Andrew: But that's not a journey. That's not a learning experience. It's not a learning environment.
Sean: And it's not curated and it doesn't demonstrate the care and intentionality and the deep expertise. Right. Right. And so, so, so same thing. So when I sit down and build these courses, it's always the, you know, and again, I, in a former life, I used to be an instructional designer. So, you know, all the mechanisms are there to the backwards design and all these kinds of things. Right. But the intent is going again, how do I make this an experience? How do I take the learner through what they need to do? So at the end, they have what they need to then move for whatever it is, whatever class it is. And so originally using those AI platforms, it was a great help at that because I would say, well, this is what I'm thinking. This is where I'm going. This is where I want it to be. And this is where I need your help. Can I... If I do this and I do that, is there going to be too much overlap? Not enough. Is this... Does this make sense to you? And I was basically using it as a colleague. Right. Right. As a sounding board. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And it was great. And I was flying. And like, it was like, this is, and I had this moment where I'm like, this has changed how I will build courses forever. Right. Fast forward to now where it has become almost like prohibitive to use. Right. Because now I'll go, I'll approach it the same way. And I'll say, and I will spend the time to be like, this is a conversation. I want to sound things off. I want to work through this. And I'll say, this is what I'm working on. And this is what I'm thinking. And no matter how much I try to prevent it, it'll go away and come back and go, here's your course. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I didn't want you to do that because now I have to detangle what you've done because you read, and again, first glance, you might go, wow, you've got it soup to nuts.
Andrew: But it's superficial. And it's garbage. Absolutely. And it's almost always never innovative. And this is the thing we find more and more with AI. It is good at looking at conventionally what's worked in the past and reflecting that. It is really bad at looking over the horizon and being innovative in what you can do, which is, of course, what humans do. And I've got to say here that one of the things that really winds me up is both of us, we are experts in using these systems. But every time I write about these challenges with AI, I get somebody coming back to me saying, I know how to do this. Give me a call. Talk to me. And I know they don't. And I know that they are delusional and they have no idea what they're talking about. But it still winds me up no end. All of these people, especially the ones that have got a company or a method who says, I know how to make AI do exactly what you want. You cannot.
Sean: That's the sign that you're over your skis, right? Right, right. Like you are. Trust me. Yeah, like you, that shows, that tells you everything you need to know.
Andrew: And it's partly because teaching is a relationship-based process. It is human to human. And yes, we can use these techniques and these tools and these methods to help that, but ultimately it is human to human.
Sean: Yep, and it brings back that other piece, right? When we talk about teaching, that it is both a science and an art, right? I mean, and that's that part too is, because what is funny to me is, and I will say where it still does hold a lot of value is shortening a lot of the things that are painstaking. If you can wrangle your, whatever platform you're using, if you can wrangle it to actually obey what you're trying to do, because there is still some value. And I will say one of the best things I have found the use case of is giving it some kind of material, right? That I'm using for a session or whatever, giving it the material and saying, make me a thing from this, like a worksheet or make me a thing. Or the best one is for Canvas, right? So if you're stuck using Canvas, right? Now, depending on who administers your Canvas, you'll have certain abilities or not.
Andrew: And for people who are listening to this, who don't teach using Canvas, which is the learning management system. It is a nightmare. You imagine some teenagers sort of coding this in the 1980s and then sort of rubbing their hands together and thinking, done.
Sean: And going back again, I remember back when Canvas was the new hotness because it was employing like Ajax back in the time. So this is web, early web 2.0 days where you could click and reorder something. And it was like, wow. Because again, we had Blackboard, whatever the version of, but anyway. But now, so it's typically very restrictive and it's slow and clunky. But one of the things that I found is amazing is, again, you can take certain content, experiences, whatever you're looking for, and you can have your AI tool basically create a single encapsulated HTML file that has all the stuff that you otherwise can't control embedded. And you can populate that inside Canvas. And it turns your dull course into some really...
Andrew: Something amazing, yeah. And it's all accessible. This is really the two faces of AI. And I think this is important because on one hand, it is really bad at some things. And people don't talk enough about what it can't do. But on the other hand, it is incredibly powerful if you can spot how to utilize it and leverage.
Sean: Yeah, exactly. And that's the piece. And again, when it comes to course development, it's one of those tools. It's like, be careful. Because the danger, I will say this, the danger also becomes, because you, with very little effort on the creator, you can output... tens of thousands of pages of stuff. But it's still what it can't do is you can, again, you could feed it a syllabus that you've already created. And you could say, here are my learning outcomes. Sketch me out content, blah, blah, blah. And it will go and do it. What it can't ever do, because it doesn't know it's software, right? I mean, it's software in the cloud. It's doing whatever. It can't say that the journey is what do I need? What experience do I have to have? What kind of, what are those aha moments that I want to lead someone to, to then go from that, now you're ready for this next piece or this next whatever. Like it can't do, it is great at going, learning outcome five meets this. Like you wanted to build a matrix? It's great on that.
Andrew: And there's a weird nuance here as well. So I said earlier that teaching is relationship-based. Of course, there is a complexity there because some learning can be done without a human directly in the loop. So anybody that's learned from YouTube or TikTok or even working with ChatGPT or Claude, there is a power in that. But certainly within education and in that curated learning environment, there is a magic that happens when you have a human helping guide another human along the journey to a point where they can use skills in a human world that are valuable to them and they've actually internalized.
Sean: Yep, yep. Yeah, and again, that comes back to that design, right? Is both this duality of one understanding that that's always at play. Because again, if you are an educator, a teacher, you know that you have your classroom in front of you. So you imagine that. You know of those students that didn't need you at all.
Andrew: Right.
Sean: Because they were so motivated and so whatever. They went off and did all this kind of stuff. They did not need you. You know the other ones who needed more than you could possibly give. Right, right. And everywhere in between. Yep. And so part of that too, and again, this is, you know, I'm dancing the line here to invoke Dewey again, but it happens with me. You don't have to get me talking long to do so. But that also comes at that responsibility when creating the courses, either using these tools to help yourself create them, but also in the stuff that you create, allowing for opportunities for your students to leverage other technologies along with what you're doing. Because again, you know, as we're sitting, you create these courses and you do all this stuff. The expectation now should be the students who are sitting in there, they also have these tools. Right. And if they're not consuming, like if you're creating slides or content, if they're not putting that into a tool, like I'm pretty sure they are, even if they've been asked not to, right? Right, right. And so thinking about that to also understand how you might allow them to leverage that, right? So how are these tools or the experience that you're creating, how are you providing those opportunities to enhance those natural impulses of inquiry, communication, construction, and expression? And letting them use those tools to synthesize the material, go through those experiences, and put that back. And that's the beauty is like, it's the journey, not the content, because the content can be grabbed from anywhere in many ways.
Andrew: And to be clear, this is a very specific philosophical approach to teaching. And we struggle with this, I know, with our colleagues, because we've talked about it. There is the transactional or atomized approach to learning that just sort of says, learning is all about facts, stuff you need to know. And our job as teachers is to stuff your head as fast as possible with those facts. And if we can use AI to stuff them in faster, all the better. But then you've got the other side of this, and this is the side that we talk about a lot, that's not about facts, but it's about learning. It's about formation. It's about the journey. It's about you internalizing so much stuff, not just the facts, but everything around them, the context, the experience, the understanding that allows you to become a better person in the journey that you follow.
Sean: And to become an expert. Yes. And to formulate your identity as someone of an expert level of learning and understanding.
Andrew: Yep. And you cannot do that just by sort of reducing stuff down into little nuggets of knowledge that you shove into somebody's head.
Sean: Yeah. I mean, and I think, I mean, I can, when you're talking about that, I mean, an unknown volume of images of that classic thing of like, that like illustration of the head opening up and then someone pouring in books and equations and you're like, there you go. And again, going back to Dewey, he even calls explicitly that model out saying, it's not our job to fill the head of the pupil. It is to, basically is to support their natural impulses for this learning. And the thing that also just, again, kind of going back to this, this idea that you sort of brought up too is like, you know, as we were thinking about opening up those, those journeys and that, that way of doing stuff, right. Is it opens up this whole new level of possibility that it's like, as this information is so becoming more and more readily available, less and less. Is it about defining here are the five things you must know, because again, they can, they can search that up. You got a class. I mean, I just got done teaching a class on digital transformation. You can use an AI tool to teach you more than a lifetime's worth of knowledge around this, right? Yes.
Andrew: Or to give you the talking point.
Sean: Or to give you the talking point. Exactly. Yes. But I think about that too. And it comes back to this thing. I know you've published, I think, two versions of this. The 10 or 14 things that you should know...
Andrew: The 14 "I can" skills. It's the list of 14 things that every graduating student should be able to say "I can" do with AI if they go into an interview.
Sean: Yeah. And when you think about that, like I think about that too, as creating a course experience is like, how can those "I can" statements help a student be better or learn or get more out of the course itself? Yes. Right. And I can't remember what they all are off the top of my head, but I don't have it pulled up. Shame on you, Sean. I should have it memorized.
Andrew: What I should do is ask. Actually, all you need to know is number 14, which is "I can use AI to learn about AI."
Sean: There you go. But that's that idea, again, is if the course material that you're creating, and I'm talking about especially right now, if you're building a course and the stuff that you are creating is something that would be easily replicated by a query into one of the LLM systems, like that, maybe that's not the thing. And what we should be thinking about too is how do we leverage these tools on both sides of that equation of creating the course and taking the course as a student? And how do we leverage these technologies to do exactly what I've been preaching with the Dewey stuff, which is, how do you ask better questions? How do you communicate more effectively? How do you build things that demonstrate your knowledge and expertise in the field? And how do you do so with your own voice and your own expression?
Andrew: So there's a lovely sort of circular coming back to this with the miserable exercise with Claude that I went through this last few days. So one of the courses, I wanted to build something around AI use. And the first attempt was lousy. So I actually stepped back and I thought to myself, what exactly do I want to achieve? And I actually came up with the idea. And the idea is something I've been playing around with for a while. And it's based on the idea of junk playgrounds, but in digital space. Creating something where online students effectively play in a virtual junk playground with AI. They're given the opportunity to build stuff with any tool they want in certain ways and learn through the process. So I came up with all of this. I fed it all the way back into Claude. This massive Claude Code session that had been running for several days at this point. And said, what happens if you build a syllabus around this? And it basically just parroted all of my words back to me with a little bit of polish on. So everything in there was now mine. And I thought, this is amazing. You've spent all of these gazillion tokens on doing stuff that actually is useless. You ran around in circles. What I just told you. Apart from the fact that what I can do now with that idea is I can go back to Claude and say, this is the course, this is the idea, this is the environment we want to build. Help me build this online environment. And that's where the power comes in.
Sean: Yeah, absolutely. Because that stuff, it can do great, right? And maybe for our listeners, what is a junk playground?
Andrew: So this goes back, and I'm not going to pronounce the Danish word because I'll completely sort of mess it up. But it goes, I think it's back into the 1940s, where this person recognized what any parent has recognized, that if you direct kids to a really pristine, controlled play area, they will tend not to play with what you put there. So it's like on Christmas morning, the kids will play with the boxes rather than the toys. But then he discovered, watching kids, that you sort of allow kids out into a sort of a junkyard with stuff lying around, they'll use their imagination to do amazing things. So this is where the idea of the junk playground came out, where it's not rule-less, there are rules, there are boundaries, but you allow kids to play and experiment with the junk that's there. And it led to a whole philosophy of learning, which is largely unprogrammed learning. It doesn't have very, very specific sort of endpoints and objectives, but it trusts the kids to learn from the environment that they're put in. So you basically curate and design the environment to stimulate learning. And it's largely gone out of favor, though, actually, you mentioned Punya. Punya takes a very similar approach in how he learns. And it's something I've been looking at this year.
Sean: Careful, we say his name one more time. He's just going to appear.
Andrew: Third time. I was going to say, third time unlucky. Third time lucky. Sorry, Punya, if you're listening. But the power of this is, if you're trying to help students learn in an area where there are no rules, because you're looking at the future, there are no guidelines as to what they should learn and how they're learning. They've got to learn for themselves. They've got to be able to sort of use their own creativity and imagination and intuition. And you've got to curate the space in which they're allowed to do that. So this is where I'm beginning to look at this idea of junk playgrounds as a way of stimulating learning where there are no rules as to what you should or shouldn't be learning.
Sean: It's awesome. And I think it bleeds into here. And we should, I'm just going to...
Andrew: And sorry, and just to wrap that up. So that is an idea that Claude would not and could not come up with.
Sean: Because it doesn't exist. Yes. Because it doesn't exist in that way.
Andrew: And it doesn't have the human experience.
Sean: And it can't go through its own trove of all the syllabi it's eaten in the world and go, oh yeah, this is how you do that. Let's do something completely different. Exactly. And I would put a pin in that because I think we should come back. We'll have Punya on too, or some, you know, cause he'd be fun to chat with us about. And that was the third time. So if he magically appears, that would be, that's a trick for AI. Put a face of Punya right here. But I think that would be a really good episode to dig much deeper on. Yeah. But I did pull it up. So Danish landscape architect, Carl Theodor Sørensen. Yes. In 1943, basically this idea. And I have the word here and I'm tempted to try it. So apologies to all of our Danish listeners.
Andrew: Skrammellegeplads or something.
Sean: Yeah, yeah. Skrammellegeplads. That we are, yes. Which is probably terrible. And everyone who speaks Danish natively is probably like, ah, my ears. So apologies for that. But it's a difficult word for the English tongue to wrap around. But it's interesting because, as you had mentioned, right, it's based on this observation from this architect that kids would play with the construction materials more than the playground, the swing set or whatever. And I first, I think I've shared this before, but I hadn't, the first time I ever noticed this, again, coming with a purely American perspective, living overseas, playgrounds, you know, I mean, I'm a child of the 80s, which by comparison was the Wild West to what we have today, where everything is plastic and soft. The fact that our kids today, for example, play on this rubber surface, I'm like, no, man, you fell off that slide. That was a broken wrist. That was just the slide with the sharp edges.
Andrew: You must be a harsh parent.
Sean: Oh, nuts. I still remember as a child, I probably was like 10 years old, taking my bike to the top of this metal slide and being like, I'm going to, like, Evel Knievel this beast.
Andrew: Of course, there is a little bit of survivor syndrome here. The kids that failed at this are no longer around.
Sean: That's true. They're not here to relive the glory days. I'm like, you rode down that slide and learned the loss of friction coefficient very fast. Skinned up everything, walked home a bleeding, crying mess, and then you learned you don't do that. And today, with all the rubber floors...
Andrew: But just to be clear, this is not what we're building here at ASU.
Sean: No, not at all. And nowhere. Skinned-knee free. But you go... But what's funny is, so I go to, you know, living in Europe, you have this, that, and then even, even now, even throughout, then, is this concept of, you can't have a place where someone could get hurt. Yes, right? You would sue. How could you do that? It's negligent, whatever. And then my surprise, walking by... It wasn't in Denmark, it was in the Netherlands, walking by a Dutch, like, preschool type of a place, and their playground was, like, different-height tree stumps and planks of wood. And I was like, I was expecting to see nails sticking out of them or whatever, because it literally was a junk pile. And those kids, you would walk by and you would just hear the laughter and the giggling, and these kids are constructing, like, a fort, a ship, or whatever. And they just had a grand old time with some planks of wood and some tree stumps, because it was their imaginations and it was their exploration of the things and the space that was the catalyst.
Andrew: That's right. And to be really clear, this isn't just random stuff. These are curated and designed spaces. Yes, they're junkyards, but it is created in such a way that you stimulate learning in a way that you can't do in a restricted environment.
Sean: That's right. And created with care, so no one's getting a tetanus shot after playing with them.
Andrew: Well, yeah. Well, huge care on multiple levels. Yeah. And again, so this is why I'm so interested in this, because if you're looking at a technology and a world that's changing so fast that nothing we've learned in the past actually applies to the future we're building, what you've got to rely on is people's ingenuity and imagination and ability to put things together in novel ways and start developing understandings in novel ways. And you can only do that through play.
Sean: Yep, absolutely. And I think, you know, kind of like a call to... maybe I'll put a provocation here at the end and we can kind of wrap it up because we've exceeded our average. The short episode as predicted. Yes. And that is also like to that point, we are in a phase right now where the technologies at hand at scale are challenging basically the status quo of how you learn, what you learn, where you learn, why you learn, all that stuff. And it almost raises this thing where I'm like, how dare anyone try to suggest that there was only this way that you can learn this material under these circumstances and these conditions. But really, it's... because it's not an easy thing, especially if you see this as a threat to the expertise that you had a stranglehold upon or something of that nature is really this idea of radical openness when it comes to teaching and learning, and moving away from this position of authority over the learning experience. And one of a, a sort of like, I would say elevated co-participant, right. Where you have ideas, that expertise still helps navigate the journey, but the stops along the way, I mean, right now, who's to say how and why you use certain of these technologies when we don't really know. And this ties into, you know, again, I don't know how many of those 6,500 hours, or minutes, of talk around of how it's changing the way that we think, the way that we learn, the way we communicate. And so it is play, experimentation and trial and error right now. And I think that would be the open call is to do this with eyes wide open and with an open heart and see what happens.
Andrew: Right, right. Yes, yes. In the skrammel... I can't even say it... the skrammellegeplads of AI and whatever's happening.
Sean: I lost it. Where'd it go? Yeah, skrammellegeplads.
Andrew: We have to stop this because this is going to lose us listening.
Sean: I have a feeling we're going to plummet in Denmark in the rankings.
Andrew: Denmark no longer on the list.
Sean: They said, sorry, boys. Try again another time, you know. Oh, geez. Anyway, so I say we end it there.
Andrew: We should because it's been a long convoluted journey. It has. But it's always an interesting one.
Sean: And an enjoyable one. And again, you can see how, again, if you've stuck with us to this point, also you can see, again, the genuine, we're literally exploring these topics as we think of them and as we go through and just how fun that is. And so, yeah, I would just, again, transition this to just a call going back to the top of the hour when we started the podcast, sharing the growth and stuff that we've had. And that has only been possible because of listeners and viewers like you all. And just a request to keep that momentum moving by following us, giving us a like, a rating, drop us a review in the show notes or into whatever platform you get your podcast from.
Andrew: Letting your friends know about us or your enemies if you really didn't like it.
Sean: What's like the new version of like a Rickroll? Like you send them, check this out. It's just us doing something. But whatever it may be, you know, please share that. And of course, if you don't like the traditional methods of following, liking, subscribing, you can also be, make sure you don't miss an episode by...
Andrew: Just going to modemfutura.com/signup, and it'll allow you to sign up for a weekly reminder that there's a new episode to listen to.
Sean: Yep, absolutely. So you be sure to never miss an episode. And one day, we will be back to under 45. I say that to try to guilt myself in the future. But anyway, until then, we'll see everybody on the next episode of Modem Futura.
Andrew: We'll see you then.
Announcer: Demodulating signal. Modem Futura is a production of the Future of Being Human initiative at Arizona State University. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. To learn more about the Future of Being Human initiative and all of our other projects, please visit us on the web at futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu. End transmission.