Skating Through Life: From Ice Rinks to Academia

On this episode of The Big 6-Oh!, we’re joined by a trailblazing Associate Professor who’s reshaped the future of education and work through innovation, resilience, and coaching. 

From her early days as an international ice skater and founder of skating schools to becoming a sought-after thought leader in AI, leadership, and navigating change, she shares her remarkable journey of reinvention and discovery. 

This conversation dives into career resilience, the power of curiosity, and practical strategies for thriving in an ever-changing world.

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Transcript

00:00

This episode of The Big Six-O brought to you by Louis Carr Real Estate, helping people in the Hills District find their dream home since 1992. Ready to buy, sell or rent? Check out louiscarr.com.au for all your property needs. If you're old enough to remember when phones had cords and the only thing that went viral was a cold, then you're in the right place. Welcome to The Big Six-O with Kayleigh Harris and Guy Rowlison.

00:28

Because who better to discuss life's second act than two people who still think mature is a type of cheese?

00:53

Hello everybody and welcome to the Big Sixo podcast for another episode. My name is Kayleigh Harris and in partnership with my former deputy school captain from primary school in 1975, Guy Rowlison, we are bringing you a lighthearted, entertaining story, as we do every week for our podcast from the realm of the third age. And that time in life when we finally get to do what we want and embarrass our kids in the process. G'day, Guy. Kayleigh, how are you? You're you're look, I've got to be honest. You're the woman that I probably.

01:23

hone my skills with when it came to snack swapping and excuses for not doing our homework but things have changed a little bit haven't they? Oh not much, not much. Now Guy people often ask how we come up with the topics and guests for the podcast and the ideas come from a range of places sometimes it's just you and I reminiscing about our childhoods other times members of the Big Six Oh community will request a topic or a guest but this week our guest was recommended to me from an unusual source right so there I am in my GP's

01:53

the annual checkup as you do, one has at 60, and we got talking about the podcast and Dr. Paul, my GP, suggested we speak to his friend, Lynne Gribble, and I said oh what's Lynne's story? And when he told me I thought we definitely have to get her on. Let me try and set this up. Lynne Gribble is an academic, in her own words an accidental academic, and she's an associate professor at the University of New South Wales and is very well known for her work in artificial intelligence

02:23

I think, hopefully got this right, she'll correct me if I haven't, particularly relating to higher education. Now Lynne wrote her PhD in retrenchment and job loss, which I think is of particular relevance to our listeners. But as impressive as all that sounds, it's Lynne's younger life that intrigued me. Can you believe this guy? She started out as a professional ice skater. I'm still working on that career. No, stop now. Just stop.

02:53

welcome. Hi Kayleigh, hi Guy, thanks so much for having me. Thank you so much for your time. Let's go back, you describe ice skating as your first career, so you've had quite a few as we mentioned in the intro. Tell us about when you started ice skating and what happened. So I started out, I was a skater and I was perhaps more than reasonable at it. I got to represent Australia, I'd been in the

03:23

you're going to leave school you have to have a real job. So I went and got a real job and I worked for a cosmetic company which I thought was a fabulous job. Somebody once told me I had all the iconic jobs right so that was that was lots of fun but skating beckoned me back and it seems to be that that community does beckon me back a lot. So it beckoned me back. Skating schools were just starting in Australia they were big elsewhere in the world to enable

03:52

small children and

03:54

adults who perhaps always dreamed to learn to skate, to do so in a group environment. So here I was, sort of understood the concepts of education. I suppose I'm an educator at heart is the thread that you'll see through everything I've done. And so I set up skating schools in Australia and worked on the program called Aussie Skate, which is through Aussie Sport where they were trying to make it so that everybody could achieve. I loved working on that.

04:24

But it was really in response to the fact that the world was changing.

04:31

it's probably been well known that there are a lot of gay athletes in skating and I found the time of when the AIDS pandemic hit very difficult in terms of losing friends and I decided I needed to change careers and I went what can I do well I'm really good at packing a suitcase and I'm really good at living out of one and I speak a little bit of Japanese so I reckon I could go

05:01

seems odd and I had a lovely career there until I was retrenched and at that point I went I've always been an educator at heart and I wanted to teach and somebody very snobbly said to me because I had left school quite young oh well you couldn't work in you know a TAFE or university because you don't have a degree and I went hmm

05:24

could go get a degree. So I had been working with the University of Technology to put together their tourism degree as an industry advisor and they had said if you want to come and study come study with us. And so I took them up on that offer and that started a whole other chain of events and I'm just trying to think so two, four, six years later I had a PhD so I don't do anything in halves. You might sort of think that way and so from zero to PhD.

05:54

went back into industry but I had a daughter and I realised that being in HR and industry and being a mum wasn't quite working for us as a family. I didn't want to be the person who was running out the door at 5 p.m. and people saying to me things like well why can't you take a conference call?

06:19

in the middle of the night. And I went, that's just, I don't think that's a good compromise for me. So my PhD supervisor said, come and work as an academic. I was like, can I? And so here I am now. So I always say it's an accidental thing. Many people do their studies deliberately to go into a research career. I love to teach and I'm an education focused academic. And so for me, it's about

06:46

anything that somebody can learn or if I can share what I've learned then I can go and learn more stuff. So I sort of look at life through that lens. I know that's a really big answer but hopefully it gives you a sort of plotted history and I think when you talked about you know third age it for me it's about constantly what would I like to do now you know I don't have any barriers on that. There's a logical jump from ice skating to move into travel

07:16

probably not as big a logical jump given that there's probably not ice rinks all over the place where young boys girls can decide I think I'm gonna become an ice skater but then to move into academia I understand there's that transition but there's a lot of hyper loops in in in logic in what you're doing to where you are today how has that transition say from skating and what you've done does that translate across into what you're doing now

07:46

So much so. Skaters have to be incredibly disciplined, incredibly focused, incredibly aware of what they're good at and what they're not good at. So you know you watch a skater, they'll always put their best thing right in front of the judges, right in front of the camera, the thing that's a little bit more dodgy will be hidden up the other end of the rink. So as an academic I just got really focused on what I was good at. I was...

08:13

good at teaching. I did my PhD in something I cared about, probably a bit of a healing journey from having been retrenched. I wanted to go, how can I understand and explore that? That's very much at the core of who I am. I like to understand things. But I knew I didn't want to be a researcher. I mean, sitting in my office all day reading somebody else's paper and then, you know, maybe doing some sort of...

08:40

And don't get me wrong, I love to research my classroom, my students. So when I discovered there was such a thing called the scholarship of learning and teaching, I was like, oh, now I've found my homes. And it's, you sometimes have to start out with what you love and then say, what else do I need to know about this? So if you'd have told me in the middle of 2022,

09:09

that for the next two and a half to three years, I would end up being one of the leading voices on AI and education. I would have laughed at you, right? I would have just said, oh, you know, what are you speaking about? But because I'm a non-technologist technologist, so what it means is I don't do zeros and ones, but I'm really good at understanding what you can do with tech, because I'm a good fidgeter.

09:36

So I realised all of a sudden this was something that we needed to think about. What would it mean for education? What does it mean for teachers? What does it mean for students? What does it mean for the two-year-old, the five-year-old? I mean, we go to restaurants and we see kids glued to iPads and phones. And I go, can you please get a crayon out and talk and draw and make funny things out of napkins? And, you know, don't just put an iPhone.

10:05

or an iPad and I'm a technology enhanced teacher. So when I say that everybody goes, ooh, you know. As a colleague of mine said the other day, we got it wrong with social media, we need to make sure we don't get it wrong with AI, right? One chance. When I think about AI, I think about chat GPT and thinking, wow, this is. My chatty friend. Yes. My chatty friend. When someone showed it to me a few years ago and showed me what it could do, it just blew me away and the fact that you can.

10:34

It can help you to write your CV. It certainly helped me to get my current job. Probably shouldn't say that.

10:39

But if you use it as an assisted tool rather than get it to do everything. But when it comes to education, there's a whole conversation around cheating and using chat GPT or other things to write an entire essay for you or entire thesis. Is that what you kind of work in or am I completely off track here? So I think that what happens is everybody's so worried about this.

11:09

it can write something for you. But the writing is only the artifact, right? So I could give you something that's beautifully written and you log on today and talk to me and you go, Lynn Gribble's got no idea what she's talking about. So it's only when we actually start to investigate, I use that word lightly, you know, drill down, have the conversations. So for a long time people have perhaps

11:37

sort of gone, oh well if this person could produce this thesis they must have this knowledge and they must be able to write. Well now we don't know that so we have to look a bit differently and so that's what I've been spending my days and nights thinking about, talking about. You know, what if it's something different and it's actually about the really important what I call work, which is you to know exactly how to do this.

12:07

You know, chat GPT might be able to give you a do this, then do that, then do this, but you wouldn't know it in your heart. Yeah. So I know when I look at a piece of literature, if it's good, if it's flawed, if the research is right, why I would include it, why I wouldn't include it, that's what we need our students to demonstrate. Because no longer can we guarantee that the writing alone.

12:34

does that. It's just like if you get chat GPT to write a speech, it will be pretty ordinary. Right. Why will it be ordinary? Well, it will lack your personality. It will lack your cadence of speech. It will lack the things that you bring into it. Yeah. We might call that term, it's actually called burstiness as journalists. You both know that, right? That term burstiness.

12:58

My chatty friend can't be bursty. I can tell it to try. I've even set a whole number of back-end prompts so it sounds a little more like me. But it doesn't have my nuance because it can't. It fundamentally cannot keep changing tense like I will in the moment. It can't have a moment of just pure joy.

13:28

because I go, oh, that's funny, and this reminds me of something else. Because unlike, so if we think about Google enabled us to search quickly. When I did my PhD, Google wasn't really around here, so I'm old. So I had to go to the library and I had to think about what words and use microfiche and get books. And if there was a journal that was in hard copy, or I could get a little code and get six downloads on my dial-up internet.

13:57

Today I can set up my Google searches so it tells me every time something new turns up in my field. Remember that chat GPT is a pre-trained transformer. That means you have to put data into it at a point in time.

14:15

particularly with chat GPT, and this is not to speak ill of it, but it's not learning from you every day because it's a pre-trained transformer. So people get all wound up about stuff and I go, well, you know, it just gets itself a bit lost. And I know I've trained how I work with mine. So sometimes I go, no.

14:36

What I wanted you to do was, and it goes, I'm trying. And I go, yes, my patience. And it will, because I'm trying to talk to me like that because that's more fun, right? But yes, it looks whiz bang because there's nothing nicer than watching that text run up on your screen. And it gives you something. And if you are a lay person about that, you go, oh, now I know about it, right? Seems authoritative. Also, because that's how it's been trained.

15:02

to give you that information. You don't have to do any intellectual work like you do if you Google, and I use that as a noun rather than a verb, or a verb rather than a noun. If you Google something, then you have to discern. Chat GPT just gives you on a platter and says, eat this. And everybody goes, yay, I'm gonna eat it all. You've gotta sort of stop and go, I love the strawberries and...

15:29

I love the mango, but you know, I'll leave the melon. That's probably the best analogy I can give you. I might come back to that and whether that's making us all a whole lot more lazy than we were when we had microfiche and going to the library. But your PhD focused on the impacts, didn't it, of retrenchment and job loss, which affects many of us at a later age, some of us a whole lot earlier than we'd anticipated.

15:56

From your research and from what you delivered with those papers and research, what were some of the findings that came out of all of that? You know Guy, thank you so much for this question because I think it's so important for people, particularly given that your podcast is the big six-o. Here's what we know. We know that if you feel qualified for your job...

16:24

and you have no perception of debt, now I'll talk about perception of debt, then you're gonna just go through retrenchment and go, yay, where's my next job? But if you feel that you're in debt, now remember some people they feel that they're in debt if they owe $100 and some people feel that they're not in debt at a million dollars, right? So it's a perceptual thing about debt. But if you feel that you're in debt, that will worry you deeply and you will suffer greatly. If...

16:52

you feel that you...

16:54

And I'm not talking now about imposter syndrome. So, you know, we often talk about imposter syndrome where people go, am I really as good as people think I am? I'm talking about, you know, are you technically qualified to do your job? So I'm in a job now, I'm technically qualified to do it. There's not a question. But if I went and worked in the engineering faculty, I would go, well, there's a question. I'm not really qualified for that. So that's sort of just to give a really lay person's understanding of qualified, right?

17:23

So if you think you're not qualified or under qualified and you're in debt, the effects of retrenchment are dire. If you think you're qualified and you're not in debt, the effects of retrenchment are often quite freeing, right? People will go and find the next thing to do, etc., etc. As humans, we're quite good at worrying about what we don't know. So if I just hark back to that pandemic that I know we're trying to not talk about.

17:49

there was a lot of unknowns and that's what brought people really unstuck. And at that time I started to talk about the research that I had done where...

17:57

concentrate on what you know. Like I knew I could go running for five kilometers, I knew I was working from home, I knew that I had enough food, I knew that my job was secure. So focusing on what you know really helps. So the same thing if you lose a job, what do you know? Well, you know that you need to either search for a job or reinvent yourself or whatever. Then what are the steps to doing that? You know, I'm gonna get up every morning, do my exercise, spend an hour job searching. You know that, you know, you don't know

18:27

maybe two and five. So that's going to be your adventure time every day. Go out, look at the trees, find something new. But you do know that the sun's going to set and the sun will rise. And so focusing on what you know, focusing on what you can do, it's really helpful. And looking at

18:48

your perception of debt and your perception of qualifications and that's the game changer. Lynne, do you think ageism does exist even though many companies and many employers will obviously actively against it and promote that they don't support it but my experience is that there is a lot of ageism out there and it's a very silent thing and you'll see it, it's not an obvious thing, no one will say to your face oh you're too old to do this job

19:18

sometimes you're treated in the workplace that you might be a little bit more invisible than the younger people in the workplace. Do you think it's out there and active still? Because I believe it is. I think not only is it active in the workplace, it's active in day-to-day life, right? Sometimes if I'm in a, I don't know, a food mall or something, I'll notice that somebody will look past me and serve the younger people. And that was my first experience of seeing ageism.

19:46

I think we all have biases. Sometimes when people are getting a little bit older or as we mature, I think let's look at it that way, as we mature there's certain things that happen. So think back about your lifespan, right? And you know there's a, and Kayleigh we were talking before we got on air about you know being mum, right? So I'm just going to use that as an example.

20:10

When you first have your children, people try and give you all sorts of advice. And because it's your first round, you know, or you're still learning, you sort of soak some of that in. And then there's a point when you go, actually you don't know my kid, I know my kid. Right? So the same thing I think happens for us in our careers. You know, people, we go along and maybe we don't, we're not driven by the same things.

20:40

Do you know, somebody said to me the other day, you know, I don't want to travel anymore for work. And they said, and they used the words, I'm too old. And I went, no, you've just done that. I had another friend of mine, she said, well, you know, I'm getting older. And I said, well, you know, we're all getting older. That's, you know, getting older from the day we're born.

21:03

But if we talk about ourselves in that light, if we present ourselves in that light as well, so think about those people you see that they look like they've just given up on life. They haven't spent the time, we look at young generations and the makeup's perfect and the hair's perfect and they've got the latest gear. Sometimes as we mature, we don't worry about those things because we know they're superficial. And so...

21:31

I think that the ageism can come from that, it can come from attitudes, you know. So it's such a complex thing that bringing ageism unstuck is quite difficult. And then we know that people make quick judgements about how people look.

21:50

Do they look friendly? Do they look happy? Do they look weathered? I remember thinking there was a time in my life I didn't look old enough to do X. Now it's like I'm in that nice ambiguous stage. But there will be a point where I'll start to look maybe I shouldn't be. And I think without... Sorry Guy, I've got to make this comment. I think there is a gender thing attached to it too. That older gentlemen can be seen as wise.

22:18

older women sometimes that feminine form is seen as well, you know, have you lost your youth and your beauty? And I think unfortunately we still have a bit of that. You know, we call silver fox but we don't, I don't know what the...

22:32

female term is. And that's not being sexist, I'm just saying that we've got a long way to go. Well I don't have the wisdom, the good looks or any of that so I'm not offended by what Evy have just said. But I was talking to a friend that I've known since my teenage years and I said look, they've got their own business and he said oh look I've got a timeline.

22:52

probably another two, maybe three years, he said, I'm just getting tired of talking to people having the same conversations. And he said, technology is just getting a hold of me. And I feel as though I'm aging very quickly because the rapid onset of everything happening is just almost too much for me, which got me to thinking, given you're a thought leader in that space, what are your views on the integration of, say, AI into either educational practices or within the workspace?

23:22

to what you can do at home today. Go get yourself some sort of digital assistant. I don't care whether it's a Google, a Siri, you know, an Alexa, anyone you like. And put a whole lot of reminders in it, right? You know, remember to take your tablets, remember to text your kids, you know, whatever you want to do. Guess what? That's going to give you independent living for longer than anything because it's going to set up good habits, right? And as we have

23:52

You know, we do enter a phase of various stages of cognitive decline, you know, those moments when you go, what was I thinking again? Right. That becomes more flustering as we age. And I'm not an age expert. I just need to be clear on that. But I do know that if we don't learn something as it comes out.

24:11

then there is such a big gap to overcome. So one of the things that I saw was my dad, rest his soul, he didn't ever want a smartphone. Then when he got really, really sick, we wanted him to have a smartphone so we could call him, right? But it was too much for him to learn. Now my mum, I won't age her, but you know, if I'm on this, you've got to sort of consider where my mum might be. Now my mum...

24:34

I love this. She's on Facebook, she's on Insta, she's you know making sure that you know she's image crafting, she's got her you know her email and she's got her phone and should she have a new phone and you know because she can use that technology. Now she's probably not an expert with say chat GPT but we did buy her a

25:03

you know, AI enhanced speaker, I won't give it a name, because that's, you know, I don't promote any products, I'm very careful of that. And I hear it when I'm visiting her, you know, don't forget to do this, remember to do that, remember to do this. Fantastic, right?

25:17

because that's less cognitive load for her. And I think the reason to go back to your friend guy, if they're thinking of retiring, they're going, well, I don't need to worry about this. So it's not that they can't learn it. It's just, I want an easy life. We all want an easy life, right? If we didn't want an easy life, we wouldn't have an obesity crisis, right? Faster. And let me list the ways that an easy life has brought us unstuck, including remote controls and everything else. So.

25:45

It's just a case of people go, do I have to do this because I'm soon retiring? Right. Rather than, isn't this cool? Let me go play. You know, and if you've, if you can get a robot to do your vacuuming, right. Why, why not?

26:03

I say, right? We have a joke in our house which is sort of my favourite one. I live in an apartment so if somebody knocks on our door, you know, side unseen, we go, how could they have got here? And I often will say to my daughter, I wonder who that could be.

26:19

And our answer is, oh, it's the Fair Work Commission on behalf of the artificial intelligence in our house. Putting in a claim for overwork. Because it is true, we've got, we don't know that we're swimming in this technology. But we're never ever too old to learn something, but don't wait. Waiting's the...

26:42

Waiting is the thing because you it's you think about when you get a new computer Something's changed something's changed something's changed So people hang on to technology for maybe 10 years and guess what when you get the new one all that change is big But it's not big if you got a new one every two or three years because a little bit little bit little bit little bit Right. So what are you doing every day? That's a little bit little bit little bit little bit rather than oh

27:09

I didn't do that for 10 years, why can't I learn it? Well, because you've got to learn it now from the beginning nearly. So go back and tell your friend not too old, retirement plan's fine.

27:23

But how about little bit, little bit, little bit, right? Here's a daily fun thing to do. Do something every day that challenges you to just see the world differently. I guess it's a practical application of what you use. Like anything, if you have no interest in a particular subject at school, you're always gonna find calculus hard. But if all of a sudden you think astronomy is the greatest thing ever, it all of a sudden drip feeds down to think, oh, well, I can actually do physics because I have an interest in that.

27:53

using a proprietary sort of piece of software and you have an interest in say music and you learn to use that software because it gets you to that particular point in your life then all of a sudden it's not nearly as scary right? Yeah and go and listen to listen to podcasts listen you know watch things that are interesting I have been working cross-disciplinary with a couple of wonderful colleagues from astrobiology.

28:21

And one of my colleagues actually is an expert on life cells from Mars, etc. When I talk to these people, I always say to them, tell me if I came into your classroom, what's the first thing you'd tell me about what you do? And then I go, oh, so when they write a paper or if they're doing something, I say, tell me about that. I'm not going to read it because it's not my field. Tell me in five minutes why.

28:49

this was important or what I should know. I love that, right? I think that's fantastic that I've learned all these things through my friends. One of them wrote a fabulous paper on space junk and how people are sending vanity canisters up with their ashes and this is creating space junk. And I was like, yeah.

29:12

Oh, hadn't thought about that. But now I'm really interested in this because I know that there's no sovereignty over, you know, that space, et cetera, et cetera. So that expands and that expands and expands. And now I read and listen to those sorts of things. Oh, I'm not an expert, that's my colleagues' jobs. But you know, I'm the one who's talking about, well, you know, what different assignments could we do and what's happening in schools? And they said to me, so Lyn, what did you create this week? Because...

29:42

That is why you see academics often engaged later in life, because they're having these rich conversations, and they're exploring more than just what they're interested in, because they might be at a conference where somebody's talking about something different. Like I'm working with some colleagues who I met at a conference, and they were in arts, education, social sciences and psychology. Well, I come from a school of business, management and governance.

30:11

But wow, don't we have some rich conversations. So. I think we might have to get you on again somewhere down the track, Lynn, because we haven't even touched on the fact that you can speak some Chinese, you can cook a Chinese banquet, you love, you're a keen traveller, you're a nature photographer, and you love writing about life. I mean, there's a whole nother podcast just in this other side to you that's extraordinary. So thank you so much for telling us your story. It's fascinating.

30:41

and we really appreciate your time. And I mean, when you start opening the jar on AI, there are so many places that the conversation can go, but we're out of time, unfortunately. But thank you so much. Thank you. It's a, look, it's a lot of fun. If I could just say the one thing, if you want to reinvigorate your life.

31:04

Each day write something good that happened and it could be that you saw the sunrise, it could be that your bird flew across your path as you were walking. You'll be surprised how many great things come into your life. And just if you go into the Chinese restaurant and they say ni hao mao, practice to say it back because you know what? There's no harm in that, no? And they're the things that...

31:30

all of a sudden it's really funny, it's about connection, it's about noticing what's good, not noticing what's bad, and doing those things just opens so much possibility. Lynn, so far you're the best part of my day, so I'm riding off the rest of the day now, and that between two and five where I'm going out to have that adventure? Yep, fantastic. Yep, all sorted. But it's early, so it's going downhill. Thanks so much, guys. Thanks so much.

31:57

The views and opinions expressed on the Big Six O are personal and reflect those of the hosts and guests. They do not represent the views or positions of any affiliated organisations or companies. This podcast is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice. Please consult with a qualified professional for guidance on any personal matters.

32:21

Oh, and before we go, let's give credit where credit is due. Kaylee Harris and I came up with all the genius content for this week's episode. Our producer, Nick Abood, well he keeps the lights on and makes sure we don't accidentally upload a cat video instead of a podcast. So thanks for keeping us on track, Nick. Nick?