Pedagogy A-Go-Go
Welcome to Pedagogy A-Go-Go, a podcast about how we engage with learning and why. Hosted by Dr. Gina Turner, Executive Director of DEI and Professor of Psychology at Northampton Community College, and Kelly Allen, Director of Northampton Community College's East 40 Community Garden and former English professor.
Episode assignments and extras: https://linktr.ee/pedagogyagogo
Pedagogy A-Go-Go
Nothing is Perfect or Complete with Dr. Marshal Miller
Hello! This month, Gina and Kelly sit down with Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Information Science, Dr. Marshal Miller. In this episode, “Nothing is Perfect or Complete,” Marshal shares with us why he believes good teaching always requires maintenance and why it's so important to help instill a love for the material when we know for students it's so easy to quit. Please be sure to subscribe to, rate, and review the podcast and follow us on Facebook and Instagram @pedagogyagogo.
00:00:00 Gina Turner
One, two, three, four, Pedagogy A-Go-Go, Pedagogy, Go, Go, Go.
00:00:14 Gina Turner
Hello and welcome to Pedagogy A-Go-Go, a podcast about how we engage with learning and why.
00:00:20 Gina Turner
This is season 6, episode 1, Nothing is Perfect or Complete with Dr.
00:00:26 Gina Turner
Marshall Miller, and we are your hosts, Kelly Allen and Gina Turner.
00:00:31 Gina Turner
Hello, Kelly Allen.
00:00:33 Kelly Allen
Hey, Gina.
00:00:36 Kelly Allen
Season 6, holy crow.
00:00:38 Gina Turner
I know.
00:00:39 Kelly Allen
Where does the time go?
00:00:40 Gina Turner
Sunrise, sunset, right?
00:00:42 Gina Turner
I guess.
00:00:43 Gina Turner
I guess.
00:00:44 Gina Turner
It's exciting.
00:00:45 Gina Turner
We're together.
00:00:46 Gina Turner
The band is back together.
00:00:47 Kelly Allen
Yeah, absolutely.
00:00:48 Kelly Allen
So how's your semester going?
00:00:49 Gina Turner
It's going really fast, actually.
00:00:51 Gina Turner
I can't believe we've just finished fall break, and my students are starting to get that slight hint of exhaustion and panic in the backs of their eyes a little bit.
00:01:02 Gina Turner
We were talking about their final project today, and they were like, oh, right.
00:01:07 Gina Turner
How about you?
00:01:08 Kelly Allen
Yeah, same.
00:01:10 Kelly Allen
So I do this thing where when we come back from a break, I
00:01:15 Kelly Allen
I kind of reprint the second-half of our calendar.
00:01:20 Kelly Allen
And then I like make some notes.
00:01:21 Kelly Allen
It's like, so here's the labor involved between now and the end.
00:01:26 Kelly Allen
And just I hand that out and we just kind of like talk it over.
00:01:29 Kelly Allen
It's like, so if you felt that the first half went fast, the second-half is just going to be a streak of lightning because there's going to be like another break in there with the Thanksgiving holiday.
00:01:39 Kelly Allen
And it's just.
00:01:41 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:01:42 Kelly Allen
I just tell them, brace yourself.
00:01:43 Gina Turner
Yeah, that's really smart to do, to hand it back out, like make it real for them.
00:01:48 Kelly Allen
Yeah.
00:01:49 Gina Turner
I pull it up on the screen and I just like, look at, look at what, look at the schedule.
00:01:53 Gina Turner
This is where we're at.
00:01:55 Gina Turner
So, but other than that, it's my favorite month of my favorite season.
00:01:59 Gina Turner
So there's that.
00:02:01 Kelly Allen
Oh, okay.
00:02:01 Kelly Allen
You're good.
00:02:02 Kelly Allen
Tell me more.
00:02:03 Gina Turner
I just love fall.
00:02:04 Gina Turner
I mean, I'm, you know, I'm kind of a nerd, so I actually always liked going back to school.
00:02:08 Gina Turner
And then, and this is the weather that I prefer.
00:02:12 Gina Turner
Even the rainy, even the rainy fall days just soothe my soul.
00:02:18 Kelly Allen
I feel smarter this time of the year.
00:02:20 Gina Turner
Yeah, your brain's fresh.
00:02:22 Kelly Allen
Yes.
00:02:22 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:02:24 Gina Turner
I don't know.
00:02:24 Kelly Allen
No, I like it.
00:02:27 Kelly Allen
So before we get into this, I need help from you all on, I need a new word.
00:02:34 Kelly Allen
So as you both know, I've kind of transitioned from a role that was primarily administrative to now I'm teaching full-time.
00:02:47 Kelly Allen
And it, like working with
00:02:51 Kelly Allen
just a whole bunch of students all at once has been awesome.
00:02:56 Kelly Allen
And I just forgot how, and here's the word, I forgot how goofy they are.
00:03:02 Kelly Allen
And when I say goofy, I mean goofy and just like, in all the...
00:03:08 Kelly Allen
the best ways.
00:03:09 Kelly Allen
So I'm thinking about, so my son who is 14 years old and he's like growing into this like little man body and just watching him just like flop around everywhere.
00:03:20 Kelly Allen
it's just like, it's goofy.
00:03:22 Kelly Allen
And I feel like our students, at least at the community college, are like that as well.
00:03:29 Kelly Allen
Like they've got a full-time course load, full-time
00:03:35 Kelly Allen
workload generally, they commute all the time and they have families that they're caring for.
00:03:42 Kelly Allen
Either it's like their own or it's like their parents or like other siblings.
00:03:46 Kelly Allen
They got so much going on and it's like, and in juggling all of that, like, they end up just doing like these
00:03:54 Kelly Allen
delightfully goofy things.
00:03:57 Gina Turner
It's almost like the filters, they don't have the energy for filters because their energy is keeping all of these other balls in the air a little bit.
00:04:06 Gina Turner
My friend and I were over at his friend's house, and she has a four-year-old.
00:04:11 Gina Turner
And at one point, the four-year-old was lying on her back, singing a song, spinning in a circle.
00:04:17 Gina Turner
And we were just like, you know, why can't we do that now?
00:04:22 Gina Turner
And then we came up with a theory that that's why we age, is because we spend all this energy preventing ourselves from lying on the floor, singing and spinning in a circle and being goofy.
00:04:33 Gina Turner
And that that's what actually ages the edges of our
00:04:36 Gina Turner
chromosomes.
00:04:36 Gina Turner
That's why our telomeres shrink.
00:04:39 Gina Turner
But you know, so I think being there's something about a student mindset, goofy is a good word, but it's almost like a, there's a, there's a, an unhinged freedom, I think.
00:04:52 Kelly Allen
Yeah.
00:04:52 Gina Turner
You know, like.
00:04:53 Kelly Allen
Then I'm going to keep using it because, so like I ran into our provost in the parking lot.
00:04:59 Kelly Allen
It's the first time that I'd had a chance to like say even like 2 words to him since the semester started.
00:05:06 Kelly Allen
I asked him how his semester is going and then he asked me and he was like, and you're back in the classroom, how's it going?
00:05:12 Kelly Allen
I was like, I love it.
00:05:12 Kelly Allen
And our students are so goofy.
00:05:14 Kelly Allen
And he's like, I've never heard someone use that word to talk about students before.
00:05:19 Kelly Allen
And I was like, oh, really?
00:05:20 Kelly Allen
Is that wrong?
00:05:20 Kelly Allen
Should I use something different?
00:05:22 Kelly Allen
But no, maybe it lands well.
00:05:25 Gina Turner
I like it personally, but I'm.
00:05:29 Gina Turner
I embrace the word goofy for myself.
00:05:32 Gina Turner
I feel like I'm going to live forever because I've never quite managed to achieve adulthood.
00:05:39 Gina Turner
I don't know, knock wood.
00:05:40 Kelly Allen
Absolutely.
00:05:41 Kelly Allen
Okay, cool.
00:05:42 Kelly Allen
All right.
00:05:42 Kelly Allen
Well, thank you for that kind of moment of kind of like solipsistic attention.
00:05:48 Kelly Allen
But all right, thank you.
00:05:49 Gina Turner
Are very welcome.
00:05:50 Gina Turner
And I think we're excited for maybe goofy times with our guest today.
00:05:56 Gina Turner
Yes.
00:05:59 Kelly Allen
I got to admit, like I'm a little like nervous because it's like, okay, we're talking with a computer science faculty and it's like, I don't get to hang out with computer science faculty all that often.
00:06:11 Kelly Allen
And it's like, I don't know if it's like intimidation or like, I'm like, damn, I hope that we're like,
00:06:19 Kelly Allen
It's going to be entertaining.
00:06:21 Gina Turner
Or is the paradigm too different, from our little arts and humanities and social sciences brains?
00:06:28 Gina Turner
Like, is the paradigm going to be, are we going to be able to even communicate with each other?
00:06:34 Gina Turner
Yes, Well, I know we will be able to communicate with Dr.
00:06:38 Gina Turner
Marshall Miller.
00:06:39 Gina Turner
And Marshall is assistant professor of computer science and information science.
00:06:46 Gina Turner
which I don't know why those are listed separately and maybe we'll find out why.
00:06:51 Kelly Allen
I hope so.
00:06:52 Kelly Allen
If I don't remember to ask, you have to remember to ask.
00:06:55 Gina Turner
Okay.
00:06:55 Kelly Allen
Deal.
00:06:56 Gina Turner
Deal.
00:06:57 Gina Turner
If you had just one word to describe yourself as a teacher, what would it be?
00:07:06 Kelly Allen
Same as this.
00:07:08 Kelly Allen
Do you listen to podcasts?
00:07:10 Marshal Miller
I do.
00:07:11 Kelly Allen
Oh, what do you listen to?
00:07:13 Marshal Miller
The nerdiest things you can imagine.
00:07:16 Marshal Miller
There's one about keyboards.
00:07:19 Marshal Miller
There's one about file systems.
00:07:22 Marshal Miller
I don't know.
00:07:23 Marshal Miller
I'm trying to think.
00:07:24 Kelly Allen
Well, talk to me about file systems.
00:07:27 Marshal Miller
Well, it's one of my examples, but there are different ways, like probably back in...
00:07:36 Marshal Miller
I don't know, 10 years ago, when you plugged in like a flash drive in your computer, sometimes it would say like needs to format or something like that.
00:07:43 Marshal Miller
And that's because different computer systems use different file systems, which just means that they store information differently.
00:07:51 Marshal Miller
So it's how they organize the data onto them.
00:07:55 Marshal Miller
That's largely gone because
00:07:59 Marshal Miller
Microsoft and Apple have kind of agreed to use this one called Extended 4.
00:08:06 Marshal Miller
And so that kind of just works for everything.
00:08:07 Marshal Miller
So most of them are just formatted to that.
00:08:09 Marshal Miller
But they're very interesting.
00:08:11 Marshal Miller
There's some really advanced ones, some that are automatically duplicated multiple times, some that you can send an entire computer over to another one over the internet real quick.
00:08:24 Marshal Miller
Lots of duplications.
00:08:27 Kelly Allen
Wow.
00:08:29 Marshal Miller
I know.
00:08:30 Marshal Miller
I guess I can check that off of favorite topics to cover.
00:08:34 Marshal Miller
Now we've already gotten to file systems.
00:08:36 Kelly Allen
It's funny, like, so my relationship with technology has always been like, I'm going to get the best, fastest, most storage-y kind of whatever processing device that's out there.
00:08:52 Kelly Allen
And of course, I have sticker shock and then I don't.
00:08:54 Kelly Allen
But then I think, well, wait a minute now.
00:08:57 Kelly Allen
I type documents and I watch YouTube.
00:09:02 Kelly Allen
I don't need all of that stuff because I don't know how to use it.
00:09:07 Kelly Allen
So like when you're talking about like LMNO P4 things, or sorry, like when you're talking about file systems, it's like, oh sweet, is he going to teach me how to organize my Google Drive?
00:09:22 Kelly Allen
That was where my mind went.
00:09:24 Kelly Allen
It is a hot mess.
00:09:26 Marshal Miller
We call that the file.
00:09:28 Marshal Miller
boy, architecture, I guess.
00:09:30 Kelly Allen
So is there anything from the file systems work that you were just talking about that could influence the strategies that we have for the file thing that I just talked about, the file hierarchy?
00:09:48 Marshal Miller
Yes.
00:09:49 Marshal Miller
Sweet.
00:09:50 Marshal Miller
But it might not keep you more organized.
00:09:53 Marshal Miller
It's just you would never have multiple copies of them.
00:09:56 Kelly Allen
That helps.
00:09:56 Marshal Miller
Some of them, even if you have two copies of the same file in two different folders, it's actually just using one memory address.
00:10:04 Marshal Miller
So it affects it, but it's not going to help you.
00:10:07 Marshal Miller
I'm sorry.
00:10:09 Gina Turner
It's good to know that at least there is nothing that I'm missing other than my own ability to organize myself.
00:10:18 Gina Turner
But I'm going to sort of start jumping in because this is actually really cool because you've already expressed that you have a real passion for what you just termed nerdy, but like for computing, right?
00:10:33 Gina Turner
For all of these aspects of computing.
00:10:36 Gina Turner
So
00:10:37 Gina Turner
Can you, is that, do you like teaching that?
00:10:40 Gina Turner
Is that something you enjoy teaching to other people?
00:10:43 Gina Turner
It seems like you do, because you're giving Kelly this, you know, this rundown.
00:10:47 Marshal Miller
If people ask questions, yeah.
00:10:49 Marshal Miller
No, I mean, honestly, you know, people often ask me just like, oh, why are you teaching?
00:10:56 Marshal Miller
You can make, like, and it's a fair argument.
00:10:58 Marshal Miller
You can make money at like this software company or something like that.
00:11:03 Marshal Miller
And honestly, I mean, my response is always the same.
00:11:05 Marshal Miller
I can do that on the side if I want to, and I do for fun.
00:11:08 Marshal Miller
I can make whatever project I want.
00:11:10 Marshal Miller
But now I just get to tell other people about the cool stuff, and they have to listen to me.
00:11:15 Marshal Miller
Like, I mean, they got to sit and listen about file systems, and I'm really excited about it.
00:11:20 Marshal Miller
And if they pretend to care, too, that's even great.
00:11:23 Marshal Miller
And I think sometimes they do, and then they go on and they tell other people about how cool file systems are.
00:11:30 Marshal Miller
And then, hopefully, down the line, that's their career too.
00:11:33 Kelly Allen
That's awesome, but you'd have to do that.
00:11:38 Kelly Allen
You would have to enjoy the relationship of teaching and learning somehow, because if not like...
00:11:50 Kelly Allen
students are, in working with students, it's a complicated practice.
00:11:57 Kelly Allen
It's not a one-size-fits-all, no matter how much someone would try when you're engaging in the learning process with them.
00:12:05 Kelly Allen
So there has to be some element of love and hopefully joy in that.
00:12:10 Kelly Allen
So.
00:12:12 Marshal Miller
I mean, I certainly do.
00:12:15 Marshal Miller
I think people who have been around me enough are sick of my constant sharing of certain things.
00:12:22 Marshal Miller
But there's just, in my mind, there's so much that's great.
00:12:26 Marshal Miller
About evolution of computing, not even, now we say computers and we're thinking about, the machine we type on with the keyboard and like this laptop in front of me.
00:12:36 Marshal Miller
But I mean,
00:12:37 Marshal Miller
The process of computing is ancient in society, and I think it's amazing to watch just to even document how humanity has figured out ways to process information that they can't naturally in their brain.
00:12:53 Marshal Miller
And so almost everything I see in my mind is like,
00:12:58 Marshal Miller
I wonder how that relates to this.
00:13:00 Marshal Miller
And I don't know.
00:13:01 Marshal Miller
Yeah, I can't help but love it.
00:13:04 Gina Turner
Just makes me think of the movie Hidden Figures, where they are called computers.
00:13:09 Gina Turner
Like that term actually referred to the women in that case who were calculating by hand, fundamentally, the calculations necessary for the space program.
00:13:21 Gina Turner
But the people were called computers.
00:13:23 Gina Turner
Just really dun bad.
00:13:24 Marshal Miller
You have now, you guys have taken two of my talking points off of it.
00:13:28 Marshal Miller
No, it's more than fine.
00:13:30 Marshal Miller
That just means I can ramble about something else now.
00:13:33 Marshal Miller
But no, I mean, you're absolutely right.
00:13:35 Marshal Miller
I mean, it's really, I've been lucky enough this semester that we got to finally start an honors section of computer science one.
00:13:44 Marshal Miller
And a lot of the stuff we did, well, pre-fall break, which is everything up to this point.
00:13:50 Marshal Miller
We did a lot of historical perspectives of computing.
00:13:53 Marshal Miller
And then after it, we said, okay, well, we'll get into some of like
00:13:57 Marshal Miller
the more groundbreaking things that are currently happening.
00:14:01 Marshal Miller
But I love to talk about how like, I mean, women especially were just so crucial.
00:14:08 Marshal Miller
And it all, well, I don't know.
00:14:10 Marshal Miller
Do we just keep going down this path?
00:14:12 Gina Turner
Yeah, okay.
00:14:13 Gina Turner
So you mentioned you're teaching an honor section of computer science.
00:14:16 Gina Turner
What else are you teaching?
00:14:18 Gina Turner
What's your regular classes that you teach?
00:14:21 Marshal Miller
That is almost impossible to answer.
00:14:24 Marshal Miller
I teach what
00:14:27 Marshal Miller
Someone else can't.
00:14:30 Marshal Miller
So whatever we can't find to teach, that's what I teach.
00:14:35 Marshal Miller
I came here at a very strange time for the computer science department.
00:14:41 Marshal Miller
We lost Ann Richards, unfortunately.
00:14:44 Marshal Miller
And Norm Lippincott retired soon after that.
00:14:52 Marshal Miller
We didn't lose Ken Kraus to COVID in the traditional sense.
00:14:56 Marshal Miller
He left because he didn't really want to adapt to COVID teaching.
00:15:02 Marshal Miller
So it was pretty bare at some points.
00:15:06 Marshal Miller
And the skill set you need to teach all of computer science is usually pretty specialized.
00:15:12 Marshal Miller
Like Norm is really great with some of the older technologies.
00:15:18 Marshal Miller
He was there and working in the industry.
00:15:21 Marshal Miller
When you hear about some of the languages that we were teaching, like COBOL or Fortran, like he was there, that's what he did for his profession.
00:15:31 Marshal Miller
And so, like the historical ones, he usually does a lot more of.
00:15:36 Marshal Miller
But it is hard to find someone who's that well-rounded.
00:15:42 Marshal Miller
But for the most part, I know the structure of most programming languages, kind of depending on what they are,
00:15:51 Marshal Miller
it's easier to adapt.
00:15:52 Marshal Miller
Like once you know one, you kind of start to get the picture.
00:15:55 Marshal Miller
So I kind of just plug and play.
00:15:57 Marshal Miller
But anything, it's limited to computer science and web development.
00:16:04 Gina Turner
Okay.
00:16:04 Marshal Miller
But it could be like, I don't know, one of 14 classes.
00:16:09 Marshal Miller
I don't know.
00:16:10 Gina Turner
Wow.
00:16:10 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:16:11 Marshal Miller
So I mean, I consistently teach computer science one because I really like it.
00:16:15 Marshal Miller
And
00:16:16 Marshal Miller
It's an extremely important one.
00:16:18 Marshal Miller
To your point, that's the one where I have to instill the love of computer science into people, because it's really easy to quit.
00:16:27 Marshal Miller
And not that other people can't do that, I mean, but it is kind of personal to me if I find that our majors are coming in, and not even just struggling, but don't have that, because it is...
00:16:46 Marshal Miller
I mean, it was a hot job for, a long time, but it really is kind of like a thing of passion.
00:16:53 Marshal Miller
Our own Jeff was a giant quitter when it came to computer science, but I know, right?
00:17:00 Marshal Miller
Shots fired already.
00:17:03 Marshal Miller
No, it's no, it's not.
00:17:08 Marshal Miller
It's not like the most shiny or attractive major.
00:17:12 Marshal Miller
It's not IT either.
00:17:14 Marshal Miller
The cybersecurity is in networking that get a lot of advertisement, but I really like it.
00:17:23 Gina Turner
Was there an experience that you had as a student that made you not a quitter like some people in the room?
00:17:32 Kelly Allen
I love you, Jeff, by the way.
00:17:33 Kelly Allen
I'm not going to let these haters hate.
00:17:38 Marshal Miller
I think I came into this
00:17:41 Marshal Miller
very similarly to how the industry involved itself, like over the years.
00:17:49 Marshal Miller
So as a kid, I very much like had engineering tendencies, like a lot of connects and Legos, I don't know, tinker toys.
00:17:59 Marshal Miller
There were some that you could make like circuits and like do like the little low voltage electricity thing.
00:18:06 Marshal Miller
So kind of got an electrical engineering.
00:18:09 Marshal Miller
went to Radio Shack, bought the two cent pieces of things to make a light bulb go on.
00:18:16 Marshal Miller
And that's really where the origin of computer science starts, is they're all from electrical engineering really built into that, because before we had screens, computers still used electrical currents to work.
00:18:29 Marshal Miller
So I very much just came in very interested in how things work.
00:18:36 Marshal Miller
And it kind of just like evolved out of that.
00:18:39 Marshal Miller
I was probably very lucky in the time that I came up in that I had the internet from a pretty early age, but also not too early that I was entranced by it.
00:18:54 Marshal Miller
Like websites were there.
00:18:56 Marshal Miller
They weren't like cool or engaging.
00:18:58 Marshal Miller
You wouldn't spend more than 10 minutes on one.
00:19:01 Marshal Miller
You could find information, but it wasn't like, entertainment really.
00:19:06 Marshal Miller
So I liked the architecture aspects.
00:19:10 Marshal Miller
And then, I don't know.
00:19:12 Marshal Miller
It seems like every Rd.
00:19:14 Marshal Miller
I traveled, there was some aspect of that.
00:19:17 Marshal Miller
So it kind of was like, even bringing me back like to here to do this job, a lot of it was just like, it's hard for me to separate that part of myself.
00:19:28 Marshal Miller
It's just,
00:19:29 Marshal Miller
It's mostly just been curiosity.
00:19:32 Gina Turner
That's great.
00:19:34 Gina Turner
So you just have always sort of been a student of this topic, right?
00:19:41 Gina Turner
Broadly and then focusing in.
00:19:45 Gina Turner
So do you disagree, Kelly?
00:19:48 Kelly Allen
Oh, no, I'm just saying he's got me thinking about a lot of things because, you know, you were
00:19:56 Kelly Allen
listing some names of former colleagues, but just got me thinking about kind of past relationships with kind of not just like the department, but the discipline.
00:20:11 Kelly Allen
So the discipline of computer science.
00:20:14 Kelly Allen
So this is, I don't know if it's intro to computers or whatever, it's something that is
00:20:19 Kelly Allen
It's required of all majors, I believe. Is that correct? That everyone has to take that course as part of their degree requirements. And like I remember taking it when I was doing my bachelor's of work and like what we were taught was like, here's how you use Windows 94. You know, it's like this is what Excel is. You make these things called spreadsheets and like whatever. It was dreadfully dull, but I think I passed it.
00:20:49 Kelly Allen
But we're now living in an age where, like you're talking about, having access to the internet at a relatively young age. Like we are immersed in technology. And granted, I don't think that very many people understand how technology works the way that you described earlier with like Lincoln Logs and Legos and Connects and stuff. But like,
00:21:16 Kelly Allen
we're like immersed in this. And so the conversation that was coming up in the past was like, why do we have this intro to computers class when students are coming in and they already know more than we do, which is false. But like the assumption is that they know more than we do. So like, what is it, like, what is it about your relationship with the discipline that kind of might
00:21:47 Kelly Allen
I guess, silence the naysayers, if you will, but then also like that thing that you're talking about, generating curiosity with students and making sure that they don't quit, and I'm...
00:21:59 Kelly Allen
And I'm assuming that you're not just talking about computer science majors, but just like our general whatever classes. I don't know if there's a question in there. Usually Gina saves me at this point. She's like, well, Kelly, I think what you're talking about now is, but.
00:22:14 Marshal Miller
I think I got you.
00:22:15 Kelly Allen
All right. Thank God.
00:22:16 Marshal Miller
So this is actually, I mean, unfortunately, I think anyone who's met me knows this. I'm a very bad liar. So I just tend to tell the truth. I'm also one of those naysayers about
00:22:29 Marshal Miller
It's CISC 101 that everyone has to take.
00:22:32 Kelly Allen
Well, then let's squash it, man. Well, listen, I'm working on it.
00:22:37 Marshal Miller
One of the things is it's a requirement for transfers for everyone. And it teaches, it teaches basically the, actually, no, it actually specifically specifies that it has to be the Microsoft Office Suite. So they learn all of the Office tools.
00:22:57 Marshal Miller
Including access, so that explains why transfer students have to take it. My B for it now is the other reason everyone else takes it is because it is our technically right now it is our only course for non-computer science majors that qualifies as...
00:23:21 Marshal Miller
What's it called? A technology.
00:23:23 Gina Turner
Oh, the gen ed requirement.
00:23:24 Marshal Miller
The gen ed requirement.
00:23:25 Gina Turner
Yeah. So for transfer students, there's a list of competency skills that they all need to graduate with. So computer science, excuse me, intro to, what is it called now? Intro to.
00:23:38 Marshal Miller
I think it's called intro to information systems or maybe information technology now.
00:23:43 Gina Turner
Yeah. And that fulfills that.
00:23:46 Marshal Miller
Yeah. I mean, sadly, I'm a monster and don't teach that class. So that's not.
00:23:51 Marshal Miller
one I instill my love in. And I like you even more. It does bother me a lot. And I have a lot of things trying to at least offer an alternative. We're not there yet. Sadly, there's a lot of things that I'm trying to change all at once. That's never fun. So.
00:24:15 Gina Turner
Okay, so I just want to go there and ask you, what would you do instead of
00:24:20 Gina Turner
So in the current CISC 101, you're learning all the Microsoft apps, including Access, which no one uses anymore. So what would you, how would you reinvent, and you don't have to drill down at a granular level, but what would be the big learning outcome that you would want to replace?
00:24:40 Marshal Miller
So I'd actually love to do, and I think I can make it work,
00:24:45 Marshal Miller
whatever, current issues and trends in computing or in technology even. We actually have the cluster, I don't want to say has the ability, like we're all powerful, but we can substitute and designate anything to qualify as that technology competency. And I think as long as we organize it right, the course outlines are done properly, we go through curriculum, it can be done. But I feel like that
00:25:15 Marshal Miller
The nice thing about those courses is obviously technology moves fast. So right now there's gonna be a section on AI. It's certainly a current issue and event in there. That doesn't mean we're gonna, you know, it's not gonna be a fully AI class.
00:25:31 Marshal Miller
which I would probably not enjoy. Jeff has again experienced me and I start in the 1970s. So no one really loves my AI talks. But yeah, I think that would be adaptable enough and we could reach all of them. And I think it would be much more enjoyable so people understand that like the computer isn't just like this tool that we do mundane tasks on that we offload things onto. But like this is kind of
00:26:02 Marshal Miller
this is where we are right now and information sharing as humanity. And that may not always be true.
00:26:10 Kelly Allen
Well, yeah, because like you were earlier talking about like what's great about computers in that it's they do things that our brains or maybe our bodies as well can't just naturally do on their own. So
00:26:28 Kelly Allen
Now that we are living in this like, just hyper like technologically complex society, in what way can we like use computers, not just as, modes of kind of like survival, but like ways of kind of like engaging with the world in like these new and like joyful creative ways?
00:26:52 Gina Turner
I mean, it's making me think of two things. one of them is we live with computers like we live with air right now, right? So we take them completely. That is awesome. Well, we take it completely for granted, right? And even in the sense that if suddenly someone sucked the air out of the room, then of course we would care, just like if someone steals our phone, right? Suddenly we would be panic stricken, right? So, but we take it for granted. And so the other, I'm about to police myself,
00:27:22 Gina Turner
and I'm not going to, I almost want a critical computing theory. It is kind of what you're talking about, which is looking at the systems that, being aware of the systems around us and how we ended up with this incredible amount of computing power in our pocket that we take for granted. I mean, that feels so powerful to be in a class that everyone has to take.
00:27:49 Marshal Miller
Yeah, and I think that's part of my general philosophy.
00:27:52 Marshal Miller
I mean, as I described it, as something that we can't do, I try to make sure not to use technologies for things that I can do. So I don't, there's certainly in math and certain things, I mean, anytime you want to display something on a screen, there's nothing I can do about that. I'm going to need to do some PowerPoint presentations at some point, or my reviews probably aren't going to be great. But
00:28:22 Marshal Miller
I think a lot of it is I don't want to replace, not myself like just in the, we talk about the jobs of that, but even just the function of myself. I very much like to, again, I like to know the full history. I think that's the one thing my students, that's the one plus I'll give myself. I give a thorough explanation.
00:28:41 Marshal Miller
of the history and why something is the way it is. So if there's something that seems weird, I'll be like, so in 1985, there was this program, and this is like, and I'll explain its journey, and it's like, it's just carry over from that.
00:28:56 Marshal Miller
It might not make sense, but at least you'll know why it happened. And I think that's very much how I try to operate with technology. That's why, yeah, when I walked in, I saw all these wires. I was like, oh, we're having a conversation. This doesn't seem like what conversations do. Obviously, we need this to have the broader dissemination of what we're doing. I guess this is how podcasts work. I'm not producer Jeff over there, but you know.
00:29:22 Gina Turner
Well, what you just said, so last week I went into my class, I'm teaching research.
00:29:26 Gina Turner
research methods this semester, and my flash drive wouldn't format, funnily enough. And apparently it just is, maybe I should give it to you, and maybe you can make it work again, but I couldn't get any of my slides. So the class was stuck with me and a whiteboard and a dry erase marker, and we were fine. So it was one of those moments where it's like, I'm so dependent on my PowerPoint slides, but I don't need to be that dependent on technology necessarily. I mean, I know what I want to tell them, and
00:29:56 Gina Turner
and I have my notes and I can write things on the board and make them participate. So it just made me think of that. But I guess I'm going to bring it back to one of our specific questions because you already talked about one of the things you would give yourself high marks on in the classroom is your ability to kind of give the historical context. So did you think of a word that you would use to describe yourself as a teacher?
00:30:22 Marshal Miller
I thought of three words. The first one I felt was like
00:30:26 Marshal Miller
mess. It feels like that because I do go, I mean, obviously I have the outline to make sure I cover the content that needs to be covered. But at the same time, I don't think anyone would go into a room knowing just how much we're going to cover or how we're going to get to where we are, including myself. So, you know, that's the one. But I would say
00:30:52 Marshal Miller
Probably like iterative would be the one that I use most. It's a big concept in computer science too, that nothing is ever perfect or complete and it requires maintenance, so updates to my syllabus and this. And then I value feedback from the students above all. First 10, 15 minutes of every class is like, hey, did anything throw anyone off in the homework?
00:31:20 Marshal Miller
Was there like a question on the test that you feel like you got right? Like we very much gather the feedback to, make a change. And sometimes I can't change it for them. Sometimes it's like, okay, well, next year I have to do this. But I do think the students very much respect that. I don't think anyone ever has told me something and felt like I didn't take action on that. Whatever the action may be, they'll get an apology if necessary or an explanation.
00:31:49 Marshal Miller
orally to, an office hour section where we walk further in it. But I do think that's probably it, as far as like my style. And I try to do that for them too. Even like homework assignments, one of the things I do is we do, we do some of it in class together, some of the coding. But for this, the second half, I usually do hybrid sections.
00:32:19 Marshal Miller
and they have an assignment to do on their own. And they're actually, I let them use whatever they want. They can use the textbook, they can use the internet. I just told them don't work with each other because I need everyone to struggle through this. And it sounds mean, but what we've done is essentially I've set up a system where they submit their code and it will give them
00:32:46 Marshal Miller
feedback and tell them, hey, there's this kind of error. And it doesn't tell them how to fix it, but it tells them what kind of error it is. So the goal is that they keep submitting it until they get it right. And then that's like my grading policy. It's like, I don't care how many times you submit. I have some people submit 20 times, but then they get it right. And so, you know, they get it. I don't mind as long as it's there by the due date, and I actually highly encourage them to do it.
00:33:13 Marshal Miller
Because it just, that feels like, I don't know, one, it feels like computer science to me, but that also feels like learning to me. Engaging in the flaws every time and then working on it. And then next time I can catch it that much sooner.
00:33:28 Gina Turner
I mean, to me, that sounds fantastic. And what you called mess really sounds to me like responsiveness, right, to what is happening in the present moment in the room. And it ties back into what you said about being iterative, right? You're operating from the feedback that's coming into you. So that sounds, not a lot of people can tolerate that quote unquote mess because they're so worried about jamming through what's on their agenda. But to me, that sounds also very much like learning.
00:33:57 Gina Turner
The process of learning,
00:33:59 Kelly Allen
and there's the part though of thinking of students.
00:34:05 Kelly Allen
doing something 20 times and then getting it right. Like there is certainly like a beauty in the, what is that, just kind of the resilience of a student. Is that the right word I'm looking for, that they just keep doing it and doing it and doing it until they get it right? Grit. Sure, grit. But then my follow-up question to
00:34:31 Kelly Allen
that I feel that I would have for that student, and I'm assuming that you've done the same, is like, okay, so what did you learn from that process so that the next time you do it, you're not doing it 20 times? So like, where's the knowledge transfer in that kind of engagement with the material?
00:34:49 Marshal Miller
So I try to integrate that into the next lesson. So when we do it live coding,
00:34:57 Marshal Miller
not to make it seem like I'm a great coder, but no one does it right the first time. So what I do is very much, I will open up literally like Notepad, not like a computer programming program, just open up Notepad and write the code out and talk through it and narrate it. And I would say, well, sometimes I think too, if I heard that feedback, I'll purposely make that mistake.
00:35:25 Marshal Miller
so that it triggers it. And then we'll run the program together. And then I'll be like, that's weird. Or sometimes when you get, I mean, the best part is like when you get to, we're about to get there, like week five, people are just like, hey, I didn't notice this. Like as you're going, like everyone is reviewing the code together. And it really becomes a collaborative effort. So the in-class ones, yeah, you work together with those people too. And it's just really great to see.
00:35:52 Marshal Miller
like the collaborative effort and it does, it seems like they do it. I think to your point, it's probably not the best way to assess that direct feedback, but that's why I have to iterate again. Now I have this feedback.
00:36:11 Kelly Allen
Well, so I teach writing and
00:36:16 Kelly Allen
The way that I approach my first semester writing class is that they're, like, all of their work is scaffolded. So the very first thing that, so I focus on public writing. And the very first thing that they do is an informative essay. So what is this public writing that you have found? And then, but while they're kind of
00:36:42 Kelly Allen
answering that question, they're also engaging with kind of like these basic writing skills. Like, okay, so let's look at sentence structure. Let's look at paragraph development. How well are your paragraphs working together to do thesis statements? So we have like these like list of like maybe four or five basic questions that we have to ask of our writing in the very beginning. And then when we move on to our next
00:37:10 Kelly Allen
essay, which is shortly after is the genre analysis. It's like, okay, so here are some new questions, but you're also asking yourself these other previous questions. So by the time that we get to our last project, there's like this like very extensive list of things that they need to run through to make sure that they are addressing so they know that they've written this thing appropriately, like within this academic setting. So
00:37:39 Kelly Allen
Again, like when I'm hearing you share with us, about these experiences that your students are having with, doing something, over and over, but then you said like on week five that they're starting to recognize that, like that's that transfer of knowledge where they've gone through this first basic sets of questions. You know, it might have been kind of dirty and kind of messy, but so long as that like we're getting these small,
00:38:05 Kelly Allen
these small gains in the beginning and then that you can kind of piece them together throughout the semester. I don't know, that's just good teaching in my eyes.
00:38:15 Marshal Miller
Yeah, I think my favorite part is again, kind of getting, hitting that.
00:38:21 Marshal Miller
week four is probably where it starts, is they've actually learned the language for the most part, but everything on top of that is a new tool. So each lesson is like, hey, here's a different way to solve a computing problem, because everything's A prompt. And so, I mean, and some people will be like, oh, is this cumulative? I was like, yeah, because if you don't know week one to three, you're not going to be, your program's not going to even like turn on. So
00:38:48 Marshal Miller
But they get to make those choices from then on to know kind of which is the best way to do it. And sometimes that's how, we get up in the submission count is because they're like, they were doing it, they saved their work, and then they're like, oh, you know what? I bet this approach will work better. And so, yeah, I really like that. It's the, oh boy, sorry, Jeff. The class as a whole.
00:39:11 Gina Turner
So,
00:39:13 Kelly Allen
I'm sorry. I think that this,
00:39:17 Kelly Allen
for this episode, the word Jeff has been used more than any previous episode. So if there's any of our audience members out there that like, every time that you hear the word Jeff, take a drink, please don't try.
00:39:31 Marshal Miller
This is a good one. No, Jeff is Jeff's my anchor being in this room. You know, whenever you need to feel a little bit safe,
00:39:41 Marshal Miller
or something like that. When I try to walk into a room in public, I try to, find that person that chills me out a little bit or I feel more comfortable with. And Jeff happens to be that. So I'm referring to Jeff a lot, but that's probably why.
00:39:56 Gina Turner
Jeff is our anchor being too.
00:39:57 Kelly Allen
I was going to say, he's my anchor being.
00:40:01 Marshal Miller
I mean, it doesn't have to be reciprocal.
00:40:02 Marshal Miller
I don't think any of us are Jeff's anchor being.
00:40:05 Marshal Miller
But.
00:40:08 Kelly Allen
Where is this going?
00:40:09 Kelly Allen
Holy crap.
00:40:11 Kelly Allen
Okay.
00:40:11 Gina Turner
Well, so I'm thinking you must not have students who are able to leave because you are working with each of them to scaffold them throughout the class.
00:40:28 Gina Turner
But do you ever
00:40:30 Gina Turner
have a student where you're thinking, I need a different approach with this student?
00:40:35 Gina Turner
I mean, do you shift the ways in which you'll work with individual students?
00:40:39 Marshal Miller
So I tend to not let a student fall behind more than...
00:40:44 Marshal Miller
a week because the class moves very fast.
00:40:48 Marshal Miller
And my rule is like reviewing what they're doing.
00:40:51 Marshal Miller
If I'm seeing something either in their submission or in class, I ask them to meet during office hours.
00:40:57 Marshal Miller
And usually I can dissect where I lost them.
00:41:01 Marshal Miller
There definitely are people.
00:41:04 Marshal Miller
I don't know what people call it here, but there is a
00:41:08 Marshal Miller
I don't remember what the term is, but basically this is the class that tells people if they want to be in computer science or not.
00:41:13 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:41:14 Marshal Miller
So there are people who, I'm sure it's not a nice term.
00:41:18 Gina Turner
No, there is a term and I can't think of it either.
00:41:21 Gina Turner
It's like the Axe class or something like that.
00:41:24 Gina Turner
It's like the.
00:41:25 Kelly Allen
Like a gatekeeper coming in.
00:41:26 Marshal Miller
Yeah.
00:41:27 Marshal Miller
It's not.
00:41:27 Kelly Allen
Is that the word?
00:41:28 Gina Turner
No, it has that meaning.
00:41:31 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:41:32 Marshal Miller
You're still doing a great job, Kelly.
00:41:34 Kelly Allen
Thank goodness.
00:41:34 Kelly Allen
You know, that's why we do these podcasts, so that I can get like affirmation from as many of my colleagues as I can.
00:41:42 Kelly Allen
So winner, winner.
00:41:45 Marshal Miller
But yeah, so we do get people, especially with the level of math that's required.
00:41:50 Gina Turner
Okay.
00:41:51 Marshal Miller
And that's usually where the problem is.
00:41:53 Marshal Miller
And I mean, I've talked to a few groups about the troubles we have.
00:41:59 Marshal Miller
people not understanding that computer science is different from IT, and that that's usually like the management of technology and working with users and operating it, opposed to, very much like an engineering background and coming up with different ways to store tiny bits of information.
00:42:21 Marshal Miller
And so I don't think, I think sometimes people come in just like, I want to work with computers, there's computer science,
00:42:27 Marshal Miller
not realizing, first semester you're going to be in calculus.
00:42:33 Marshal Miller
And then you're going to have three more math classes after that.
00:42:37 Kelly Allen
Oh, wait, okay.
00:42:38 Kelly Allen
So IT, the focus is working with the user.
00:42:44 Kelly Allen
So that's the people.
00:42:45 Kelly Allen
So if you're an IT person, you need to know that you're working with people.
00:42:52 Kelly Allen
But if you are a computer science person, you're working with machines.
00:42:58 Marshal Miller
Usually, you're, I mean, yes and no.
00:43:04 Marshal Miller
You're working in systems, but those systems are often people, but you're not, you're probably not working with many people outside of computer science, or at least the process of making a program.
00:43:17 Marshal Miller
So we do collaborate often with, say, sometimes marketing or sales teams, because they come with a feature.
00:43:24 Marshal Miller
Sometimes it could be a web designer, a graphic designer, because you don't code images.
00:43:31 Marshal Miller
So there is a lot of collaboration, but it's always like an internal team, not an external facing team, usually, unless you're like a freelancer or something like that.
00:43:45 Kelly Allen
How many computer science people end up in IT?
00:43:49 Marshal Miller
That's a great question.
00:43:53 Marshal Miller
I couldn't tell you, for a number of reasons.
00:43:56 Marshal Miller
It doesn't happen as often as you think.
00:44:01 Marshal Miller
And it's usually a personality thing.
00:44:04 Marshal Miller
I am, I hold the distinction of being the only person at the Bethlehem campus with a basement office.
00:44:12 Marshal Miller
And that kind of comes with the territory.
00:44:17 Marshal Miller
Actually,
00:44:19 Marshal Miller
this came up before, but even, the term hackers or even the term artificial intelligence were actually derogatory terms to early computer scientists.
00:44:32 Marshal Miller
It was like, you're not a real intelligent being, you're just working with machines.
00:44:38 Marshal Miller
So there is a lot of that, I don't want to say like they're non-social.
00:44:44 Marshal Miller
I think they get a lot of that, but it, yeah, it's definitely not,
00:44:49 Marshal Miller
I think the personalities are very different.
00:44:52 Gina Turner
Well, this strikes me as similar to what happens in our allied health programs, because we have a major in health sciences that students who are nursing intent or one of the other professions take.
00:45:05 Gina Turner
And the challenge is if they, the, I'm still trying to think of that word, the weeding out class, right?
00:45:11 Gina Turner
So anatomy and physiology is a big weeding out class for that population.
00:45:16 Gina Turner
And so then
00:45:18 Gina Turner
Is there a sort of a safety net or a guidance program to direct them toward health adjacent professions?
00:45:28 Gina Turner
Is there something like that for the computer science student who's then going, what, calculus and three more math classes?
00:45:38 Gina Turner
Is there kind of an off ramp for them?
00:45:40 Marshal Miller
I am so glad you brought this up because I am, I love to drop this tidbit.
00:45:47 Marshal Miller
Yes, we have a system.
00:45:50 Marshal Miller
Her name is Elena.
00:45:52 Marshal Miller
She is the greatest academic advisor.
00:45:55 Marshal Miller
I will fight anyone to that.
00:45:58 Marshal Miller
She comes to every single cluster meeting, sees any conflict, even like a conflict with a math class, and is like, hey, you might want to shift this class because it is possible technically for a student to be in both these classes at the same time, and I don't want any conflicts.
00:46:14 Marshal Miller
She knows all of our programs,
00:46:16 Marshal Miller
better than any of us.
00:46:19 Marshal Miller
And, that's where they go first.
00:46:23 Marshal Miller
And she is just amazing.
00:46:26 Marshal Miller
she comes to us all the time with questions to help her advise them.
00:46:30 Marshal Miller
So if she has a question, but there is just, I have never seen someone like so proactive and just like have it under control.
00:46:38 Marshal Miller
So she's usually pretty great about that.
00:46:41 Marshal Miller
But it is just,
00:46:43 Marshal Miller
I feel like it's, well, one, it's a lot on the workload, but I also don't know if that's the best way to onboard people is just like talk to your academic advisor, and then we're relying on one person to sort them out.
00:46:56 Marshal Miller
I mean, we've been trying to talk about
00:46:58 Marshal Miller
about that for a while.
00:47:00 Marshal Miller
And it's hard too, because they actually share zero of the same classes.
00:47:05 Marshal Miller
So if you start in IT or you start in computer science, there is no, like, debt credit does not go over.
00:47:12 Gina Turner
Wow.
00:47:13 Marshal Miller
Well, I guess, you know, Gen.
00:47:14 Marshal Miller
eds, but I just mean, like, yeah.
00:47:16 Marshal Miller
So it is, we see that as one of our big issues that we're trying to figure out right now.
00:47:25 Gina Turner
I mean, that kind of does lead me to another question along those lines, which is you've already talked about wanting to see changes in the 101 class and maybe finding a way to find the common ground between the IT and computer science, maybe for those reasons.
00:47:44 Gina Turner
What other things would you want to see differently in
00:47:48 Gina Turner
in the pedagogy around computer science or in your profession?
00:47:53 Marshal Miller
Oh.
00:47:54 Marshal Miller
It doesn't have to be here related, right?
00:47:56 Gina Turner
Nope.
00:47:56 Marshal Miller
Okay.
00:47:57 Marshal Miller
Because for a while, I'm going to be honest, it was whatever I wanted.
00:48:01 Marshal Miller
So there's not much, you can blame me for everything that happened in computer science.
00:48:06 Marshal Miller
So that one's hard to say.
00:48:08 Marshal Miller
I mean, I changed things, but.
00:48:11 Marshal Miller
So this is the thing I'm most passionate about in the world.
00:48:16 Marshal Miller
I think
00:48:17 Marshal Miller
Some of it stems from, I'll start at the basic part, which would just be right now, like the ed tech space is really bothering me.
00:48:26 Marshal Miller
And most of it centers around this proprietary nature of like getting locked into these contracts and kind of being predatory and selling lots of things.
00:48:36 Marshal Miller
So I personally have a pretty big vendetta against
00:48:44 Marshal Miller
proprietary things.
00:48:45 Marshal Miller
That sounds bad.
00:48:46 Marshal Miller
I do very heavily abide and read copyright law and all of that, but that's part of where it comes to.
00:48:54 Marshal Miller
the Copyright Office and Patent Office were designed specifically to incentivize innovation, and I don't think that's what it's doing right now.
00:49:06 Marshal Miller
And a lot of that comes from a shift in funds and support from
00:49:12 Marshal Miller
the government, not just our government, but we, going back to the history.
00:49:21 Marshal Miller
We're talking, yeah, World War II.
00:49:24 Marshal Miller
We have a huge incubation of women and funding from the Navy and NASA.
00:49:32 Marshal Miller
And we're just training everyone to compute and cryptology.
00:49:41 Marshal Miller
for code breaking.
00:49:43 Marshal Miller
And we're just investing so much money into this.
00:49:46 Marshal Miller
And this is done primarily through academic institutions.
00:49:50 Marshal Miller
So, we were getting a lot of funding for that, and it was done there.
00:49:55 Marshal Miller
we have the space race, and we have ARPA, which is now called DARPA.
00:50:01 Marshal Miller
But they were just investing in some really big ideas.
00:50:06 Marshal Miller
Again,
00:50:08 Marshal Miller
just, they started the early versions of the internet.
00:50:12 Marshal Miller
They funded that.
00:50:14 Marshal Miller
They had a lot to do with the creation of AI, again, in the basement of MIT in the 70s.
00:50:22 Marshal Miller
They really did that.
00:50:23 Marshal Miller
Their ideas were moving so fast.
00:50:26 Marshal Miller
that they actually started to try to recruit science fiction writers because they were moving so fast that the only way they could think of to plan the thing next was to have someone with like outrageous ideas.
00:50:38 Marshal Miller
Like they were just like, we can't, we're moving so fast, we're running out of ideas.
00:50:43 Marshal Miller
That's so cool.
00:50:45 Marshal Miller
and when was the last time, you heard that kind of funding coming to, the academic institutions, where it's like, we want to support everything and we love these ideas.
00:50:56 Marshal Miller
And some of that, we had, again, the early internet, it was called ARPANET at the time, which was only linking of like 4 academic institutions.
00:51:08 Marshal Miller
Again, big part of that.
00:51:10 Marshal Miller
We get the NSF out of that.
00:51:11 Marshal Miller
They take over
00:51:13 Marshal Miller
the internet for about a decade, well, 88 to 94, that's not a decade, but somewhere around that time frame.
00:51:21 Marshal Miller
It's called the NSF net, then eventually, so fully funded by the NSF, that's great.
00:51:28 Marshal Miller
And you know, from them we get things like the MRI.
00:51:32 Marshal Miller
I don't think they invented Doppler, but they certainly improved it a lot.
00:51:38 Marshal Miller
And then deep ocean exploration, these all come out of NSF at this time.
00:51:43 Marshal Miller
But I think kind of when I went back to Ed Tech, some of it just came like I see a lot of big technology companies coming in and taking those contracts and doing things like in secret.
00:51:57 Marshal Miller
So even going like, again, back in computers, we have IBM, like one of the biggest companies ever made, or sorry, Bell Labs, not IBM.
00:52:06 Marshal Miller
They come later.
00:52:07 Marshal Miller
It's annoying people.
00:52:09 Marshal Miller
But, I mean, they've gotten broken up.
00:52:11 Marshal Miller
I don't, I can't even count how many times as a monopoly, but they like, they owned the internet essentially.
00:52:18 Marshal Miller
And they were charging major prices for access to software, a lot like what we're seeing right now.
00:52:26 Marshal Miller
And it was just, you know, and now we're seeing more deals with things like Oracle and Meta and Amazon.
00:52:33 Marshal Miller
And basically people found out you could make money off of these things.
00:52:37 Marshal Miller
And obviously less and less funding is going to academics.
00:52:41 Marshal Miller
Personally, I tend to believe that's because there's less transparency if you don't have to go to an IRB board or be held to ethical standards.
00:52:51 Marshal Miller
And you can just, you know, do what you want and sell it.
00:52:56 Marshal Miller
But I just, you know, out of some of that, especially in like the 90s, came this idea of
00:53:03 Marshal Miller
just open, so like open source.
00:53:07 Marshal Miller
There was a student, Linus Torvalds, and he was Finnish, and he couldn't afford a copy of the Bell Labs operating system, but he was a college student, obviously wanted to learn more about computers.
00:53:25 Marshal Miller
This dude ends up just making his own.
00:53:28 Marshal Miller
And it's still today, runs about 97% of the internet.
00:53:32 Marshal Miller
It's all the servers and backend stuff that runs it.
00:53:35 Marshal Miller
Mac OS is built on top of it too.
00:53:39 Marshal Miller
But there was a big push during this time of like this shared knowledge and innovation that just brought about a lot of things.
00:53:51 Marshal Miller
And a lot of it was from that early internet.
00:53:54 Marshal Miller
So I think, you know, my biggest thing, I don't actually know if I want the government giving us all of our money again.
00:54:02 Marshal Miller
I mean, funding's nice, but I don't know if, maybe I shouldn't be like that.
00:54:08 Gina Turner
Well, if the strings attached to the money are worth it.
00:54:11 Marshal Miller
Exactly.
00:54:13 Marshal Miller
Like, I don't know if I want to say that, but I'd love to go back to the days of like the collaboration and investing in innovation opposed to these, you know, I feel like right now we're not advancing humanity with these projects.
00:54:28 Marshal Miller
We're advancing or raising stock prices.
00:54:31 Marshal Miller
Whereas in the open sharing community, we're kind of just, yeah, we're moving forward in different areas.
00:54:39 Marshal Miller
And it just really has that spirit of innovation that
00:54:44 Marshal Miller
and freedom and sharing of knowledge that feels, again, kind of ancient to me that could be passed down.
00:54:49 Marshal Miller
Whereas like, I don't know, a program from Meta, probably we're not going to, one, we don't know how it works now, but in 100 years we won't.
00:54:59 Marshal Miller
But we have records of these open things from thousands of years.
00:55:04 Marshal Miller
that were written down because they weren't, some of them were sealed and laid uncovered.
00:55:09 Marshal Miller
But the idea is just this.
00:55:13 Marshal Miller
I really wish we shared more knowledge and collaborating, even like between institutions.
00:55:20 Marshal Miller
Like it doesn't have to be this race.
00:55:22 Marshal Miller
I feel like the opportunity here is to advance humanity in some way, making tools for things that we can't do, not things that can replace what we can't do.
00:55:36 Gina Turner
Yeah, go ahead.
00:55:37 Gina Turner
Sorry, this is a tangent.
00:55:39 Gina Turner
I saw this movie on HBO called Mountain Something.
00:55:45 Gina Turner
Let me know if this rings a bell.
00:55:46 Gina Turner
Do you know what I'm talking about?
00:55:47 Gina Turner
Do you remember what it was called?
00:55:48 Marshal Miller
I think it might have just been called Mountain View.
00:55:50 Gina Turner
Mountain View, yeah.
00:55:51 Gina Turner
And it's about these tech guys and they're sort of, you can tell they're loosely based on some of our tech billionaires.
00:55:58 Gina Turner
But really the, and it wasn't the best movie I've ever seen, although it was pretty funny.
00:56:03 Gina Turner
But it was
00:56:03 Gina Turner
is really about inventing things just to invent things and make money, as opposed to what are the ramifications of having invented these things.
00:56:13 Gina Turner
And they're just constantly trying to undercut each other.
00:56:15 Gina Turner
And I mean, it really speaks to the moment that we're in, I guess.
00:56:18 Gina Turner
So, and to what you're saying, because that sort of, you know, brave new world, that Star Trek world of like, let's share all the information in the tech and envision brave new worlds.
00:56:32 Marshal Miller
That was always a thing I think
00:56:33 Marshal Miller
that people liked about Star Trek was that they weren't like, this wasn't a war.
00:56:39 Marshal Miller
They were there for scientific discovery.
00:56:41 Marshal Miller
It says at the beginning of every time, like we're there to explore the world and make peace and share our technology with others.
00:56:49 Marshal Miller
I'm not a huge Star Trek nerd, but I think that's admirable.
00:56:55 Gina Turner
Our delightful, what did you call him?
00:56:57 Gina Turner
Your support being?
00:56:58 Gina Turner
Your anchor being.
00:57:01 Marshal Miller
My anchor being.
00:57:02 Gina Turner
Our anchor being is letting us know that we have to sadly start wrapping things up.
00:57:06 Gina Turner
But we can't let you leave without asking about your guilty pleasure that your fellow faculty don't know about you.
00:57:14 Marshal Miller
So that one, that one's hard.
00:57:18 Marshal Miller
I don't feel guilty about, I think I'm pretty transparent in those same ways.
00:57:24 Marshal Miller
I feel like if you, I think you have all heard some of my guilty pleasures already in here.
00:57:29 Marshal Miller
They're just very nerdy things.
00:57:32 Marshal Miller
Can I alter the question?
00:57:34 Gina Turner
Absolutely.
00:57:34 Marshal Miller
All right, let's be, let's do the like job interview one of like, what's your greatest weakness?
00:57:43 Gina Turner
Interesting.
00:57:43 Gina Turner
And I should have prefaced that I usually do in saying no pleasure should be guilty.
00:57:48 Gina Turner
But yes, please take this question in whatever direction you would like.
00:57:51 Marshal Miller
And this might not, this probably ties in a lot with the things we're talking about, which is, I guess, I mean, it is kind of a guilty pleasure, but, and I just really like building things, but to like a little bit of a compulsive level.
00:58:07 Marshal Miller
I don't know if it's because I'm just like really stubborn or cheap, but
00:58:12 Marshal Miller
instead of my classroom needed a doorstep.
00:58:15 Marshal Miller
Instead of just sending an e-mail, I went and designed one on a computer and 3D printed it.
00:58:21 Marshal Miller
And I was like, okay, good.
00:58:22 Marshal Miller
I took care of that.
00:58:24 Marshal Miller
And if there's anything that I feel, I think this goes to my view of technology, where it's like, if there's something that I can do, I don't want to take that agency away from it, which I'm sure it's a control issue.
00:58:38 Marshal Miller
Gina can decide all of that.
00:58:40 Marshal Miller
But
00:58:41 Marshal Miller
I mean, I think a lot of people have seen that around some tasks here too, where instead of using a flawed system, I'd rather make the thing specifically for the task that I want.
00:58:55 Marshal Miller
I see it as a flaw.
00:58:57 Marshal Miller
I don't know, because to Jean's point, I don't know if I feel guilty about it.
00:59:00 Marshal Miller
I mean, it brings me pleasure.
00:59:01 Marshal Miller
I try to do what I think is right, and even that brings me pleasure.
00:59:05 Marshal Miller
So I don't know.
00:59:06 Gina Turner
I, again, there should be no guilt, but you know, it is the, that's the phrase.
00:59:11 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:59:13 Gina Turner
And I see that as a strength.
00:59:15 Gina Turner
I was thinking about something sort of similar to that idea of just
00:59:21 Gina Turner
of knowing what you're doing and then doing it yourself and how satisfying it is to at least have that understanding of what it is that you are doing or wanting or needing in the moment.
00:59:32 Gina Turner
And so I'm going to confess something here.
00:59:36 Gina Turner
I don't feel guilty about it.
00:59:37 Gina Turner
I have been a very late adapter to using ChatGPT in any capacity.
00:59:42 Gina Turner
But yesterday I was writing up a proposal and I just said, can you just please put these books into APA format for a reference page for me?
00:59:51 Gina Turner
And so I did, but I have been teaching psychology for 47,000 years.
00:59:56 Gina Turner
And so I know what APA format looks like.
00:59:59 Gina Turner
So then I was able to look at it and go, yep, no, wait.
01:00:03 Gina Turner
And I was then able to correct it really easily.
01:00:06 Gina Turner
And it made me feel really good about myself because I have spent 20 plus years learning the skill of APA formatting and all the updates to APA formatting in order to partner
01:00:18 Gina Turner
with ChatGPT, putting it together.
01:00:22 Gina Turner
So I don't know, that just made me feel like a lot of what you're saying, which is to know why I'm using the technology and to be conscious of the fact that I'm using the technology for a very specific purpose.
01:00:33 Kelly Allen
I was teaching APA format in my first semester writing class today, and I don't have very nice things to say about APA format.
01:00:44 Marshal Miller
What's your preferred format?
01:00:46 Kelly Allen
Chicago.
01:00:47 Marshal Miller
Oh, really?
01:00:48 Kelly Allen
Yes.
01:00:49 Gina Turner
Okay, you get to break the tie, Marshall.
01:00:52 Kelly Allen
Yeah, when I write...
01:00:53 Kelly Allen
It'll be difficult, IEEE.
01:00:56 Kelly Allen
What?
01:00:57 Marshal Miller
Yeah, there's another one that's called IEEE.
01:00:59 Kelly Allen
I dig it.
01:01:01 Kelly Allen
Like, I mean, I'm in a discipline where it's like I write in MLA format, but if I had my choice, it'd be Chicago.
01:01:09 Kelly Allen
I think it's gorgeous.
01:01:11 Marshal Miller
But not Turbian, right?
01:01:14 Kelly Allen
No.
01:01:14 Kelly Allen
Okay.
01:01:15 Kelly Allen
I don't know.
01:01:16 Marshal Miller
Isn't that the, that's the one, there's a lady, that's her last name, and she decided that she should work off of Chicago style, but make it her own.
01:01:27 Gina Turner
Oh gosh.
01:01:27 Marshal Miller
And people adopt it.
01:01:28 Marshal Miller
I'm just saying it's oddly popular.
01:01:31 Gina Turner
APA came first.
01:01:32 Gina Turner
That's all I'm going to say.
01:01:35 Kelly Allen
So intrusive.
01:01:37 Kelly Allen
But okay, we're not going to get there.
01:01:39 Kelly Allen
Marshall, it has been just an absolute pleasure to just spend some time with you and to say Jeff's name.
01:01:47 Marshal Miller
I know.
01:01:47 Kelly Allen
A few dozen times.
01:01:48 Kelly Allen
It's been just great hearing, like, you know, the fabulous work that you're doing.
01:01:55 Kelly Allen
And while, you know, I know that many of our listeners don't have the pleasure to, you know, work at the same institution as you do, it just gives me
01:02:04 Kelly Allen
the feels knowing that our students are being taught by someone like you.
01:02:08 Kelly Allen
So thank you so much for being here with us.
01:02:10 Gina Turner
Yeah, it's been a real pleasure.
01:02:12 Gina Turner
And I just love the history angle.
01:02:14 Gina Turner
I mean, really, I could sit here and just listen to you talk about the history of computer science for two reasons.
01:02:19 Gina Turner
One, you actually are really passionate and really obviously knowledgeable about it.
01:02:25 Gina Turner
And 2, because I just think it's so important for us to have that context.
01:02:29 Gina Turner
So thank you.
01:02:30 Marshal Miller
Next time we can talk about how the Loom started
01:02:33 Marshal Miller
Created that first algorithm.
01:02:35 Gina Turner
Fantastic.
01:02:36 Kelly Allen
Let's do it.
01:02:36 Kelly Allen
OK, so he's already volunteering himself for chapter 2.
01:02:40 Kelly Allen
Yes.
01:02:40 Gina Turner
All right, thanks.
01:02:44 Gina Turner
Pedagogy, a go, go.
01:02:49 Gina Turner
Pedagogy, go, go, go.
01:02:53 Kelly Allen
Well, Gina, that was delightfully awesome, but we didn't ask the question.
01:03:00 Kelly Allen
And what was the question again?
01:03:03 Gina Turner
The difference between computer science and information science?
01:03:07 Gina Turner
I think Marshall kind of covered that, though, when you asked him about, is it people versus not people?
01:03:14 Gina Turner
Right.
01:03:15 Kelly Allen
Oh, what did he say?
01:03:17 Gina Turner
He said, it depends.
01:03:22 Gina Turner
So I don't know that we will ever know the answer to that question.
01:03:27 Gina Turner
But I really love how much I understand more about the context of
01:03:32 Gina Turner
our technological world now with the historic contacts that he gave us, which I could have talked to him for another hour about.
01:03:42 Gina Turner
I love that stuff.
01:03:43 Kelly Allen
Yeah, absolutely.
01:03:44 Kelly Allen
And what was...
01:03:46 Kelly Allen
so prior to our talking with him, I was saying it's like, that I was like a little nervous because I don't get to talk with, computer science faculty all that much.
01:03:57 Kelly Allen
And I don't know why that is, but like there's this disconnect between the humanities in that field.
01:04:05 Kelly Allen
But after talking with him, it's like, it's really refreshing.
01:04:10 Kelly Allen
And I feel kind of like bad for not knowing this earlier, just like how immersed
01:04:15 Kelly Allen
that field is in the humanities.
01:04:18 Kelly Allen
Like you're saying, like I could listen to him talk for hours about this kind of stuff.
01:04:23 Kelly Allen
And, he kind of like was hinting at maybe like a round two of this.
01:04:29 Kelly Allen
I don't know how serious he was, but like I definitely have a list of questions that I would like to ask him, from a humanities perspective about
01:04:39 Kelly Allen
like computer science and what that is meaning for our humanity.
01:04:42 Gina Turner
Right, exactly, and the social structures around all of this too.
01:04:46 Gina Turner
So yeah, very social science as well.
01:04:50 Kelly Allen
But the part that he ended on about, and I don't remember how he really worded it, but it was essentially like the freedom of sharing of information.
01:05:04 Kelly Allen
He used the word proprietary, I believe it was, but
01:05:10 Kelly Allen
I don't know, like I'm still trying to chew on that.
01:05:12 Kelly Allen
And just thinking about like how often we place these limitations on our ability to kind of like grow and adapt and be kind of just, healthy humans because of like this other desire that seems so unnatural.
01:05:31 Kelly Allen
Like this, say something about like.
01:05:36 Gina Turner
Right, Like curiosity instead of stock prices.
01:05:43 Kelly Allen
Yes, Yeah.
01:05:46 Gina Turner
I loved the image of him as a little guy and making his little circuit boards and building his things and that never stopped.
01:05:56 Gina Turner
I mean, he really saw that as just a continuous line into what he does now.
01:06:00 Gina Turner
I really love that.
01:06:02 Kelly Allen
Yeah.
01:06:03 Kelly Allen
I don't know.
01:06:03 Kelly Allen
This is
01:06:06 Kelly Allen
definitely been like just a unique podcast for us.
01:06:13 Kelly Allen
And each one is unique in its own way.
01:06:16 Kelly Allen
But what Marshall kind of like shared with us is kind of like, these conversations that I don't find us having very often.
01:06:25 Kelly Allen
And that is, what is our relationship with technology?
01:06:27 Kelly Allen
At least in a way that just is so like,
01:06:31 Kelly Allen
healthy and just amazing.
01:06:33 Gina Turner
And engaged.
01:06:34 Kelly Allen
Yeah.
01:06:35 Kelly Allen
totally.
01:06:35 Kelly Allen
So that was awesome.
01:06:37 Gina Turner
It was awesome.
01:06:40 Gina Turner
That's the end.
01:06:47 Gina Turner
That is the end of our podcast.
01:06:55 Kelly Allen
Goodbye, humans.
01:06:59 Kelly Allen
Was that awesome?
01:07:00 Kelly Allen
Yeah, awesome.
01:07:01 Kelly Allen
Awesome.
01:07:02 Kelly Allen
Totally awesome.
01:07:18 Kelly Allen
Thank you for listening to Pedagogy A-Go-Go, recorded in the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
01:07:26 Kelly Allen
Our producer in all things technology is Jeff Armstrong.
01:07:29 Kelly Allen
If you've got any questions, please send them to pedagogyagogo@gmail.com.
01:07:35 Kelly Allen
And be sure to follow us on social media at pedagogyagogo and click into our bio for copies of podcast transcripts, guest assignments, and other useful tidbits.
01:07:44 Kelly Allen
Until next time, this is Gina and Kelly saying we hope your day is filled with wonderful learning experiences.
