Online Learning in the Second Half EP 12 - With Dr. Michelle Miller - Tech, AI, the Brain, and Online Learning
In this episode, John and Jason talk with Dr. Michelle Miller about how and if technology rewires the brain, artificial intelligence, online learning discussion boards, and her new book “Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World.”
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Resources:- Michelle Miller’s Website
- Subscribe to Dr. Miller’s Substack Newsletter here
- Michelle Miller at LinkedIn
- Minds Online (2016 )
- Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World (2022)
- James Lang’s “Small Teaching” book
Dr. Michelle Miller is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology (Harvard University Press, 2014). Her latest book is Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World, coming out in 2022 with West Virginia University Press.
Dr. Miller is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. She completed her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology and behavioral neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, and currently writes, teaches, and speaks about maximizing learning in today’s technology-saturated and rapidly-changing world.
TranscriptEP 12 - Michelle Miller final
Jason Johnston: [00:00:00]
Coffee BanterJason Johnston: My first question is, do you have a morning drink of choice?
Michelle Miller: Let's see. I drank about a quart of coffee with a lot of sugar. And as a cognitive psychologist too, I know that caffeine is actually , pretty good for focus and doesn't have too many downsides until we get into the afternoon.
Jason Johnston: And I love those studies, you know, if I'm biased in any way in terms of my research, it is definitely with the coffee studies, because I completely ignore it has a negative title. I'm not interested in that kind of negativity in my life now. The positive ones, longevity increasing productivity. Increasing awareness. I love those coffee studies. Those are some of my favorites.
Michelle Miller: Oh, absolutely. That's a little confirmation bias before breakfast. I know, right? Right. Harmless, right.
IntroJohn Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason
Jason Johnston: Johnston. Hey John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the second half the Online Learning podcast.
John Nash: Yeah. We are doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the [00:01:00] last two years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great and some of it is, a lot of it still isn't.
And so how are we gonna get to the next stage?
Jason Johnston: That is a great question. How about we make a podcast and talk about it?
John Nash: I think that's a great idea. What do you want to talk about today?
Jason Johnston: Today's an exciting day, John. It's not just about what it's with whom. So we have with us today, Dr. Michelle Miller. And Michelle is the author of a number of books as well as a professor of psychological sciences at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. Welcome, Michelle.
Michelle Miller: Hi. Thank you. Thanks so much. It's great to be here today.
ConversationJason Johnston: What else would you like our listening audience to know about you on the front end as we're talking?
Michelle Miller: Let's see. So I started out really in my career, if I could just hear a little bit of my origin story for those who haven't heard it [00:02:00] yet. Absolutely. You know, I started out in my graduate career. Studying just really kind of core topics in cognitive science and just really theoretical stuff.
So working memory, language, attention and so on, and how all those things come together. And got to do a great postdoc at Rice University, exploring what were then some very new technologies for functional brain imaging and so on. And it started out as a faculty member at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.
And just to set the scene a little bit Northern Arizona is it's very physically and geographically different and very distinct in many ways. Folks probably picture a lot of cactus and little road runners and things like that. And you know, triple digit temperatures up here in northern Arizona.
It's pine trees, grand Canyon mountains skiing and all that. And some very remote areas. And Northern Arizona University, historically has been really at the [00:03:00] forefront of a lot of kind of what we would have called distance education. It's a little bit of a dated term, now, but just to meet our mission of working with students and creating more opportunities in this unique remote landscape, we are also adjacent to the Navajo Nation and our institution sits on the traditional sacred lands of the Navajo or nation. And there are tremendous challenges of distance and access.
And so this has created this incredibly fertile ground for people interested in educational technology, but also all kinds of educational innovation. So that's what happened in my career after a lot of graduate students, I was prepared for a very, a narrow pathway on the traditional R one research institution.
And let's keep doing studies on these different narrow theoretical issues. And I still love that stuff, I think it can do so much, but it is a function of these different things in my career. I really [00:04:00] pivoted to looking at very practical issues and how we can take what cognitive psychology, cognitive science, brain science tells us, use it to live, work and especially learn better.
So that's what I do today. And I'm also a Long-term. I'm a fan of technology. I've never pursued it really professionally, but always interested in how can we adopt the next thing and what's coming over the horizon. And that's something that in Minds Online for those who have read that, that first book, it opens with me as a kid encountering a computer, which most kids didn't back when I was growing up in the seventies.
So that's kinda where I'm coming from and I think that's the context that I wanna offer to readers that today most of my own research is in applied areas, but I love kind of picking and choosing and almost translating some of this classic research and exciting new research to see how can we use this to, to help our students.
John Nash: I loved your sentence in [00:05:00] one of the opening paragraphs in Remembering and Forgetting, your new book. And you just said, "this interest in creating great college pedagogy is a major development." And I highlighted that and I said, gosh, yes it is. Could you say a little bit about why you think it is a major development?
I think we're have a fan base here and we agree, but what's from your perspective, feels different about this?
Michelle Miller: Right. And that is a, that is an important point too, that I like to use as context is that the things that I has to do, really, I think I think it was as part of a movement, I think that what we have here among people who I think are your podcast base here, we're the people who are really passionate about, yeah, by any means necessary bringing more opportunities for more learning to more people and doing so frequently, not always, but frequently through the lenses of these empirical ways of knowing of cognitive science and so on. But this is a big deal to [00:06:00] me. when I first started getting into this writing about educational technology and the applications, It struck me.
I always say there are folks out there, they will walk on hot coals for these innovations, there are people who are so dedicated. What is this movement about? Partly one little thread of it is I would call the course redesign movement that I got involved with, probably around 2005, 2006 I was I got shuffled off to some conference I went to, to basically to be nice after my e-learning center said, we gave you this grant for online learning, go to this conference, national Center for Academic Transformation. I'm like, all right, I'll go, but I, within an hour, I was like, this is speaking to me. So that's when I really started seeing the connections among these individuals out there, leaders who were saying, Look, these things in technology are happening.
How can we use them to, to reduce the cost, but also to advance learning as well? It was the first [00:07:00] time I'd heard people who were talking about eliciting student effort as the means to meaningful learning and really talking about engaging students in new ways, even in classes that were very large sometimes saying, yeah, we don't have to accept that just because Psych 1 0 1 has 300 students in it, that students just take two midterms and a final and go home.
So that was part of what I would see as this movement. And I would also say too, I started teaching our teaching practicum course for our graduate students around then. I think there's probably a little class like this sort of tucked away at a lot of graduate departments and it's an oddball that i, I took it and you might imagine ran with it. And when I started teaching that course, there was one textbook that was out there. I think it was, I don't know, it was really good for it time. It was called Teaching Tips. So it didn't have really a super coherent framework. There was a lot of like, "well, I do this in my class and students like it."
There was a lot of " like, "well, your number [00:08:00] one teaching strategy and philosophy: show up 10 minutes early to class."
That's, and that's pretty much it. So the advice was scattershot. It was not taking into account what I was seeing going on in the study of memory and attention. And it wasn't taking advantage of that.
And all that started to change. You started I would say that James Lang a really treasured collaborator and I don't know, hero of mine was writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, this powerful column about teaching. And his work started to evolve more in this more empirical, more conceptual direction.
And today we have this incredible international community of people who share these values and share a real passionate interest. We, of course we have differences of opinion, different favorite methodologies for getting there, but that's what I see out there.
Jason Johnston: Yeah and just talking about your book minds Online.
It was and is a significant book for me. I've been in a [00:09:00] couple different contexts where I've bought it for everyone that I have influence over to talk about. And it's partly because you do, I think, a great job of putting together a lot of the research, your own and other research on the front end.
But then you've got a chapter nine you call "putting it all together," which is set up in such a way that you then organize as you said, you're a practicum teacher. And I think that is very much how I read your work too, and you put it together in such a way where you can talk about the questions and then the tools and tech techniques and principles and ideas to actually put things into place. And I really appreciate that about your book. It just made for a very, it's a very practical approach to doing online, which I think is part of this movement as you've talked about over the last couple of decades.
Oh, thank you.[00:10:00]
The one part of the book that I. I have the page memorized because I referred to it. Yeah. It's not very many things. I'm not, this is not my typical orientation, but I think I've referred to it enough times. I see the number 41, at least in my hard copy book
Oh.
In my head when I think about it.
But I just wanted to read it and then have you expound on this and what you've maybe learned a little bit since writing this book. This is from 2014, which is not that long ago, but there's still been a couple things. Yeah. One or two things that have happened since then. Yeah. But you wrote on page 41 you said that
"in another online class research collaborators, and I found that the number of discussion posts students made were the number one predictor of their overall course grade. even though these made up only a tiny fraction of course points. Based on this information I built in [00:11:00] more choices of discussion topics and began contacting students who weren't participating early on."
How has your kind of understanding of that either expanded or changed or are you like me where this is something that you've come back to over the years?
Michelle Miller: Oh, yes. And I remember exactly what you're saying. I mean, and, And this is one of these things that I think probably many of us in this community also have experienced, maybe the first time or two and I think that came out of the, out of one of my first iterations of an online, fully online course that we realize, oh my gosh, there's basically, I guess you would, you'd call it learning analytics but our evidence of student activity realizing, oh, wow, it's no longer a basically uneducated, guess what the heck is going on in the back row or over there. Or has this person even been to class?
We know, or we can know. And so in really delving into some of [00:12:00] those numbers, as a social scientist too, I'm like, oh, it is. This is fantastic data. I love it. So that data's our love language in social sciences. So we look at that and it was surprising.
And now that I think back at it too it, it also ties into something we might circle back to later. We'll see this issue of student motivation and engagement and decoupling that from points and grades. Boy, is that a big conversation too. So maybe there was a little glimmer of that, of me saying, oh, wait a minute, there's not like a one-to-one correspondence between the percentage in the syllabus allocated to your final grade and your actual level of engagement? Who knew? So those are some things, when I think back to that's what I would look at it now and say, yeah. And we realized again in this very very beginning, nascent ability to look at what students do it on online courses
to say, what do students even do when they come in? We, I [00:13:00] was realizing that, entirely outside of any design of mine, in that particular course, the discussion post with the discussion board students, they were coming in and checking on them. And that's what they would do first to ease in.
And I then I could look at that from my perspective and say, oh, wait a minute. If that were me, then I, yeah, I might do that too. Instead of like, "I'm gonna go and do the test for today in the first five seconds I'm logged on." I might poke around in discussions and see what folks have put down.
Mm-hmm. So, So that is true. But I do think that today especially of our students who've been through a few of these online courses there's definitely not a novelty factor in online discussion anymore. That, that has been long gone. And I think that there is a little bit of fatigue from them and from us with the post one, reply to two.
So I definitely think ways of shaking up discussions, ways of backing up and saying, okay, what is the purpose of this? Which no doubt in one of those early courses, I [00:14:00] probably, I was like, oh, okay, here's a tool. I'll do that cuz I'm, that's what you do, right?
I'll just focus on coming up with some neat creative choices of these as it talks about. And I did expand those and I'm, I think that they were more a, they were more of a social or humanizing purpose than a, we are going to have a debate. We are going to discuss a concept. So that's always been a little different in how I've used them, and I definitely deal with them in some different ways now.
Now, when I'm teaching a faculty professional development workshop online for example I teach, I, I help facilitate some that are very short. They're like a week. And those very now traditional ways of looking at discussions are not bad. Just to say, okay, here's what I want you to discuss.
Present this right, and then read over at least two other people's posts and say something and reply. So it's not like that has no function whatsoever. But there are lots of different ways, and this is where the creativity is starting to blossom. And where our [00:15:00] students, when they click in, maybe they stop and realize, oh, wait a minute, the, this is gonna be something a little bit different.
John Nash: It's a challenge to assess these discussion posts sometime I think instructors feel challenged to figure out how to assess them. I had that experience myself, and it was a field of dreams. We built it and nobody came. And and nothing really interesting happened. So I think that's was, it's useful to be able to think about that.
And then when you have such a situation where participation starts to tell you more about overall learning, that's a good feeling.
Michelle Miller: Oh yes. I completely, yeah. So it's like it can give us this wonderful window, but it's true. If we're sitting there with rubrics and word counts and what I've been putting out there recently is you can accidentally, you can create some pretty perverse incentives for students to type a lot of words and not have a lot of concepts.
So I think again, there's a place for that depending on. There probably are some courses where [00:16:00] okay, I want a very put together factual thing that responds in some particular way. When I use them and really this goes back a ways, I have tended to use them in I guess context that are more, there's hardly any right or wrong answers and good faith answers are full credit to me.
And I, in case your podcast listeners are falling off their chairs here and saying, how can that be? I am teaching psychology, right? And especially in something like an introduction to psychology course or a cognitive psychology course, which tends to be a little bit unapproachable for some students.
I frequently, what I'm doing, whether it's a face-to-face or an online class, is saying, okay, you just learned about this hypothetical theoretical concept. Let's talk about how you've seen this play out in your life or with students. Students love to talk about their favorite media so including podcasts.
So I'll say, Hey, have you seen an is there an example from a podcast you listen to, or a show you [00:17:00] watch and you're really passionate about, or a movie series that you're a big fan of? So that is, yeah, as long as they're getting in there and saying, oh yeah, this completely happened in this show.
Or oh, I was talking to my niece the other day and babysitting and this totally happened. Those kinds of moments I don't, yeah, I don't really sweat a whole lot of the assessment. Now. It means you that, that's why I talked a lot about choice there too, because I. In psychology courses. Yeah, you are talking about some of course sensitive issues, and so you wanna give people a little bit of opportunity to say, yeah, I'm gonna steer clear of that, that's a sore subject with me, I'm gonna steer clear of that.
But there's ways to do that or recently too, my graduate seminar, here's how we use them. And they work brilliantly for this. We will sometimes have guest speakers in my teaching practicum course, and one of the pre-assignment for this is something that I want my students to get in the habit of as professionals, which is go [00:18:00] Google this person and find some interesting thing.
You know, coming to speak with us. Oh, wow. Tell us about them. And so in the discussion you post some facts now. The twist is you can't post a fact that somebody else has already posted. So if they're writing about me and say, oh, she wrote a book called Mines Online, you can't have 20 people say that.
So you have to read all what's come, and then if you're late to the game, you're gonna have to dig up some more obscure stuff about me. So there's lots of other ways besides that traditional one, which I think you're alluding to, or you're sitting with the rubric and going, I don't even know.
John Nash: Yeah. I, and at the risk of listeners saying all they have is a humanizing online education hammer. And so everything the guest says is a nail. You're, it does sound like the, what you've built is discussions, or you're recommending that discussions center not on the arcane or a application of the facts but rather a dialogue on how it applies to the learner's lives, and thereby [00:19:00] creating community and creating and humanizing the process and then getting to outcomes nonetheless.
Is that fair?
Michelle Miller: Yeah. Yes. I think I, I think so. And that is, that is an important connection I think in our idealistic world. We are getting to know each other in discussion forums, perhaps in echoes of almost the early internet. And what kind of preceded social media with folks would say I've been just in this discussion or posting, and there's individuals who I've never met in person and never will, but I feel really close to them.
And when I, at the end of the day I'll probably rush off to my computer and say, oh, I can't wait to see what happened with thing that they were going through. Or again, see so-and-so with their great sense of humor, say what they posted or have this passionate debate. That's what we want.
Getting there as a challenge. But that's the ideal.
Jason Johnston: Yeah, and I've had these conversations with faculty members or administrators [00:20:00] frustrated because students often are frustrated with the text based and especially as you said, post once, respond twice kind of thing. And I think they're new tools out there that we've been talking about that maybe help a little bit in this way, but I often throw it back and say what are you trying to do?
And if you are truly trying to create a conversation, I know I don't like to be graded on my conversations with somebody. You know, if I was having a, sitting down having a coffee with somebody Yeah. And I felt you know, there's somebody with a grade book out saying that was a, that wasn't a great sentence, you know, kind of thing.
I don't think I would feel very free about the conversation. I don't think it would just roll forward feeling like everything is gonna be put to the test. Of this kind of particular litmus test that it has to be this particular way. Now at the same time, I think there are, there's a place for essentially doing assignments that are open for everybody to see.
And that's what some discussion posts are more so, less about humanizing, more [00:21:00] about creating an assignment that other peers can respond to and perhaps give some challenge back to and so on. But you just have to partly just figure out what are you trying to achieve here? And I think our online courses need to remember that just because it's a discussion post format doesn't mean it is crafted in a way to really help discussion happen.
Michelle Miller: Yeah, that's just so well put. And what an amazing analogy of, yeah, so we're sitting in that proverbial coffee shop, having some incredible, trying to have a good, deep discussion. And I'm the teacher, I have this understanding, and you're the student, and here's a person who's got the checklist running down.
I'm like I think you needed a semicolon there. That, that is terrible. But I think what we're converging on here too is, of course, creativity, but I come back a lot to something very similar to the concept of affordances. Instead of discussion [00:22:00] does this, and here's the way to do it.
Or you have to have it or not have it. What does discussion elicit as an interaction? What does it support? What does it support easily? What does it not support so easily? And yeah, you're right that the technology itself doesn't dictate post ones reply to two. But for anything you want to be an open assignment for other students to see, to unfold in an incremental fashion, to be text-based and to be asynchronous so that you can think about, it can be almost like a text conversation, but usually it's a type of interaction where we sit and we compose our thoughts.
So yeah. That's how I think about that.
Jason Johnston: Before we Run outta time here. I did want to talk a little bit about your other book, your more most recent book that we've been that John referenced earlier, and just to focus in on that a little bit more. A couple of quotes out of that I thought were interesting just on the front end, this gives a bit of a summary of the book, [00:23:00] which you stated as the questions at the core of this book, remembering and forgetting.
"Does technology enhance memory and by extension all of our other cognitive capabilities that depend on memory or does technology erode memory, making us dependent and getting in the way of creating new memories." And then you do an excellent job walking through this in various ways.
I think you take such a, I feel like such a moderate, cool headed approach to technology, which I appreciate. You are neither a pie in the sky kind of person, like it's the best, it's gonna save us from everything, nor are you the doomsayer, walking around with your, sandwich board, telling people that this is gonna be the end of us all.
Somewhere in the middle of those two I think we wanna be in terms of our conversations and it feels like you are in terms of your books. But I am curious about this [00:24:00] because oh, and there's this other quote that you're actually quoting Steve Pinker, which said. "New forms of media have always caused moral panics. The printing press, newspapers, paperbacks, and television were all once announced as threats to their consumer's brain power and moral fiber."
brings us to, having this conversation, at least at my university, saying, what in the world are we gonna do with ai? Is this the end of us all? Can we leverage this? Various conversations in between? I just curious what you think in your book as far as I could tell
you, you had one mention of ai, which is on the very first page. What would you, if you were to write another chapter outta this book? It's an excellent book, but. Given where we are today in 2023. Thinking about ai, would you still take a moderate kind of approach to it? Do you, would you see AI as an amplifier to our abilities [00:25:00] in education, or is it weighing into the threats a little bit
Michelle Miller: more?
Right.
Okay. And I, that's, thank you so much.
Just a little question for you.
No, yeah. Thanks so much for the characterization. I do love it. Sandwich board. I do walk down the middle of the line and as far as anywhere where I feel like, oh, I would go back and revise that, or where I really significantly kinda changed some of my views over the years, if not a change.
A strengthening of the position that, that social media is really different. So I would change, social media was the previous " oh my gosh, this is blowing up." And there too, based on the, on the research it, it's, it's a whole different kettle of fish in a way and operates on some of its own principles and has some of its own impacts in not all super positive ones.
But getting back to this AI thing, yeah, you could tell that I do take a somewhat of a long view of these things and we do, we look back at, I'm of the [00:26:00] Sesame Street generation and Sesame Street was definitely, was gonna scramble our brain and do all these bad things to us. And so I kinda, I look at anything I hear now and go yeah, that was, that was supposed to be true of television, which was also quite habit forming and had a lot of negatives and downsides that.
Were never anticipated. It is funny that we are at this point too, with chat, G P t I almost, harken back again to my seventies childhood, I think about how when computers themselves started to become part of the everyday landscape for people. And there were, we look at, we look back at it now and it's so laughable, but there were TV shows and books for kids and so on just saying what are these things?
Can they, do they, are they thinking? Do they have personalities? How are they different than robots? And I think when you're generating all of those narratives in your popular culture, you're definitely wrestling with what does it all mean? And it's also tempting to me to be a little blase about it too, as a cognitive scientist, [00:27:00] because, granted not at all in the form you see today, but when I was in grad school, we were looking at neural networks to do things. And we said, yeah this will be really practical eventually for doing more complex, more human-like solving a problems and things like that. But we were looking at how net neural networks work to just to address some of these things. So I, I say it, but we did clearly hit a tipping point.
I almost would liken it to things like email or social media, those kind of perked along at this really low level for a long time until they hit a certain point of power and usability to where we all said, oh my gosh, we have to change. We have to change everything. So we're looking at it right now and I do hope to be kinda revisiting a lot of these core questions in for minds online.
I wanna have that sort of perspective and consciousness that it's new, but it's also not in, in some ways. Mm-hmm. [00:28:00] Uh, Let's not completely run away with, "it'll be able to do everything human beings do." I think 30 minutes worth of interaction with it in reality disabuses most of us at that notion.
But I, I think too it gives us even more reason to start to build more flexibility into our courses. I think I've been writing a lot about that. If we do see it through that lens of it's a cheating tool. It's something that students can just run to when they're trying to grapple with something and develop their own skills.
We might ask and we might say, you know, what really increases the likelihood that will happen is rigid deadlines and a lack of a student-centered purpose in a course where it's about you need to do this for me. Yes. Instead of why are, what do you wanna get out of this course? And whatever you're here to get out of this course so that you can go on and succeed in the future might not be compatible with you relying on a chat G P T or something.
Something like that. As in a lot of [00:29:00] things, I'm like, okay. Take a breath, everybody. Let's take a breath. But let's also really acknowledge that yes, we finally are to the point where relatively natural human-like communication in visual and text forms is becoming more accessible.
John Nash: I wonder if I could ask you a little bit about something that my colleagues in the P 12 space have been worried about for a while, who are interested in school technology leadership, thinking about ways in which we can think, you know, and measured sober ways about the ways in which technology can be integrated into the curriculum and even in post-secondary but certainly this matter of whether phones should be in classrooms, these handheld computers that are actually quite powerful, but could be used in an interesting way.
And you talk a little bit in the first couple of chapters in actually in what chapter one, what technology does to us and for us and how this the notion of the brain getting rewired [00:30:00] gets so much traction and particularly amongst naysayers of use of phones in classrooms and the media that's in put in front of children.
Could you talk a little bit about the brain rewiring notion and why it gets so much traction and maybe what are some better ways to look at technology and the mind, especially as my P 12 sisters and brothers start to talk to parents and other pundits about this space?
Michelle Miller: Right. Boy, that's, that is a big one.
And I, and that's really great that you zeroed in on that. I swear something just pings in my own brain, every time I run across that trope of it's doing something to you. And there's also kinda, I think, a related spinoff of tropes that the look at digital interactions as a sort of a pollutant or contaminant or, you're consuming something and you don't realize what it's doing to you.
And it's an, it is an important question. But yes, of course cognitive psychologists, brain scientists, we say, "yeah, everything is rewiring your brains." Two in particular that I've written about as counter examples are reading. [00:31:00] That really, I've seen the brain scans of people who are reading, there are brain areas that are hitched up to other brain areas that never, never would've, I mean, you're just creating these new super highways between areas that formally were more, more roundabout as far as the connections.
And you can't undo it. Very easily. At least once you've learned to read you can't not read. It is a big thing learning to drive a car. How many, yeah, how many hours do we spend on that? Yeah. Right. And that, so it is, I do really think we ought to get out the word that cannot, just because something might impact your brain doesn't mean that it's nefarious.
You know, I talk about that one study too that went around years back showing oh, and people back when they could study people who were net naive who didn't use computers. And we teach 'em how to use a search engine and scan their brains and their brains are different. It's okay alright, yeah.
Teach them to jump rope and their brains are gonna be different. [00:32:00] What is special here? So there is that. Better ways to think about it. I do think or that it was social media and with applications and uses that are engineered to take you off of whatever you were doing and go keep doing them.
It's important for adults in this society to learn how to spot that and cope with it. And when I'm talking to college students, I'm a very big advocate of, "okay, you know, own your technology, not the other way around. And what is your strategy going to be to make sure, especially if you are a person like me who loves their tech, how are you gonna make sure that you're not going to miss out on things in your college education?"
And college students are perfectly capable and often tell me about strategies they have. For example, going on a vacation together, going on the big senior trip and agreeing not to be on their phones or posting selfies. So that conscious [00:33:00] determination I think is important. Now, when we get into younger kids now, I always, and I always say too, my, my specialty and my expertise is with adults.
So I, I wanna be sure not to overstep my actual expertise. But I don't think that, and I'm not gonna list an age or anything like that, but I think we all know that. Yes. When you have a lower level of maturity anywhere from being a preschooler to a younger teenager, do you have the ability to do that?
If I have difficulty putting my phone down because I notice some, I pick it up for one reason and I'm spirited away. If I have trouble with that, then somebody who's 10 is definitely gonna have trouble with that. So I do think that external management of, okay, we don't have our phones at school.
Right. Right. Or we turn our phones off when, or we collect the phones at night. That's another big issue is of course, sleep. And so on. That makes a huge amount of sense. So we need to develop those skills for management. But [00:34:00] at the earlier age, we, I think not leaving it to chance is important.
And really with my college students, we question a lot too of just wow. So as the assumption that I can't even park my electric car now without my phone or I, you know, it's for so long. We're like, okay, you kids put out down all your phones also. You need this to log into to school. You're gonna need it to park. I need it, you're gonna need it to order your food at lunch. All of these incursions, they may be good, bad, or neutral. But we can't just sit and accept them happening to us. We need to be drivers of that.
John Nash: So it sounds like it's really a matter of context with youth and perhaps those caregivers around them are thoughtful about when this is good to use and when it may not, because the, whether or not my brain is being rewired, which it is or is not that's a different matter from whether it's impeding me from getting to sleep or other practical matters, I think is what I hear you saying.
Yeah. And
Michelle Miller: yeah. Yeah. And with kids [00:35:00] especially too, and this was true of television Definitely. Yeah. And our children is the issue of replacement. And to degree as well with adults, not so much, oh, the phone is doing something to me, but what am I not doing because I'm on the phone?
Yeah.
And how can I find those intersections? I might share that. I, I follow a hobby, a very exciting hobby of knitting, which actually has a lot of connections to the technology and was really revived by being able to search out certain things online and do certain things we couldn't do before.
But I realized that I was relying on it to store my patterns, to store the, to count my stitches and do all these things. And I recently went through and consciously said, no, I'm gonna take all of this offline. I'm gonna make it so I don't have to have my phone open in order to work on my sweater. These are now gonna be two separate things.
And so that's a small thing. But that's an example of, again, that the very practical, just, you know, don't panic, but. Let's look at what the trade-offs are. And for younger children, those trade-offs get very [00:36:00] serious when we're talking about things like physical activity, real-time interaction with peers, and all that important stuff.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jason Johnston: Well, your, Your recent book has a good healthy dose of cognitive myth debunking, which I appreciate as well as I think some practical mindedness to it. So, um, Really appreciate that. When you were talking earlier about taking a breath around ai I, I thought of this idea that we could do, for people that are listening, we could have a mindful moment when it comes to technology.
And I feel like that's what your writing's about a little bit. Taking a mindful moment, and we could say something like even right now, we could take a moment and say, breathe in your concerns about AI taking over our educational institutions. Now, let them all go. Or you could breathe in, concern that technology is rewiring the minds of our youth now.
Let that go. [00:37:00] Yes. So it's a, it is some, you know, if you ever wanna use any of that in any of your workshops now that's it's you're free to move forward and those listening right now, you could just re-listen to that part over and over again. Hold pause as long as you need to breathe these things in and then let them go.
Yeah. Oh,
Michelle Miller: I think you really captured the spirit of it. Thanks. I feel better already.
Jason Johnston: Okay. Good. Good. So do I. This has been a really wonderful conversation. It has and Michelle really appreciate you taking the time. How can people connect with you? After this podcast, after listening, what should they be reading?
Michelle Miller: Nice that you mentioned reading. One of my projects this year, which kicked off in January is what as we often do is I started a Substack and I, it's part of the drama. I, I quit Twitter a year ago. I kind of, mm-hmm. saw which way the wind was blowing and decided this wasn't serving my purposes anymore.
So it made one of those mindful [00:38:00] choices. Mm-hmm. And uh, at the same time got interested in, in Substack along with a lot of other academics and fascinating folks who write in the space. Now, I don't I don't always use it uh, the identical way they do. But yes, if they find my ck that I usually, every few weeks I send some things out and usually the focus is on research that's like they say roughly about a year old or less. I really do write about what I'm reading, and it's been a really good way to focus me, Frankly to, to say what is important out there? And that is, I'm getting back to my roots of what I think the value is that I provide to my fellow academics sometimes, which is okay, there's so much the research that comes out providing these sort of capsule summaries and talking a little bit more about what's the implications for our practice.
So that's, you can find on Substack and I also um, I, I do, I guess, lack of a better word blog post from time to time. I've I blog in frequently, especially when I have a book [00:39:00] out, but sometimes the spirit moves me, so I'll sometimes be writing more of a really an opinion piece. And so there was one recently on motivation and cognition, which is a perpetual favorite of mine to really wrestle with uh, well, uh, thing why I did leave Twitter for those who are super curious. So that's a big way you can find me.
I have a website. I, there's not a whole lot of action there, but it is the one-stop shop where you can see things like speaking topics. I love to speak about the role of memory in learning, for example and the role of motivation, all that stuff. And catch any blog posts that I might put up in that way. So it's Michelle Miller phd.com and LinkedIn because I'm using Twitter for professional or was using Twitter just for professional communications, I thought, you know what, let me just move all this over so you can also find me on link.
LinkedIn and follow me for things that I love to repost, that I see articles that are out there and yet another way to discover when I do write something like a, [00:40:00] or an article that comes out and some mainstream publication.
Jason Johnston: Yeah. And we've really been enjoying LinkedIn as a professional community of late.
So that's been a good space for us, which is actually the, one of the places that we connected, I guess more personally is with our current podcast and connecting with that, so. Well that's great. And we'll put your website, your sub. Link your books in our show notes, so those listening, please check out our show notes and check all those as well as check out anytime online learning podcast.com has all of our episodes and all of our notes there, as well as the link to our LinkedIn community.
So I'd love to hear from you and see what you think about all the things that we've talked about today. Right, John?
John Nash: Michelle I'm, I'm very concerned uh, for you and your knitting because of all the bevy of research that's out there about how it's rewiring your brain negatively.
Michelle Miller: Oh, definitely. Right. You think I've spent a lot of time on social media.
I [00:41:00] spent a lot of time making sweaters,
Jason Johnston: and we were obsessed. I heard about some kids who uh, all, all they, when they looked at other people, although they could see were two knitting needles.
Michelle Miller: Is that a raglin? Yeah. How's the neck as the neckband attached? Yeah. So yeah, that was a little off the cuff, but definitely an illustration.
Jason Johnston: It's so great to talk to you. Thank you so much for taking Thank you. All in touch. Yeah, thank you so much.
John Nash: Yeah, absolutely. Really looking forward to continuing the conversation online as we think about these things we've talked about today with you, michelle, thank you so much.
Michelle Miller: My pleasure. Looking forward to connecting and continuing the conversation as well. Yep.
Jason Johnston: Thank you.