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The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.
This is the Transform Your Teaching Podcast. The Transform Your Teaching Podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.
Ryan:Hello, and welcome to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. In today's episode, Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles provide a book review of Intentional Tech, Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching, by Doctor. Derek Bruff.
Ryan:Thanks for joining us.
Jared:Doctor. Thank you, Ryan. All right, Rob, we're going to do a book review in this episode. The book we're reviewing today is Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching by Doctor. Derek Bruff.
Jared:Derek Bruff has his PhD in mathematics. His background is in math ed. He directed the Vanderbilt University Center of Teaching for more than a decade, and he is currently an associate director at the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia. He's also written another book called Teaching with Classroom Creating Active Learning Environments. Specifically, we're gonna
Rob:look at intentional tech with AI, with the things that are coming. I think this book was written 2019. '19. Oh, it's
Jared:in 2019.
Rob:So, you know, it's been actually, in terms of technology, it's been ancient. Yeah.
Jared:Yeah. It's true.
Rob:Mean, genuinely speaking.
Jared:Think about how much has changed since this book was published in 2019.
Rob:Yeah. One of the one of the pieces in here that that he accurately utilized was Prezi. Yep. In terms of intentional tech and organization, right?
Jared:Mhmm. What I like about the book is I don't necessarily think it revolves around specific tech tools. It's not like he's like, you know how some ed tech because, you know, ed tech is my wheelhouse. Let's be honest.
Rob:They're usually more technology centric.
Jared:It's more like, here's how to use Google Slides in your course. Right. Here's how to use Pear Deck or here's how to use Well, eventually that stuff becomes outdated. And so now you're stuck with Or they say, Use this extension or Use this tool. Well, they Google nerfed that three years ago or something like that by the time you read it.
Jared:Right? What Derek does, which is great, and we can ask him about this when he comes on, is that he focuses on more principles. They're not necessarily tied to a specific type of technology or a specific tool.
Rob:Well, and the principles themselves aren't necessarily tied to a particular philosophical perspective and education either.
Jared:Correct.
Rob:They they seem to me to be more pragmatic in my reading of the book. Like, were the principles that in his experience were popping up the most. Yep. Given the time. And so, you know, I think our readers, if they choose to read this book, need to keep that in mind is that it is a contextual book in the sense of it's a snapshot of the day, the principles of the day in education.
Jared:Should we go through and talk about each one of the principles?
Rob:Yeah. So the first principle is times for telling.
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:And essentially, you know, that really means giving students time to wrestle with difficult problems. So you present them a difficult problem. This sounds very similar to what we heard from self determination theory in terms of actuality of how you help students move into that as you give them a difficult problem to solve. Yep. Right?
Rob:And you don't give them the answer. You let them struggle. Right. And you wait for that time to tell them when they finally come to this situation where it doesn't make sense. And, you know, any answer could be the right answer.
Rob:And that gives you the opportunity to have a deeper conversation, lead them into deeper learning.
Jared:Right. Another principle is the practice and feedback idea. Practice plus feedback equals learning. And he talks about giving them, and we talk about this as well, low stakes opportunities to give students a chance to practice, to try a new concept, to fail and to improve. Give them opportunities to work out, like you said, the hard problem and fail at it and find ways to improve.
Jared:So this could be done, he mentions doing it through blogging, through group discussions, collaborative projects using technology. But yeah, practice and feedback.
Rob:The next one is the thin slices of learning, which can seem a little confusing, but what actually he means here, I believe, is that it's really practice and feedback for the instructor. So the instructor is putting some of these really small pieces out there to see and test where their students are, see how they're responding to the content or the assessments, and they're getting feedback for themselves to be able to make changes or, you know, answer questions or places where students are stuck. Just trying to figure out how are they processing the content, how are they processing the course.
Jared:Gives them a chance to adapt where they need to. I think it also, you could make this connect with Uncommon Sense Teaching as well, the little microlearning aspects and giving a chance for, again, the octopus to throw the balls to the back of the head to stick to long term memory, give them a chance to reflect, process, and everything else.
Rob:A thing I liked about that number three was the fact that, I mean, usually you talk about practice and feedback like in number two for students, right? Yes. You give them that opportunity, but to build into your own course or to think about that, giving yourself feedback to see, Is my design working properly? And you're not waiting to the end of the course to do that, but you're doing that, you know, in small thin slices throughout the entirety of the course.
Jared:So principle number four, he calls it knowledge organizations, visualizing information to help students connect ideas. I'm a huge fan of this idea of mind mapping. Yep. Big fan, I used it. I still have my I thought about this actually.
Jared:This is so ridiculous. I thought about printing out the mind map that I have for my dissertation and mounting it on my wall. I don't know why. Could be because I invested so much time into it.
Rob:Yeah. But not only that, it it is somewhat of a odd work of art. Yeah. I mean, when you look at it holistically, and I think that was what was cool about Prezi, you know, go back
Jared:I loved Prezi.
Rob:Prezi kinda had that feel too.
Jared:Yeah.
Rob:Whereas mind mapping tends to be a lot more structured in terms of the tools that you have to show connections and have nodes and those kinds of things. Prezi was much more fluid. So you could use whatever you wanted to. But what the cool part was, you could go, you know, micro. You could go down in and see things that you couldn't see when you were scaled out and looking at the entirety of of this, I don't even know what you wanna call it, canvas that you had that you're Yeah.
Rob:Working
Jared:But I love the idea of helping students create these knowledge organizations by having them use things like, Doctor. Bruff talks about Post it notes, doing mind maps, but then using things like Prezi, and even Google Earth was, I thought, an interesting idea.
Rob:Well, you even talked about using personal whiteboards. I mean, he, like, went old school.
Jared:Yeah. Big fan of that as well. His quote that is important for this is a quote that he uses, knowledge made visible is knowledge made memorable. So helping students make those connections visibly is a tremendous help.
Rob:So the next one that he underscores is multimodal assignments. And to kind of give our listeners perspective on what's meant here, it's an antithesis of some sort to whole learning styles, you know, theory. Yeah. Right? Like matching learning styles was the right thing to do.
Rob:Right.
Jared:If kinesthetic you're learner, you should only learn by moving around. Right. That kind of thing.
Rob:Maybe a kinesthetic learner needs a fidget spinner and then they can learn by listening.
Jared:Or Rubik's cube.
Rob:Yeah, that too. Basically, they've, you know, I think the research, even to this point in time in history has debunked the idea of learning styles. Yeah. Reality is we switch. We may prefer a particular style, but the reality is we switch between multiple styles just depending, and there's not always a rhyme or reason to it.
Jared:Yeah. It just be it depends on how we feel that day. It could be, I don't wanna listen. Let's visually learn.
Rob:So he talked about multimodal assignments. So instead of just thinking about just a handful of ones, it's more using different kinds of media, providing a multimodal experience.
Jared:Yeah, there's a K-twelve term for student voice and student choice. Giving them the opportunity to do a project that you have for them, but giving them different modalities to use. So infographics, storytelling, podcasts, vlogs, you know, whatever else you would different ways that they can still accomplish whatever you have in your rubric, but just in different modalities.
Rob:Well, what was interesting in his book, did cite a couple of studies, And one discussed the idea of using modalities that were unfamiliar to the student. And how the content being unfamiliar and the modality kind of did some interleaving. You know, we've talked about that in the past. Is that combination of the students not knowing both seemed to amplify the learning opportunities for the students?
Jared:Yeah. Principal six is learning communities. This is a great way of doing this. This is, again, 2019, Bruff talks about Twitter, but I guess it's now called X or whatever. But for a while there, using hashtags on Twitter was a way of building a personal learning network for educators.
Jared:There were lots of talks that they did with a specific hashtag. But he's talking about using the hashtags as a class or using some sort of collaborative annotation tool.
Rob:Like live reading. So they do a reading and then they tweet out either a summary of something they were reading that they thought was cool or a quote of some sort.
Jared:Yeah, so it's a way of just helping them learn from each other because it helps enrich that learning process for them.
Rob:I think one of the challenges with that, and that kind of goes into our last one, which is authentic audiences. Before I jump there, though, is this idea of doing things externally, you know, now in 2025, user data and what we do with student data is extremely important. And as teachers and designers, we have to be very careful about putting things out in the public. Mhmm. You know, the k through 12 sector has this problem, obviously, bullying.
Rob:So there's a lot of protection over them. This has continued to be a space where higher ed has had challenges as well, given college credit plus or dual enrollment courses, and you've got underage students in your classroom with college students. Right? So you got adults and minors in the same. So you just have to be careful with that design.
Rob:Authentic audiences really lends itself to giving students something to do that benefits a real audience.
Jared:Yeah. Serving the community around them.
Rob:Or, you know, I know one example that he gave was having two different classes in two different universities. One that was doing critiques on films and then one that was actually doing creative work on creating films. They combined their project so that those who were doing work on building critiques and learning how to critique art and critique films were helping out those who were learning how to actually make films and documentary films of some sort. Mhmm. I thought, well, that's definitely an interesting way to benefit each other.
Rob:It's authentic. I get it. I get where he's coming from. I think nowadays, it seems to me that a lot of this is probably done, at least here at Cedarville, we tend to like to do internships Yep. Quite a bit.
Rob:Mhmm. And internships can be utilized in all sorts of different ways with different types of technology. You know, obviously, Teams was not a big one or Slack, FaceTime. People weren't using that back in 2019. So it doesn't really show up per se in here.
Rob:Mhmm. But the principle, I think, is still sound.
Jared:Yeah. Think the idea authentic audiences was something that I used a lot when I taught freshman in high school. I was inspired by a good friend of mine, Ben Songaroth, who now does ed tech in Illinois. He presented at a session that I went to back, I guess it was around this time, seventeen-twenty eighteen, where he had students, he was a history teacher and he would have students create YouTube videos based on a concept. And some students would do mind mapping or they would actually put themselves in front of the camera or they would do sketch and speed it up or whatever and present the content.
Jared:And he said, okay, just so you know, these YouTube videos are going to be public. So we're gonna put them on the, school's account so it's not tied to you directly, but these videos are gonna be made public. So that gives them, these students, a sense of authentic audience, but also a sense of responsibility and a bit of a understanding that what they do matters and it's going to be presented to others. And he said that some of the videos would just completely take off and they get comments and views and everything else. It was a way of showing the students that their audience matters, but also what they can do can make a positive impact on whoever's viewing it or whatever.
Jared:So let me ask you a question.
Rob:Sure. You've read this book, you did a review I did. For Boise as
Jared:Me and part of your two of my friends.
Rob:As part of your coursework. Yeah. What was your favorite one?
Jared:Of the principles? Mhmm. Oh, that's a good question. I think if I were to pick one, it would be the knowledge organizations because it I immediately thought of my own teaching practice. I looked for the one that was the most applicable to what it is that I was teaching, and I think that one fit best.
Jared:And I thought that was a great way of summarizing the idea of getting your thoughts out in some sort of visual way, regardless of just inside your head. So I think it was number four, the knowledge organizations one. Why do you ask? I'm curious.
Rob:I think our listeners would like to know. The one that was probably the most important to me was the practice and feedback. I think that's because as a learner, I've always appreciated those opportunities. The more time that you have on a particular skill or idea, And especially if they're low stakes, I get to try.
Jared:Yeah. Such an important part of the education process.
Rob:Well, is, and I think, unfortunately, many of our courses tend to be summative and very punitive in nature. And I get that. There are certain jobs where I don't want someone who can't process quickly, namely a surgeon who's working on my brain. Uh-huh. Right?
Rob:They need to know what they need to know immediately, not
Jared:They need to be able to adapt.
Rob:You're not gonna have somebody that got a C, of course, say, Don't worry, anybody who got a C in A and P would probably not be. Yeah. They don't go on they don't let them go on. Yeah. But you understand what I'm saying.
Rob:I do. You want to know that there's a certain level of competence, and I get that. But before you get to that, it would be nice, it would be nice if our courses had more practice and feedback. Yeah. So that's why I liked it.
Jared:Yeah, I agree. I think this book is great for anyone, any instructor who's kind of skeptical of using tech. I think it has some meaningful strategies to get started in that process, some very easy entry points. I think it's also, again, if you're not into flashy tech, you're not into the new stuff, I think it shows some simple, intentional tweaks that can transform your learning.
Rob:It's also a really easy read. It is. Mean, it's not very heavy. And the language is easy to understand. They don't use a lot of jargon.
Rob:And they use I mean, the author, Doctor. Bruff, uses quite a few examples from colleagues at Vanderbilt and other schools where he's actually seen it. They've seen it work. And so he's just providing these as, hey, to think about.
Jared:I'm really excited about having him on to talk about what he thinks since writing this how he thinks How
Rob:things have changed.
Jared:And how is it applied, how it applies with generative AI and everything else that's going on. Real excited. I would recommend this book. It sounds like you would recommend it as well. Yeah.
Jared:It's a simple read, very quick, very informative. Again, the book is Intentional Tech Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching by Doctor. Derek Ruff.
Ryan:Thanks for joining this episode of Transform Your Teaching. If you have any comments or questions on our review of Intentional Tech, feel free to send us an email at ctlpodcastcederville dot edu, or you can connect with us on LinkedIn and send us a message that way. Finally, don't forget to check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog. Thanks for listening!