In this episode, John and Jason talk about current reading, recent seminars, and their upcoming OLC Accelerate Conference (2023) presentation in Washington, DC

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• John’s Book Recommendations:
  • The Renée Ballard series by Michael Connely
  
  
  • Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell
  
  
  • The Whistler and The Judges List by John Grisham 
  
  
  • How to Make Sense of Any Mess, by Abby Covert
  
  
  
  


• Jason’s Book Recommendation:
  • Everything is Figureaboutable, by Marie Forleo
  
  
  
  


• John & Jason’s Slides from the University of Tennessee’s 1st AI Symposium “Reimagining online assignments with and because of AI”


• John’s Slides from Sweden where he talked about the promise of AI and whether it can democratize innovation or dilute quality. 


• OLC Session 1: EXPLORING THE IMPACT OF AI ON STUDENT CONNECTION AND BELONGING IN EDUCATION (Thursday, October 26, 2023 - 9:30 AM to 10:15 AM)


• OLC Session 2: ONLINE LEARNING IN THE SECOND HALF: TURNING DANGERS INTO OPPORTUNITIES (Thursday, October 26, 2023 - 1:15 PM to 2:00 PM)


• Contact John or Jason through LinkedIn if you are an educational podcaster and would like to join them in a recording session!

 We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions!

[00:00:00 ] John Nash: Do you smile when you talk? Did you know when you smile while you talk, it actually makes you sound like you're like. 


funny. It  


works. 


[00:00:06 ] Jason Johnston: that's what they, that's what they told us to do in telemarketing. 


[00:00:09 ] John Nash: That's right. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. 


[00:00:14 ] Jason Johnston: Now I'm laughing. I can't. Okay, I'll 


try it again.  


Intro 


[00:00:19 ] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great and a lot of it is, but a lot of it still isn't. How are we going to get to the next stage, Jason? 


[00:00:42 ] Jason Johnston: That's a great question. And I've got an idea. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? 


[00:00:48 ] John Nash: I love that idea. Let's do it right now. 


[00:00:50 ] Jason Johnston: good. Today, I wondered if we could talk just a little bit about the road behind, the road ahead, what we've been doing lately what we will be doing next, we've got some exciting events that we're doing together in the next little bit. 


[00:01:03 ] John Nash: We do.  


We do.  


[00:01:04 ] Jason Johnston: First I was wondering about have you been reading anything these days, John? 


[00:01:09 ] John Nash: I've been reading my usual kinds of journal articles and other things , but 2023 has been a little different for me in terms of the topic of reading because the funniest thing happened to me in January of this year. I started reading electively non academic. books, novels. And I don't know how it happened, but I just did. I was I was on a work trip to Honolulu and I found, I discovered that you can check out books from your public library and put them on your Kindle. 


I didn't know about Libby, the app Libby. 


[00:01:45 ] Jason Johnston: Libby's amazing. 


[00:01:47 ] John Nash: Yeah, it's amazing. I'm running around my friend's house in Honolulu going, Hey, do you know you can do this? As if, just split the atom or something. And yeah. And so I've been reading I read a bunch of Michael Connolly novels. About a female detective in Los Angeles contemporary of Bosch's, and I liked those a lot, and now I'm on like book 12 of the novels about Kay Scarpetta, the fictional and famous Virginia chief medical examiner it's a longstanding series written by Patricia Cornwell.  


[00:02:20 ] Jason Johnston: Is this like a secret desire to be a detective and solve crimes for a 


[00:02:24 ] John Nash: Yeah, I don't know, but I do, I'm drawn to these novels because I don't know, I guess I like the technical aspects of these novels with Kay Scarpetta as the protagonist, because they do get pretty technical about some medical issues related to examining the dead and help having the dead speak. 


Actually, there's a UT Knoxville tie in, they talk about the body farm a lot in these novels. Yeah. And for those who may not know the body farm is the outdoor laboratory outside University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where bodies decompose and they study them. 


[00:02:57 ] Jason Johnston: And as part of that body farm as I understand they're actually buried under the field at Neyland Stadium. So if you watch a UT Vols football game the bodies are buried underneath that field. , last. Fall, my son and I were at a game just right around Halloween. 


And the band at the halftime did thriller, and then they spelled out body farm. So it's all part of the lore there. That's great. 


[00:03:22 ] John Nash: Yeah. Yeah. 


[00:03:23 ] Jason Johnston: You know what book I just started that was on your recommendation, is Everything is Figureoutable. 


[00:03:31 ] John Nash: No, I don't remember recommending that to you. Yeah. That sounds like a great book. 


[00:03:36 ] Jason Johnston: Yeah maybe. 


[00:03:38 ] John Nash: I think you just recommended it to me. 


[00:03:41 ] Jason Johnston: Oh, that's funny. It's so funny because I've all throughout this book, like I'm only, three or four chapters in, but I've been thinking this is such a John Nash book. I can totally see why he enjoys this, from a design thinking standpoint and the person is witty and pretty terse and just to the point so easy read, really easy  


[00:04:00 ] John Nash: I'll check it out. 


[00:04:01 ] Jason Johnston: Oh, good. I'm glad I could 


[00:04:03 ] John Nash: hilarious. I might have recommended it to you. The older I get, the more I say stuff that I don't remember ever saying. 


[00:04:09 ] Jason Johnston: But you haven't read it, right? Is that  


[00:04:11 ] John Nash: No, I don't think I've ever read that book. 


[00:04:14 ] Jason Johnston: That's funny. That's a great phrase, isn't it? Everything is figured out. 


[00:04:18 ] John Nash: Yeah. Yeah. I know. I'm just looking at, I just brought onto my desk here, How to Make Sense of Any Mess, which is the one that I'm, I do recommend by Abby Covert. 


[00:04:26 ] Jason Johnston: Oh, I bet you that was it. I think that was the one you recommended, and somehow I ended up on this book. Probably some sort of loop off of 


[00:04:35 ] John Nash: It's got a similar cadence to the title. It's Oh, this must be the book you recommended. 


[00:04:39 ] Jason Johnston: Yeah. But this last weekend, it was a great story. I served for a number of years at a small boarding school in Eastern Kentucky, called Oakdale Christian Academy great school. where people from all the world and from all sorts of different contexts, often students that are. Not making it in their current context and they needed a, another opportunity for them and lots of great students, lots of great staff. 


So I was there for six years and this last weekend they were decommissioning a hundred year old chapel, just this kind of small chapel. It was like it was maybe 30, let's 30 by a hundred and something feet, right? There's this kind of one room. Chapel. They were decommissioning after about a hundred years. 


Anyways, somebody got up and told the story who he was born in 1935 and he was a teacher there in the 50s, okay? And this relates back to the book, but also the kinds of things we talk about. There was a teacher there in the 50s, and so one summer, after, school was over, he and another teacher, their job was to move the chapel. The president came to them and said, we got to get this chapel moved, it's too close to the road, they're expanding the road, and we got to move it down here to the creek about, maybe 500, 600 feet or something like that. And just figured it out. They'd never done this before. 


They had no engineering background, but this is just what you did in the 50s. It was like, okay, and so he told this story about using some old telephone poles. to put underneath the chapel and move inch by inch as they pulled it with the school bus down t