Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to Kendall speaks.
I'm Dr. Brian Stewart Kendall, campus president.
And today we're blessed to have two wonderful guests. First, our chair of the English department, Dr. Craig Titus.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Welcome.
[00:00:20] Speaker C: Good morning. Thank you, sir.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: And one of our veterans here, our speech lab manager, Paul Klein. Glad to have you here today.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: Let's first by talking about each of your backgrounds, Dr. Titus, we'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about your journey to Miami Dade College, if you would.
[00:00:34] Speaker C: Oh, it has been quite a journey. That may be the exact right word to use. This might surprise you, actually. I don't think you know this.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: I don't think I do.
[00:00:41] Speaker C: I have come here via a circuitous journey. I went to college in New Jersey, outside of Philadelphia. I majored in English and philosophy. And then I decided that I did not want to go into teaching.
It just wasn't for me. It wasn't a good fit. I wasn't a teacher. My personality, it was all wrong. So I wanted to go out and make good money. So I got a job on Wall street, which is not too far from where I was at the time. And the whole thing, the suit and tie, my little briefcase, and buying and selling and screaming on the phone, it's going down, it's going up, all that, it was very exciting. And I got everything that I wanted out of that. Everything I had set out to pursue, I got. But I found myself in the men's room of my downtown office reading novels at lunch, reading books of philosophy.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:01:38] Speaker C: I got a little dog, and I named him Zarathustra after a character in one of Nietzsche's most popular books. And I realized I was doing the wrong thing with my life of my time. So I left. I gave it all up. I walked away from what from the outside seemed like a really good life, but from the inside was a really good life, but wasn't enough. So I went off to graduate school. I did a master's degree in English. I wrote a thesis in the philosophy of early wordsworthy and poetry, funded by Stephen King.
Went to the same department I went to and lived down the street and had made a big donation to the department, which was, did you ever meet him?
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Did you get to meet him?
[00:02:20] Speaker C: And never met him.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: I figured he was off in Hollywood.
[00:02:23] Speaker C: I think so. And he's got a bunch of other places, too. But, yeah, off doing big fancy, all three things. So that was a great experience. I went on to a PhD at Purdue in Indiana. So now we've gone from New Jersey to Maine to Indiana we spent five years there, did a PhD in English. I wrote a dissertation on problems of human rights. And if we read things correctly and we read the history and the philosophy of it, we could see that human rights were, in my argument, the most powerful and best idea ever thought, and that we ought to respect them as the basis of all governments around the world. And if not, then we ought not to take those governments seriously.
From there on to a faculty job at a small university in Missouri.
[00:03:08] Speaker A: So you did go back to teaching?
[00:03:10] Speaker C: I did.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Okay, I did.
[00:03:12] Speaker C: I learned in graduate school that I loved it.
And my personality, despite what I thought, actually was a good fit for the classroom. So off I went. Faculty job in Missouri. From there I had a limited term contract, so I set out in pursuit of adventure. And I joined the faculty at the University of Alaska.
And we went up there and had a really interesting time. The bears and the moose and the students. And we got to do some really good work. We developed ways of sending out education, high quality education, out into the remote villages that you can only get to by bush plane. They used to actually make little boxes, you know, like the plastic milk crates. They used to put all the materials in there, hard copies, and kick it out of these bush planes with a parachute, go back six months later and pick it up.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:04:02] Speaker C: And from there, my father got sick and he and my mother had retired to Fort Lauderdale some years before, and he got sick. And my sister couldn't pick up and move, but I could. So I did. And that brought me to Key Largo, where I live now, and joined the faculty down there at the College of the Florida Keys, ultimately chaired the department and ended up here.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: What a great journey. From Alaska, from one side of the country to the other, to now south Florida.
[00:04:34] Speaker C: It's 5,000 miles.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Holy cow. I don't think I've ever had someone with that kind of journey.
[00:04:39] Speaker C: There's a whole country in between. Somehow you stay in the one country, but there's a whole country in between.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:44] Speaker C: So figure that out.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Well, that's amazing. Well, Paul, I don't know if you can top that, but I feel like we've had this conversation before because you've been in so many of these podcasts, but tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got here.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: I should have gone first, I think.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Yeah, my bad, my bad.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: It's like I was in Miami college.
[00:05:01] Speaker C: So just say, me too, me too. Yeah, same.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: Ditto. No, kind of like this is gonna be so pretentious. Yasujiro Ozu he was a famous Japanese filmmaker, and he had a movie called Floating Reeds. I am that floating reed. I just kind of.
Just kind of go where the water takes me.
[00:05:18] Speaker C: I love that.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: And I think from that pretentious description, I think, you know, when I went to college, what I majored in was film production. I went to University of Miami. I mean, we can go all the way back. My family moved at 10 months old to Germany, so I kind of had that experience of living in Germany for 10 years.
And we moved here, went to high school here, got into University of Miami, did my graduate there also, and I got a master's in arts tailored towards film theory.
Having a degree in film theory is like having a pink belt in karate.
Doesn't really do much for anybody. No, no.
So I ended up here. And especially from all the podcasts, I've heard many people have this journey here where you just kind of bounce around. Miami Dade College. We get here, we love it.
There's so many opportunities. And so we bounced around. I was a tutor in the college prep department, then I was a tutor for speech, and then I ended up taking over to speech lab. And we'll go more into what happened with the speech lab a little bit later, but here we are.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: That's great. And you have your own podcast, too.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: Talk a little bit about that.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: We have several podcasts. Our producer for the podcast is here. He's my co host. It's called Watch this. It's a movie review slash discussion podcast.
And it's a lot of fun. We're looking forward to doing more episodes and. Yeah. And then I also have another podcast which has a terrible name called Back to Blade Runner.
We will.
[00:06:45] Speaker C: What's terrible about that?
[00:06:47] Speaker B: It's so random.
[00:06:49] Speaker C: I think it's so Paul.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: I know, I know. I mean, we're thinking of changing it to Respective Perspective because it's the. The hook on that one is that it's an older guy and a younger woman in our different perspectives. So you have sort of the millennial perspective. You have a Gen X persp. So that might be a little bit more descriptive of what we're doing.
[00:07:07] Speaker C: That's more descriptive, but harder to say.
[00:07:09] Speaker A: Makes for interesting conversations, too.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: I'm sure it definitely does.
[00:07:12] Speaker C: Why this title? Yeah. And then you get to explain it.
[00:07:15] Speaker B: Yes. As we do at the beginning of every episode. So kind of it's like a nice lead into that.
[00:07:19] Speaker C: Okay, well.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: And I have to give you credit for this podcast because you were the germ of the idea that created Kindle Speak. So thank you for that.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Of course, you're very welcome here.
[00:07:29] Speaker C: That's why your audience at home didn't realize that Paul Klein, who is really behind all of this. And we'll tell you more about that later when we talk about this place.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: Well, let's go back to the English department before we get into some of that, Dr. Titus, and talk a little bit about the programs we offer, most popular courses. Tell our audience a little bit about our programs.
[00:07:46] Speaker C: I would love to. I love this department. We have three main disciplines. We are officially the English and Communications department, but we also have journalism. So English Communication, which really is speech and mask communication, and then journalism, which is like basic reporting, and some other journalistic classes that I wish we could offer more of. One of the things that's cool about this is that we offer classes, a number of them, that are required of virtually all students who come through Miami Dade. ENC 1101, for example, is the big one. Essentially, everybody has to take that or some equivalent of it in high school or through AP or whatever. ENC 1102, which is a more advanced writing class and can steer people into an Introduction to Literary Studies by way of Analysis and writing about it.
Then we have two speech classes that are really popular.
Introduction to Communication and Introduction to Public Speaking. And again, virtually everybody who graduates from here has to take at least one of those.
We also have a category in our graduation requirements called Oral Communications. There are four classes available.
All students have to take one to satisfy that box. This department offers all of them, and it includes lit2480, which is studies in Literature. And the topics change from time to time or sometimes every semester. And then ENC 2300, which is advanced Composition.
So we have really the great honor of seeing basically everybody at this college come through.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: This department being the largest campus in the college, we get to see a lot of those. Paul.
[00:09:27] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Wait, I lost a question. What was the question?
[00:09:31] Speaker C: I thought you were going to talk.
[00:09:32] Speaker A: About the speech courses.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: I was just looking at Dr. Titus, and I was just like. You answered the question. Yeah. No, no. We'll leave it in. We'll leave it.
[00:09:38] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:09:38] Speaker C: We leave all the flow.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: Human.
[00:09:39] Speaker C: Yeah. Humanize us.
I like it that way.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: Let's talk. And, you know, we're in this great lab here, and there's so much technology innovation here at the Kendall campus. Talk a little bit about either one of you, the recent developments and things that are helping our students with technology and the curriculum.
[00:09:55] Speaker C: You want to start that one Yeah.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: I mean, I think the big change we had in here was, of course, this podcast room and how the speech lab sort of veered more towards podcasting.
When Dr. Titus came in, we were looking at the speech lab, and we were successful.
But there is this component of forcing students to come here because everybody hates public speaking.
My running gag always is, I hate public speaking. And I'm the manager of the speech lab, so, you know, with Arts and letters.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: We're going to get to see some of that soon.
[00:10:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. No, no nerves there. I'm fine.
So we've been doing this for, I think, two years now. Right? I think, really where we've really been up and running and have everything set up and the students. It is amazing. I think there's two stories I have. Should we get to the stories now?
[00:10:40] Speaker C: Let's come back to that. Okay, yeah. Pause for a second. The story itself, I think, is so. I mean, we're biased, clearly, but I think it's compelling. Paul and I, we stood here in the lab three years ago. Like, when I. When I came to work here, this department was very much in transition for a lot of reasons. We had the old guard of faculty who were. They had been eyeing up retirement. And then Covid came and kind of disrupted everybody's plans, and nobody knew what to do. So a lot of things were put in a holding pattern. So there are some people who said to me, when I got here, I should have retired four years ago, but I'm still here, and I don't know what to do. And we had these very good discussions about what they should do and whether how or whether they can adapt to the changing students.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:11:30] Speaker C: And we're looking around like not only do we have this sort of new generation of students, which a lot of us who are older struggle to understand sometimes, because they're not the same students we had 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago.
They learn differently, they respond differently. They're really very different.
And we had to adapt to that, and that wasn't easy. And then we had all the disruptions from COVID And so when I got here, we were really right in the aftermath of all of that, trying to figure out what the future of this department looks like, the future of higher ed looks like. And one of the things that we did was we realized that we had this great asset. We had this resource lab. We had the space, we had the staff, we had tutors, we had all of this stuff, but it was not at all activated. Remember what it looked like?
[00:12:19] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:12:19] Speaker C: It was a sea of roundtables and.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: How many random things?
[00:12:24] Speaker C: Black chairs. How many black chairs? 400.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. 400.
[00:12:28] Speaker C: 500.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I forgot about all the round tables out here.
[00:12:31] Speaker C: You almost couldn't get through the lab.
[00:12:33] Speaker B: Yeah, no, you could not. You could not. It was not a big open space like it is now. We had computers lining the walls because we would have testing in here.
[00:12:39] Speaker C: Oh, kind of.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: Which would be really strange.
[00:12:41] Speaker C: It was set up to be a testing center, but then it never came to be. So we had 14 computer stations on the wal or just collecting dust that nobody ever used. And so we're just standing in here looking at this wasteland of space, thinking how lucky we are, but also, like, how frustrating it was that we didn't know what to do with it. And then. Okay, then Paul and I put our brains together, and we said, well, let's go with this.
How do we activate this space to sort of speak to the challenges that we are seeing on a broader scale about the changing students and post Covid, et cetera?
And then in another conversation that I don't think you were a part of, I was talking with our journalism faculty, trying to figure out what journalism even means anymore and what communication and reporting on information looks like. And so it all finally came together, along with what Paul was talking about. How everybody hates public speaking. It's well known to be everyone's biggest fear. They'd rather jump in an ocean full of sharks than give a speech to a big audience.
Which I think everybody can understand. I think we all.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:48] Speaker C: So we said, how do our students learn? Well, collaboratively, what makes them comfortable?
Technology, you know, what are they good at operating these sorts of devices and being their own unique, sometimes quirky selves. How do we capitalize on all of that to help them learn public speaking, communications, journalism, et cetera? And the big thing out there was, as Paul said, podcasting. We looked into it. We had a budget. We studied.
Myself, I alone studied every single YouTube video of podcasters out there.
Every single one. Like, for example, I have a long commute to get here from my house, about 90 minutes each way, and I have a little iPad. So I would make a playlist of all these videos, and I would set it on the car stereo and listen to all of these podcasts three hours a day.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:14:44] Speaker C: Every day. So over a few months, we learned a lot. We saw the patterns, and basically, we set it all up and we got about the business of doing it, and that was where the real learning happened.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:14:58] Speaker C: So now we're back to where you left off.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: Yeah. So we put this into play, and, you know, I have my own experience. Okay, we'll start with me. You know, like I said, I hate public speaking. I can do it now, partially because I would practice a lot in the speech lab. But what's really helped me actually sort of. And this is the. This is the weird part where I actually sort of enjoy it is that's the weird part, because I still didn't enjoy it coming in here, everybody. Whenever students put on the headphones, I'm very surprised. In a world where people film themselves all the time, how many students come in here and they put the headphones on? It's the first time they've heard their own voice.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: Exactly right.
[00:15:35] Speaker C: And can we talk about that, Paul, the headphone thing? I think actually that was one of the first breakthroughs that we had. Do you remember this?
[00:15:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:41] Speaker C: So we were trying to figure out, like, how to bring students in and, like, introduce this to them and explain what's happening and why we think it's important. We didn't really know. Right. We were really just experimenting all the time. So what we would do is we bring them in, we'd sit down, like the three of us are sitting here. And, you know, the first thing I would say to them is, all right, well, put your headphones on. And, you know, speaking of the microphone, which made sense, and we instantly realized that when you put the headphones on, you entered a different world.
Right. Whatever's happening outside of this room, which you can't see and you can't hear, it doesn't matter anymore. The only thing that matters is this table.
And then after that, we realize that this is one of the few times in students lives where they sit down in close proximity to each other and they face each other.
Right. We're sitting at a round table, an ovular table, where we're looking at each other. Here, we're not side by side. Paul and I are kind of side by side, but we're turned in ways that we can see each other and we're close to each other and we're talking to each other, and this just doesn't happen. People talk in cars or on couches or while walking on the phone, or worse, maybe via social media. They're messaging on Instagram, exchanging TikToks, or maybe worse than that, they're just sharing memes with each other instead of actually talking.
And so here you have a mission and you have an assignment or a conversation or an interview or whatever it is, you actually talk to each other face to face. And even if you have your phones out, like, we actually all do, we're not looking at them because we're engaged in this human connection. And we were blown away by that, by how powerful it was and by how universally it affected people. And from there, we just kind of leaned into it and we started doing the exit interviews, asking.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:17:38] Speaker C: Right.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah.
[00:17:40] Speaker C: You want to talk a little bit about that? That was eye opening.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: Yes. Well, I kind of want to go back on the. You know, when you have the headphones on, it's like you just have a person right in your ears. It's almost like someone's thinking for you. Right. Like, it's just like when we step out of here. So in here we have, like, the sound dampening materials, and everything is just kind of quieter and you can hear each other better. And then there's a person right in your head. The moment we step out of here, you suddenly go, I hate this.
Like every. The real world. Yeah, it's the real world.
[00:18:09] Speaker C: There's no humming. There's no buzzing in here.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: No.
[00:18:12] Speaker C: Right. Your voice. All of our voices are being processed. So we all sound great.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: We all sound really good.
[00:18:16] Speaker C: Very professional.
[00:18:18] Speaker B: Kind of, in a sense, that's why I kind of got lost when you were asking me that question, because Dr. Titus is giving this long explanation, and it's in my ears and I'm just.
[00:18:24] Speaker C: Like, yeah, drifting away.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: And then you brought me back to reality. I'm like, oh, shit. Shoot. I have to answer this.
But, yeah, we. We started having these exit interviews that you were filming, and I think you had little microphones. And the thing we started noticing was just how joyous the kids come out of the room. Like, it sounds kind of like. Like, this is hsn. I'm trying to sell something, but it's so true. And it happened to me, actually, just recently. We had classes in here, and they were morning classes. And then so it was an 8 o' clock session, and it was like they came in. I showed him an orientation video, and they were dead. They would just kind of mope around and they'd walk into the room. They wouldn't say a word. We put them in the room. I set them up. Close the door. Half an hour later, we couldn't get them out.
So class time was over.
[00:19:10] Speaker C: That's the thing, right? We would send them in here and they'd be skeptical. They're students. They're all Skeptical as we were then, we're all still skeptical of new things that we don't understand. And so we'd usher them in here, we'd give them the rundown, put the headphones on, and they'd say, okay, this is cool. And we give them 15 minutes. And they look at us like, 15 minutes?
[00:19:29] Speaker B: What am I going to do with 15 minutes?
[00:19:30] Speaker C: How am I going to talk for 15 minutes? That's forever. Even though there's four of them in here. And then, like Paul said, half an hour later, we're literally dragging them out. You guys have to come. They've come out and they've exchanged phone numbers with each other. You know, they. They have business ambitions to start their own podcasting company.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: Always, always.
[00:19:48] Speaker C: Right. All the time. Like, they're friends now. They. And they say to us, can we come back and do this on our own, even if we don't have an assignment? And we. Yes, right. And we definitely sound like sh now, like we're selling this place.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: But it's amazing.
[00:20:02] Speaker C: I know, and I don't. I don't like to sound that way, but there's just no other way to describe what was happening in here. And we were just as surprised as everybody else.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:12] Speaker C: And we started doing that thing. We put a little microphone. I remember we'd stand there, we'd just say, how was your experience?
And they would give this effusive, like.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: Coming from Disney World, you know, like stepping out, like they just saw Mickey Mouse or something, you know, they were just so excited.
And that's what I experienced with that class. When they came out, they went in like zombies. And they came out and they were so lively and just happy. I don't think I've seen them, like, especially in 8 o' clock class. I don't think I've seen, like that.
[00:20:39] Speaker C: And in fact, Dr. Stewart, if you don't mind, I would like to put you on the spot just for a moment, because you're a really good example of this. You came in here just like everybody else and didn't know what this was all about. And you had heard of it, no doubt, but.
And you came in, sat down, and Paul had pitched this idea to you, say, hey, why don't you do a podcast? You're the president. You are new to the campus. It would be a great way for everybody to get to know you here on this campus and all that. And now here are what your 20 podcast is close to 25 now, approaching 25 podcasts.
What do you think? I mean, what was your experience like of sort of falling into this podcasting role?
[00:21:19] Speaker A: The very first thing thing was a tour. I think I met you guys and it was a tour. And I was seeing the lab and it hit me that, you know, this would be, you know, have an athletic background. I was thinking of sports podcasts and all that. And I told Paul, we got to bring the athletic director over here.
[00:21:33] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:21:34] Speaker A: It took me weeks to get him here.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: It was.
[00:21:36] Speaker A: It wasn't quick. And we got in here and got him on the microphone, and Paul just sort of calmly said, what would you think about doing a podcast? And it kind of hit me as. Because I'd been looking, being new at Kindle, this is such a big campus. There's so many amazing programs. I was trying to figure out what's a way that, that I can brag about this campus, that I could learn it, but I could also say, what's going on in our fine arts department? Or say, what's going on in the engineering program? And Paul hit me like a ton of bricks. It was that. That aha moment we love when we teach students. I see it all the time in math. It was like, that's a brilliant idea. Let's do it as a podcast. And you guys were talking about the group of students that came in earlier, and it made me think about all the people that have sat in these chairs that are so nervous. And to me, it's like a rollercoaster. They get off of this and they want to do it again. I've had so many people say, when's the next podcast?
[00:22:25] Speaker C: Oh, that's a good analysis.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: To me, it's like that roller coaster you get on as a kid. Like, oh, I hate to be off this scared. And then I can't wait to do that.
[00:22:32] Speaker C: You get to the top of that hill and you're regretting all your life decisions. You're like, why did I do this? I want to get off?
And all that. And you're like, you're trapped and you're terrified. And then you're right, you get off the roller coaster and you say, oh my God, I want to do that again.
Right back in line. So it. And maybe that's a little more dramatic than, you know, a little bit.
[00:22:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:52] Speaker C: But I think it's a really good analogy. Is that how you felt about it?
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Well, I never. I actually. You guys don't know this, but I used to do math videos.
I've had publishers that would rented a house. And every day after work, I'D go do hours and hours of math videos. And so I've. I was. What I hate to say was the talent, but I've flown to Boston, I've flown to Malibu. I did them in a house in Malibu once. The guy lived in Malibu. So I did the reshoots.
[00:23:19] Speaker C: We got to find a way to do this podcast in Malibu.
[00:23:23] Speaker A: Maybe not now. I don't know.
[00:23:24] Speaker C: I don't realize we could do that.
[00:23:26] Speaker A: But anyway, so. So I was never nervous about this part. What I was more nervous about was bringing people on and being able to ask questions and. And what it's turned into is people. I've learned so much about this camp and gotten to meet people. That's the best part of it for me, because it's hard when you're brand new to a campus as big as we are.
And bringing people in here and giving them this space, as you guys were talking about, allows them to know me, but also me to know them. And I get a lot of publicity from this. That's not my intention. My intention really was to shine the light on all the amazing things here at Kendall.
[00:24:01] Speaker C: The experience you're talking about really mirrors a lot of the experiences we had where we knew something good was going to happen in here because, you know, all these stars had aligned and it just made sense. But what actually happened tended to be different from what we anticipated and like it. So what you're talking about actually is a good example of one of the things that happens.
You fall into a conversation, right? And this is what happens with the public speaking students. They're so used to going up and standing at a lectern, standing up in front of a group and delivering this.
This monologue. Right. But in here, it's much more of a conversation, and things come out that would not come out in a much more formal setting, because this is more casual in a way. And I think it has to do with the fact that we're sitting down together around the round table like King Arthur. King Arthur, right. Which is a little bit of a stretch. And we're looking at each other and. And it's fun.
[00:25:04] Speaker A: Let me ask you a question, though. You know, you have a veteran group of faculty here, 20 plus.
[00:25:10] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: I mean.
[00:25:11] Speaker C: Yeah, 22 full time.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: And I'm sure not all of them have embraced this technology. So what is. What has been your strategy within professional development wise? How. How do you try to engage them? Paul? You two. Either one of you? Because I'm sure they walk through here and say, what's going on in this place.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: What do I do in here? Yeah, yeah, actually, I'm gonna let you start on that one, because I think you've been doing the.
[00:25:30] Speaker C: The legwork on the recruiting. Yeah, yeah, it's a really good question, actually, because veteran status is a good way to describe some of the faculty here, although we now have three generations in the department. You know, the older, the middle generation and some new people who we've just brought in. And the new people, of course, are right on board. They say, oh, great, you have podcasting. I've been doing this perfect. And you don't have to explain anything, really, just kind of, you know, how to schedule time. But some of the older folks for whom this is very foreign, they don't understand. And sometimes, you know, I'll lead with, like, well, it's like radio. It's like everybody having a radio show, but it's a little bit different. It's over the Internet, and it's asynchronous. Right. So you don't have to tune into the station at the time of the show. You can listen to it whenever you want and wherever you want via your phone, with headphones, or in the car, while walking, while mowing the lawn, that sort of thing. And. And so that's helpful for them just as a way in. And then we talk about how to address the students who seem to be bored with the traditional things or have trouble sometimes getting them to read the textbook chapter or even getting them to engage in the class they don't necessarily want to. These students came through Covid. They have a lot of experience with online classes. You know, they are used to kind of being on zoom and disconnected to the degree that you are in those cases. And so it's difficult to get them really engaged in the ways that we want them to in the classroom. And so I explained this to the faculty. This is maybe the single best way to do that, to reestablish that engagement that we've lost and go back maybe 10 years or so to the way when students would come in and they'd ask questions and they would get involved in discussion. And some of these things have changed over the years.
And for the public speaking faculty, that was easy. And the Intro to Communication faculty, which is a class that also has some speeches in it, it was easy.
Easy. Ish.
The English faculty, though, we got a little more creative. We said the students are skeptical of writing these long essays that we've always done.
And I know, myself included, I would always make this argument that to the Students, I know you're not going to need to write essays out in the real world. You're not going to get a job and have to be a professional essay writer. I get that.
But the reason that I. In fact, sometimes this might be the last essay you'll ever write, right? I'm the first person to acknowledge that. But the reason we still do it is that it is, in my opinion, the best way to learn the skills that are available here. Critical thinking, how to organize your thoughts, how to make a claim and defend it, how to source it with other credible evidence outside of your own experience. Those are the things that we teach in an essay is a really good way to do it. However, that's gotten complicated with AI, with how Chad GPT, how easy it is to copy things from the Internet. It's just so easy. It's too tempting. And so it's. It's an issue.
So I said to the faculty, well, listen, imagine you gave them a topic. Let's say it's an argumentative essay, which is common, and you need to have a main thesis and a counter argument from somebody else and a rebuttal, which is your way to address the counter argument. And you go through rounds of that. Well, what better way to do it than in conversation in a podcast?
And you can still teach all of your competencies where they write essentially an essay of all this stuff, but it's all preparation for the deliberation, delivery of it, which is what we're doing now. And it's more compelling to the students because it's not an essay for the teacher. They're not that impressed by that kind of assignment.
Here. They talk to each other and they're judged in a way by their peers and in real time. They can tell by body language, by feedback, by the verbal responses, how it's going and whether it's effective. That turns out to be a much more effective way of teaching those skills than we used to do.
[00:29:44] Speaker A: Before you answer, you know, we've heard about the flipped classroom. And it just made me think, what if we had a room like this in the middle of a classroom and the students were around it and you were talking about some.
I'm thinking about the English faculty, how you really could engage the whole class and you could have this open mic that someone come up to while we're having this conversation, Someone in the room.
I mean, it might be a way to flip the classroom.
[00:30:10] Speaker C: I tried this. So in the very first semester, we got these microphones set up long before I was ready to start making pitches to the faculty and making promises that this is a good thing. Right. I brought my own students and I was teaching an ENC 1102.
And when we got it up and running, I said to them, listen, it's experimental. If we don't like this, it's fine. We'll go back and you can write 10 page essays for me.
So they were incentivized to like this. But we came in the other podcast room over there, and it wasn't even, even fully set up and it's not big enough for a whole class. And so I had them just sitting on the floor and they were standing in the doorway and kind of piling out, and they were sitting all around the table. And we had like a regular class where we sat down together and we're just chatting. And then somebody would chime in, they say, oh, I know what I would say about that. And I point to the microphone, they come up here and they would offer their thoughts. And I point to somebody else, say, paul, do you have a counter argument to them? Paul say, no, I'm not sure. And then somebody else, I'd say, Dr. Stewart, do you have a counter argument for that? And he'd say, well, yes, I do. And we built this stuff together.
[00:31:16] Speaker A: Dialogue.
[00:31:16] Speaker C: Yeah, just like that, you know, like in real time. We put it together and it was fun.
It was a lot, and it was totally different. I thought, you know, another good example is not with English, but with Professor Wadel's class.
[00:31:29] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. That's the first time we really saw it.
So Professor Wadel was actually one of the professors who is a veteran.
[00:31:37] Speaker C: Yeah, a veteran professor.
[00:31:39] Speaker B: Yeah, Been here for a while and presented with this one. He jumped on it immediately. He got excited. The way we're describing how the students got excited. He has all these ideas. He comes in sometimes and he's like, I couldn't sleep last night because I had this idea. And he comes in and he's so happy.
[00:31:53] Speaker C: And Wado's been doing it 30 years or 32 years now. So he's a good example of this, like, old school model. He did the same thing. It worked great. He learned how many students for years and years. You know, it was great. You know, he's a beloved professor at this school and in this department, but he started to think too, that times have changed. And he jumped on this when. When we mentioned it to him.
[00:32:15] Speaker B: Yeah, he felt he was kind of losing them. And then once we said this, he was like the person that spearheaded everything, showing the Other professors, how he could do it. And we actually have his classes coming in tomorrow. And on Thursday, he came to me.
[00:32:26] Speaker C: And he said, can I teach my classes in the speech lab? And I said, I don't know.
I'm not sure.
Let's think about this. I like the idea. Let's sit down with Paul. Let's look at the schedule. Can we give up all this time? Because we close it down to everybody else? And we said, you know what? Let's try it. And Paul and I decided, remember this? I said, the faculty come in here with an idea. The answer is yes.
Answer is yes. I don't care how crazy it is, or if we don't have the knowledge or the skills or the equipment, say yes. And we're going to figure it out. Right? Because it's all. It's a big experiment. So Professor Wadel came in and said, hey, can I teach my classes in here? And we said, yes. I don't know what it's going to look like. He didn't know what it was going to look like, but it ended up being what you're talking about. Dr. Stewart, we just made it available. And he said, let's figure out how to learn public speaking with these resources. And we have the tutors. Alex is available. And our other tutors, Paul is available. We have multiple spaces in here, which, you know. And he has done all of this experimentation, right. And learn what works. You really kind of can't go wrong. I mean, none of it, like, doesn't work, I think.
[00:33:33] Speaker B: But maybe once when we set the cubicles out here and had him recording all at the same time, the audio was kind of bleeding over and he couldn't hear each other. So we're like, we're not going to do that.
[00:33:42] Speaker C: Yeah, that wasn't going to.
[00:33:43] Speaker A: What about the future? What. You know, we talked about how we got to this point. What would you like to see in the next couple of years? Any great ideas that.
[00:33:51] Speaker B: Well, we have what we call the video room that we've been working on. So we have our two podcast rooms that we're like, hey, we love this. We would like to set up more cameras. We would like to have more camera angles for those rooms, I think. But the thing is, the video room, we're still trying. We have some good things we've done with it. We have faculty and staff using it for presentations, zoom presentations, things like that. We had the provost come down and record an interview, a zoom interview here.
[00:34:16] Speaker C: Or the conference day.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: We had the presentation just last week. We had them come in and I think you must have all seen the video about the AI. Is that what it was?
[00:34:24] Speaker A: Oh, that was done here, the qe?
[00:34:26] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: That was shown to every department. Yes, now that, now that I remember, I know where it was.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:34:31] Speaker C: You see the background?
[00:34:32] Speaker B: Alex did the editing on that. In short time. There was a lot of nerves around here.
So we have that room available and we love that room, but we want to do more with it. We have been talking about making it an interview style room. We would like to get another. Another road caster. Our little soundboard here, put it in there. Maybe just have two microphones, comfortable chairs that we have out there, a nice skyline shot of Miami in the background.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: Or the beach maybe.
[00:34:56] Speaker B: Or the beach. You know, we'll put on the green screen. We can do, you know, wherever we want to put it. Put in space and have people interviewing each other, like have the one on one interviews like that.
The easy answer is I just want more technology and I want to play with it and I want to see how the students, you know, what, what they can do with it is what I'm looking forward to.
[00:35:15] Speaker C: Communication is becoming more digital and it's becoming more collaborative and it's becoming more asynchronous and done in real time and from all different places. And it's this real flattening of communication where it's available to everybody at all times.
And as we're teaching our students how to engage in effective communication in their lives and whatever context they're going into, their professional lives, their personal lives, and no matter where they end up going, if they leave Miami or if they stay in Miami, we are imagining that future that they are going out into where they're going to have to learn how to be well prepared for that kind of communication. And so what we think is the more we can bring them into the sorts of technology Paul was just talking about, the more we can get them involved in variations of what we're doing right now.
That might involve, for example, live video feeds with zoom, like here on the computer monitor that nobody else can see but us in the room. But you can imagine that we pull up somebody there and we learn how to communicate using a microphone, communicate over a sometimes unreliable Internet connection, over an interface that doesn't really do well when two people are talking at the same time. Right. All of these things are kind of different from the sorts of communication that we've grown up with.
We, I say we, the three of us @ this table, and none of that's going to change. We're not going back to what we grew up with. We're going forward, and we're trying to do our best to imagine what that future is going to look like and build this place and let this place evolve in ways that provide the skills that those students are going to need.
[00:37:06] Speaker A: You know, as I hear you both talk, it occurs to me you were thinking about more technology.
We probably could write a grant, as I've had different chairs and different faculty in here. If you think about chemistry, for instance, there's some in every discipline has certain areas where students struggle. So imagine if we created a podcast on balancing equations in chemistry today and had students in here, and then that podcast is there for eternity, and our faculty could use that in the classroom, and you could think of examples of that in any discipline. And so that might be a way for us to write a grant to get some more equipment to get other disciplines that maybe don't see how they could use this technology.
[00:37:43] Speaker B: Right.
[00:37:43] Speaker C: And we started out, we had a faculty member from Engineering and technology. He came in here, and he was just enamored with the place, and he said, wow, what can I do? And he started thinking about filming some of the descriptions that he does with his students in technology. Can we have an overhead camera? He says, can we have a camera at this angle and this angle? And of course, the answer is yes, yes, yes, we'll find a way to make that happen. And he was thinking about recording lectures that could be used again and again and things like that. That's another way that faculty can use this space, too, to create content that they can reuse.
[00:38:21] Speaker A: Well, this has been an amazing conversation. We're kind of wrapping up the end. Any parting comments, Paul, you want to make to our audience about podcasts? And if there are any concerns.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: There's no need for concern. We have, you know, we have Alex, we have tutors who we are all now well versed in podcasting. We want you to come down, we want you to see this awesome space, and we'll set you up, we'll get you going, and you just go take it from there.
[00:38:43] Speaker A: All right, Dr. Titus, any closing words?
[00:38:45] Speaker C: Same. I think if I could. If I could leave one message with everybody, it's that if you came in here and you tried this out, you will be amazed at what you become capable of when you. When you eliminate or reduce the anxiety associated with this sort of. Of work. And when you engage with this sort of modern technology, you'll find that we adapt and we grow in ways that we never could have imagined. I think everybody will be really happy about that.
[00:39:15] Speaker A: Well, I sure appreciate you both being here today. Thank you, Dr. Titus, for your hard work as chair. Paul, thank you for all you do here. Alex, you're not on the microphone, but thank you for all you do.
Kind of feel like it's all. All of us here today. I want to thank our head writer, Christine Saenz, Paul Klein, our executive producer, and Alex Bello for his producing today. Thank you all, and goodbye for now.
