Here is the transcript from an interview I did with Eric Stoller about being a facilitator on last year’s 12 Apps of Christmas:
Chris: Okay, good. Right, a few questions. We might go off to little tangents or what have you. First of all, where do you work?
Eric: I’m independent; I work for myself. I have a consultancy within higher education. I also write for InsideHigherEd.com.
Chris: Okay, straight away off tangent. How did you get into that?
Eric: Just fortunate series of accidents I suppose. I started blogging back in 2004 when I was a graduate student. At the time, I never thought I would go off on my own, but then at one point in 2010, I started then blogging for 6 years. I’d started engagements. People would bring me in to speak at events and started paying me for it.
Chris: What were you blogging about originally?
Eric: Mostly around technology and HE and from a student experience, student engagement perspective. That was what my graduate work was in. My masters is in education, but it’s with a focus on higher education administration, which is unique here anyway. In the US, they’re all over the place. I was writing for 6 years just establishing my presence on the web and my voice and writing about a variety of topics that I felt strongly about. During that time, I was also presenting at a lot of conferences as part of being a new professional. When you’re a graduate student, you’re perceived as a new professional even if you’ve worked before. I knew that I needed to be out there presenting at conferences.
Eventually, I started getting invitations to present from a paid speaking perspective. In 2010, I was working full time as an academic advisor for Oregon State University. I was writing about a post or 2 a week for Inside Higher Ed and I was using all my holiday time to go speak at events. I was stretched really thin. That’s when I decided to quit my full time position with the university and try consulting full time. I’ve been consulting full time now for almost 6 years.
Chris: Wow. My second question is can you describe what you actually do now or is that so varied?
Eric: Sure, on a daily basis, I always say that I teach organizations and individuals how to communicate more effectively using digital channels and whatever way that manifests itself from a leadership retreat where I’m working with administrators for a day. Most of the time it has to do with social media, strategic communications engagement. Sometimes I’m talking with students about career development, how they can use all things digital, as they work on building their own career from networking to just making connections and which tools to use, where to be in university marketing and comps to where I’m working with the umbrella of the institution on their marketing efforts.
Chris: Okay, is it Britain?
Eric: No, initially my focus would have been North America, primarily in the United States, and then Mexico and Canada as well. Then, 2 years ago, moving over to the UK meant that I had to essentially learn this sector. It is different than the US in many ways.
Chris: How is it different?.
Eric: Gosh, that’s another interview.
Chris: Oh, right, sorry.
Eric: How is it different, I would say is that the biggest difference is that on the surface it would seem as if it’s very comparable to the US system, but when you dig a little bit just beneath that surface level, you realize that there’s so many differences. In terms of timelines, students usually go for 3 years. The structure of courses like here versus majors-
Chris: Maybe rephrase my question slightly there.
Eric: Sure.
Chris: How’s the digital world in higher education different across the water?
Eric: This is a tough one to answer in that some of it’s intuition and based on feeling because having engaged in social media spaces in the US for so long and having come up with things like Twitter from, what was it? 2007 was when I joined. Twitter’s been around since 2006, and watching how US HE adopted it and grabbed onto it and started using it for all things marketing and recruitment based. In the US, digital may be a bit more part of the day-to-day workflow as opposed to here things like the learning and teaching in higher education chat, the #LTHEchat, it occurs on Wednesday evenings after normal work hours. In the US, it would happen during the day if it had started. It’s a little bit different where it’s still seen as extra.
There’s the work, there’s the core work, and then there’s this extra stuff on the side that’s almost an accessory still. At the same time, there’s pros and cons on both sides. I feel like in some ways US institutions are a bit more free and willing to use digital channels for communications with a voice and tone that may be a bit less formal, but part of that is related to the nature of HE in the States, which is much more competitive and is much more about retention. You think about our culture of customer service in the US and how that relates to how people want to serve students outside of the learning context.
Chris: Becoming very much of the mainstream now really I suppose.
Eric: Exactly.
Chris: Okay, I don’t want to go too much down that tangent. We haven’t even started yet really.
Eric: Essentially, that’s what I’ve been eating, breathing, sleeping, dreaming about for the past 2 years.
Chris: Okay, all right, great, good stuff, which is how I met you really. The next 4 questions I’ve got are really to do about the 12 Apps of Christmas. First of all, why were you interested in the actual course? I approached you initially.
Eric: Yeah. My interest was just how could I help out, how could I participate in an activity that seemed like a lot of people were interested in it. I’m not an academic in the formal context. I don’t lecture or teach at an institution. I teach on a regular basis as part of my consultancy. It’s essentially what I’m doing. It felt as if this was an interesting activity. I wanted to see if there was an app that I had a particular interest in that could be folded into the 12 days and that hadn’t been done before. Also, with my consultant hat on, it’s good for me to be everywhere, for me to have my name and my work out there in a variety of places.
Chris: Yeah, okay, right. Following on from that, again, this may be hard to quantify, but how much time did you actually spend on the 12AoC?
Eric: Not enough. I wished I had been able to allocate more time. One of the challenges about being a consultant is that it’s obviously about prioritization and being able to balance your time with your engagements, your activities that are paying you with the more altruistic, almost volunteer efforts. I knew quite a bit about Evernote. Unfortunately, by no means a super power user of it because when you dig deeply into Evernote, it can do just vast things. A lot of really good digital channels can do that. For me, it was about saying here’s how I use it. Would I have allocated more time if I’d had it?
Chris: Yeah, you facilitated that one app on that one day. Did you dip into the other days at all?
Eric: A little bit via the hashtag.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Eric: The hashtag was a saving grace because I wasn’t logging into Blackboard or having to hunt for it. I could just have, in TweetDeck, a column of the hashtag flowing in. If people tweeted I could see what they were saying. I didn’t really jump into the conversation. Again, it’s one of those things where if I’d had more time and again, you never know as a consultant which day you’re going to have a lot of time on, which day or not. Every time I plan my week, it always ends up looking far different from how I initially constructed it.
Chris: What did you actually like about the course?
Eric: I liked the excitement. One of the things that I really appreciated was that all these tweets were happening. Everyone was so excited about it. There was a lot of almost anticipation about it. The neat thing was I’m fairly plugged into a lot of apps but to hear the questions, read the questions people had and the discussion, that was probably the thing that really pleased me the most.
Chris: No, that’s good. There was a degree of discussion that’s happening with the hashtag but also happening on the discussion boards inside the Blackboard as well. That was people suggesting ideas or ways of using the apps and stuff like that. I found particularly useful.
Eric: I like it when people disagree. There was some dissonance there with people saying, “That’s not true.” I use OneNote instead; I find that it’s better; I’m all for that.
Chris: I deliberately used a couple of apps, which I knew certain people would really find difficult using. I’m just trying to think what they were now, but actually it’s the apps that cross or blur the line between the professional and the personal use of them. A lot of lecturers in HE have difficulty with that on lots of different levels.
Eric: Yeah, you asked me about what are the differences between US and UK. That’s massive difference right there. In the US, the blurring between personal and professional people are much more comfortable with.
Chris: Why do you think that is in the States?
Eric: It’s a cultural difference.
Chris: Is it?
Eric: We’re not as formal in many ways, just culturally. Totally a tangent here, but look at the Queen’s speech. She goes from Buckingham Palace to Parliament in a carriage that’s gilded, covered in gold, with men on horseback surrounding her with tall hats. You want to talk about formal and structure and etiquette and traditions. In the US, we have tradition, but we haven’t kept them going. In the UK, there’s a lot more delineation between personal and professional. It’s a sociologist’s dream if you were to look at the differences.
Chris: I feel doing quite a lot of workshops and face-to-face stuff with lecturers, some people are just completely happy with it and don’t have an issue with it. I would say every time we do a workshop that issue comes to the fore at some point.
Eric: Yeah, it’s why people always say, “Should I have 2 accounts on social media?” That question, I get it every time I present and maybe a little bit more so here.
Chris: Okay. That’s interesting. You bring us some insights. Next question. Did you actually enjoy being a facilitator on the course?
Eric: Yeah. I got to say …
Chris: I know I’m also paying youJ
Eric: I know. There were brief interactions. I didn’t get to meet anybody new necessarily, but there were some new followers and people that I saw on Twitter and had brief interactions with. That and, this is going to sound really nerdy, but I enjoy going into the VLE because, to be honest, I don’t have enough with VLE’s on a regular basis. I don’t want to just be someone who’s talking about something like the VLE or the LMS. It’s good to get my hands dirty every once in a while. Just to see if there’s things that are intuitive or easy to do.
Chris: Have you had experience of using Blackboard at all before?
Eric: I had, but it’s been a while and/or it’s been just a brief, again, quick dip into it for this activity. I was just on a call the other day with someone who was using Blackboard Ultra. It looked really pretty from an aesthetic point of view.
Chris: Yeah.
Eric: I thought to myself this is good just because it’s good for me to see what they’re up to. The other thing was I’m a big fan of activities that cause me to have to stretch a little bit and to think what would people want to know about this app that I use on a regular basis, but I use it in my own way. I had to think more broadly about that. It’s enjoyable whenever you step outside of your normal day-to-day stuff and have to challenge yourself.
Chris: Okay. That’s good. This question’s about the actual experience of the course. The next 4 questions I want to ask you about is your experience since Christmas after the course.
Eric: Okay.
Chris: Okay? The first one is, have you used any of the 12 Apps of Christmas apps at all since Christmas?
Eric: EverNote, first of all. I said this during my part of it. It’s my brain’s external hard drive. I use it for storage and for tagging of things. It’s my virtual filing cabinet for a lot of different resources. The other thing was some of the apps I was already using. It wasn’t a question of have I kept using them since Christmas. I was already. I’m trying to think. I need the list in front of me.
Chris: Oh, no. When I’ve been doing these interviews, I’ve had the list because I’ve had the computer in front of me. I’m desperately trying to think which ones there were as well. There were things like Trello, which is the boards; Periscope, which I have seen you actually use a couple of times actually.
Eric: I’m a big fan of Periscope.
Chris: How have you used that at all? Did you know about it before Christmas?
Eric: Oh yeah.
Chris: Okay. Had you been using it before?
Eric: Yeah. Funny enough, since we’ve talked about Blackboard just briefly, the creators of the very first mobile app for Blackboard, they’re actually the same people that created Periscope.
Chris: Oh, right, okay.
Eric: Almost the same team and everything. They’re very creative people. The Periscope app, when it first came out, I was aware of Meerkat and the Periscope came out right around the same time and then Twitter acquired them. I always try my best to stay up on the pulse of what’s new and what’s happening in the world of apps and with social media. When Twitter acquired Periscope obviously it raised their importance quite a bit. I’ve used it in a variety of ways. A few examples come to mind. I was giving a keynote speech at North Carolina State University, NC State. I was talking about Periscope. I said, “I shouldn’t just talk about it. I’ll bring it out right now.” I just held my phone up while I was giving my keynote basically. Terrible camera work, of course, but at the same time, I had all these viewers from all over the globe tuning in to this keynote with me speaking in North Carolina.
I was at Princeton University I guess it was last December. I was on a tour. I was there for a social media conference. At part of the conference they had us do a tour of their art museum, their art gallery there. I Periscoped a couple of different times walking around this art gallery. It’s an amazing place. They have works of art from some of the great artists there. At one point in time, I had 120 viewers asking me questions and saying, “Hey, can you pan back over to that?” They would comment back and say, “Is that so-and-so?” My wife and I were at Durham University. We were staying at the Castle. I Periscoped a little bit of the castle grounds and had people from Russia and just from all over the place viewing.
I’ve done broadcasts of me just walking around Trafalgar Square. Again, it’s the technology where in the past it would have taken a lot more gear to broadcast. Even Periscope is getting more sophisticated. Now, you can connect it to a GoPro. You can connect it via your phone. You can connect it to a drone. DGI, which makes the Phantom drone, the white one that has an amazing camera on it, I’ve seen footage now via Periscope live streamed from a drone. It’s amazing. You think about that technology; you don’t need a sat truck. The challenge of course for something like Periscope is that it hides on your phone. I turn notifications off because I don’t really want to get interrupted all the time with broadcasting.
Facebook Live will publicly be next year’s 12 Apps because that’s another video broadcasting platform that’s on mobile. It’s not necessarily a new app, but it’s definitely a huge part of the functionality of Facebook. Anyway, so Trello, I’d never really used Trello. I knew of Trello; I have friends that use it. As you know with most apps, the ones we use are the ones that we find value in or that we think are a good use of our time, that fit in with our particular work flow.
Chris: I didn’t want to bring out any really obscure ones. Not against obscure ones, I just had to feel that they had some use and the focus was higher education. It wasn’t just the use of apps.
Eric: Yeah, what else was on the list? I can’t remember.
Chris: Pinterest was another one that’s been around for a long time. I’m trying to think now myself. The last one was ElfYourself. Nobody realized but actually I had a serious app, which was Bb Collaborate as well on the same day. Not everybody tuned in to that. They just focused on the ElfYourself. I did an interview with Andrew Middleton dressed as Father Christmas. I was Father Christmas interviewing him talking about his book actually. That was quite good. We didn’t do Snapchat as well. We did Sli.do. The year before that we did Poll Everywhere. That’s taken off quite big time here at Regent’s, actually.
Eric: One of the main benefits of the 12 Apps of Christmas is that people don’t have time to troll the web or the app store for things that other people are using on a regular basis. People are busy. It’s a good way to present them with this a la carte, bite sized exposure to a whole bunch of apps that they might pick 4 of them.
Chris: That’s true, yeah. That’s the purpose of it really. Okay. Next question. Have you used any other apps recently since Christmas? Ones that you-
Eric: New ones?
Chris: New ones that you looked at.
Eric: That’s a really good question because there’s ones that you just get really ingrained in, you’re always using on a regular basis. I’ve added Snapchat; I’ve used it; I’ve gotten rid of it; I’ve brought it back. Snapchat’s one of those that I’ve continuously tried to incorporate into my work flow. WhatsApp is going to be one of those that continues to grow and influence. I was teaching a classroom of about 30 university students. They told me afterwards that an indicator that the content that I had been presenting to them in the discussion, everything had been I guess captivating enough that they hadn’t been distracted and conversing via their WhatsApp group the whole time.
Chris: Right.
Eric: That’s a great metric I guess. For me, that’s success. The iTranslate apps, there’s 2 of them. My wife and I recently volunteered at some refugee camps in northern Greece. Neither one of us reads or speaks Arabic. This iTranslate app, it’s magical. Google Translate has a great app, but it’s not quite as accurate with spoken word. In the middle of a field without any internet access really, because it works offline, being able to do fairly accurate English to Arabic, Arabic to English translation, it really makes you feel like you’re in the future in that sense. If you’re doing something that, wow, people in the past could have never done this. This is such a cool thing.
Chris: Can you give me an example of that and how you actually used it?
Eric: Yeah. At one point, I’m in a tent communicating with 4 different guys. They’re all speaking to me in Arabic; I’m holding my phone out. It beeps, like Siri, but instead of Siri, it’s this iTranslate app. They speak into it; when they’re done speaking, it then says to me in English what they said. It puts it out there, projects it on the speaker on my phone and then puts text as well to tell me what they said. The same thing, I spoke into my phone and then would hold my phone next to them and they could hear it in Arabic and see the words in Arabic script. We talked about all kinds of stuff. What is it that you need? What country are you from? Not to get into too much detail but really tough conversations with emotion.
One of the most emotionally charged conversations I had was with a Kurdish man from Syria. I had a backpack full of supplies. They were in tents and I was literally a hardware store walking around with duct tape and clothes line and random tools and things. This guy, he looked like he was 50 years old and he was younger than I am. You could just tell the stress of living in a war torn country, of being a part of a population. Kurdish people have been just oppressed almost more so than a lot of others. It aged him quite a bit. He said to me flat out, “I don’t want anything from you.” He wasn’t being rude; he was just being very honest. Said, “I don’t want anything from you. I just want to go to Germany where my daughter is at.” His daughter was living right now with his brother, with her uncle.
It was just the most emotional conversation that would have never happened. It was facilitated entirely by an app. Otherwise he and I would have had to communicate in hand gestures and very simple communication. This was an actually in depth conversation. One of the things I notice too is when I sat down and started “talking” to these guys, is that they said, “What app are you using?” I pointed it out on my phone and showed them. They all had android based phones. Everybody was like this refugee app culture in terms of apps that they all had. There was this app that would let you share apps. One app’s sole purpose is to help you share apps from one phone to another via local networks so you don’t have to have cellular connection.
They all pointed to that and said, “Do you have this app to share?” They wanted the iTranslate. I said, “I’m on iPhone, sorry.” The realities of different platforms was a part of that, but then they went onto GooglePlay and they downloaded iTranlate. They were using iTranslate on their phones and I was using it on my phone. It was brilliant. I ended up doing so much translation work, not just for myself but for other people. There’s that and then I haven’t really done too much of it with it yet.
I have an older iPhone, but Google Cardboard and even the New York Times has a VR app that you can use their content that they’ve created specifically for VR, which I’m very excited about. I love the open source nature of that. Google just came out with a new app called Spaces, which I’m just starting to tinker around with. I can’t even really give you this quick sound bite about it yet. There’s also Beam.
Chris: Our business is this collaborative thing like sharing.
Eric: Yeah, there’s Beam, which is a video app. It’s unfiltered content. You put the phone up to your chest and it starts to record. Once you take it away, it posts it. There’s no filtering or making it pretty. Reddit just came out with an official Reddit app, which I’m a big fan of Reddit. Now, they have their own app. There’s so many apps. I love utility apps, too. Oh, this is cool, too. Google has a new keyboard called Gboard, which you can install into your phone’s keyboard. It gives you access to great functionality than your keyboard, which is a very interesting play by Google to get their content and their search data onto your phone.
Chris: That’s a really good example. I’m going to actually use some of those in this year’s course. Right. I’m conscious of time. How are we doing?
Eric: We’re not getting too much background noise?
Chris: It’s okay. Right, where am I? You’ve answered this already, but my next question would have been have the apps enabled you to do things differently? I don’t know if you can add more to what you’ve already said.
Eric: Yeah.
Chris: You’ve given me already quite a few good examples.
Eric: Apps from the module or the course or the class, I was using some of them already. My philosophy with apps is that I don’t want them to slow me down. I don’t want to feel as if I’m having a lot of difficulty trying to figure out how to do something that I want to do with an app. The best apps eliminate static; they eliminate barriers. I use my phone because it makes me more efficient. It allows me to connect with people. The iTranslate app, I can connect with people verbally in a way that I wouldn’t be able to. Things like Periscope, sharing a view of the world. Maybe I’ll Periscope Regents Park on a day like today and it’s beautiful. Those are the things that apps make you more efficient. They make you able to connect and communicate with more people. It should hopefully speed up some of those activities of your day.
Chris: Okay.
Eric: My hope and aspiration is that apps actually open up more time for me to have analog things to do and to be offline.
Chris: Okay, not spending more. I won’t ask you if that’s true or not. You’re in a slight role.
Eric: I’m connected, plugged in all the time. People have a tendency to perceive my level of interaction and engagement to equate to an “always on” mentality and always connected mentality when that’s probably the farthest from the truth. I am most likely the person who has their phone in their pocket when others have their phone out. I love to be out and about outside and to be disconnected. When some people are really upset when they don’t have a signal, I’m okay with that. Oh darn. Life goes on.
Chris: Right, true. Next question. I don’t know if it’s really applicable to you. My question is what reaction do you get from your learners. Let me rephrase that question again. What reaction do you get from the people that you communicate to when you’re talking about apps generally?
Eric: Yeah. Because my focus is on communications and engagement, you hit upon it earlier in the conversation. You talked about the split that some people struggle with when it comes to the personal/professional aspect of the apps. A lot of times they straddle those 2 aspects of your life. They don’t cut your identity in half. They span your entire person. When I’m working with people, with clients or institutions or with learners, sometimes I am in the classroom, that is a big part of the conversation. Talking to students about, “Okay, let’s have 2 columns, 1 personal, 1 professional. Let’s put these apps in the columns that you think that they sit in.” Then, having a really in depth conversation around the fact that most of the time they sit in the middle. They’re blurred between the two even though their initial thought is Snapchat is personal or LinkedIn is professional. In fact, they bring you together.
Chris: How’d you think that’s going to pan out in the future?
Eric: I love it. I love the fact that these social constructs around hierarchy and boundaries that we’ve constructed, you call it social class. Call it personal/professional. That’s created maybe some opportunity for people to talk about things like work/life balance and what not, but at the end of the day, being human means that you just exist. You roll through a variety of spaces. The thing I’ve enjoyed the most about apps and social media is that it breaks down any of those artificial barriers. It allows the student to connect to the CEO or the parent to connect with somebody else.
I love that things like Facebook, Facebook has changed the way we look at what it means to be professional, what it means to be personal, what it means to share, what it means to talk about privacy. In the future, again, it’ll ebb and flow. It’ll go up and and down. There’ll be some tension there around what people share. People label other people as oversharers. They’re just projecting their own stuff. It’s fine for one person not to share and it’s perfectly fine for someone else to share as much as they want to share, which is a radical idea.
Chris: Yeah, it’s true. The last question. I don’t know. I’ll ask it anyway. Do you have any future plans to use more apps? Sorry. Do you have any further plans to use more apps in the future?
Eric: Yes. I have an iPhone 5. It’s getting a little old now. It’s almost a retro device. It can run most apps, but at some point I’ll probably get a phone that has a larger screen to be able to do more VR intensive things. I’d love to do more virtual reality. As that technology grows and the resolution improves and the technical things it’s used right now, headaches and things, that’ll change. There some really neat stuff that we can do there.
The cool thing is at the core of apps it’s just the nature of human creativity and expression. I love the fact that app stores, they offer up these platforms for creativity. We’re always going to have new things come out. Some things are going to seem ridiculous; some things are going to be silly and fun. Why wouldn’t they be? That’s what people like. We entertain ourselves; we do serious things; we engage in learning; we engage in teaching, exploration, connectivity. I can’t wait to see what the next generation of apps looks like.
Chris: Okay, brilliant. Actually, you made me think about somebody here who’s working at one of the lectures here. I’ll give you her Twitter name actually. She’s very interested in virtual reality from a sociological perspective actually. I don’t know if you know her. Her name’s Zoetanya Sujon. She works here actually. I’ll show you on the phone. Any other parting comments before we finish?
Eric: The 12 days of Christmas is an initiative. Any time institutions and the people that work for them offer up opportunities for learning and global engagement that doesn’t cost anything. That to me is just this sense of good will. It’s at the core of what universities should be about, sharing knowledge and creating opportunities for exchange.
Chris: Good. I’m surprised in some ways that they let me do it to be honest. I made it open; it adds to what we do. You have all this discussion and it’s across universities, across countries and everything like that. Actually, lecturers, they don’t have to participate if they don’t want to. They can watch and see what the discussion’s all about. That’s fruitful, but I was thinking maybe this year rather than charge people, I might say at the end of the course, would you like to make a little donation to this particular charity or something like that. Maybe that’s something I might do, but I don’t know. We’ll see a bit nearer the time. People would actually. Speaking to people, you can get a lot out of doing the course.
Eric: I just love that people from all over the world getting in there and asking questions and being really excited. Because it’s connected to a university, you can say, “Hey, I just did this as part of an open course, an open module, with Regents.”
Chris: Yeah, okay, right, brilliant. Thanks. Sorry if that all sounded a little bit confused at times, but that was longer than I was expected!
You can contact contact Eric at ericstoller@gmail.com or @EricStoller.
To enroll on the 12 Apps of Christmas 2016, go to http://tinyurl.com/12AoC16
Watch the video here: http://helixmedia.regents.ac.uk/Play/3360
For further information contact Chris Rowell rowellc@regents.ac.uk or on Twitter @chri5rowell and @12AoC #12AoC