Episode 066: Maha Bali OE Award for Excellence Educator Award
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[00:00:00] Maha Bali: It was always part of the class. And I start with the intercultural element, like knowing yourself.

[00:00:12] And knowing the bias and all of that, before we get into the technology part. A lot of students at first how are these two parts of the course related to each other? And then they started to say, Oh, I need to know about inequality and inequity in order to then see it in, how, technology can reproduce that or exacerbate that.

[00:00:29] I need to understand about empathy and about othering and then think about, oh, how does technology possibly perpetuate that? 

[00:00:39] Alan Levine: Hello, everybody. I'm Alan Levine from Open Education Global, and we're doing a podcast recording live. Typically, when I do these for OEG Voices, it's just, me and the guest, we have a nice little conversation. And I've been liking the opportunity during Open Education Week to open up the place we do the recordings to people.

[00:00:59] And often, they just to listen in and be there. And I keep saying it's getting a preview of the podcast before I publish it. 

[00:01:07] So in this episode of OEG Voices, it's part of a series that I like to do. And actually I get the most out of this, I think, because, we talk to people who, received the Open Awards for Excellence, which were handed out actually in August.

[00:01:22] Slowly catching up. And just so proud and excited to have this conversation with Maha Bali, who won the Individual Award as an educator. 

[00:01:32] So welcome Maha. And it's so nice to see you. I think it's just a chance for us to have a conversation because we don't get to talk as much as we used to.

[00:01:40] Maha Bali: I miss you, Alan. It's always good to talk to you. 

[00:01:44] Alan Levine: I heard your episode with, Bonnie Stachowiak on, her, Technology and Higher Education podcast, and you started talking about the award. And I was like, 

[00:01:53] Maha Bali: Was that supposed be exclusive to you? no. 

[00:01:55] Alan Levine: I was quite honored by that. I just thought it was like, that's what you guys started your conversation with. So that's really great. 

[00:02:02] What we want to do is just, we can talk about we talked about many things just, while we're waiting to get started.  I'd certainly like to hear about, the things that are, current interest, especially in your teachers and your teaching.

[00:02:17] And because this was an educator award, but, as I usually say, you're an educator in the broadest sense. You're always teaching. And, for me, like anytime when Maha is leading a session, here in zoom, it's I want to go because the way you facilitate, I want to learn this, I want to take a, like a mentorship with you, because the way you invite people in and, make the session lively and not just in the entertaining way, but like meaningful is just really powerful. 

[00:02:48] And so I want to, know, your secrets, but I just want to know what you're interested in these days. 

[00:02:54] Maha Bali: Yeah. So first of all, you're a really warm and wonderful facilitator yourself. And I started with warm because that's the thing that I think not a lot of facilitators are.

[00:03:01] A lot of facilitators are good, But they're not necessarily, they don't give you that sense of warmth, like you know them, like you have this relationship with them, and I think you're one of the people who are like that. But anyway, the thing we were talking about before is a real area of interest to me right now, for several different reasons. 

[00:03:19] I've been working with Yasser Tamer who is the Student Award winner, one of the student award winners. who is himself visually impaired and a disability advocate. We've been working on a course, for faculty on accessibility, working with our accessibility unit in my university. And we're working on a course on that.

[00:03:36] And then, I also coincidentally, four of my students are visually impaired this semester. So it's like really out there, like I've never had that many in one semester. And I have this point though, it becomes really noticeable that first of all it's not like you have one, you have four. And it becomes a thing, like they're not a minority in terms of numbers in my class, they're really noticeable and they make a huge difference just being there. And it makes everyone in the class become more aware and everybody has a role. 

[00:04:03] And one of the things that we've been talking about in terms of like, when we used to talk about Intentionally Equitable Hospitality, we used to focus a lot on the facilitator's role of making sure equity is intentional and making sure everyone's welcome.

[00:04:15] But actually it's everybody's role.

[00:04:18] Have someone with us here, Jonathan, for it. Hi, Jonathan. the more people get used to being together in the community, they get used to this praxis of being intentionally equitable, then everybody has a role to play in that. And sometimes the facilitator will miss something and someone else will help out.

[00:04:33] For example, Yasser talked about, so he's there somewhere and somebody's describing something and saying this and that and here and there and he can't, he has no idea what's going on. And he's telling me about, a student who's a foreign student who's not Arabic And someone starts code switching between Arabic and English, and he just automatically starts translating because the teacher didn't realize that was happening.

[00:04:54] so I think it's everybody's, it's everybody's responsibility to make sure everyone feels included, not just the facilitator. Because, when you have large numbers of people, it becomes really, difficult for a facilitator to notice everything. They should try, but, what if it becomes everyone's responsibility?

[00:05:07] So we're trying as we Develop this course and try to support faculty in our institution to be more intentionally equitable to their students to think about the ecosystem that you need to support students. And, just sometimes the faculty member really doesn't know what to do, and sometimes the best person to help another blind person is another blind person, actually, not one of us, because they know this tool is accessible. And hey guys, which tool is accessible for video editing? 

[00:05:34] Even if Alan says this tool is supposed to be accessible, only someone who's actually used it for sure can really tell you that, oh yeah, it is accessible through a screen reader, for example. So those are the kind, those are things that are on my mind right now. 

[00:05:45] And speaking of openness, because we're talking about that, I recently just created a playlist of how do you create alternative text slides, email, different tools, how do you create closed captions, and just so that you can tell someone, you know what, you have a blind student, watch this five minute video, 

[00:06:01] And that will tell you quite a lot about what you can do in your class, I'm trying to make it like that, like it's not actually as much work as people think. Sometimes people are intimidated. And I'm not like a complete expert on accessibility and I will never claim to be. But there's some things, and then you have the intention and you keep, checking in with people.

[00:06:20] Those are the things that are on my mind a lot these days. 

[00:06:23] Alan Levine: Tell me a little bit about the class that you teach and what's what's, the, what's, it like on, I walk into your class and what do I see and experience happening? 

[00:06:30] Maha Bali: Oh, so you walk into my class and I've been teaching in one of those, super duper active learning classrooms for a while.

[00:06:38] This semester is a slightly different one, but the key idea is I have lots of boards. in my class, and then I also have movable seats, and we can change the arrangements all the time, which is actually quite uncomfortable for people with, with a visual impairment, because some of them learn to navigate your class, and then agreed with them, I do is that I have certain configuration. I'd say we're using the first configuration or the second configuration, and I'm trying not to over change it. 

[00:06:59] But when I don't, I just go all over the place. For the most part, we're sitting in a circle, and then we're breaking up into groups on the boards and doing things on the boards. And the boards are touchscreen and you can have different things on different boards or the same thing on all the boards.

[00:07:13] And it's fun that way because I can, you can walk in and there's a gallery of like different photos of animals and you go next to the animal that you like. And then we have conversations around that. or an exercise that they did the day before, which was like, what are your metaphors for AI?

[00:07:28] Which of these metaphors are anthropomorphizing and making it human? Which ones are positive or negative or mixed about AI? And I asked them to have that discussion amongst themselves and then post that on the board.

[00:07:39] And then we compared everybody's answers and people disagreed on things. and this was a thing where I had to be very intentional. Like I had to pair every visually impaired student with one who was sighted. One of them can't see the screen, but they'd have to have the conversation and make sure they listen to each other in order to do this.

[00:07:56] And then you'd have to describe it back. And, so those are the kinds of things I do in my class. 

[00:08:01] We play games. I sometimes bring in board games. I have these socio emotional board games. We're talking about identity, but I think your emotions are also part of your identity, So we play games. I have a lot of just small talk, like small conversations in small groups before they share with me.

[00:08:19] And, we laugh a lot. 

[00:08:20] Alan Levine: And what, is the, what is the class itself? What is, 

[00:08:21] Maha Bali: Oh, what's it about? It's irrelevant what the class is about.


[00:08:24] The class was called Digital Literacies and Intercconnected Learning, but now it's called [audio gaps] "Digital Literacy, AI Literacy and Intercultural Learning." But it always had an element of AI. I think with generative AI, it became like more central. It was always part of the class. And I start with the intercultural element, like knowing yourself.

[00:08:43] And knowing the bias and all of that, before we get into the technology part. A lot of students at first how are these two parts of the course related to each other? And then they started to say, Oh, I need to know about inequality and inequity in order to then see it in, how, technology can reproduce that or exacerbate that.

[00:09:00] I need to understand about empathy and about othering and then think about, oh, how does technology possibly perpetuate that? And students get also from all over the world on video dialogue, parts of it in different ways. Some of them, I'm not with them and they just go with a facilitator with this program called Thulea.

[00:09:19] And sometimes we do it through people I actually know, like we've done this together before, Alan, when you used to teach with Mia Zamora. Alan. So I do it with various people and they really like that too. 

[00:09:29] Alan Levine: And class to class or year to year. how much are you reinventing and then how much are you changing as you go?

[00:09:39] Maha Bali: Yeah, all the time. At the beginning of the very, very first time I can get up day by day and sometimes I just make decisions on the day. I always invite my students to contribute things. For example, one of the key things that I do in my teaching is use Quickdraw. Jonathan, do you know Quickdraw?

[00:09:54] We should show him Quickdraw. Anyway, it's free and you find it on your phone or you don't have to download it. You can just play it on the web, on your phone. And it's basically Google trying to understand how humans doodle. And so they give you the name of something and you try to doodle it. And then you either, it tries to guess, like it makes itself think like it doesn't know what it is and it tries to guess what you've drawn.

[00:10:12] And it's a really. A good recognition AI in action. Nobody taught the QuickDraw what, what a wheel looks like. It just learned from the different types of wheels that people draw and how close your wheel is to the normative wheel that another person draws. And so I teach them this, and this is a very difficult one to teach when you have people who are visually impaired in the class.

[00:10:33] But it's really useful when you're sighted. and then we play this a few times, and I start to say, Oh, did anybody get a nail? And they're like, so what's a nail? What would you draw for a nail? So it could be a nail with a hammer. And it knows both, because half people go this way, half people go that way, so it knows both things.

[00:10:49] But then it goes to other things, and so bats and bat could be the bat the animal, it could be the baseball bat, cricket bat, whatever. So But then it goes to some other thing, then it starts to show its bias. So when you draw a hospital, it's expecting a cross on the hospital. We don't have cross on hospitals here, we have crescents.

[00:11:00] So it starts to do things like that, and then I say, that's what it is. The training, the data set, the dominant people do this. And even if you play QuickDraw in Arabic, it's still you just asking you the question in Arabic. And it's actually using very weird vocabulary for the Arabic things. I don't even understand what it's asking for half the time. 

[00:11:16] I actually learned this. How did I learn this? This was a student, I give my students DS 106 Assignment Bank, which Alan is part of the creation of, and I tell them to choose their own digital literacies pathway, choose something that interests you and, go ahead and do that.

[00:11:30] And, And then that's how I learned about QuickDraw. Sometimes I invite students to contribute anything to the class. So one of them contributed the move from just talking about bias to talking about Othering more broadly. That was her idea. I had another student who contributed really interesting fake news stories.

[00:11:47] There was actually an Egyptian student from my institution who convinced, who kept creating fake news about a relationship she had with NASA. And people believed her. It was crazy. And then, so someone showed me a video of her telling the story of how she kept going and she'd make a Photoshop image with Ellen and then in a Photoshop conversation with Elon Musk and things like that, people would believe her, it was incredible.

[00:12:13] So yeah, so students contribute a lot to what's the new things that I'm going to talk about. And then sometimes whatever interests them in the course becomes a thing that we focus on a little bit more. And so sometimes I do more or less of other things, but there's also this openness of choose your own pathway for certain parts of the course.

[00:12:30] So over time, I've added an AI pathway. Okay, you want to explore AI? Okay, go try these different things. And this semester, I'm working on the AI Pedagogy Project from the metaLAB in Harvard to choose their own assignments to explore AI.

[00:12:44] You're interested in visual AI, do this. You're interested in text based AI, do this. And come back and report back to the rest of the students so that they've all learned slightly different things that they were interested in. And then I learned from them as well. 

[00:12:57] Alan Levine: I'm always interested because I'm not working with students right now, and how do you gauge this? Like, where are students at in terms of not their awareness, like their positioning of themselves with regards to what AI means? Obviously we know that they're going to explore it on their own. But I just think like, how are they seeing it fold into their future work, studies, et cetera?

[00:13:21] Maha Bali: That's a good question. So first of all, the first thing I have to tell you is it takes a while for students to start trusting you to tell you what they really think of you. So last semester, I remember the first day of class, yeah, who uses AI? And two people raised their hands.

[00:13:35] And then three weeks later, "so which AI tool do you use?" Everybody had a particular tool. They had to take time to trust you to know that, that's not the thing you're going to penalize them on. I think the awareness is changing. There are some students who are just really scared of it, and they really don't want to go near it, and I I want to respect that as well, and I want to give them opportunities to learn about it and explore it without creating accounts. So one of the nice things about the Harvard Pedagogy Project, I'm on their advisory board, so I like it, but it's just, it's got an LLM like place to play around in. 

[00:14:04] There's a space to play around with something that looks like chatGPT, but it isn't like you don't have to create an account to use it. So that's a space where you can let someone play safely without losing any of their privacy. It's not really collecting any of their data while it's doing that.

[00:14:15] So that's important to give them spaces to do that if they really don't want to use it. but the other thing to me is I think they, I think everybody needs to understand what's going on here, and then make their decision but you need to know what it is and how it's working and then make your decision and. 

[00:14:28] Most of the time, the more you use it, the less impressed you're going to be with it. As you how much it can do because you also get to see the limits of it. And the limits of it are huge for me. 

[00:14:39] A lot of people come out and say, oh, I'm gonna use it as a tutor. How do you use something as a tutor that hallucinates every now and then and gives the wrong answer to someone who's still learning something?

[00:14:47] They won't know that it's wrong. At least if you Google it, and this is my daughter, when she was like 10 years old. She's at least if I Google it, I'll know the source and then I can decide if it's a good source. But if you get it from AI, you don't know where it's from. 

[00:15:02] So anyway, so what I try to do in the classes with my students, model a little bit of exploring the limits of what it can do. I was just showing you it doesn't create flags very well and because flags have a precise answer, it flight only has one way it can look. And AI is not trying to get you the right answer.

[00:15:19] It's just getting everything it thinks might be related to it. 

[00:15:23] Instead of the Egyptian flag, it just gives me King Tut and things like that. That was Stable Diffusion. But the US has been so trained, trained on that one, but every other flag I've tried has been just an amalgam of things related to the flag.

[00:15:37] I think the visual AI helps a lot and that's really difficult because visually impaired students aren't seeing that, but the visual AI gets, it's very obvious when it's messing up. But then it's really fun when you do it for creative stuff. So I'm trying to get them to think about that, and then apply that, transfer that to writing.

[00:15:53] I think, because most of the people I teach are non native speakers of English, they're impressed by the grammatical correctness. It makes me really sad because I've seen students use it to write email and then the emails, it looks like they're lying because it's so perfect.

[00:16:06] The English is so perfect and it's so polite and so formal and students don't even remember to put a subject to the email. Like, how are they writing these emails? So I asked my students, are you guys using, can you put it through Grammarly and then we put it through Quillbot put it through ChatGPT. they don't even just use it in one way.

[00:16:21] They use a cocktail of tools in some way that makes sense to them. 

[00:16:26] Alan Levine: Yeah, I keep wondering when the spammers are going to start making better use of AI, because being able to recognize, bad spam used to be easy. The language often was so bad. It will happen. I wonder too, you've done a lot about, and you're talking about this class is in AI Literacy and, I just came out of a, we had a panel discussion from Chrissi Nerantzi's students at University of Leeds, which is really good about, their vision of what AI literacy. But the idea of literacy, in something that is amorphously changing on us and that we don't understand.

[00:17:05] I can guess what the way you'll describe it. it's really our expectations and how we can be critical of it. Yeah, I could learn to be literate in Greek if I, took classes and things, but Greek is changing into a different language every time I talk to it.

[00:17:22] And so it's a different kind of literacy, right? 

[00:17:25] Maha Bali: That's a great point. but let's just go, Let's step back a second. So AI exists for a really long time. And Machine Learning has existed for a really long time. And, when I was an undergrad 20 years ago, I created a neural network that used machine learning to do something, right?

[00:17:42] This has existed for a long time. It's been used in medicine. It's been used in a lot of different fields. if you understand the basic way it works, it helps explain a lot of things. 

[00:17:51] So whatever is changing, we're still basically pretty much the same kind of technology, or elaborate, but it's, if you understand that, that helps you understand a lot why it will always hallucinate, because it's not meant to not hallucinate. We're talking about machine learning and not expert systems that are trained to think like a particular expert, it's trained to learn randomly, and then probabilistically, and so on. Yeah, the statistical model.

[00:18:12] When you think about what it gets trained on. All of these things that we learn, and everything we've learned from what's happened before, helps interpret a lot of what we're going through now.

[00:18:19] So all of the people who've been talking about how AI has been racist and ableist for years, of course the new AI is just like the old AI. They haven't worked on that yet. Not enough. And then when they try to work on things, like when they had a bad experience of the AI that started to just spew offensive language and violence.

[00:18:36] And so they tried to avoid that this time around, then they used human beings. And then those human beings, laborers whose mental health was basically destroyed by this exercise. So that happened. And then also what ended up happening is that someone somewhere in the company that's Open AI decided 

[00:18:54] it's offensive, and these things are not. Sometimes it surprises you about what it considers to be offensive and what it won't draw. It will give you pictures of all kinds of people, but it won't give me pictures of, dead, Egyptian presidents for some reason. What's wrong with that? 

[00:19:07] I don't know what's wrong with that. And it'll, At some point it wouldn't give me feminist interpretations of the Qur'an and I thought, that's offensive, I was offended that was considered offensive. And then another time it would, I don't even know how that works.

[00:19:19] So they're not being transparent, and that's clearly one of the issues, right? They don't know what they're training it on, and those are the things we need to always be critical of, but we always need to get, go to try and see what's going on right now. And as much as I'm very concerned about the environmental impact, and I don't understand the extent of it because I don't think we know.

[00:19:39] We have enough data to know how bad it is, but we expect that it's pretty bad, from what we know, From what we know it's pretty bad, but they don't be transparent a lot of things. and I keep thinking, maybe I, I try to minimize how much I use it. 

[00:19:51] But for my teaching and actually need to know what's going on here. I think educators really need to know what's going on because their students are going to use it whether or not we think it's ethical or whether or not we think it's appropriate for our particular course.

[00:20:01] We still need to know because we need to know it when we see it. I always say like our sense is much stronger than an AI detector. Then sometimes you're like, yeah, actually, it's okay for you to use AI to this extent, and especially people in like science and engineering tend to feel like that's okay.

[00:20:15] But then if you really don't want your students to use it, you really need to know what it can do so that what you're asking them to do isn't the thing that it can do. When the [internet Please don't create an exam where the answer is on Google. Don't do that. that's the point.

[00:20:28] They'll be able to find Google when they go into the job market or when they go into life, so there's no reason to pretend , no reason to be that inauthentic with our students. So I think it's the same for AI. If it's gonna, if it's something that all of them are going to give the same answer to, then they're going to copy it from each other, they're going to get, whatever it is.

[00:20:42] It's not even just AI. There's that too. 

[00:20:42] Alan Levine: I generally find it interesting when it's so easy to get drawn into that conversational part where you and like, I remember like, when you tried Eliza I, it was so obvious that it was programmed and, you did fall in with it. Often with this, you feel like, sometimes I'm yelling at it or sometimes I'm just, shaking my head.

[00:21:01] Maha Bali: Have you tried the voice ones as well? Like the chat GPT with voice? I start yelling at it. I was trying to get it to speak good Arabic and it's Arabic was so bad. And the Arabic language teachers here are like, I want to have my students use ChatGPT to help them with oral practice. I'm like, it has a horrible accent.

[00:21:16] That's not a good thing. Why do you want to do that? You have so many Egyptians around you. If a student is here, you just go speak to someone. why are we thinking about using AI to replace things that we have perfectly available, human beings right here. Pay them something if you want or find a way to make it worth their time.

[00:21:33] Alan Levine: And I always find chat GPT just sounds, it sounds too smug. I don't like that. A panel we were on and a librarian from a university in Missouri, she says they refer to it as their intern "Chad". And they trust Chad to do simple things. Chad is unreliable and they have, they refer to Chad, the intern.

[00:21:54] We can go on about AI forever and I don't mind, but what other things are burning at your curiosity and interest level?

[00:22:03] Maha Bali: There's always a lot of things actually. The other thing, I'm, Simone and I are expanding our work on equity and care, and this has not been published yet. So this is just like we submitted a proposal about this. We'll talk about it some more. 

[00:22:16] We're trying to expand, not just talking about equity and care and intentionally equitable hospitality, but also the nuances of when it's authentic and when it's formative and then the nuances of what it's when it's public and when it's private.

[00:22:30] And when it's collective and how all these things feed into ecosystems of care. How that helps us move towards more social justice. I don't know if we talked about this before or during the recording, but it's like distributed responsibility for being equitable. For that to happen, everyone needs to have a sense of what it means that there are inequities here and to notice the inequities and then to be willing to address them and wanting to address them.

[00:22:53] I would say, because of Yasser, I'm much more aware of what a personal impairment needs, but I'm much less aware of what a hearing impairment would have. Although my mom, for example, doesn't hear very well, but she's not my student. And I don't know if, if we were in a group of, 20 people, how would I care for her?

[00:23:10] It's very different than when it's just me and her. 

[00:23:12] How do you build this nuanced care for new inequities that you may not have grown up to be aware of, or you don't have a lot of experience with? And I'm going to say something political here, and a lot of people who are pro social justice suddenly are not feeling it for Palestine.

[00:23:29] Suddenly these are oppressed people, and that this is a genocide, for example. And how do you build that sensibility of, you may, you can, by the way, be very angry about the Holocaust, and very angry about what happened on October 7th, and still realize that historically the Palestinian people have been oppressed, and that what is happening right now is truly socially unjust?

[00:23:51] And still understand that this is triggering for people who are Holocaust survivors and that this is triggering for people who were born in Israel. How do we work with injustices that people are not used to recognizing and helping people build that sensibility? Because, as someone who is a woman, I'm always aware of gender inequality, right?

[00:24:10] It was easier for me to understand LGBTQ issues when I got to know more people who are LGBTQ. But I did not grow up understanding that. It took me a while to understand that, right? And then, as someone of my own social class, upper middle class, this is a harder thing. This takes a lot more effort for me, and I will make mistakes, and I recognize my privilege. So I think it's one of those things like how do we keep iterating towards justice always and recognizing that we're never there.

[00:24:40] And that it's always going to be a struggle and there will sometimes the road towards justice won't appear clear. And you won't know how to get there without someone getting harmed along the way. So 

[00:24:53] Alan Levine: I love that description "iterating towards justice", because sometimes these things that they try to boil something so complex to an either /or.

[00:25:05] Like you said, having an appreciation for the genocide that is happening to Palestinian people and, also that it was, it's always bad to have genocide. Come on, it doesn't matter, like which, which side, that you think you're on because, we're on the side of people and, yeah, I look forward to it.

[00:25:24] Jonathan, you're here. Do you want to, ask anything? the original, I was saying like, we should just have people come on who can tell Maha stories.

[00:25:31] Jonathan Poritz: I, as I've said to Maha before, anytime I see Maha's going to be somewhere, if I can fit into my schedule, I just want to go to see, to learn things from her. So I'm just happy to hear. I love some of the things you've been talking about, the, the other, the non AI work you're doing lately, about the, bringing in distributive, distributed, not distributive, that's another term, but, ideas of justice, I think it's really interesting.

[00:25:49] I think, I feel like one of the things I notice about education-- I taught math for, and computer science for most of my teaching career, and it seems like a lot of the failure mode of teaching mathematics, at least in the United States, is, shut up and compute this thing, which is, memorize some formulas and compute, turn yourself into a lousy computational device, is the easiest thing that we, we end up doing to people.

[00:26:15] And, I think it's easy for people to have a sense of authority because I'm the one who understands these things. And I think it's interesting that when you were talking about it, it seems to require a little bit. letting go of authority, letting other people, speak, fill in those, their insights.

[00:26:30] As you were saying, an instructor might not have the insights into the disability experience of students with another student might have a greater insight. So I think it's letting go of a sense of authority in the classroom is, I think really is an important background step, which is what you were just describing, which I feel is something is important in my, now former career as a math professor.

[00:26:50] So it's interesting to hear you talk about that. 

[00:26:53] Maha Bali: That's a really good point about what you're saying in terms of this letting go of authority aspect. And I think what's really tricky that I think sometimes we forget to talk about is it's so important to let go of authority, but it's also important to recognize there's power between the students and amongst themselves.

[00:27:07] And so even among people who are visually impaired. They have a hierarchy, I was born blind, you became blind. And there's also, they deal in different ways, and they navigate the world in different ways, and some of them feel like the way they do it is superior, and others. Oh, they're all this, and therefore they will deal with it in the same way, and that's also interesting. This is one of the things that I've told my visually impaired students as well, When you cannot see, you don't have the visual cues that someone else wants to talk.

[00:27:35] So when we're having a class discussion and it's opening. You don't have to raise your hand. This person to speak will always be a person that someone else has raised their hand and they want to speak and unless you start to set rules and say, "Okay, there is someone else who wants to speak and I will come back to you."

[00:27:52] Yesterday in my class at the beginning and he was my friend before he was my students was very comfortable talking and stuff. And he kept talking, and then one day he's like, why is nobody talking in class? I'm like, because you're talking all the time, and they're intimidated by you.

[00:28:06] So then he started to, So you would think he's the most marginalized person in the room, but actually he's had a lot of privilege because he knew me very well, and he's a very confident person and he's just a great personality. So he learned to back off a little bit and the class became better because he gave everyone else more space to start speaking before him.

[00:28:22] And he was always ready to talk. So I knew I was, I could always go back to him. But so that was an interesting thing to realize. Hey, Nate. So good to see you. 

[00:28:30] Alan Levine: Welcome to the, this turned out to be the friend show. and this, I did this earlier today. I had one of my drop in sessions with, Martin Weller and Marin Deepwell and, Jonathan Worth was there and then, and Marie-Scott

[00:28:39] showed up. This idea about having time where we have unstructured conversation.  it's Virtually Connecting in many ways, that seems to have slid by, a lot in the past. And so it's been very reassuring to have these conversations where we can really listen and be there and be with. 

[00:28:58] Maha Bali: Jonathan, were you ever part of a Virtually Connecting session? I don't know. Did we know each other at the time? 

[00:29:04] Jonathan Poritz: Yeah, that was a great experience. I actually heard you speaking. I think it was at a Creative Common Summit the And I heard you in another context and you were talking about sometimes, and you say a white male academic just dominated some virtually speaking session and really ruined it for everyone else. I was thinking, Oh my God, was that me?

[00:29:24] I hope I never do that. Because everyone has seen those, but yeah. 

[00:29:29] Maha Bali: So for people who don't know, so Virtually Connecting was to [a] grassroots movement to bring in hallway conversations, like informal unstructured conversations for people who aren't at a conference to have a talk with people who were at the conference. and it's not like hybrid and watching things.

[00:29:43] It's just having these conversations what we're having now. And it fell away a little bit during the pandemic because the conferences that were online were so condensed there was no time for it. so we did MyFest, Alan? and Nate was also part of that Mid Year Festival. I don't know if you ever joined us.

[00:29:58] Did you ever join us for that, Jonathan? Mid Year Festival? 

[00:30:02] Let's make it three months. Why does it need to be three days? We're online anyway. Everybody's home. Just, chill, take it, take some days off, come back, one or two sessions a day, five a week or something, and, and then it's time for conversation.

[00:30:16] And we have time for some presentations or whatever, but. we're hoping to organize another one this, this mid year. 

[00:30:23] Alan Levine: I look forward to seeing that. I do want to know, because, I am again, so impressed the way that you handle, especially large audiences when we do, when you do a virtual-- it, it's not a keynote or presentation.

[00:30:36] It's almost It's to some degree, I feel like I'm in the room with you. But, like, how do you, what is your, not, a recipe, just like, how do you go about thinking about making those sessions be something, the way they come off to those who are there in the audience? 

[00:30:53] Maha Bali: Yeah. So it's interesting the way you asked that question, because I think you focused on like making the fact that I make you feel like we're together in the room, right? And First of all, I imagine what I would have done if we were in the room, and I imagine what I would have done if we were like three or four people. 

[00:31:08] And I think about, of all the things that I know, which most of the things that I know are not like certainties that are like there's, there can only be one way. And so there's, I always think about where's an opportunity where I can get to know who these people are. So One of the crazy things to me about keynoting online is I have no idea who's there.

[00:31:26] I don't know anything about them. I haven't had lunch with them. I haven't had breakfast with them. I haven't like even shook hands. I'm like, I don't know, nothing. I haven't been there the night before. Like these things help prepare you for a session the next day. 

[00:31:37] If I'm in a conference face to face, I'm editing my slides up until the moment I'm up on the podium, because someone said something just before mine that I think is relevant to what I wanted to say, and I wanna show them that I was listening. It's relevant anyway, so it, it makes sense to make those connections.

[00:31:51] And so I always think about like, how am I gonna connect with people there to know something about them that will help me, modify my session as I go. And so one of the things like I do is -- and Martin Weller is the person who taught me this. I was getting invited to keynotes, like I'm like nobody wants you to do a new keynote.

[00:32:10] If they invited you, they've seen you somewhere else and they want something similar. So don't make it too different. But the way I make it different is that I ask questions at the beginning, always. And so I get to know a little bit about them. And then I build on that as I go. So for example, I always ask how they're feeling.

[00:32:24] And then it depends on what time of semester it is for them. And I learn something about what's going on there. And if it's hot or cold or things like that. And then I often will ask some questions related to what's on their mind. 

[00:32:35] So a lot of times if it's a long conference and I'm the closing keynote, I'm not the first session. I wasn't there at all the other sessions because it's really hard when you're online keynoting all the time to go to the conference. I'm like a helicopter keynote online. And so I want to know, what have you guys been talking about, or what's on your mind, or what's a challenge you're facing right now, and these kinds of things.

[00:32:52] And then it's the same slides, or similar slides to what I've used elsewhere, but I'm commenting on them completely differently based on what people have been saying all the time. I think the key thing here, and I've seen other people try to do this and fail. There are two key things to when you ask people questions.

[00:33:06] The first one is when they answer within 30 seconds. Don't ask, a question that the answer is a paragraph, or it's actually really hard to answer, or it actually has a right answer. Don't do that. Or it's an intimidating thing -- like I'm very careful if I'm keynoting within an institution, not to make them out, systemic issues in their own institution too much.

[00:33:25] But I ask those questions when we're more open, and I use Mentimeter so that it's anonymous. So it's really important to think about how someone will feel to be named for certain things. So what do you ask in the chat versus what do you ask on a Mentimeter? So that whether they're virtual or on site, they all connect in the same space. and then the other thing is you read out what people say. People sometimes ask questions and then they only read out three of them, three of them. No, I read all, as much of them as possible unless they're like repeated, and then use a word cloud which helps with repeating and sometimes there's AI that helps with that.

[00:33:54] So I think that's really important. and honestly, it does help a lot if there is one or two people in the audience that I actually do know. , it's not fair because, I'm more connected to those people than everybody else there, but then it just feels personal. So recently, I was keynoting at Thompson Rivers University, and Carolyn Ives, came on camera with me just before I went live.

[00:34:14] That's a huge difference. It made me feel welcome and like I was there. I was, There's a lot of people, and Brenna was, like, Brenna and Brian were in the chat, and that, that made me feel good, even though I don't know anyone else. But then, and also then, if there's a chat that's live, and I start to notice certain people are chatting a lot more, and then I start to notice them. 

[00:34:30] There's this thing with social media, too, that I think a lot of people think with social media, we're just broadcasting to lots of people.

[00:34:35] But no, I'm making connections with Alan Levine, and I'm getting to know this person, I'm getting to know Nate Angell this person, I'm getting to know Jonathan, this person, right? It's not about, like, all these people, So I think that's, important.

[00:34:46] I think sometimes when people say something that makes me feel an emotion, I'll react emotionally to it. Sometimes someone, and Sometimes I'm asking people, what's good for your well being? So I get to know what they like, and  I don't know if you can ask about, what's helping your well being these days. It's not about their dogs, or their families, or their kids, or music, or walks, or, nature, and I, if I have something that I connect with, I say, I've started to appreciate nature a lot after the pandemic, things like that.

[00:35:09] And they seem like they're not connected to the keynote, but they totally always are, whatever the keynote is about, they're always connected in some way. 

[00:35:16] Oh, I love it. So something really nice happened to me related to crochet recently. I was giving, an invited talk, with, to someone, I don't know this person almost at all, and he's introducing me, normally, my bio, and then he's and you should read her blog, and her latest blog, and I'm like, what was my latest blog, what was my latest blog, he said, it was about crochet.

[00:35:36] Okay, it's but it's really relevant to AI and it's really relevant and it was, but I thought nobody would read it. Like sometimes you write something that's like such a weird connection. 

[00:35:46] I've seen this post, but it's about frogging and crochet. So when you do something and they do it wrong and then you have to undo it and then you have to redo it again. And someone was talking about how important it is to be comfortable being bad at something new. We're always bad when we're new. if you were good at everything you're new at, like that would be weird. Then what would be the point of experience? What would be the point of doing something for a long time, right?

[00:36:08] And so my daughter, as a younger person of this generation, used to get very frustrated when she got something wrong. And I was like, totally okay, let's undo it, let's redo it. And then you get better at knowing to undo a little bit instead of undoing the entire [thing]. And the problem is, when you use AI, Ha!

[00:36:22] You don't get through that frustration, and you need to feel a little bit of frustration to actually learn. And so some things need to be a little bit hard and you learn through that, and I'm not the kind of person who wants people to suffer to learn, honestly, I'm okay with learning through fun and all of that, but it's okay to not be good at the beginning.

[00:36:42] You shouldn't be perfect from the beginning, that's, totally okay. 

[00:36:46] When, Nate knows this, because he helped me with my, helped me with my baking, I was making cookies, and then suddenly I got better at making cookies, and I just got better and better, but the first time I did it, I just thought, I think I put twice the amount of butter or something like that.

[00:36:57] And his daughter's "I think she did something wrong with the butter." But then you get better, and you learn from your mistakes, and then you invent new things. And that's what I think is the issue. You know what, it's not about just how, with AI, like the learning, but then you start to invent new things, or you recover from your mistakes, like one time I was trying to do a square, but I realized that I counted something wrong, and I made it into a star, and it's really nice.

[00:37:19] I figured out how to make it work, and then you're creative, like you mess up the cake, you change things a little bit, and then it's still edible, 

[00:37:26] I love crochet, it's really relaxing. My mom's in the hospital right now, and a friend from high school, is a doctor who's specialized in what she needs, and he's just passing by as a volunteer to help out. And I'm like, I can't pay him for this, like there's no way I can pay him back, but I made a little beret for his daughter with crochet, and he really appreciated that, I like it for the possibility of making things personal, I like it because it's so bright in an age of a lot of technology.

[00:37:54] And I think that it feels like something that, yeah, it doesn't feel like it gets done with machines in the same way it's when humans do it and there's so much room for creativity and, community, like doing it together and learning from each other and, giving and, then, and exploring different textures and it's, I love things that you can touch.

[00:38:17] And it helped me actually explain to Yasser. what fractals are. These crocheters have done a million different ways to create a million different things that do not look alike, but they're actually really, when you look really closely at them, they're actually the same thing. And so that I thought that was also interesting.

[00:38:34] Alan Levine: So I read that post and I said, this is this is classic Maha. There's so much here. And so I just appreciate it. There's more here, even when you talked about it. So I appreciate you you're willing to do this. And I firmly believe it's so much better to mess up in public. It's not bad.

[00:38:52] And so I just run into again, the, this fear of not being perfect. And it's Oh my gosh, it's such a relief not to be perfect. It's more fun. 

[00:39:01] Maha Bali: I was gonna say, Actually life is complicated and messy and human bodies are not machines. And it's not A plus B equals C and it's complicated and they will maybe make mistakes, but hopefully they'll be able to undo them. I'm hoping. 

[00:39:15] Alan Levine: All right. I don't know if I'm ready to take up crochet. I'm not ready to take up crochet yet, but I'm a little bit inspired. I'm always inspired when we get a chance to talk. And, again, like for me, it just so reinforces why I was so pleased when you were selected for the Award for Excellence because you typify that award  Thank you so much, Maha. 

[00:39:36] Maha Bali: so much. It made me so happy to get that award, thank you. 

[00:39:39] Alan Levine: You've been listening to a new episode of OE Global Voices, the podcast produced by Open Education Global, where we featured a conversation with last year's OE Award for Excellence winner in the education category, Maha Bali. This was recorded live on March 6th, 2024, as an event during Open Education Week.

[00:40:03] And we appreciate our guests listening in with us in the studio, Nate Angell and Jonathan Poritz. We ask that you start thinking about a person, project, or resource worth nominating for the 2024 Open Education Awards as nominations open May 13. You can find all the information about the awards program at awards. oeglobal. org. 

[00:40:26] Each episode of OE Global Voices features a different musical intro track selected from the Free Music Archive. To honor the daring attitude of Maha Bali, even in the effort of crochet, today's show features a song called "I Dare You"  by Little Glass Men, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

[00:40:47] You can find this episode at our site, voices.oeglobal.org, where you can ask your questions about what you heard or share your comments with Maha in our OEG Connect community, connect.oeglobal.org. If you're listening and would like to share your open education work or suggest a future guest, please let us know via our website or email to voices@oeglobal.org