Thomas Keenan
Professor, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, University of Calgary, Canada
Interviewed December 2020 by Mac McGinn
MM Tom, let’s start off with you telling a little bit about yourself. I understand you have a little bit of a story to introduce as well.
TK I was born in New York City. I went to Columbia University and wound up getting a wide range of degrees there, everything from engineering to philosophy to education. I came to Calgary in 1972 to take a job in the Computer Services Department of the University of Calgary and I’ve been with the University ever since. I have been a professor of computer science, a professor of continuing education, dean of the Faculty of Continuing Education, and now I have the honour of being both a professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape (SAPL) and an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science. My lifelong interest has been cybersecurity. It’s a subject that’s never going to let us down. There’s always something surprising and it teaches me a lot of great lessons. When COVID-19 came along, one thing that I learned is that it’s always a good idea, educationally, to give your message right out front in case people tune out. So, I’m going to tell you in the next ninety seconds or so, the key message I want to get across with a little story.
It starts out soon after COVID. I went into a food store and there was a big, long line to get through the checkout. I saw a sign saying something like “first responders and medical personnel—we honour and thank you—please come to the front of the line.” Now, I have a doctorate from Columbia University, but I’m not a medical doctor. But hey, I do have a white lab coat. Of course, lots of people have a lab coat, so that might not be convincing enough. But then it occurred to me that I had something else, an old medical ID card. I was an actor in a movie that was shot at the Calgary General Hospital. I played a doctor named Dr. Joseph Bullock. As we were about to shoot a scene, the assistant director said “Hey, that doc doesn’t have an ID badge.” So, I was marched down to human resources where they took my photo and laminated up a badge in my character’s name. I still have it in a souvenir box.
And here’s the point. Just because I could have used this ID card and my lab coat to get to the front of the line, I didn’t do it. My key message about teaching with technology is that just because you can do it doesn’t mean that you should. For example, you can probably spy on your students in whole new ways and find things out about them, but don’t do it. Make sure that every use of technology is intelligent. In fact, I teach a course on intelligent communities and that’s a key message of that course: just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should.
MM Going forward into online education and having to do remote learning, that brings up some interesting aspects for educators and instructors. What does your teaching look like now in 2020, considering the adjustments we’ve had to make with COVID?
TK One part of my teaching has not changed, and that’s the EVDS 401, which is now called ARCH 400, the overview course of our SAPL disciplines that anybody at the university can take. We had as many as 120 students sign up in the Spring semester, and that was because they didn’t have summer jobs so they thought they might take courses instead. That course has been completely online for nine years now. We designed it right from scratch to be a totally asynchronous, virtual experience for the students. It’s very popular, I have to say, and it often has a long waiting list. Each week I get one of our professors to speak about something really interesting in their field of expertise. I cut that lecture down and I build a week around that. There’s a week on urban planning, there’s a week on industrial design, there’s a couple of weeks on different aspects of architecture, residential architecture and so on. That course did not need to change at all to adapt to COVID-19 since it was designed to be completely online.
My other teaching has moved to Zoom. That’s different, and there are pluses and minuses. One of the things is that when I have a room of maybe thirty students, I say go form a group and work together, and they go with their friends. Well, now Zoom assigns them randomly and they get to meet everybody else. So, in this aspect, the switch to Zoom has been a plus.
However, I do see more people getting very stressed. Some students are just disoriented; people that I have known and who I think should be fine but are not. I had one young lady e-mail me this morning, saying my computer crashed and I have lost my final paper. What am I to do? The computer security guy said, I hope you had a backup, but I gave her extra time. I am seeing a lot more of the human side where people are suffering. I had one guy who said, I can’t really go to look at a neighbourhood in Calgary for EVDS 401. I have never been to Calgary. I’m in Nairobi, Kenya, and I’m a first-year student. So, I said, well, do a neighbourhood walk in Nairobi, that’s fine. But I also thought how weird it must be to be a first-year student at a university when you’ve never even set foot in the country where it’s located.
MM I think this is the first time in this interview series that I’ve had somebody say that their course hasn’t changed. It’s great to hear that you were already set up beforehand.
TK Well, let me tell you another story. We’re going back to the 1970s, early 1980s when I taught some courses by audio teleconference. We didn’t have Zoom, nor did we have the ability to do video conferencing. I would go into a place similar to a radio studio. I had people taking this course from all over the province and we were studying computers. There were computers then, but they were hard to come by. You could actually buy a Timex Sinclair computer for about $100. So, I called up the Timex Canada people, and I said, can you give me a university deal? They were very abrupt, and they said, we’re not in computers, we’re a watch company. I said, I have an ad here that says you sell computers. And they said, yeah, that was a bad mistake. Do you have some? Unfortunately, yes, they said, we have 755 of them. I said if we can set a good price, I will buy them all. I think we got them for about $30 each and I had them shipped to Calgary. For several years on that course we gave away one of these computers. It was a big thing—a $100 course that included a free computer.
So, we were doing the course via audio teleconferencing and back then you had to store your programs on a cassette deck. I had a student in Peace River, and he couldn’t get his cassette deck to record his programs. I couldn’t see him of course, and I finally said, look, Carl, would you please describe your cassette player? And he said, well, it’s pink and it says My Little Pony on the side. I said, I think you have your daughter’s cassette player. Go buy one that’s a Sony or Sanyo. The point of this is that I have also learned the limitations of technology. That very day I swore we would never do another course by audio teleconferencing where we really needed to see the people.
MM Interesting. That leads us into the next question as well. What are the opportunities that you see being created by digital education?
TK Brilliant ones. I chair the board of the Information and Communications Technology (ICTC) Council of Canada. We normally go to Ottawa three times a year where we have a dinner with the CEO and a board meeting. It became very clear that we were not going to be able to do that for this last board meeting and we were all disappointed. We like to see each other. But I talked to my son about it and I said, do you have any ideas? And he said, why don’t you turn it into an opportunity and go out there and find somebody that you normally wouldn’t be able to bring to the meeting? So, we found a member of the German government who was able to give us their perspective. Before the switch to remote meetings, we would not have asked this person to fly to Ottawa for a forty-five-minute presentation. I know that in the architecture program, they’re bringing in people as guest speakers that normally would not want to come to the university, wouldn’t have the time, or who live in a different place.
It’s a good thing and a bad thing. It means that the whole world is on the list of guest lecturers. The flip side is what I call the astronaut problem. I happen to know people at NASA, and they said we have this awful issue when the astronauts talk to grade three students. And I said, why is that awful? And they said, well, there’s only so many hours in the day and the astronauts are busy. We have a list of 14,000 teachers who want their kids to talk to the astronauts. We’re going to get into that situation where some of the best guest speakers from around the world are going to get Zoom fatigue and maybe start telling us no.
MM Zoom fatigue is a quite real aspect. I have also seen in my courses that we’ve had a lot of international guest lectures coming in and providing different perspectives that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to see or access. So, on the flip side of that, what challenges do you think are experienced more through this online, remote education?
TK I think there’s the mental challenge. I mean, as you said, there is Zoom fatigue and there are also students who are attending university in a country that they haven’t even been to yet. I think it’s taking a toll on peoples’ psyche. Many may be cooped up, particularly if they’re in an environment where they don’t have a space of their own, maybe in a multigenerational family household. I’m certainly seeing students struggling with that. The problem is that, in person, I can look a student in the face and see that they’re not doing okay. On Zoom you can hide that. A lot of students turn off their camera, even when we encourage them to leave it on. I might go through an entire class without ever looking somebody in the eye, and I am worried that they’re going to miss something important.
Then there are obviously questions of academic integrity. There are worries such as, if we can’t see the student, how do we know it really is that student taking the test, and things like that. But I think that this is actually an opportunity. I have a doctorate in education, and I think that the idea of putting students in the gym for three hours with a proctor walking around to invigilate a timed exam is not always the best way to test if they’ve learned something. So, in my classes I’ve come up with ways where we don’t have final exams, but I get a pretty good idea about whether or not they know the material.
MM Interesting, if you could elaborate a little bit more I’d like to hear about how you’re testing and going through those new processes.
TK Well, the course that I have coming up in the Winter term is a course that anyone can take. It’s called EVDS 402—Design, Digital Technology and the Built Environment. It’s based on my own research and a book that I wrote called Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy. This is the textbook for the course—I don’t feel too bad about requiring it because it’s less than $20, and you can use the e-book. So, for EVDS 402, we have three-hour classes, and that’s a little unusual for an undergraduate course. I give a lecture for about the first hour, and then I give the students a problem and they go off into groups with their classmates. Then they come back in the third hour and make their presentations. The result is that their presentation skills become extremely good, there’s no question about that. When it comes to grading, those presentations are their micro-grades. Each one of them is worth maybe four or five percent of their final grade. I grade all of the presentations and if there are, let’s say, ten of these presentations in the course, I take the five highest grades for each student. So, the reality is that every week they learn something. Every week they share and work together on the presentations with their peers, and every week they show their work to me. If they do a bad job, I let them know. I might say, you got a C on that first presentation and that’s not really up to par. But you can still get an A in the course. Here’s how you can make it better. By the end of the term, I actually have a really good sense of what they know and can give honest grades.
MM Absolutely. I think that instead of the traditional term project, creating a midterm and a final to be able to test and acknowledge students’ work, and assess their progress each week is a great methodology. It would be great to be able to keep students more consistently focused and attentive throughout the whole semester, instead of just having students think, well, all my projects are not due for another three weeks, so I’ll put that on the back burner. Then they’re panicking the night before.
TK That never turns out well.
MM Definitely not. So, you did mention that you use Zoom as one of your most frequently used software tools. Is there anything else that you are using as a primary software tool?
TK So, the global answer to that question is the Internet, but we all know you can spend an awful lot of time on the Internet and just waste your time, so I try to channel students into what are useful resources. I like to use specialized search engines and search databases. So, if the students are going to do something in psychology, I tell them to log on to their Taylor Family Digital Library account and use PsycINFO because that will help to narrow it down. In the course that I teach on smart communities, I’m a big fan of the Intelligent Community Forum (www.intelligentcommunity.org), which names the Intelligent Community of the Year each summer and provides lots of terrific resources.
I always tell the students to go look at their stuff first. Then it may take them off in other directions. So, I don’t want to just say the Internet is my primary software tool. It’s the Internet, along with guidance, that directs them to things that I think are going to be useful.
MM I like that you brought up the term “guidance” instead of just saying, go look at this topic, and then have your students sift through so many different avenues and routes. The Internet is so broad. It’s good to hear that as an educator, there are ways that you can provide good guidance through those kinds of software and tools. You’ve talked about directing students to the Taylor Family Digital Library databases to help them narrow down their searches to get the information they need more efficiently, but is that the only way to do it? Or are there more?
TK It depends on the field of study. As I said, in psychology, which I know pretty well, PsycINFO is a curated database. You’re not going to find papers in there on high density lumber or other things like that. You’re going to find relevant articles.
The human beings in the library are amazingly good and they’re accessible by chat. I hate to tell people this because it’ll get really busy there, but the reality is that you can ask them your research questions and at the very least, they’ll be able to point you in the right direction. And these are human beings. I think they’re pretty much all working from home now. Most of the time when I go to that library info chat line, there’s no delay. They get right on it. I see nothing wrong with seeking human assistance to point you in the right direction.
Then there’s peer learning. In all of my courses I have discussion boards. They’re always a small part of the grade; for example in EVDS 401, students are required to make a post every week and it’s worth about ten percent. They are also encouraged to reply to each other’s posts, but at the very least, they have to post a resource every week. And guess what? I scoop them all up at the end of the term, thank them for them, and then I build them into next term’s class because they find stuff that I didn’t know about. Anybody who tells you they know everything about any field is an idiot. Students, when motivated even by this little bit of their grade, will go out there and post stuff that I look at and say, hey, I didn’t even know that existed. It really and truly is collaborative learning, and that’s one of the big pluses. I mean, because in many courses where you would be face-to-face Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 10: 00–10: 50 AM, there is really no space for this. Now with the switch to remote teaching, we’re forced to make space.
MM Absolutely. I like that the posts each week allow you to progressively accumulate good resources each year. I imagine that also allows you to stay more updated with what’s going on in those resources and perhaps it might even save you time from having to go over all of that reading yourself. Maybe it filters it a little bit.
TK I should mention something about that. You have to also teach students how to tell fake from true. There’s a famous professor, T. Mills Kelly, who taught a course on fakery on the Internet called Lying About the Past.1 In this course students go out there and their assignment is to create something false that will fool people. The most famous one was called, The Last Pirate of Chesapeake Bay. This had people believing that—I think in the 1920s—there was a pirate ship sailing around Maryland and Virginia. It was so well done, with fake New York Times articles and clippings from newspapers, that it got picked up by USA Today.
On the bright side, in the latest one that they tried, some girl supposedly opened up her grandfather’s trunk and found trophies that showed that he was a serial killer; it was debunked on the Internet in 22 minutes. Thinking critically is an important skill that I try to teach everybody.
MM If you’re sitting at home and trying to analyze and gain a perspective on that, nobody really teaches you how to filter out false information. Sometimes we fall into a habit of just taking in the information for what it is, so it’s good that you’re able to introduce these analytical skills and have them take on the other angle of providing that false information. That’s a really interesting strategy. So, we’ve been chatting about the different resources that you use, but do you have one favourite resource in terms of remote and online teaching and learning?
TK I’ve become a pretty big fan of Zoom. I’ve used it in lots of presentations and what I like about it is that I know all of its features, although I learned just yesterday that, apparently, you can give yourself a virtual beard or a moustache or something like that. So, I haven’t tried all of its features, but I like Zoom because I do like to have visual contact with people. I’ve done conference presentations all over the world on other platforms, and often something goes wrong. I have a conference presentation on video fakery, where I play some Deepfakes, and I would say that one time out of three, the audio doesn’t come through properly. So fundamentally, I’m very comfortable with Zoom, but I’m also open to other things.
MM Zoom seems to be the go-to, especially at the University of Calgary, as it is an approved platform for our school. So final question here, and this is one of my favourites. What do you expect higher education to look like in ten years’ time?
TK We’ll still be going back to campus, but maybe not for everything. I don’t think someone will stay in Nairobi or Kenya and get their entire degree from the University of Calgary. We have other facilities such as the Open University in the UK and Athabasca University that specialize in distance education. I suspect that most of our students ten years from now will still have a campus presence, but there will be so much more technology in hand. We’ll be doing things like we’re doing now, where people can be reached anywhere in the world.
Strange and even humorous things will still happen.
I taught a University of Calgary course while I was at a conference in Australia. It turned out to be during the noonday sun. It kept getting hotter and hotter, and I had to keep picking up the computer and moving it to get out of the sun. There are always going to be logistical problems, but I think we’re going to get beyond that. People now go, yeah, you’ve got your mute button on, or whatever. I think we’re going to get over the logistical problems of using technology and get back to the core of education.
I don’t think we’re ever going back to what I hated when I took calculus at Columbia University—a boring professor who was more interested in his or her research, droning on from 8: 00 AM to 9: 00 AM simply reading from the textbook. I don’t think that students are going to accept that anymore. They’ve seen the holy grail of being able to do things better, and I don’t think that we’re ever going to go back.
There are a whole number of things that we can anticipate. Right now I have my students working on augmented reality. I haven’t used the new Oculus VR headset, but people who have tried it tell me it’s like really being there. Ten years from now, there’s going to be stuff that we can’t even imagine now.
Reflection
The TALON project has given us a remarkable, and much-needed opportunity to reflect on a major social disruption, COVID-19. This won’t be the last cataclysm that “rocks our boat,” as we face major challenges from climate change to social equity to ethical issues in science and medicine.
COVID-19 has demonstrated how fragile our lives are and also how connected they are. As some countries are emerging from their pandemic lockdowns, others are just starting to feel the full impact of the disease and its variants, which are almost certain to get worse.
What does this mean for education? Will we ever go back to the world of 2019? I think not. Some evidence can be found in the excellent recent study by Jose Maria Barrero of ITAM (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México) in Mexico and colleagues at Stanford and the University of Chicago called Why Working from Home Will Stick.2 These researchers surveyed 22,500 US workers and executives on their post–pandemic work plans. They learned that during the pandemic, half of all paid works days were done from home, and that the experience was “better than expected for the majority of firms and workers.”
Going forward, they predict that most workers will continue to have offices, and go into them, but “that about 22 percent of all full workdays will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5 percent before.” They suggest that a typical worker might work from home for two days per week, and they predict that they will be happier and more productive and spend less on work-related expenses like commuting.
I see a similar future for education. Since we are social animals, we will want to get back together in face-to-face situations. I chair a board (the Information and Communications Technology Council), which normally meets face-to-face but has been meeting virtually. We get our business done, and it’s efficient, but I think most members value those exchanges around the coffee pot outside of the formal meeting agenda. I predict we’ll move back to in-person meetings but probably with a hybrid option for those who are unable to attend. In the past, we have sometimes done this by audio teleconference, but it was less than satisfactory. Now we have better technology and are better at using it.
The pandemic has given us new tools and, more importantly, the need and desire to use them. People no longer laugh if you forget to unmute yourself on Zoom. We bring in experts from around the world without worrying about the time and cost of their travel. Most of all, we have learned new ways of teaching, learning, and interacting that, just as Barrero and colleagues found about the workplace, are going to stick in the learning environment.
About
Thomas Keenan taught Canada’s first computer security course in 1977 and has been a systems programmer, computer science professor and expert witness in technology cases. He is also the author of the best-selling book Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy. He has spoken about the social implications of technology on five continents and appears frequently in the media.
Tom was educated at Columbia University, earning degrees in philosophy, mathematics and engineering, and a doctorate in education. He is currently a professor in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape at the University of Calgary, where he teaches courses on smart communities. He is also an adjunct professor of computer science where he teaches students about computer security and cyberwarfare. He is a fellow of the Canadian Information Processing Society and the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, and board chair of the Information and Communications Technology Council of Canada.