Sean Tibor: Hello and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 86, Global Understanding in the Classroom. My name is Sean Tibor. I'm a coder that sometimes teaches. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: My name's Kelly Schuster Perez, and I'm a teacher that codes not going to get used to that. Sean Tibor: I know it's a little strange, the new world that we're in. I do get to teach, but not as daily as I used to. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's right. Well, Thankfully, I haven't been having to teach this week either. Sean Tibor: Yeah, it's nice to be on break. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It is totally. Sean Tibor: That's awesome. Well, this week we're going to be talking all about the future and preparing our students for that future. We're going to be talking about what it means to be global in the future. And today I think it's an interesting topic. We've got a lot of good research and reading, thanks to Kelly. You've been pulling all of this together, and I get the benefit of that. But this is something that I think both of us have thought about over the course of our careers. And something that's constant in our conversations and in our classrooms is really thinking about how global everything really is these days and how we best prepare our students for a future where things are even more global. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, 100%. And then with our previous speakers and guests that we've had on the episode and with COVID-19 and going back to normal or not normal, this has been like what's it called when it's going over and over. I'm like percolating. That's not the word I was looking for. Separating. Yeah. Sean Tibor: It just keeps recurring. Right. It keeps coming back, and there's a reason for that. And I'm excited to get into that with you and talk about both the bigger picture. But then how we bring that into our classrooms and into each student, that's really the important part is how do we make it relevant for the individual learner? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. I'm excited to dig in onto this. Sean Tibor: Well, before we do that, let's start with the wins of the week. Kelly, any particular notable wins this week, other than not being in the classroom and have a little bit of time to decompress or think differently? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That was my total win. I think my win this week is just that ability to be still to shut down. I was pretty much shut down most of the time. Only worked from six to 645 before everybody woke up that night. Silence in the cabin. So those have been wins. No coding, winds, nothing else. Just again, I think the biggest one is just being still in the moment and enjoying the moment for me, which is hard. I kept saying we should be doing something. We should be doing something. And I kept reminding myself, no, we're not doing anything. So that's my win. Sean Tibor: I'm really happy for you. I know that that makes a difference when you get those moments to just calm down. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Not even any books for me, that's been rare. Sean Tibor: That is definitely a departure from normal for you. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: All right, what about you? What have you been doing this work week? Sean Tibor: Well, I've been working on a bunch of things, and I had some very productive days, some days where I was working the whole time, but didn't really feel like I was making any progress. But I think that the biggest win and it is a good start. I wouldn't say it's really there yet, but I relaunched my personal website over the weekend. So I have Seantimer.com created again, has a little bit of information about me just creating it as a way to have a spot for my own personal thoughts and reflections and everything that may have some things from teaching Python, it may have some stuff from teaching in general. It may have some stuff from my new professional career. So just a place to collect all those things. And the coolest part about it was I used a static site generator called Hugo. So the really nice thing about this is it's all written in go, and it makes it really fast to be able to create static sites that you can then host for relatively low cost. I don't think I'm even paying anything to host. Netlify, and it's really kind of cool. So I can create my content using markdown and I can give it specific commands or directives. And then I say go and it builds the whole site out and post it to Netlify via GitHub. So I have all my versions of the site, I have my new posts. It's pretty impressive. And because it's all static pages and not generated by Flask or Django or something like that, it loads really fast. The whole site is very responsive and quick to load and I'm really enjoying it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's pretty cool. Sorry, I just moved into the bathroom. Sean Tibor: No comment. No, I can see you on video. Like it just needed a quiet spot. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Right. It's hard to find a quiet spot in the cabin. Sean Tibor: Yes. So you are in a cabin in the woods. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: This I am in a cabin in the woods in a tippy top top cabin. We have no gas and the gas guy just came in. So it's very important to have heat in the cabin in the woods. Yes. Website. Very cool. And just to go back to that, I think it's important and something that we really always comment on, his ability to go and be reflective and to write it out and being able to explain once you start writing things out and talking about it to somebody, regardless if it's writing it, it helps you to really document that idea and to flush out things that have happened. So that's awesome. That's a huge win. Sean Tibor: Yeah. So I'm excited right now. I basically have a Hello World post and a little bit about me, but it's a start. So you got to start somewhere very cool. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Any fails this week? Sean Tibor: Just the usual tech fails, like things that we're supposed to be working and don't, and then you figure out a way through it and you rebuild, refactor all that stuff. So just working through those things, I'm still very much enjoying what I'm doing and enjoying the team that I'm working with. And it's been really kind of nice to have that moment of realizing that, yes, even though it may not always go perfectly, I feel like I'm at the peak of my technical knowledge so far and it will just keep growing as I go. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Very cool. Well, I had a mommy fail. I was telling you a little bit about it, but we had a massive cry session where crying doesn't solve any problems. And I wasn't the one crying. I was the one screaming. Crying doesn't solve problems. But my son had a crossbow and a gas error, and I love the names of their errors in Minecraft. Let's just make it something that you have to search up and you have no clue what it means and pretty much resulted in us deleting the app and losing all of his realms and all of his connections and all of his friends. And as you said to me, back up on the Icloud, I'm like, yeah, okay, whatever. It was just Minecraft in my mind. But Just Minecraft is not a just thing when it comes to an eleven year old who is like addicted to playing with his friends. Sean Tibor: I have to say, Minecraft is definitely one of those apps that I think will be around for a very long time because it captures that element of play and creativity together and some kids use it for that purpose and some kids don't. And that's okay. But the fact that there is a sense of loss when you lose your world is a sign that there's something of value there, that there's something that was special and meaningful to them and that's going to happen again. There's going to be other moments of loss, but it's a good sign when you lose something like that that you're upset about it because it was something you didn't want to lose. It had value. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. But we had a whole conversation of instead of freaking out, why aren't we reading the error messages? And he was just like trying to remake new accounts. He comes back and he's like, I need you to go and do this code. And I'm like, what are you making new accounts for? I need a new account to get into Minecraft. I'm like, Read the error. Read the error. How could you be doing this? I'm a coder. Read the error. Let's Google it. But it's funny. They were playing capture the flag with, I guess, sort of in the Minecraft world with two teams or about eight kids. Send me your coordinates. Oh, no, they're attacking our secret base. And it's been a very interesting learning experience as a mother, listening to them play new games inside of a virtual world. So I never got into it, even growing up, listening to my dad and his friends playing Atari football all night in the same room, not in virtually, but it just gave me flashbacks. Sean Tibor: Well, it might be as good a place to start as any to talk about those skills and the different worlds. We've talked about that a little bit with, like, Richard Colada, for example, around everyone, but especially young people, are inhabiting two different worlds at the same time. They have the physical world in the virtual world, and the skills that you and I grew up with in the physical world and with the face to face interactions and social norms don't always translate to that virtual world. And as we think about the future, we're all going to be living in those two worlds, and sometimes they're going to overlap. If you listen to meta now, they're thinking that it'll all be one Metaverse that is indistinguishable and everything, but I don't think we're quite there. But there is definitely this idea that you are going to have virtual worlds that you inhabit that don't suffer from the same limitations of the physical world in proximity and location the way that we have in the past. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. Speaking of which, though, based on that whole metal world. And I will put the link in the show notes, but Brookings.edu, I don't know. Sean Tibor: The Brookains Institute. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. There you go. Brookings. Yeah. So, you know, they just did a really good article, came out February 14 about a whole new world education meets the Metaverse. So it was a cool article talking about this is the interesting part, the same stuff we've been talking about with a new tool, like how is this experience? Yeah, it's going to be this whole cool thing where the kids can be archeologists and can be in Greece and dig up artifacts in the meta. But is it really educational? Are we still designing things to be just a fad or just an excitement, or is it actually going to cause them to think critically? Are we enhancing these skills? So it's a pretty cool. Sean Tibor: Conversation I think that's the right conversation to have. So when it comes to things like this, I'm still highly skeptical about the whole Metaverse concept at the moment because I haven't seen what's really different about this iteration of it. I went through the whole Second Life hype cycle back in the 2000s where everything was going to be done in Second Life. And you can literally take the same headlines from 2007 and 2008 and 2009 with Second Life and fast forward them to now, and they're coming back again. Someone paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for virtual real estate next to Snoop Dogg in the Metaverse. Why? So there is this whole there is a lot of this. Like, what's different? What's different about the world. But that being said, my skepticism of the technology and the hype around the Metaverse aside, we can definitely acknowledge that there are going to be needs for specific skills and specific capabilities and competencies of our learners in the future that may be related to the Metaverse. They may be related to something different. It may be something we don't even see coming yet. But knowing that we should be thinking about the way that people learn, the way that they interact, the way that we have experiences that cause knowledge to be acquired, that cause skills to be built, you can't just take the same things that we've done in the physical world and put it on a VR headset and say, well, this should be totally fine. Let's see what happens. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I wonder if they can fill out worksheets on the Metaverse as well. Sean Tibor: As a matter of fact. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: We'Re just going to stare at a worksheet and fill it out and with our meta pencil and yeah, exactly. I mean, this is that great article, and it's talking about these apps. If developers are going to start designing apps, they need to talk about not just capturing attention to the children, but how are we going to play out that transferable learning? How are we going to make sure that what's happening is actually going to develop a skill? And I think that whole conversation comes into this topic that we're talking today, which was pretty cool. I don't know how you segue. So naturally it's beautiful. Sean Tibor: But I think it brings us right to the crux of the conversation. So this is a beautiful place to get to, because what we've identified here is that there is this problem of applying technology to existing situations in ways that's not smart, not intelligent, doesn't respect the learner, doesn't respect their needs as a learner or as a person slapping on a layer of technology and saying, good luck, have fun. So we think about that problem, like, where does that come from? There are these major global trends that are occurring there's, these major things that are happening both positive and negative, that we can literally see reshaping the world in front of us. And like any period of great change, you need to have certain skills and knowledge and attitudes to be able to not just survive that change, but to thrive in it, to embrace it, to be a part of it, and to shape the direction of it rather than being crushed under the wheels of it. Exactly. It's a big thing. So let's talk a little bit about some of these big trends that you see. So the first thing that you brought up, and I think we have some guests coming up in future episodes about this or the jobs that are being created or changed by technology as well. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, 100%. I mean, just backing up a little bit. And I guess we'll talk about this in the episodes to come. But as an educator, I think it was 2007. There was this big video about shift happens and how are we going to create these skills for kids, for the jobs of the future that we don't know about? And that was a huge all the teachers like, oh, we're preparing kids for jobs that we don't know. And I was reading an article, I said I didn't read any books, but I can't help but reading some articles. But it was just like we're not really trying to prepare our students for the jobs that don't exist. We're trying to prepare them for the emerging technologies and the stuff that is coming into play that don't already exist. Like how are we preparing our kids? So then, yes, go into these jobs with new emerging technologies. It got us on to this conversation that you and I were having about what are these jobs that are happening now and how did they come into play and how did they transform over the years? Sean Tibor: Yeah. Look, we're all part of it. The job that I have today of being a cloud engineer didn't exist when I graduated from College. It didn't exist ten or twelve years ago, really, except for maybe in a few small pockets. But it's a real job. It's something that has work. It has a product that we're creating. It has value that we're creating for a company. Ideally, it's also helping take what we're doing and make it more efficient so it's more sustainable. Rather than running servers and network devices in our local data centers, very inefficiently, we can shift them to cloud data centers that are better designed, better running. And so compute cycle. For compute cycle, it should require less power, less water, less heat, waste all of these things that we should be trying to make as efficient as possible, especially if we design it in a smart way. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. I mean, let's just look at our role or my role as a computer science teacher even going as simple as that. I mean, think about when you were in school. Probably you're younger than me. But we didn't have computer science. Sean Tibor: We didn't have computer science until I got to College. I didn't have a programming course. The only kid I knew who was doing computer science in high school was doing it as independent study. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Were you typing on typewriters, too? The quick round fog. Sean Tibor: I think my typing class was all computer based. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Okay. Sean Tibor: I don't think we actually have to do it on a typewriter, but it was on a computer. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I just dated myself. Sean Tibor: It was Mavis Beacon. I still have a crush on Mavis Beacon for teaching me how to type. Thank you, Mavis. But yeah, these things change quickly. And so especially if you project that outward, today's high school graduates and College graduates over the course of their career are going to see even more change than you and I have experienced in our career in terms of the adoption of technology, the way that the work changes the nature of the work. I think, yes, there were people who are working remotely or in distributed global teams 25, 30 years ago. This is not a new concept, but the adoption curve, the number of people who are information workers and can work from anywhere is much higher than it was 30 years ago. Yeah, but you take that a step further and say, yeah, it's not just the fact that we're moving locations where I'm working from my garage instead of from an office cubicle. I'd still prefer my garage to an office cubicle. But there are skills that are not technical skills that are required for that. The social emotional knowledge, the emotional intelligence, the ability to see and understand someone and empathize with them remotely when you're sitting around the world from one another and be able to collaborate with them, the cultural understanding, all of those things are skills that are necessary not necessarily directly driven by the technology, but absolutely influenced by it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. I wish there was a new key term and maybe there will be coming out that whole globalization. I've been Googling that for a little bit because we talk about the global classroom. And I remember, I don't know, like 2003, 2005, the flat classroom came about and there was a huge website and I forget her name and I'll Google it later where she brought in this connections of Skype. And then it was Skype, the expert. So globalization, yes, it's been going on since even the silk trade, where we were flattening the world by trading abroad. But it's like this new sense of globalization instead of just in the trade world or the business world, as you said, it's actually come down to my eight year olds or five year olds or six year old. They are experiencing that global connectiveness. I mean, all the kids that my son is playing with right now, one is a couple in Vale, some are in Vermont, some are in Florida. They're all over their place and they are running and messaging to meet up at a time. It's like we're going to meet up at our Fort at the playground when we used to call on the phone, but now they're just sending text messages and getting that out. So it's huge. Sean Tibor: One way to think about it if you're going to use a technology term for it is really looking at the latency of communications and the latency of information being shared. Before the information age, latency was measured in the time it took to send a physical message. And then we have the Telegraph and we can send things much faster across the country, across the ocean, things can be communicated nearly instantaneously. Right. But there's still this lag time there. And if you want to ship goods, if you want to work with someone, you often might have to get on a ship or a plane or travel to meet someone, you have the telephone. Not the best sort of connection. But this latency goes from being very high latency long times in between when you and I could collaborate or work together or talk to one another or learn from one another down to latency being measured in milliseconds. Right. So even though you and I are in different parts of the country right now, we can still connect and record a podcast together remotely because that latency is now fractions of a second. And so when the fractions of a second latency is effectively the same, no matter where anybody is around the world now we can start to look at the only limiting factor in terms of our ability to communicate are the working hours, what times can we actually meet up? And the time zones, language barriers and culture barriers are the only thing that separate us now, not the physical distance. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's huge. It's mind blowing. And I think that's when we start bringing this stuff into the classroom because the kids don't really see it, they don't really understand the growth that we've Sean over the years. And it goes into the fact of teaching these pros and cons of this tech world. And I know we talked about digital citizenship, and teachers still think digital citizenship is don't post things online, make sure you change your password. And it's gotten bigger. And hopefully our listeners understand that from our last few guests with Richard Colada and Will Richardson, it's this whole change. And the pros and cons of the tech world have gotten huge. It's bigger than what you can imagine of just making sure. I mean, yes, making sure your password is safe. But now you have two factor authentication to deal with that kids are like, oh, yeah, I need to do this, no problem. Sean Tibor: And I think this is really the speed and scale of everything is beyond our own comprehension sometimes. Think about it. Like, in the 19th century, Jules Verne wrote around the world in 80 days, which was at the time, mind blowing. You could travel around the entire world in under three months like that. This was a race to go around the world. And now the fastest we can go around the world if you're not in orbit is in an airplane in less than a day, physically traveling. But I can send a Ping around the world in probably 80 milliseconds. Right. Like, I can literally travel around the world with information. And that means that my reputation can travel around the world in under a second. My brand, what people think of me can travel around the world in under a second. And my collaborator, my knowledge, my contributions, the things that I have to share can also travel around the world in under a second. So all of those things can be used for pros and cons. We talked about some of this already it's not just the speed of communications, but it's also once we have this and once we have this computing capability, it means that we have the ability for better AI, we have the ability for better data integrations, better data sharing, better data consumption analysis. All of these things can be done in seconds. And that leads to both some very good things, but it also leads to some very scary things. So I love this list of things that you came up with. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I didn't come up with it, just. Sean Tibor: Collected them. It makes me feel uncomfortable to sleep tonight because all of these things are real. Science fiction is becoming science reality faster than I think it ever has. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: 100%. I was getting this from Global Insights from UNICEF we're talking about. And I started feeling bad about some of the things I was thinking about with Covan 19. It didn't really affect us. And that was really shallow of me to think about when I was reading this article. Yes, I know in tons of places around the world, it affected a lot of people. And a lot of the times we say, well, education wasn't lost. No, maybe it wasn't lost to a developed country, but I know Peru, that whole country was out of school for almost two years with limited Internet access, with people that didn't have computers, people that didn't have ways to connect, people that, yes, they had a cell phone, but it was their Paredes cell phone. They had one, and they had limited access to cellular data. So I started reading about these things and all this negative issues, these things that had happened because of the tech world, because of the pandemic, because of the things that happened. And how are we preparing our students today to combat that issue if it happens or when it happens again in their lifetime? How are we going to combat the negative effect of that technology that the rest of the world had faced? And I was like. Sean Tibor: Oh, there's also an implicit assumption in there also that has to be addressed, which is that how do we make sure that our students recognize this as a problem, especially in developed countries, because we as humans have a tendency to focus on our own issues and our own problems and the things that are happening right around us or that personally affect us. But building that empathy, to be able to look across borders and across streets, even sometimes to see what's happening to other people and recognize that that is a problem that needs to be addressed. One of the technologies that are emerging that is both positive and problematic are these low Earth orbit satellites that provide Internet access. On one hand, they are basically low orbiting space debris. They have a purpose. But there's all kinds of issues with astronomy research, with potential collisions, with other objects. Like, there's a lot of things that we have to be rightfully concerned about. But on the other hand, these low Earth orbit satellites are bringing high speed, low, latency, good quality Internet to people that have never had access to it before or had very limited access to it. This is something that could be tremendously transformative, not just for people in our country that are in rural areas that have limited access to high speed Internet, but this can be transformative to developing countries all around the world to help bring that access to more people. And I believe that every person should have access to technology like this because of the empowering effect that it has on their ability in life, their ability to set their own direction and have some freedom to create the opportunities they want for themselves. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. And that brings in, too. And I know our listeners know we work in a very fluent private school where I feel we have a very strong obligation to make sure that these students who have an edge up, I guess some of them not all of them have an edge up financially, that they can help make a difference in the emerging technology world. How can we really help to promote social good and how to use emerging technologies to combat Internet issues or poverty issues or financial issues? Thinking about the financial technology revolution, how is that going to affect lower or developing countries? What's going to happen when the money goes all online? So I feel like there's a Huger that's not a word on vacation, a big responsibility in education to really teach what you said, empathy and social good in the digital world. Sean Tibor: Yeah. And it is also a challenging environment because of the rising inequality that happens. These are all technologies that should be equalizing the playing field or at least giving people an equal shot. But in some ways, even though these are happening, there's still measurable differences, inequality that we have not been able to overcome both in our own country and around the world. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So just to make a little switch on a positive, because we're going to get too negative, just read today from this negative UNICEF article. But it's good. It's really good. But the first mRNA, mRNA vaccine, vaccine that came from the COVID, and before that, now they're able to look at tuberculosis, malaria, HIV. They're talking about clinical trials coming up. So it's teaching these things where we can out of something that was negative, this pandemic, how can we take that technology and create more positive technologies in the future? So that's a lot of things that I was thinking about. Kids talk about technology and we talk about Python and coding. And the kids always say, Kelly, why do we have to learn coding? I mean, even in this day to age, they're still asking that, but it's everywhere, regardless if it's mRNA or if it's electric vehicles, AI, whatever, it's everywhere and it's empowering. Sean Tibor: This is one of the areas where I think there's going to be that digital access divide where students who have knowledge and understanding of principles of coding and computing and networks and technology will have a distinct advantage over students who don't or avoid that information. And the ironic thing is, once you have access to the Internet, and once you have access to technology, most of that information is right there. A lot of the first documentation, the first knowledge that was shared on the Internet was about the Internet right? Here's how this thing that you're using actually works. So that's why it may be hard to get a medical school education online. Like, I still want my doctor to have some practical hands on experience and things like that. But medical schools have more and more hybrid models for delivering information. But a technology degree could be acquired entirely online, and it could be done from anywhere as long as you have an adequate Internet connection and a laptop. So these sorts of possibilities are really going to be transformative. And where our students, I think, will really thrive is once they are able to apply this knowledge to areas that have not been able to take advantage of it in the past. So if you look back to one of our earliest episodes where we talked about AI and agriculture, one of the things that's constantly been on my mind has been how much of a need there is for bringing high speed Internet to the middle of a cornfield, which is like, the ironic thing is why would we need that? But think about all the downstream effects that has if you have smarter, more intelligent, more efficient farming and agricultural processes, it means that we can feed more of the world. It means that fewer people have to go hungry. If we can be more efficient with our food production and distribute that food production. America is amazing at producing grains and crops and agricultural products. But actually getting that to the places that need it is very difficult. But if we can start to bring the agricultural means of production to the places that are in need of the food itself, that means that we don't have to spend the shipping costs, the carbon footprint of moving stuff on ships and airplanes and everything like that. It can be conducted right into places where it's needed. So it starts to more efficiently distribute that capability when we have smarter technology that we can use for something as traditional as agriculture. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You just gave me a really cool idea for a cool lesson. Like, where in the world do you think technology does not exist? And how could we make it, like, a positive impact? I'm thinking in the middle of the rainforest, is there technology sitting there? And at what point in time can we get? I mean, I'm sure you can. I'm sure it's already there. But talking to the kids, like, where in the world is there not technology and how could that technology be implemented in order to do a positive change or have a positive effect on the world? That would be a fun exercise. Very deep in conversation and bringing up the AI in agriculture. One of the students used the circuit playground last week because I made them do the activity about sustainable goals, and it was looking at produce. Can you imagine if, you know while that robot that's picking the produce is able to shift it out and become more efficient or use more around the world, how much food loss would be reduced? How can we benefit the world and the economy and trash, etcetera. Etcetera. By using technology? Very cool questions. Sean Tibor: Yeah. And that's really the key to all this is that there's a quote, I think it's attributed to William Gibson, the author, but I don't think it's actually him or it's hard to pin down. But the quote is the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. So if you think about it, if you go to any Metropolitan city around the world, you have ridiculously high speed internet. You have wealthy people who are able to pay for it and use it and have access to all of that technology. And now you can go to your phone and I can order something from Amazon. And by this afternoon, it can be here. And there's this whole global supply chain that goes into that. There's all these amazing apps that are created technology that's created if you have the money and the means, you can get pretty much anything futuristic that we could think of. If you want to fly to New York on your own private jet, you can do that. If you want to go into space now with enough money, you can do that. The future is here. But in the same world where people have that kind of capability, we also have people who don't have access to clean drinking water. We have people who don't have the fuel to Cook food properly. We have crop failures. We have starvation. We have all these things that coexist in the same world. And how do we start to bring that together? And I think that's where if we come back to the world that our students are going to have to navigate and the skills that we need to teach them, it really comes back to how do you go into that world as an adult and make a positive change in the world? How do you make a positive difference in the world that's all we aspire to do is to make the world better than we found it. And we're sending these students into a world that may not be better or worse, but it is certainly different than the world that we entered into as adults when we came in. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And not to give away any of our cool conversations that are going to be coming up in the next month but I'm so excited because what you were just talking about is one of our guest speakers. And I don't know the exact date, but talking about envisioning humanity. And we have these smart cities and we have smart cars. But again, yes, they're doing some good things, but they're only doing good things in a small amount of areas. And even though in the UNICEF article says electric vehicle sales are expected to more than double in 2022, which is great, but it's not necessarily doubling around the world unanimously or equally. It's only in pockets. And so this revolution of technology is very well divided. Sean Tibor: Still, it's interesting. I think you bring up a good point, which is it's easy to look at replacing a Honda Civic or an equally small compact car with a Tesla and go, wow, we did so much. And it is a significant improvement. Let's be honest. It's a significant improvement. But if we really want to see widespread change, we have to address the bigger systems, the scale problems. The most exciting electric vehicle now is not the next Tesla, and it's not the next family friendly crossover SUV that's electric. Like we saw all those commercials on the Super Bowl here in the US. It's the Ford F 150 Lightning. It's the Chevy Silverado pickup truck. It's the electric semi truck. It's the things that are used all day, every day, not just for commuting, but it's for people doing their jobs, getting work done. It's for logistics, it's for shipping, it's for how do we make one thing that you ever think about is like locomotive engines. The locomotives that we use to transport freight on rail lines have gotten fabulously more efficient over the last 50 to 100 years, where it's one of the most efficient ways to move a pound of goods from one place to another. But there's more to be done. So those scale problems where we Pat ourselves on the back for saying, I used a paper straw instead of a plastic straw, or I did one small thing. Those things all add up, but the place where we can really make a difference is at scale. When we start to think about fleets of trucks, we think about how many trucks does your electric company drive around? How many of those could be electrically powered? How many of them could have a backup power source? Like those sorts of things are where we will really start to see the world transform. And we're not quite there yet. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: No, there is. I was trying to look for his name of the company, but a former student of mine actually works for a company that has its first electric truck, semi trucks, and they're putting it off in Europe. I'll try to find the link of the company. I don't know if it's the first, but the way that I was reading the LinkedIn, it seemed like it's pretty relatively new and unique. So it's got to be widespread. And while you were talking, I was just thinking about the cities that I've lived in or traveled to, the ones with these high populations who don't even have exhaust or emission control on their cars. Yay, we got a smart car. And Lima, where there are five cars driving in a two Lane Highway that are running from that's not so bad anymore, but it was ten years ago. But driving down the road and the cars are from 1970, 1960 and just sputtering out black smog as we go along. It's incredible. It's incredible. I have to read this quote from this book that I'm going to be reading as soon as I get done with my vacation. And this is kind of like the stem of it, but it kind of summarizes where we're going. So this is, however, the starting claim for the contention that to productively wheel technology requires humans who understand both technology and themselves, which goes into this SEL that all the schools should be promoting social emotional learning, possess the knowledge to capitalize on technology's, affordances and mitigate its dangers and the moral judgment to determine when it is and it isn't being employed for the betterment of their communities and society. I think that's going to be like our theme for the next two months when we start talking about this. How are we wielding our students to grow to use technology, to use their social emotional learning to build a better place? Going into biases and AI, that's great. And that's a huge step in the right direction. But that's not the only step. Sean Tibor: Yeah. The key thing there and this is really tough, and it's hard to teach. It's something that can really only be learned through experimentation, through trying and failing and having good coaches and mentors, whether that's parents or teachers or trusted adults or peers to help guide you through this is that there are many, many problems that have been created with technology. With the best of intentions, I want to solve this problem, and I did, but then I created eight others as a result of that. Social media is a great example of this. It was created to solve one problem, which was to connect people online. And it does that fabulously. But at the same time, it also drives disconnection, and it drives all these other problems that we are now experiencing as we are working our way through that. So this idea of, yes, having technology and also having self awareness, of having understanding of oneself and of others and understanding human nature is a critical skill because I get excited about the future. I could talk about the future all day. I could talk about what's possible, why this is really possible. And this other thing isn't like I can do all of those things, but where I'm really going to get excited and I get really inspired by our students is knowing that some of them are going to come up with those ideas that I never saw coming that come up with that problem that you never see until someone points it out and says, this is a problem, and I'm going to go fix it and helping them build the skills and build the empathy and the understanding and the insight and all of those pieces that go into being able to recognize a problem and create a solution for it and do it in a way that doesn't cause a million other problems is one of the most exciting and inspiring things about working with students that are going to inherit this world like that. They are going to see things that we never thought of and we never saw coming because of our own biases. They're going to be able to take that on and go run with it 100%. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Now you're going to add to that. Wow. Go ahead. Yeah. It's like we get too deep. I'm on vacation. Sean Tibor: Well, we've covered a lot of things. We've talked about a lot of futuristic things, and it's always hard to talk about the future and talk about these big picture things, because at least for me, it always feels like we're walking away without having actually come up with concrete things that you can do today. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: There isn't really I think that's the whole point of the conversation. It isn't concrete. We just need to keep preparing the students for all these emerging technologies. I feel like in my role at Pinecrast, we have that benefit of constantly can bring in the emerging technologies, and they know that I get these things. And I'm like, well, look at this, and what are the positiveness and what are the issues with this? And how could this be used for positive change? And talking about the Metaverse and just making sure that we highlight this and keep investigating ways to use this as a good way to solve problems and try to remind them of the bad things that are out there and not say don't do it. But just to be aware that these things exist, cybersecurity, why do we have two factors? Why do we do the things that we do? Why do we talk about our Aups and why do we have these restrictions and what does it do? Or how can you use them to stay safe and benefit your learning? So it's just those conversations. Sean Tibor: And then the other important part, too, as teachers, as parents, as educators of one form or another, in order to help kids learn about how to use and embrace an emerging technology, you have to expose them to emerging technology. You have to show that to them. You have to let them play with it. You have to let them make mistakes and break things and learn from that. And it's that whole idea of one of the ways that I learned about computers and hardware and how they worked was my dad brought home the computer and said you can do anything you want to it, but if you break it, you have to fix it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I think you should buy some real estate for teaching Python podcasts. And we will release our podcasts in the Metaverse. Sean Tibor: I will go take out a loan for $100,000. We can be right between Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart. It'll be amazing. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Martha Stewart, wonderful. You ready to hear some sheriffs for some of our email listeners. I have been working hard. When I said I'm on vacation, I really have gotten a lot of good stuff done. Shout out for a few things. Mark Williams from the Microbit Education Foundation sent me us. I say me because. Sean Tibor: That'S fine. I get it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Python microbit, the Alpha version. I'm hope it's released. He was asking if we had anyone in the UK and Australia who use this. It was really cool. I checked it out. You know, when you would go to the microbit version of Python, Python microbit.org, you would just have this information. You have this website. Kelly. They took a new, improved and they chunked it into great concepts with the microbit and the code's right there. And it's easier to follow. It's more child friendly. It's got a lot of cool things in there, little snippets. So I thought that was really cool. And we'll do that for the show notes. Also, I was digging back a couple of years on the emails. I'm really bad at that. I'm sorry, people, but Mark Wilson sent us because I guess we were talking about the regax and I was really hit on that from PC World, Python regatt's cheat sheets, which is really cool. If you're into regrets. I'm moving on a little bit from that. I haven't played a lot with them, but I checked it out and it's got a great list of the percent signs, the AZZ, lowercase, et cetera, et cetera, so you can do for searches and who else? I'm not going to announce some of these because they're going to be some of our listeners I'm really excited about. Yeah, that's it for now. I'm not going to share anything else because there's more to come out there. Sean Tibor: Well, I like the episode with Andre, who's our neighbor here in South Florida. He teaches at one of the area schools. And he brought up the episode with Becky Smetter back on episode 80 and talking about vocabulary versus narrative, which I thought was really great as well, using the proper vocabulary and teaching that vocabulary versus losing the narrative thread of explaining what's happening and telling the story of what's happening in the code or in the Python. So I thought that was a great shout out. It was a really great point from that episode that I think Becky really did a fantastic job of explaining how she uses that astrophysics. So if you get a chance to go back and listen to that episode, it's a really good one. One of my favorites from the last twelve months or so. Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You had a definitely a nerd crush going on. You pick on me about Colton 100%. Sean Tibor: I have to tell you, I admire her for her intellect and the way she teaches and gets people excited about science. We need more people in the world like that. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: She had you at Galaxies. You kept saying, DA DA. Sean Tibor: It's cool. She has a whole reaction video to the first image coming off of the James Webb Space Telescope. It's so good. My daughter just adores her. So we have the best time learning about space with Dr. Becky. So if you want to go back and listen to that episode, it was really good and one of the ones I'm most proud of over the last year. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Cool Shout Out for Luxembourg International School. We are presenting on March 8. You can get your tickets. I think it's a free, but you have to do eventbrite on it. It's is Lux March 8. Learning Lost. It's pretty cool. If you haven't checked out that link, please go there. They have so many good guest speakers. I've seen a lot of them in South America. One of the ones that was really cool and he presented earlier, I'm trying to find the link to it. There's a whole bunch of people, but we're on there. No, really. Why coding. We're going to be talking about that and so much fun. I'm excited. Sean Tibor: Yeah. I wanted to also kind of pull our audience as well. If you've been working with some cool stuff in Python or outside of Python, stuff you want to share with us, like that Alpha version of Python microbit.org, send it our way. We love to hear this stuff. We'd love to feature it on the show, share it with more educators, and just get the word out about it so you can hit us up on Twitter for that through our website. But pretty much any of those things that you find that should be shared with others, send them our way. And we'll make sure we get them out to the other listeners and let them have a chance to play with it. Also, I do want to give a shout out to our listeners also to you, our listeners. We passed a pretty big milestone earlier this month, actually, I think it was late last month. I'm very excited about it. We now have over 300,000 downloads of the Teaching Python podcast in the three years since we started. So that is really thanks to our listeners. Everyone who shares it with another teacher or a friend who says, hey, check this out. Big thanks to the other podcasts that have worked with us over the years, like especially Michael Kennedy and Brian Aawkin and Julian and Bob, like so many people to mention that have really gotten the word out about us. Even that post that we had on Hacker News got a bunch of people listening to the podcast. It really is amazing how quickly the listener base for this has grown, and I couldn't be happier to be connected with each of you. It is the most amazing experience to have this great network of educators and pipe and ease around the world talk about going global. We have listeners everywhere. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And my world got incredibly, incredibly small. One of our listeners actually worked with another one of my colleagues from the UK, and it's insane. It's insane. And it's amazing how connected we are just from the Internet. So I mean, that sounds stupid, but you know what? Sean Tibor: I Sean well, it all started from you and I having these great conversations in our classroom and wanting to involve more people. I'm really just happy to see how far it's gone and how much it's meant to people. Several of the listening emails we've got just recently talked about how they don't have anybody else to talk to about these things. They don't have someone to have the conversation with about teaching and learning computer science and how to be an educator in this space. And this podcast is for you. Our goal is always to have you as that third person in the room or fourth person or fifth person, depending on how many guests we have. But you're always with us when we record. It means the world to us that you've come with us on this journey. And we have so many more exciting things to come, especially thanks to Kelly's hard work booking guests over the last few months. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, we're excited. I'm so excited about our lineup. We're talking about jobs in Python coming up. We've got our teachers in computer science coming up. We have envisioning humanity with another speaker that's coming up. I'm not trying to promote it too much, but lots of fun things keeping Sean busy. Don't worry, he's not going anywhere. Still talking about teaching and still keeping me reflecting constantly and pushing me to practice more Python. Sean Tibor: I just booked my hotel and my conference registration for Python us in April, so we're gearing up for that. We're getting excited. I was thinking we need to actually make stickers this year to hand out to everyone and share. So regardless of how many stickers we hand out at the conference, I would love to get some stickers that we can send out to our listeners and help you kind of show your love and affiliation with the show. So I know this brings to a close the love Fest with our audience. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: But time to turn off the podcast. Sean Tibor: I think this is as good a place to end as any, but one last time. Thank you all for supporting the show, for supporting us. A big thanks to our Patreon supporters who took it one step further and actually gave us a few Bucks a month. It really does help to keep things moving, especially when I need a break and I can set it off to five or to have someone else do the audio production. It really does help us keep things moving and keep things moving forward. So thank you for that. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Thank you. Yes. Sean Tibor: Okay. So if you want to get in touch with us if you want to send your own listener emails for Kelly to look through and make me feel guilty about not doing my part, the best place to do that is through our website, teachingpython. Fm if you'd like to connect with us on Twitter you can always reach us at teachingpython. I'm at smteber on Twitter and Kelly is at Kelly Parad on Twitter. I'm going to give out your personal phone number now. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Kelly apparently I have like five different Hotmail outlook accounts out there too so don't send those anywhere to those because I don't even know how to get into those. Thanks to my son. Sean Tibor: Yeah, there's definitely been a bit of proliferation there. I have some ideas for you. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Thanks. I need a Python search to automate that for me. Sean Tibor: Think we can make that happen so we'll get right on that will wrap up the show here. So for teaching Python. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: This is Sean this is Kelly signing off.