Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Hello, friends, loyal listeners and Bayers everywhere. Welcome to the sound barrier. That's right, Northeast State Community College's official podcast. We're coming at you today from the entertainment technology studio here in the technical education complex on our Blountville campus. My name is Thomas Wilson. I'm here with my co host, Mackenzie Morgent, and. And we got a great, we think a pretty great episode lined up for you today. We are welcoming two Northeast State faculty members, Tabitha Garman, associate professor of history here at Northeast State, and Daniel Arnett, instructor of Engineering Design Technology here at Northeast State. And what are we talking about? Interdisciplinary skill sets that you get in college. They're not necessarily confined to just one area, but specifically we're talking about humanities and technologies. Two divisions here at Northeast State that may seem very different, but they're not. And Tabitha and Daniel are going to talk to us a little bit about why they are very dependent on each other to be successful, whether you're a humanities major or a technologies major. So, Daniel, Tabitha, welcome to the sound area. Glad to have you here.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Very excited to be here.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Tabitha, you're our first second guest on here. You and Kristin Lazarova talked AI and boy, was that prescient, I guess you could say, about what was coming.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Oh, exactly. It really was.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: And what is here, if you want to, to just get to know you all both. Tabitha, what history courses do you teach and what do you find history interesting? How did you get here at Northeast State to teach?
[00:01:35] Speaker B: I teach both sides of American history, early and modern Tennessee history. I teach technology and society as a humanities class. I have honors editions and regular editions of all. And I do a lot of online teaching right now is primarily what I've been focused on. I got into history originally. I was a wheezy, asthmatic child that read encyclopedias for fun. And I always found it really. Interesting is the wrong word. It was just easy. I always remembered it. And I had every major under the sun when I first went to school. And it wasn't until a history professor took me aside and said, why aren't you doing history? That it even occurred to me that that could be a major. It was so easy to me that I didn't see the value in it. So once I switched over, I never stopped. I love it.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: Cool. Cool, Daniel, Engineering, design, technology. What is that? Can you explain that for the folks at home what that is and how you kind of involved here in Northeast State?
[00:02:31] Speaker C: Well, we do computer aided drafting or manual sketching to create parts and or house residential commercial buildings. Kind of got into it a long way back. I came to school here at Northeast State. Four of us went to school together. We graduated and went on. I went on to work at Siemens for 10 years, and Siemens decided to leave our area and go to El Paso, Texas. So I decided not to go out to El Paso, but I opportunity for me to go back to my high school not far from my house, and to teach and coach. So I went that route, started teaching architecture, engineering, design there and taught there for 13 years. And then coming back around, my good friend, a good buddy who's now the TCAT of Elizabethan President, Heath McMillan, called me up. I was in transition, looking, looking maybe to advance, and he gave me the opportunity. He said, hey, we've got an opening out here. Would you be interested? I said, yeah. So actually I had three job interviews in one day and had three job offers in the same day. And while I was finishing up one of my interviews, Heath called me as I was on my way to my truck. And he said, where you at? He said, actually, I interviewed out Sullivan county for a job at Westridge. And he said, you need to get out here now and meet the dean. So I drove out here, hustled in and went upstairs and met Dr. Farrell at the time. And we started talking and the opportunity came open and the good Lord opened the door up for me and I got to walk through that door and I'm here today. This is finished up my fourth year here at Northeast, and I very much love it over here.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: Awesome. The rest is history. Yeah, awesome.
[00:04:10] Speaker D: Now, like very two seemingly different programs that you all are in. I mean, we've got, you know, Daniel Arnett year over in technologies using hard science, math. I've seen what your and that software to design, what they do design. And then Tabitha and the history department specifically, and humanities and Arts, where do those two different seemingly fields collide, so to speak? What like specifically Tabitha, where have you seen maybe technological use in your classrooms when like maybe conducting research or paper?
[00:04:47] Speaker B: First of all, it's a great question and I get asked by students all the time who are into the technology, saying, why do I have to take humanities? Why do I have to do this? What I say to them is, it's two sides of the same coin. We use a lot of the same skill sets in technology as you do in academia. So critical thinking, finding solutions, problem solving, adaptability, the ability to adapt to the changes that are coming in your field and to know and have a history behind you so you understand how these things Impact people, all of that stuff is something we both do, that you need for both. And it doesn't really matter what field you're in. You need to be able to communicate. You need to be able to project what's going to happen and to see the real impact and how these things impact the people around us. In my classes, I teach almost exclusively online right now. And technology is everything. If you think about. It's very exciting to me to think about how this can change lives. We have so many people who need to work full time or who are trying to work part time and pick up classes and being able to go online, to conduct your research online, to communicate with faculty and other students online. All of those things are relevant skills where technology impacts my classes and it impacts how we work. The idea that a remote work may be controversial right now, but the bottom line is communicating online, whether you're in an office or not, is necessary. So these are all skills that we share in common.
Like I said, it's two sides of the same coin. It's literally we need each other.
[00:06:24] Speaker C: My thought is that we can't have success really until we have a failure. I don't know if anybody's ever thought of that. But the historical impact, if we make a mistake as engineering disasters, we don't want to do that again. We have to learn from our mistakes. And so that's a historical aspect to that. Such as the building over in Bristol, the hotel that's right there on the State street, had a misfortunate accident there. Even bridges, the recent bridge collapses around the area, even from our floods that we've had, not much we could do from that, but maybe look and think, hey, what happens if the flood comes down the road? I think the historical impact of failures, that's where we do a lot of our recalculations.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: And that goes to what I was saying too, because if you look historically, how technology has impacted society or how these things evolve, it's all driven by people. Technology makes things possible and humanities make them meaningful. So they work together. And the mistakes, not just that we've made in modern ages, but historically speaking, we can learn from it doesn't have to happen yesterday.
[00:07:25] Speaker D: You know, that kind of reminds me of like, gosh, this, you know, the most basic question ever, like the chicken or the egg, like, what came first? And kind of when thinking about that question, like, I start to think in humanities and technology, which was like the first driver, I guess, in the two different fields, like, do they. I mean, I know they kind of feed off of each other, and they help the other field progress and adv and evolve. And they kind of evolve together. But, like, I guess my question here is, which came first? I guess, would that be humanities or. I mean, but very early humans were also using, like, tools, which is kind of technically a piece of technology.
[00:08:01] Speaker B: Yeah, that's how far back you want to go. Yeah. Oh, gosh.
[00:08:04] Speaker D: We could go as far back as possible. What did that look like?
[00:08:08] Speaker B: In my Technology in culture class, I used to show a little video of a fish that used a tool. It would pick up these mollusks on the seabed and knock it against a rock to open the mollusk. And so that is using tools. I will say, though, it's human need that drives the search for the tool. I need to feed myself. I need to be able to do it efficiently. I develop a tool to do that thing. So I would argue that humanness comes first, and then the technology comes out of human need. And that doesn't necessarily mean it always benefits humans. But we'll talk about that, I'm sure, in a little bit. But that it's that that drives it. And then the technology is developed and it can kind of take on a life of its own if there are supporters of it that humanity then confronts and deals with those questions.
So it goes back and forth.
[00:08:59] Speaker D: Yeah, kind of. It just feeds each other.
And that kind of brings me into another question. But I don't want to go, like, too far, you know, off on my own tangent, but. And I just like, forgot the question as I was saying too. So that's great, you know, back to you, Tom. And the question will probably pop up.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: In my head now. Speaking of, like, the history of humanities and technology, there's a cave, I think, in France that's of course, it's highly, highly protected now, but it's some of the oldest paintings done by humans. I don't know what it dates back to like 4000 BC, maybe earlier. But you also see the humans using spears, bows and arrows, some of the most primitive types of technology at that time. But for whatever reason, someone needed to express that on a cave wall of what was going on.
What does that mean to kind of the winding thread of human existence as far as, yes, we have technology, but the act of creating the technology and performing the act is not enough. I need to explain this. Even on the side of a cave, I need people to understand what I'm doing.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: Pixar, it didn't happen. Yes, it's the same drive. It's that Desire to stand out, to be something, to matter, to demonstrate that you matter. In the case of the cave paintings at Lascaux, I think is the ones you're thinking, yes, yes, it was. Look how cool my people are. You have to think of people being mobile. And so you didn't stay in the same cave. So you were basically leaving graffiti about how awesome your team was for the next team that came in to then look and go, wow, we kind of suck. Which is why they developed scaffolding as another technology, so they could start painting on the ceilings where it would be harder to paint over what they had done, because it was just that desire.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: To leave your mark.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: Yeah, isn't that crazy?
[00:10:44] Speaker A: Fascinating.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: It's just like the development of fire led directly to the development of communication. Once you had time to sit around and be safe, there was a reason to start knowing what your name is.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: The invention of leisure time.
[00:10:56] Speaker B: Exactly right.
Technology, man. That's what it's about.
[00:10:59] Speaker D: My favorite adventure. And I actually, the question did pop back up in my brain, and it was just revolving around, you know, how technologies and humanities kind of feed into each other. Do you all think this is kind of just all opinion really right here? But is there a threshold into how advanced we can get? Or I guess just like the amount of information we learn, like, I guess in humanities, like, philosophy would fall under that. And then in physics would be, I guess, more of the stem technological side of that. But would there be like a threshold, I guess. Guess to.
[00:11:34] Speaker C: I don't believe so. I think that's why NASA is looking at going to Mars. Yeah. I was just recently down there in Houston and went. We got to travel over to NASA and visit. And they. They had a whole big wall of information. They even had the current temperature, what was going on at Mars at the time we were there. It was -23 Celsius at the time. Okay, it was a little cool.
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Yeah, just a bit chilly.
[00:11:59] Speaker C: But it said that the temperatures could go up. Up to low 20s in Fahrenheit. But at the time, it was pretty cold on Mars. But the technology being able to go even into space, I think is growing even in the need. So I don't believe our technology is going to be limited. It keeps growing as we go every day.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: I absolutely agree. We always think. I think it's kind of ego, human ego, where we say, well, this is it. We have absolutely reached the apex of technology. It's never going to get any bigger, and it always does. And like Newton said, you stand on the shoulders of giants. Technology builds on itself, and as we understand it and need it and understand our own needs from the technology, it evolves and changes and adds to it. It's endless. It's just like human creativity and human imagination. It doesn't have any. There's no sandbox, you know, it's all open.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: Daniel, what kind of traits will a good engineering design student have that you found even back in high school, when did you kind of see. Start seeing clues?
[00:13:03] Speaker C: We're usually presented with various problems from people in the community here at school. The number one problem, problem solving is number one, and I believe patience, communication skills, attention to detail, especially in my class, attention to detail. But we got to figure out the tough stuff. We got to figure out how to get it to work or why is it not working. And we got to be able to talk to people to see what problems they're having or what they want to create. Those are some really good skills that I think technology students should have in engineering design.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: One of our students actually did a design for the Stoney Creek Volunteer Fire Department, one of their fire stations up over in Carter County. Now, designing a fire station, a pretty big undertaking for an engineering design student. Fire station would be much different than, say, a house, a retail building, an industrial development. Every project is a little different. Every project needs, I guess, a different communication skill for those students when they're talking with the client, let's say. And how. How do you kind of work with people? Because I know this. Some of the guys in Stoney Creek Volunteer Fire Department came over and talked to the student, and I think observed a lot of the work. How do they best kind of communicate what they're doing to clients? And how do you kind of, kind of encourage that?
[00:14:19] Speaker C: First off, I just got to ask them what they want right off the bat, you know, what size, how big, what's your. What's your limitations? And then we can go from there. And what. What do you want on the interior? How do you want it to look on the exterior? Simply just sitting down talking to them. I actually got an email sitting in my inbox right now for the Oak Mills Poga Fire Department that got washed away in Carter County. And I've got a. I've got a request for another volunteer fire department build because that. That one got washed completely away off the foundation. Gone. Fire trucks in the lake. I've got to go up our firsthand to see it. Their design is going to be very similar to the Stony Creek design. However, the students that I've got Now they know nothing about the Stoney Creek design. They're going to have to be brand new and have to sit down, just figure it out and see, hey, what do you really want? Do you want three bays, four bays? How many trucks you want to put in there? Do you want bathrooms? Do you want sleeping quarters? They just sit down, talk to them, and then we go in on the software, which I teach in architectural and fall. And they sit there and work and figure it out.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: Right?
[00:15:23] Speaker C: Of course, that's one of my quotes. I tell me students, I said, hey, you gotta figure it out. They don't like to hear that. But because we have our technology's right at our fingertips now to find an answer on a search engine, and it's not necessarily right off the top of your head that you gotta figure an ideal out. That's one of those problem solving skills that they're gonna have to use.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: Somebody once said that it's science and I guess technology now that lets people live to the age of 100, but it's the arts that make us want to live that long. What's the intrinsic value still and certainly of history, that people hopefully learn from it and apply it in a better way. But that is not necessarily always true.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: And that never was true.
[00:16:07] Speaker A: Never was.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: I mean, even in the Renaissance, you had great artists and you had really cruddy ones that were just copying what the great ones were doing. And it's up to the humans to decide which one is more valuable. Ultimately, it would be as if Leonardo da Vinci was complaining about Monet being able to use watercolors instead of and having to mix his colors from egg and paint and all that technology advanced. I tell my students all the time, I imagine that when the first fire was developed, there were a whole bunch of people that were anti fire that it was changing the way we are doing things. This has altered our reality. It's no longer valuable, et cetera. So when it comes to art, I think the same thing. You're going to have people who cheat. You're going to have people that use technology as a dodge or as a way to get out of it. But you had people that were doing that before the technology. It doesn't change that. AI Art, for example, is going to develop into its own art form, just like photography did when photographs first came up. Real quote, artists complained. In fact, a lot of the early really popular photographers were ones that recreated classical art in a photograph as kind of an ironic statement about modern technology's impact on creativity and man.
So Is it going to positively or negatively affect the arts, technology?
Yes, both. It's going to be positive and it's going to be negative, and it's going to be up to us humans to determine what that is. And we will do it just like we've done it every other time.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Yeah, people will find the way, as you know, you'll figure it out. Like Daniel said, just figure it out. And human beings, we'll just figure it out. Does history suggest that people, and I guess those involved in humanities direct technology's path a little bit more than scientists sometime? I mean, is there a vacuum of need that people in humanities or art see that maybe the technology driven don't? And either through art or literature or what have you suggest an idea that technology or science draws upon that they never saw before?
[00:18:12] Speaker B: Well, I think that kind of goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning. I think people tend to see technology in the humanities as opposites, as these are two different sides of the spectrum. But they're not. They're both essential. Even the scientist uses humanities to come up with his scientific breakthroughs. It's all incorporated all the time. So there isn't this dramatic difference between the two. I'm not really sure. And maybe Daniel would want to throw in on this, where that idea came from, that somehow technology or science, maybe it was the influence on the impact of STEM education or something. But there's this idea that these things are incompatible even with what you were talking about, with using the software and designing it requires creativity to know what to do. But I don't really see the difference between the two.
[00:18:58] Speaker C: An example that I think if you were ever to go over to the Biltmore house. Yes, you go over to the Biltmore house. On the outside, you have all the pretty cool stonework and architecture and that artwork. Someone had to carve it or chisel it out or create it using some kind of technology to create that art. The Biltmore house is a great example, I think, of historical aspect as well as technological aspect. When they built this house, they actually created a rail system to the front door of the house. The railroad and a train came to the house to unload materials. If you walk through it, you're amazed that the time frame when they built the house and what technology that they created, even a bowling alley and a swimming pool inside of the house at the time. Having the water in the swimming pool at that time, you probably had to bring in the water at some point, other than having it from a city System, probably a well or something that they had to actually either dump in or pump in.
Not sure how they pumped it in at that time in the early 1900s, but that's a historical, technologically advanced house in our realm.
[00:20:09] Speaker D: So, Tabitha, you were discussing, you know, how humanities and technology, a lot of people have this idea that they're on two opposite ends of, like, a spectrum of some sort, when in reality, it's like they're more of, like, in this bubble, and they have, like, different aspects, different facets of each field that interplay and affect the other. So this episode in itself, really going off of that is a good example of, like, you know, how technologies and humanities play together. I mean, we've got this technology that we're using right now in the tec, we've got the mics in the studio, We've got our student worker, Jordi, who just did some troubleshooting and problem solving for us, which is kind of a humanities feat. And just looking in the software, making adjustments in the software would be more on that technologies in the technologies realm. But it all plays together. It's all related somehow. So I guess now this would kind of be a good opportunity to discuss, and we may have already discussed it and touched base on that during this episode, but just how you use technology in your classroom in certain projects.
[00:21:16] Speaker B: What you're talking about is exactly how I use technology in my classrooms. First of all, for one thing, in addition to using all this recording equipment and all of that, to record what we're talking about in our thoughts in this moment in time, which combines technology and humanities, it also is a prime directive of humanities to reach other people with it. So a podcast is a great example of technology and humanities colliding for the purpose of informing everybody who's listening. It's a ripple effect through it, which is how I use technology in education. Like I was saying earlier, teaching online, I think, is one of the incredible side effects of the modern age. I've been interested in online education since way before COVID The first online classes I taught were when I was in grad school, just because I do see this as a really beneficial way to reach people and educate people. And ultimately, it's people that guide how technology will be used. So all of that links together in my online classes, when I was back in school in the late 80s, when I first went to college, if I was researching a paper, I had to go to the library, I had to find books, I had to use microfiche, I had to go through the card Catalog. If I could answer that one question, I was doing really well with technology, we can go beyond that. So now you're not just answering a research question, you're developing your own questions because you have time to find answers. Before, there wasn't the luxury of time that allows for curiosity to be indulged. Now I can ask students don't write notes, just write down questions.
So my students just write down questions for everything they view or read in my class, and then they pick a question a week to find an answer for. I'm teaching them how to evaluate a source, which I think is more important now than just finding a source. We can all go online and find a source, but how do you know it's good? So showing kids how to evaluate sources and all of that, using technology to teach history while also teaching them about the use of technology.
So it all plays into each other endlessly in this beautiful little loop. I get a ton of students that are in technology programs for my humanities, technology and culture class because they're interested in that interplay to begin with. So again, it's another opportunity to say, not only are we looking at how technology is impacted society, but how is the technology of this class impacting you right now? How much bigger are you getting because of all of this that you can have now and all of these things you can access? So I think that they're together. I mean, there's just no how can you function in the modern world without technology? So I use it everywhere in my classes.
[00:23:52] Speaker D: I think it's really fair to say, like, we wouldn't be able to function in this world, in this society without the technology. And Tabitha, you also said something, you know, now that your students are able to retrieve these answers quicker with the help of Google and AI and of course, you know, ensuring their sources are reliable.
Would it be fair to say with technological advance, like the more technology advances, that gives us more of an opportunity to advance human society as a whole?
[00:24:24] Speaker B: Yes, I would say that. Exactly, exactly. It's like I was saying about standing on the shoulders of giants. You build on what came before. We'll get better and better as a society as we figure out how to use technology successfully, how it benefits people. While there is tons of downsides to technology, you also have to look at as people are allowed to be educated now where before they could have been denied because they were rural, or they couldn't get into school, or they had to work all the time. It's equalizing individual information.
I think that's priceless. So yes, we're going to advance because students who would never have had the opportunity to study before can get that information. And that could be the great idea, the great mind that jumps us forward. The next group project you're working on could be the thing that changes the way we look at an event, or in Daniel's case, in the way things are built or the way they're put together. All of these things, things can be altered because more people have access to the information thanks to technology.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Daniel, when students go through design and like you said earlier, you first ask somebody what do they want? How much kind of specifics do you go into when say you're building or you're trying to design something within a city area, in a rural area, in a cold area, a mountainous area, as opposed to maybe near the beach or something. What do students kind of have to research about those areas and kind of get an idea of and maybe translate into, kind of write down, translate what they need to do to design.
[00:25:50] Speaker C: The first thing that I would have them research is probably the weather related issues that they may have a lot of stuff down near the coast. If it's metal, if it's not treated or even stainless probably would rust. Even the house varies. Northern climate versus the southern climate. Of course, you got the hurricanes in the southern climate. You're even talking about basements, roadways. I know in the northern part of the country, Northeast even drawing up roadways in the civil aspect. Roadways will become very, very bumpy along the way because of the frost, freezing and thawing, freezing and thawing. Building houses on stilts along the coast for tidal aspect, the eaves on the house.
So I have been fortunate enough to be in two main. And a lot of those houses do not have overhangs. They go. The roof pitches are very steep because of the snow aspect where that it'll come straight off. And very few of them have gutters. Whereas in the south we do have lower pitch roofs with overhangs. The guttering is because of the course of the snow. As it starts melting, the slide off like an avalanche effect. You know, everything in its path is ripped away. Even nobody thinks about this, but the graveyards are indoor cemeteries. And how that they. They would bury someone either above the ground and or in the ground. So so far the water lines, electricity below the frost lines that we have probably very different down here in the south versus the northern part of the country. Even the sanitation, you have to get into all kinds of wastewater. And what we do here is slope our parking lots for the rainwater to wash off. And there's usually a holding pool before it drains off into the ground and or slash creeks, branches that we have here. Same aspect up there. They have a different way to collect all that. They usually have snow piles.
So I do know even on the roadways in Colorado, I've been out there before, we have dividing markers at night in the middle of the road in Colorado I know they don't have markers in the middle of the road because the snowplows just cut them in two scrape them off the road. So they don't even have them. So we have to look at several aspects. And that was just talking about architectural and structural designs that we're talking. And if we go into mechanical, like I said, the rust prevention very bottom part of the nation because of the salt content in the air. Even the up north in Alaska, you've got to think about the environmental aspect of everything you do. Because of the freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw. And a lot of people in Fairbanks, instead of wearing regular shoes, they wear those muck top boots because the ground is pretty much saturated.
[00:28:35] Speaker A: So with design you have to be creative in what you're doing. You have to come up with creative ideas to solve geography, elevation, everything about it. So you've got to have a creativity in how you're designing. That has to be an aspect in what you do.
[00:28:49] Speaker C: Yes, very much so.
[00:28:51] Speaker A: Another thing you do that's quite popular here on campus is the bridge building competition. I know we faced off against Milligan University and we did TCAT Morristown not long ago, but that is. It's one thing to design something on a computer screen or on paper and see it, but to make the design and then demonstrate it where people can actually see it happening. Talk a little bit about how. Well first how that came about. I think that originated at UT University of Tennessee maybe. Or it was. It started there, it was done there. But what's the importance about taking something off paper and getting it where people can see it?
[00:29:28] Speaker C: Going back to University of Tennessee, I had students that competed at engineering day down there in high school. I kind of what we call permanently borrow their ideal. And I brought it with me to here northeast to get students a real hands on aspect on actually putting their hands on the equipment and or let's just say wood and trying to put it together instead of just piecing it together on a computer software, it looks good on software and or paper. But until you put your hands in there and you get frustrated and you try to Glue it. You glue your fingers, you glue your eyeballs together.
Even using saws, you know, even nicking your fingers or cutting your fingers. You've got to learn how to use those tools. So I don't want my students going out into the field and having someone out in the field that's actually on ground, such as a carpenter or construction worker, say, hey, those students or that person that's in there in the lab drawing. He's never done this, so he doesn't know what he's talking about. I want my students to have that real world. Yeah, we've actually done it, so we kind of know what we're talking about whenever we go out there. So not only the bridge building, but we also do. I have them do tapping holes for threads, they do rivets. They also go back to the weld shop. And we just completed, back in the fall, we actually built walls. So they had to draw up a wall in the classroom on software. Then they had to go over into, into the lab and actually physically build it with two by fours and put it together, naming each individual part McKenzie, come, come and viewed it.
[00:31:04] Speaker D: I remember this. And something interesting about that project too was, I remember you have them design it in the software and then they get done with those designs, but then all of a sudden the client changes up what they want, which is something that happens in the real world every day. So it's just so realistic and it helps them with their problem solving.
[00:31:24] Speaker C: Yeah. So what I, what I do, they create it in the classroom for the wall. They create the, the wall. I give them certain concise constraints. And then I give one team, I give them a window to put in the middle of the wall and, or a door. This year I was lucky enough to have enough students that they, they were to do both. They were to do one. One team was going to do a window, one's going to do a door. And what they had to do is draw it up on our CAD system, give me a bill of materials, give me a cut list. So I had, I had the boards ready. All that they were going to get were those boards that they told me that they needed. So if they did not think ahead and say, oh, I might make a mistake, I might need an extra board, they didn't get it. They gave me the, I gave them the amount that, that was required to be built. What they told me, Right. So I said the next class day that we're going to come in, we're actually going to go out in the lab and build it they were excited. So we're going to use tools and I made them use a handsaw instead of the actual circular saw because that, that's an art that has been lost. I didn't make them put it together with hammer, nail because I wanted to be able to take it apart. So we use screws, screw guns and, and some drills. So I had students that had never used that before. They got a hands on approach.
Learned how to do some of that stuff, especially with the saw.
Very difficult if you've never used a handsaw before trying to get it started. I grew up doing it, my dad forced me to do it, but I learned how to do it really fast. The day of the build, I walk in and I tell them mama called because mama wants a different size window slash door.
[00:33:08] Speaker D: Oh no.
[00:33:09] Speaker C: On the day of the build. So now within the time frame they have to readjust their drawing and their bill materials and their cut list and must begin to draw that and build it within the class time frame. Real world aspect because things change immediately on pretty much everything we do. I don't know of a house plan that's, I don't know of one that's set in stone. Whenever you build it, somebody changes something immediately. Even, even parts. So I did that on purpose.
Yeah, I'm kind of mean. But it's, it's a real life teaching lesson immediately. So they, they have to use a lot of communication skills in there to get started. Because if, if some of them don't go out into the lab to begin to build while the others are making the changes, they'll never get done on time.
And it's got to be accurate. I measure it, make sure it's accurate. They can't be off. I give them maybe a quarter inch to be accurate and square things that we in the classroom because we're very picky in what we do.
[00:34:21] Speaker B: It's the real application of what they're learning. It's invaluable. And it reminds me of like Picasso learning how to paint traditional portraits before he Picassoed it up. He had to be able to have those skills before you can get creative. So I think it's a fantastic project, the bridge building.
[00:34:37] Speaker C: I tell them first two bridges that you build, they're going to be horrible. They don't believe me. And then they build it. Oh yeah. Well, now we believe. But after their third one, fourth one fifth one, one tenth one. Hey, we're getting pretty dang good right there. And the proof in the pudding, we've, we've Done really well. Tom will tell you. We've done really well competing against Milligan and TCAT of Morristown. We.
I'm not going to toot our horn, but we've done. We've done well against other schools.
[00:35:08] Speaker D: Absolutely. Toot that horn accomplishment. And when you're discussing the bridge build, that's when students, they need to design a perfectly functioning bridge using the least amount of materials that they can.
A lot of planning, a lot of mathematics, a lot of physics, I would think.
[00:35:29] Speaker C: Yep. And the other aspect to it, even though they're designing and creating and seeing failures, we have to have failure. I said before, to have success. This is the part that you can't buy, is that big smile whenever that student builds that bridge, and they have that all that weight on there, or they have tears coming out because it failed. Right. So that. That's pretty cool. Pretty cool deal that you have a lot of emotions built onto. Yeah. Two or three, four, ten pieces of wood there. That is basically the m. It's like a trash wood. The. The boss is like a trash wood. So we take it and do some pretty cool things with it. Yep. We. We base it off of the triangular shapes. We have a lot of fun with it. There's a lot of emotion that goes into it, but in the end, we're pretty happy with where our results are.
[00:36:25] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a thrill. Thrilling to watch. I mean, there's multiple bridges of head held in excess of £70, which is you.
[00:36:33] Speaker D: You just wouldn't think, looking at it, but it's all in the design.
[00:36:37] Speaker C: Most of our bridges, whenever we do the project in the class, they have to be 30 grams or less. Whenever we're competing against the other schools, I try to get them to be under 25 grams or less. So a sheet of paper is 4.6 grams. So that's the weight of the bridge is between, you know, 20 and 30 grams to hold 60, 70 pounds. It's pretty nice. Like I said, you can't. You can't buy that smile that. That you get from the student being overjoyed. And Tom will tell you, when we're out there, when we're out there testing in front of everybody, when it comes down to it, you can hear a pin drop, can't you, Tom? I mean, it's just, like, dead solid.
[00:37:16] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:37:17] Speaker C: Yeah. Everybody's just focused, making sure nothing happens. Nobody breathes funny. No, because it's dead solid.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: But yeah, it's truly an exciting thing to see. If you've witnessed it or seen any of the videos, we put some videos on Instagram and Facebook. But yeah, it's engineering with a capital E, truly to use balsa wood to move that kind of weight and hold that kind of weight in a bridge.
[00:37:44] Speaker C: I don't tell them exactly what their design is, but they do have to have a truss built. And we go over that in the classroom pretty handily. I think if they just pay attention a little bit to what the old man has been experienced to, they should do.
[00:38:00] Speaker A: Well, you used an interesting phrase when you were talking about the hand saw to cut wood. You called it an art that has been lost.
And I don't know if many other phrases kind of captures the marriage between technologies and certain aspects of humanity. Certainly art and that because every, every welder I've ever talked to said there's an art to it. Some people can do it and other people simply do it better because they understand the art to it. And there certainly is that among most things, technology driven.
But is that kind of the secret binding thing between art and technology that you have to be an artist to really pull off some of those things? And even, even design or engineering or auto mechanics. And I've known auto mechanics who are just for whatever reason, way better than others, even though they've had the same.
[00:38:53] Speaker C: Training, a lot of it has to do. I think just being experienced to learn how to do it, pulling that saw back, trying to get it started, if you're, if you're starting it and you're pushing instead of pulling, you're not going to get anywhere. So the welders, Even in our SkillsUSA competitions, there's a contest called Welding Sculpture that they actually take pieces of metal. And I've saw forks, knives, spoons to create a big turkey. Like it's a wild turkey. And it's truly phenomenal. It's a piece of work. It's a piece of artwork, I should say. Or that they take that technology to create artwork.
[00:39:34] Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.
And if you've seen, seen many welding sculptures or how, how welding kind of can be seen. And again, it's the human imagination. It's human creativity simply being applied to material objects and created.
[00:39:50] Speaker B: It all comes out of us. And that's one of the cautions too because technology is limited by our own biases and understanding. If you're looking at research or AI use, for example, example like Chat GPT, it's pulling on everything that was ever written about a subject. But not all those writings are good. So having the critical thinking skills to be able to say, well, this worked in this context, but is no longer valid. All of that stuff is interrelated in it, too. You can teach a person to weld, but you may not be able to teach that welder to identify the problem, understand what it is they're trying to do, why this thing needs to be done, who it's impacting, and all of that. So I think it's just like anything else. You have people, the different degrees of it. You know, some people are just going to weld, but then you have those people that are going to move welding forward, you know, true, truly, and kind.
[00:40:38] Speaker D: Of turning, I guess, shifting gears. Is that the idiom? I forgot. I'm really bad with idioms, but how people historically reacted to advancements in technology and, like, adopted, like, what? What's the adoption been like?
[00:40:53] Speaker B: One of the things I always tell my students is that the appearance of history repeating itself is not factually correct, but it's rooted in human psychology. We're the same people. We just now have more technology, but our limitations are similar and the same. So that's a long way of saying that it doesn't go over well. People tend not to, like, change. People tend not to, especially if they feel like it's going to alter their way of living or tradition or how it's always been done. So you introduce a new technology, the first reaction is, this is the worst thing that has ever happened, and we have to stop it. When factories, textile mills first sprung up, textile workers responded. Cottage industry workers responded to that by throwing their shoes in it and trying to break up the machinery. It's all very noble. I mean, they were out there fighting for the craftsmen and all that. Doesn't change a thing, does not stop technology. It is going to happen. The thing that I think humanities can be really helpful with is if you know that, then you can adapt and move forward. The people that tend to fight the technology are generally the ones that end up getting left behind because of it. It's the people that can see the technology and go, yes, there are bad things and good things, positives and minuses, but I'm going to adjust to this and adapt that. The people that went from being a weaver to being a mechanic, that could actually have a better quality of life because you had more time. You weren't working 24 hours a day. You weren't under this. You were getting a check for the hours you were putting in, as opposed to hoping that you'd be able to sell your wares. But if you're not able to, to See that this offers an opportunity. And I always think of technology as ultimately the great equalizer. The more technology people have, the less those little differences like economics and stuff can impact your learning and your ability to advance yourself.
Because we now all can find that information. We can now all look this up. We can study all the bridges that have been built and kind of analyze what makes one work and makes one fall apart and come up with a solution that's rooted not just in our limitations of knowledge, but in all of human knowledge. We have access to all of that now. So again, I think I went rounded off your question, but no, no, that.
[00:43:15] Speaker D: Was great because I actually had more stuff pop up just off of that. And like, just thinking how terribly ironic that is. Like, the ones who are more hesitant to adopt helped get left behind. Because you have to think there must be like, maybe some sort of like, safety feature of this. And, you know, maybe people are threatened, like for the, like the tech, the meals, they're like, oh, well, we won't be needed anymore. If I'm not needed anymore then.
[00:43:43] Speaker B: But even that is ultimately rooted in I am not needed as I am.
You're always needed. It's just whether or not you adapt to what the things in the world are so that you can help answer those problems. If you go, this field is changing and I refuse to change with it. The changes are just going to keep happening. It's just going to keep rolling over. It's going to get bigger. The gulf between. My dad always says there's a learning curve. He's too old to worry about the learning curve figuring out how to make this new technology work. But as long as you're willing to engage with that learning curve, you can keep contributing actively. If you freeze and say, no, this is just too far. Even looking at AI, like ChatGPT and stuff, if people look at it and go, no, this is terrible. This is going to destroy everything. It's not going to stop it. And it just kind of increases the likelihood it will be terrible and destroy everything. Because you're letting the technology kind of travel on its own without the ethics and the humanity behind it to say, no, this is. I was saying this just the other day. When I was a kid, they used to teach you how to make friends, you know, in kindergarten or whatever. It's like, this is how you meet friends. We should be doing that with social media and AI and technologies. This is how you use these tools. This is how you use this to a benefit. And then we wouldn't have these Discussions about it ruining everything.
[00:45:04] Speaker D: Exactly.
[00:45:05] Speaker B: But as long as we get hung up and stopped there, that this technology shouldn't happen. It makes everything else go so much slower. So we can't evolve the ethics to go with it. We can't evolve the education to go with it because we're too busy arguing about whether or not it should exist while it continues to exist and while.
[00:45:22] Speaker D: Others, you know, learn how to use it to their own benefit, you know.
[00:45:26] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:45:27] Speaker D: There are people who are, you know, prospering off of. Who are benefiting off of AI. Well, me, for example. I mean, AI helps me sometimes with photo captions, especially if I've got like, you know, just writer's block. I'll be like, chat, gbt. I talk to it almost like a human. I was actually, I went to a conference once and they said, you've got to treat it like it's a human. You want to keep that, you know, human aspect to it.
[00:45:50] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly.
[00:45:52] Speaker D: And it comes up with great answers when I treat it just like I'm emailing a colleague. Like, it's almost like I'm emailing Tom and, you know, asking Tom, give me some ideas. And ChatGPT generates all the these phrases and just language that I would use myself.
[00:46:05] Speaker B: So, and oftentimes and I tell my students is, you don't stop there. You take what they give you and you go, oh, that's great. And that gave me an idea. And I'm going to evolve it either through. I like playing with ChatGPT and saying, no, now more. More feeling. You know, I want it to be more emotional. Less emotional. More emojis. Less emojis. Just to kind of get it to do what I want it to do. It's using a tool just like any other tool. And I also, I use it for emails. I am a super casual. Yay, extra exclamation point lol. Emailer. So whenever I have to do anything professional, I can run it through chat and just say, can this sound like I have an education?
[00:46:41] Speaker D: Can you make this make me sound like a robot?
[00:46:44] Speaker B: So, yeah, it's just a great tool as long as we teach everyone how to use it.
[00:46:49] Speaker D: Exactly.
[00:46:50] Speaker A: How do we humanize technology?
Specifically, how do we keep the phone phenomenon, which has already eaten us up, and it did several, many years ago. But how is that kind of evolving to at least incorporate some type of humanity into what we're seeing and what we're looking at and what we're trying to communicate with as a communication tool?
[00:47:09] Speaker B: You know the term setting boundaries? Yes. That actually evolved in part out of that, out of technology. Because suddenly we could be working seven days a week and employers picked up on that. So it's like, why didn't you answer the email on Saturday? Or whatever. So humanity responded to that eventually, if not at last with, okay, you need to set boundaries, and you have a right as an employee to set these boundaries, and you need to make your boundaries clear. In order to humanize technology, you have to ask questions about it. You can't be afraid of it. You have to see it for what it is and say, this is a tool we're using. How should we best be using this? And humanities is vital in that process. The ethics of a thing. Who is this technology helping? Who is this technology hurting? Is this overall plus or an overall minus? And if it's a minus, how do we turn it into a plus? It's figuring out how to question it, determine how it fits into human society, how we're going to use it. And like I said earlier, there's always going to be people who use technology or anything else to cheat. I talk about early humans in one of my classes and I used to say that there was always somebody who would either want to trade you for your gold disc, hang out with you because you had a gold disc, or punch you in the face and take your gold disc. So that's not going to change. That's always going to be there. But we can't be afraid of that. It's like focusing on the 5% of people who commit crimes instead of the 95% that don't. It colors our whole outlook. When you look at it as, is this some negative as opposed to, hey, that's not too bad, we're not doing that badly. Yes, AI could pose a threat to creativity, but only if we let it.
We have to determine that human creativity is more valuable than AI creativity. But we only do that by asking the questions and coming up with solutions to problem solving.
[00:48:57] Speaker A: Ask the questions. Always, always Some of the best advice in any way, shape or conform.
[00:49:02] Speaker B: Curiosity. I'm always saying that. Develop your curiosity. I think the worst thing technology has done to us in the modern age is that is it's kind of sucked our own curiosity out of it in favor of give me the answer.
[00:49:16] Speaker D: Which is so ironic too, because you would think it would feed curiosity if you're using it the way maybe that would be beneficial.
[00:49:24] Speaker B: Exactly what I'm saying. Yeah, it's a gift. But until we ask those questions and say, hey, is this damaging our creativity? Not As a gut reaction, but as. No, it really is. And here's how we adjust. This is what we do. Until we start doing that, that we're kind of at the mercy of it.
[00:49:38] Speaker C: In some aspect, I think we've lost some of our technology art of like, if you went back to the pioneer days when they built wagons, I don't know of anybody in my realm of people that could probably build a wagon wheel or even a covered wagon. And so in some. Some way, shape or form, I'm always going into. How did they do that then?
[00:49:59] Speaker B: Oh, I do that all the time. You look at like the Blue Mountains is how did.
[00:50:02] Speaker C: How did they build the road through there or even down at Cades Cove in the park? How did they get to that area where it's located at now? Because, you know, you're traveling through the mountain 20, 30 minutes on the road, 20, 30 miles even from Townsend back into that community, that big flat area. I'm always amazed at how that. How did they get into that area?
You know, the first person that went through there, how did they travel through then? They had to cut the road through and try to get the wagons through. Even the people that went all the way across the United States over, you know, into Oregon and California, how that they got out there. And if the wagon wheel broke, those people were tough people, you know, surviving raids at night from. From the Indians. I don't know how they did it, but they did it. They were tough people. We just came through, you know, the flood. Within days, we're back in business trying to figure out how are we going to get this road from point A to point B. A lot of people lost their houses, lost their lives, lost their land. We're tough people, too.
You know, we didn't. We didn't have somebody to say, here, you do it this way. We had to go through and figure it out. I kind of think some of our art, such as a crosscut saw or even candle making. We've got a presentation tomorrow. My students are creating molds to make a candle, and they're going to present their candle to what we call Bed, Bath and Beyond or Hobby Lobby or one of those corporations that they've got to present their candle ideal, but they have to create the candle using a 3D printer to make the mold. And so they got to create the candle that way and sell their ideal. So we're using a lot of humanities and history right there in that one presentation that we do. We do another structural bridge presentation in the fall that my Students do and they have to do a research presentation. A lot of history is based on it. And the research, it's pretty neat goods and bads and failures and researching the people that created the trusses that we still use today, not only our bridges, but also our roof trusses.
[00:52:02] Speaker A: There's a lot of homesteading and going back to getting off the grid, as they say. And I know you mentioned making a mo, using a 3D printer to make a mold to do candles, which is like marrying ultra new technology with a very, very old art form as well. How, as far as an education system, how do people go about learning that homesteading life, like maybe not necessarily building wagon wheels, but doing other things, maybe from, I don't know, 100, 200 years ago. As far as farming, making your own nails, I mean, I know, I know a couple of people who have their own like blacksmithing shop now. They can make their own nails and do a lot of things. Horseshoes. Is there a resurgence of older technology against newer technology? And has that occurred in history? That there's kind of a move back away into a more traditional way of.
[00:52:55] Speaker B: Life from the historical point of you that's always existed. Like I said, not everybody could build a wagon wheel. That's why you had wagon manufacturers who could make your wagon for you. Now if you decided to go out west, you'd probably be smart to learn how to make a wagon wheel so you could repair it. But there were plenty of people that didn't and they didn't make it all the way out west. They had to turn around and go back or they died somewhere along the way because they were unprepared. So I think that's always been a division. The purists who say it has to be done with no technology and then the modernists who say no, it's all technology. And the bottom line is like learning about homesteading research, you want to learn how not to use technology, use technology to find out how not to use it. And then even then, if you decide to go homesteading, how hardcore are you going to be? Are you dropping it back to where you're going to have to manufacture, melt your own ore and create your own mold? Or it's a 3D printer, an acceptable alternative, what is the goal? And that's all humanities. I mean, if you're thinking about homesteading, asking yourself why in depth, not just some surface answer, which is one of the things I'm working on with my own students is asking questions that actually get to the meat of an issue.
Figuring out what the purpose is, what you're trying to do, what you're trying to prove, what you're trying to. To say, what's the history behind it? How is it done successfully? We could all just drop technology and start raising chickens, but I wouldn't be able to do it. The only way I could do it is if I researched chicken raising. You know, so it's all linked again.
You can't get rid of technology without technology.
[00:54:35] Speaker A: Right.
[00:54:35] Speaker B: It's hard because, and I'm glad you brought up like, candle making and stuff, because so many students today even think of technology as computers, you know, phones and stuff. And it's like, no, no. Technology is the pen you're using to write with. I mean, it's all technology.
There's just fancier stuff and slower stuff. Before the software, people had to get the rulers out and hand do the design.
[00:54:56] Speaker C: We still do that.
[00:54:57] Speaker B: There you go. Well, that's like I was saying too, like with art, you have to know how to do that so that you can use the software effectively. If you don't understand why the wall is drawn that way, software is not going to help you. You'll just end up with a crummy house. But if you understand everything that goes into it, then you can build something good with the technology. So it's ultimately only as good as we are.
[00:55:20] Speaker D: We are the limitation.
[00:55:21] Speaker A: Yes, we.
[00:55:22] Speaker B: Yeah, we are the limitation and we are the boundlessness at the same time. I mean, it's both.
[00:55:28] Speaker D: Tabitha, you were discussing. I know that you had said, like, you know, technology, it advances because the need arises. So I had a talking point on here just to discuss humanities driven technological advances. But by the sounds of what you said, it's like all technological advances are, you know, humanities driven. They're. Because they're human driven.
[00:55:47] Speaker B: Yeah, part of it is, and I think that's part of that, too. I was saying earlier that doesn't always benefit everybody, you know, so the technology exists, but does that mean necessarily that everyone benefits from it? In the Industrial Revolution, it led to worker exploitation and all sorts of disparities and educational inequality and all of that until the people fought back and said, this technology is not going to be the end of us. It's just going to be a tool we use. You're not going to use this just to use me.
I'm going to use this too. It's all perspective and how you look at it. So like a tattoo artist using a digital design software to come up with. With the design that the clients requested is just another tool. And it also makes things quicker and more efficient. Like I was saying with having to go to the library, if I could research one question, I was doing good, but now I can research 20 in the same amount of time.
[00:56:40] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:56:41] Speaker B: So all of that makes it a little faster, a little easier, and if you look at it the right way, it allows more people access to it. I might not be able to hand draw, but I can master this software technology to do the work. And the idea is still mine. I'm just using the computer to draw it instead of my hand. It's all a form of creativity that. It's like using AI to help you write a paper. It allows a person that has a hard time with the written word to no longer have that hard time. And through using it, you'll develop those skills because you'll start seeing, oh, that's how sentence goes. That's how it's supposed to sound. And you get it all anyway.
[00:57:22] Speaker D: You'll start to pick up on different phrases, different talking points, different ways to argue a thesis.
[00:57:28] Speaker B: Four entered in the calculator a couple of times, and you start remembering that it equals four. So the information still gets there. An educator named Liza Loop, who was really big into computers in the 1970s, you had the first. Steve Wozniak donated an apple to her school so she could use it. But she said that there was something exciting about technology that took something that was otherwise considered dull and mundane and made it suddenly interesting. And if you see it in that way, it can be a real benefit, truly.
[00:57:59] Speaker D: Tabitha and Daniel, thank you so much for sharing your practices, your fields with us and how those two seemingly very different fields aren't so different after all. Very much involved with each other, Very much feed off of each other and help the other advance and progress. With that comes, you know, human progression, human advancement. So we do appreciate you all giving us.
[00:58:21] Speaker B: Thank you so much. It's always fun. Thank you.
[00:58:24] Speaker D: Yes, and thank you to all of our loyal listeners for joining us today on the sound barrier. You know, you can stream us anytime you're in the mood for a listen. We're on thenortheaststate.com so/the sound barrier. We're also available to stream on any streaming service. Really. Listen, subscribe. Leave us a great review. Until next time, this has been Tom Wilson and Mackenzie Morgent along with our colleagues Tabitha and Daniel on the sound barrier.
