Are Wearables the Next Big Thing in Higher Ed Tech?

Sophie White: Hey everyone. I am thrilled for you to check out this episode of EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. In line with some of the discussions that we've been having about the latest technology and AI, in this one, Jenay and I talk about wearable technologies and how they can be used inside and outside of the classroom. So specifically, we talked to a team from Notre Dame about some research they're doing related to smart glasses, how they can be used in the classroom, how they can enhance accessibility, both in personal life and in class, and some of the pitfalls related to these technologies, guardrails that institutions should think about putting in, but also the opportunities and promise of them as we think about AI, smart technologies, wearable technologies going forward. We had a really powerful student perspective in this one from a student who's using the smart glasses for accessibility and the ways that it's really improved her life. So I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did and check it out.

***

Hello everyone and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White. I'm a content marketing and program manager here at EDUCAUSE, and I am one of the hosts for today's discussion.

Jenay Robert: Hi, everyone. I'm Jenay Robert. I'm a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE, and I'll be your other host.

Sophie White: Great. We're really excited today to be talking to a team from the University of Notre Dame about some research that they have been doing related to wearable technology. So I'll introduce the team and then we'll jump into it. First of all, we have Steve Varela. Steve is director of the Teaching and Learning Technologies team at Notre Dame. The team has expertise in the areas of learning management, academic software, data management, learning analytics, and professional development. He specializes in multimodal approaches to teaching and learning, curriculum instructional course design, and development for fully online blended and tech enhanced courses. Steve has led research and development of emerging technologies, project-based learning, and interactive immersive multimedia integrated into teaching and learning for student success. Thanks for being here, Steve.

Steve Varela: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Sophie White: All right. Next up, we have Elena Mangione-Lora, who is a senior teaching professor of Spanish at the University of Notre Dame. Her work focuses on refining pedagogy and using technology and active learning to move students to unplugged language proficiency. Elena's other interests include AI, culture and interculturality in the humanities, alternative assessment, media literacy, and community engaged learning to move student focus and production from theory to production in collaborative, global and professional environments. Most recently, she led a faculty exchange program with UPAEP—we'll talk about what that is in a minute, because I'm not sure of that acronym—in Puebla, Mexico, where she and other participants collaborated with generous, accomplished international colleagues to explore and integrate diverse pedagogical models and cultural traditions into our respective programs. Love that. And can you just say what that acronym stands for?

Elena Mangione-Lora: Yeah. It's UPAEP, which is our ... It's a partner university in Puebla, Mexico, a small university where we send our students to study abroad, and we were lucky enough to do a faculty exchange with them and learned a ton. I can tell about that later because in some ways, because it's a smaller group, they're further ahead with some of the technology even than we are.

Sophie White: Wow. Okay. I would love to hear more about that. Thanks for sharing.

And third, we have Madeline Link, who is a third year PhD candidate in medieval studies at Notre Dame. Her research explores how medieval female mystics describe the textiles they saw in their visions and use metaphors and vocabulary associated with textile production to articulate, claim ownership over and communicate their indescribable experiences of the divine with others. She's also interested in broader questions concerning the function of clothing, bodily adornment, wounds, and other tactile experiences as markers of identity formation and transformation in medieval religious literature. She currently serves as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate survey course titled World of the Middle Ages. And as a student with a visual impairment, she has long been enthusiastic about assistive technologies that make the sources she studies more accessible. This has included a collaboration with Notre Dame School of Architecture to produce a 3D printed map of the campus and ongoing partnerships with Sara Bea Accessibility Services and the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship to test emerging products with the potential to enhance independence in research and daily living. Thanks for being here, Madeline.

Madeline Link: Thanks so much for having me.

Sophie White: Great. We have such a broad range of perspectives on this call. I love that we're talking about teaching technologies and amazing exchange program to Mexico and textiles and accessibility. So I don't know what we're going to get into, but this is exciting. Great. So can you all tell us a little bit more about this research project that you've been working on at Notre Dame related to wearable technologies?

Steve Varela: Sure. I can start us off here. So about a year ago, we were approached by faculty from the physics department regarding this. One of the physics professors had had lunch with a colleague and the colleague was wearing the Meta Smart glasses. And in the process of their conversation and showing the functionality from one to another, it led to some concern from one of the faculty members regarding their labs and academic integrity and things like that. And so they asked us to, my team and I, to evaluate it and to get a better perspective in terms of what the capabilities of this kind of technology has and even where it's going. And initially we were reticent because part of what we try to do is not look at technologies just from that narrow lens necessarily. While academic integrity is an important piece to teaching and learning, when it comes to technology adoption and integration, we're far more broad.

And we also, the concerns with those smart glasses not only were the video capabilities, but the AI capabilities as well. And that was where we really wanted to help destigmatize AI's use. And again, look at technology always as an opportunity, not necessarily as a barrier or have a negative approach to our evaluation. And so we basically put together a team of wonderful folks like Elena, and Maddie was willing to take the glasses as well and really evaluate them on her own. And we have a team of total of about eight colleagues that not only from the teaching and learning technologies teams, but faculty members and also the Navari Center also that Maddie has worked with and the Hesburgh Libraries in general, also Notre Dame Studios because we wanted to really look at the video capabilities. And then assessment, one of my colleagues focuses on everything we evaluate we want to make sure that we base in evidence and data as well. So we looked at everything from it as a learning tool, a technical tool, an accessibility tool, what development opportunities might be available with technology like this, the privacy concerns, media and spatial video, the translation capabilities, and this is where we're at right now. We're still in the process of getting things going, but we've learned a lot so far.

Elena Mangione-Lora: I can jump in, but actually I'm really interested to hear about what Maddie has to say.

Madeline Link: Sure. Yeah. So I was asked by our colleague, Adam, in the Navari Center if I would be willing to explore using the glasses as someone living with a visual impairment, both in daily life and in my research work as a graduate student here at the university, I had learned about them because a number of people in the blind and low vision community have been really excited about the potential in this product. And so I was really grateful and honored for the opportunity to be able to borrow a pair and explore how they might function in my life.

I have been really impressed with how they function within the home for me. So I've used them to identify ingredients for cooking, medicine, mail, all things that I can't see on my own. And I did try to incorporate them a little bit into my scholarship as well. So I think the translation piece is actually really interesting and I have two kind of exciting anecdotes about that. The first is I asked it to identify a Korean skincare product, which it did, and then I asked it to translate the instructions from Korean into English, which it did well enough for me to follow and know how to apply the product, which I just thought was so cool. And then the other thing that I asked it to do, I'm a medievalist, so I have a lot of books in various languages. So I tested it with a book in Latin, which is the primary language that I work with.

And it summarized the page in Latin and produced a pretty accurate summary in English of what was in front of me on the page. So really exciting. I'm still trying to figure out how to get it to actually capture the text in its entirety so that I can be working with the actual text and not just the summary, but I've been really impressed by the translation as well as the ability to identify kind of products around my home.

Elena Mangione-Lora: That's really cool. And I can build on what Maddie's been talking about. I have been testing it intentionally as a translation tool and as a teaching and learning tool, because I think what you captured from Steve's sort of introduction is that one thing that I really appreciate about Steve's team is that, of course, there are nefarious ways to use various technologies. And of course we have to be aware of those things and decide what our intentions are and how to make sure that those intentions are realized as far as teaching and learning goes. But there's also so much potential for it. And as a translation tool for live translation, I find that it's still a bit clunky, but as Steve says, it's as bad as it's ever going to be, it's just going to get better. So I will be interested to see how they solve for the output.

So if I'm listening to somebody and they're speaking to me in one of the romance languages, which are French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, which are the languages that the glasses support right now, I may be able to understand, and that's fantastic if I'm trying to get around somewhere, but it doesn't do anything for me as far as being able to respond. So you kind of feel like you've climbed up this fantastic mountain and then you have no way of getting down.

So that's an interesting problem. I'm looking forward to how that's going to be solved. That's as far as the live translation goes. I have used it in ways that Maddie has described. I do have my cheaters, so I cannot read small print. And so sometimes I'll look at my phone and say, "Could you please read what you see on my screen?" And it does a very good job of that in English. In order for it to do a good job of it in Spanish, you have to change the settings in the phone, otherwise it speaks Spanish with an atrocious accent, atrocious. And Steven, I think I may have mentioned this in some of the correspondence, but we experimented with using it also in a film production course as a point of view type of camera, and there's a big learning curve. We see the potential, but we don't have any finished products that we can share yet.

That's also still in development, but it's kind of a neat thing.

Sophie White: No worries. What were some of ... Oh, go ahead, Jenay.

Jenay Robert: Oh no, I was just going to say, I love that quote of it's as bad as it's going to get. And I think that is so important to keep in mind with all of the AI technologies that we talk about when people say, "This tool is useless because it can't do all these 10 things that I think it should be able to do. " Well, yeah, I mean, it's its first try, it's going to get better in the future. And so it's so important for us to keep that in mind because if we wait for the tools to evolve to that point where we think they should be, we've lost so much time in learning about them and being intentional about their integration, especially in higher ed. And you've brought up some of the concerns around, there's privacy concerns, there's academic integrity concerns, there's all these things that we want to think about.

So if we're waiting until that last minute when it's magically the thing that we want, we've lost maybe years in some cases of exploring that intentionality behind implementation. But sorry, Sophie, I didn't mean to step on you there.

Sophie White: Oh, no, go for it. Elena, did you want to add something to that?

Elena Mangione-Lora: I was just going to add to ... Yes, thank you. I was just going to add to what Jenay was saying, something that's been really, really important. I think Steve and Maddie would agree that in terms of learning about it, Jenay, but also steering it. So having a voice in how it's developed, I think that's really important having multiple voices and multiple perspectives and as you said, being intentional, ethically intentional and for the societal good, intentional, all of the positive things that we want, I think it's very, very important for us to be part of this dawn of this kind of technology because I think that it is going to allow us to avoid some of the pitfalls of past technologies. I wonder if we'd had a little perspective in other voices, if cities, modern cities would've developed the way they did around the automobile, privileging the automobile over bicyclists or walkers. And so having people like Maddie who can talk about why this is going to be an essential part of and how it can be an essential part is just so important.

Madeline Link: Yeah, I would love to jump in there as well and just say, I think that's an awesome point. And it's exciting how a technology that wasn't necessarily developed to be assistive technology has had already such immense success in the low vision community. Meta recently partnered with Humanware, which is one of the largest developers and distributors of technology for the blind and visually impaired, and they're selling them now. So they're being marketed now as assistive technology in addition to everything else wonderful that they do, which I think is awesome. I'm really glad to see Humanware getting on board with them.

Steve Varela: Yeah. I'd like to add one more thing too, just to kind of, again, connect back to the intentionality of utilizing technology and things like that. When I first talked to Maddie about the glasses, we were talking about some other stuff regarding assistive technologies, but I mentioned to her the reason why we were evaluating that the physics professors were worried about cheating. And Maddie, the first thing Maddie says was, "I didn't even think about doing that, using it that way." And I think that to me, that was so impactful because again, there's an assumption and a distrust and a suspicion we sometimes levy towards students and their use of technologies and they're in their framework of learning and stuff. And I don't know why we immediately assume the worst of intentions necessarily, right? Usually it's because we all had one student or something that did something teaching at a class and then we're just so hurt by it that we generalize it, I guess, or so forth.

But like I said, when Maddie said that, I was like, "This is exactly right. There's an optimism here that I feel like we sometimes forget and that people do have to be intentional with the choices that they're making." So including if they choose to be academically dishonest, for the glasses themselves, there's the process they have to go through to get these working the way that they would want to. And that's a lot of work actually besides just studying. So yeah.

Sophie White: Yeah. I think that's such an important point. And I know, Jenay, when you brought up this idea, we were looking at wearable technology as kind of a new emerging conversation in the space around AI, which for a while it seems like has been dominated by this academic integrity piece. And I'm curious, I feel like this has so much potential as we've been talking about in terms of different teaching and learning applications and accessibility. I also was just reading an article this weekend about wearable technologies related to privacy, people being recorded without consent, especially just out in the world, not even in an academic setting. I'm curious, do you all have thoughts on that? How did you consider the pitfalls of these wearable technologies when you were creating this research study and starting to implement them into your courses?

Steve Varela: I think the privacy issue itself was probably foremost on our minds because the ability for someone to quickly catch a video and record someone without really ... Again, there's a little light that kind of goes on on the glasses that indicates that something's being filmed or recorded, but we don't necessarily always catch things like that. And as you read about, again, some folks have some nefarious reasons for it and are not always letting people know that they're recording or context where it should be. I think in higher education though, one of the ways we've addressed it is, again, in classrooms, we usually students have to request permission to record anything that happens in that classroom. And so there are already guardrails in place for things like this. I think for me, just on one hand, it's just a matter of, again, faculty just being aware of the different technologies that are impacting higher education and learning as much as they can about it. So that for me, it's always about integrating and incorporating it into the teaching and learning process. But if those who have concerns about issues of privacy and academic integrity, again, so they can be better aware of perhaps what kind of parameters and guardrails they need to add to their classes.

Elena Mangione-Lora: Maddie, did you

Madeline Link: I think from a more of a daily living and accessibility standpoint, the thing that I've been thinking about with regard to privacy is if I'm going to have it, let's say, read my mail, which is something that I need assistance with, it's tax season, unfortunate. Do I need it reading my tax documents or things with my bank account number on them? So if I am holding up a piece of paper to have it read it and I don't know what that paper says, is there a risk that it's going to share sensitive information that I would not want AI seeing or accessing is an accessibility concern that I've been thinking about with them.

Elena Mangione-Lora: That's a good point. As you were speaking, my Agatha Christie mind was like, "Ooh, you could capture credit cards from across the restaurant and all of these other kinds of things." There's certainly potential where there is mal intent that there's always going to be potential, I think. And so thinking about those things is really important. I had just anecdotally, we had a memorial for a family member just this past Sunday, and we took some family pictures afterwards and shared the pictures. And then there was some video of the mass. And I said, "Well, where in the world did this come from?" Because we were a small group and we're all kind of in a circle. And my nephew who will never see this podcast, so I don't feel bad outing him, he said, "No, tia, I have these glasses." And I was just able to take some footage of these intimate moments so that they would be captured so that we'd have them.

And truly, I felt super conflicted because here we are in a very emotional moment and I understood where he was coming from. There's a generational sort of gap that I think that we, generational, cultural, these kinds of questions, humanities questions, I might add, really, really important. And so on one hand, I was grateful to have these intimate moments forever. And on the other hand, I thought, oh, wow.

Wow, I had not expected it. And I can see how people would react very strongly, see that as an invasion of privacy at the same time. Yeah.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. I'm putting on my sort of researcher academic lens on this, I'm curious, we have a couple of culture experts in the room, right? And so I'm curious, when you think of it as a culture shift, as societies and families needing to set up new cultural norms, what I'm curious about is, have there been other instances of whether it's technological innovation or some very sudden change in the environment that sparks such quick adaptation in a cultural sense? And I wonder if that is giving us a little bit of whiplash.

Steve Varela: Oh, that's a great question. I think Elena will ... You start, Elena, then I'll stop off.

Elena Mangione-Lora: I can't contain my excitement.

Jenay Robert: She was very excited.

Elena Mangione-Lora: No, I've been thinking a lot, and Steve knows this too. I have been thinking a lot about agility in decision making and agility in scholarship in part because I with Steve and Maddie, I don't know if you have experiences of this sort too, but I'm involved with a lot of committees who are charged with creating policy or studying this or studying that. And by the time we've studied it, the technology has moved on by leaps and bounds. It's a thousand years ahead of us. So I think agility in data gathering and decision making is going to be key. I think that it is not as difficult a problem as we make it out to be because we have strong foundations in terms of values, in terms of goals, outcomes, impacts, things. And if we're guided by those things and grounded in those things, I think it gives us the kind of flexibility to move quickly.

We don't have structures that do that right now. And so that's one aspect. So a second branch, which is maybe on the other side of the tree, is the kind of culture that sprouts up around technology. So everything from the way our language changes because of the input coming from social media, from AI or these kinds of things changes our language. There's a fantastic book. It's very fun. If you're interested called I'll Go Speak by a young linguist YouTuber that I find him to be marvelous.

Sophie White: We can add it to the show notes.

Elena Mangione-Lora: Yeah. Yeah, that'd be fantastic. But I'll give you an example. When I was in Mexico at UPAEP, I had had some familiarity with some differences between the way students work together and the way colleagues work together. In Mexico, it tends to be much more collaborative focusing on small groups that help each other out, sometimes in ways that would raise eyebrows here in the United States. And tech is the way I perceived it to be accepted as another sort of group member that helps move the group forward. And just from reading, because I don't have a lot of personal experience with that, but I have read that in Africa as well, it's an Africa is a continent and there's so much country by country, community by community, but articles that I have read that talk about the use of AI and other technology in some African countries also point to that total embracing of, "This is a tool that we must use if we're not to fall further behind." I think that's going to be, just as a parentheses, a huge question that we need to look at the haves and have nots as well as we go.

Steve Varela: I think we struggle with, as an institution, institutions of higher learning, I should say, struggle with change and meeting the evolution of our students. I think where a lot of folks are struggling with AI or things like wearable technology is that the technology is moving with such expediency, to your point. And the paradigms that we have currently in higher education don't evolve as quickly. And so it feels very existential for a lot of folks and a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty in terms of how they're supposed to teach or how they're supposed to be now, how they're supposed to learn. At the same time, I always feel like teaching should always be iterative. We should never really say this is the only way that we can teach a class or experience a class or anything else like that. Sometimes I feel like we lose that idea of we build a class and it takes a lot of work, don't get me wrong, I know it does in terms of everything from the learning outcomes to the assignments and the assessments and everything else like that.

And so having to have to rethink that again every semester can seem kind of daunting. But I think technology gives us an opportunity to try things off little by little until we continue to iterate every semester. I always think it always should be the students in mind to begin with anyway and how they're consuming information, how they're experiencing it. And sometimes it's helpful, obviously, because I have two kids and one's 15 and he's completely immersed in everything from gaming to AI to multimedia on so many different levels. And it's scary. But at the same time, it's quite exciting to see how him and his friends are engaging with the world. And I think we can't close ourselves off to that if that's ... Higher education will be slower in terms of that, but I don't want us to close ourselves off from that either. How about you, Maddie, in terms of your student, especially with your PhD and things like that, what do you think?

Madeline Link: Yeah, I mean, I think I'm in a really awesome position where I'm both a student and a teacher. As part of my responsibilities as a TA this semester, I lead the Friday discussion section for half of the students in this lecture class that I TA for. And part of that is my preferred method to teach is that I have my little lesson plan open on a device that I have that has a Braille output. So I'm reading in Braille and I'm commenting on what the students are saying in this document in Braille. And I've had a number of my students ask me to talk about the device and what it does and how it works, which I think is so cool. And I love being able to show them. I suppose that, as you were mentioning, Steve, there are multiple ways to teach. There are multiple technologies to integrate and they're fantastic.

I have them all say their name before they speak so that I know who's speaking and I can make sure that I'm grading them appropriately on their contributions, but also so that they all get to know each other and they have needed very little prompting. This is my third semester now TAing in that format. And they're so great about remembering that and engaging with me and my technology and my accessibility needs, which has been really exciting to see. As a student, I think what I am really excited about with the glasses is the opportunity to navigate our really vast reference collection with a little more expedience than I currently have. And still, I think there's a learning curve around that. So what I would like to be able to do is have the glasses capture text and then convert it or paste it into a document that would be in a format that my Braille reader device would be able to use.

And that's something that I'm still working out. But I think if it could do that, because the reference books are ... So what I do currently is any book that I need to read if it doesn't have a ebook format, which a lot of these reference books don't because they're older, is that somebody in our accessibility services team will scan the book and use an OCR software to edit the scan and make sure that it's all correct, that the scan has been captured correctly, and then I'm able to access it as a Word doc, which is awesome when the book is two-hundred pages and printed in relatively recent times where that becomes more difficult is with these reference volumes that you can't check out that are thousands of pages that are in Latin that have footnotes and marginal notes. So I'm really excited for the potential of the glasses to engage with these really visual formats and a lot of material that is not in English and hopefully find a way to be able to convey that material to my Braille device in a targeted way so that I'm reading the ten or twenty relevant pages and not a thousand page encyclopedia volume or volume of multiple primary sources if I only need one.

Elena Mangione-Lora: Yeah. I have a couple questions for Maddie, if I may.

Sophie White: Go for it.

Elena Mangione-Lora: The first, Maddie, I have done things like hold up a photograph or look at one of my children or a messy bathroom and say, "Hey, Meta, what am I looking at?" And it's a mixed bag in terms of the description. And so as you're talking about visual things, what it is good at is for me, in my experience, I'm curious about your experience, is if I'm looking at a book with a famous picture like the Guernica or, I don't know, the Mona Lisa or whatever it is, it can look it up and then give me the Wikipedia information about it. But if I'm looking at my kid who is curly like me and 17 and very shy, and I might say, "Well, hey, Meta, what am I looking at?" And it might say, I don't know, "A raccoon with a Beatles T-shirt" or something or that kind of a thing.

Have you had experience? Have you asked it to do these kinds of things? It's not good for me, at least, yet.

Madeline Link: I have, and I've had a mixed bag too. I actually had a really funny exchange with the Meta AI earlier this afternoon where I asked it to identify one of my cat's toys that looks like a mouse, and it told me that there was a mouse in my kitchen. "Oh no, no, it's a toy. "I was like, " Well, which is it, Meta? "And it wasn't the door. So that was really funny. And I mean, obviously I knew it was the toy, but I was curious whether it would have trouble identifying that. But yeah, I as well have had it try and identify things. One of the things that this YouTuber I follow, her name's Molly Burke and her content is excellent, and she did a really great review of The Meta Glasses soon after they came out. And one of the things that she did was have it read care labels in her laundry.

And I have not been able to figure out how to orient the label relative to the camera that it can pick up the print on that.

Sophie White: Seems like another example of it's the worst it's going to be at this point, and we can see the potential for how it'll be enhanced going forward, but that's really interesting. I'm curious, Elena, you mentioned that there was a learning curve when you tried to include it in another one of your courses related to film. What were some of the challenges there? I'm just thinking if someone's watching or listening to this and they're thinking about how they might be able to incorporate these into their own course, what were some of the obstacles that you faced incorporating it?

Elena Mangione-Lora: Yeah. Well, we had this, before we began teaching this particular iteration of the course, which for nineteen years was a telenovela production course where students watched, read about, and then wrote and produced their own telenovelas. Steve had the fantastic idea since both of our kids love horror. He said," Why don't we do a horror one? "And so last semester we taught a horror film production course. Well, they watched horror movies and then they produced their own, one of which is about the dangers of technology, AI specifically.

Sophie White: Sounds meta.

Elena Mangione-Lora: I love that. But as we were sort of imagining these things, we thought, well, if we give them the glasses, they can do these POV shots where someone comes towards you and then there's this thing that becomes a super closeup plane and plan on shot. And so we found three sort of problems with that.

The first is that the glasses are attached to our phones. So either we give them our phones, which no, or we sort of give them the glasses and let them connect them to their phones. We could have done that, but we thought that we should probably learn some things we could do with it ourselves first. And we had an actor from the London stage come to our class and I was using ... I didn't want to make the students nervous as they were doing these acting activities. So I said," Well, this is the perfect opportunity to be discreet and take some video."

The meta description, the description that they give with the glasses is that it will take up to three minutes of footage. And for me, it kept cutting out after 30 seconds, but that was a little bit frustrating. So just as I was sort of waiting, we had people walking around doing funny walks and these kinds of things. And as I wanted to capture people coming towards me, we cut off at in opportune time. So that was the second thing. And then the third thing is that even though the quality of the footage was quite good, it didn't match the quality of the footage, they ended up recording with their cell phones, but even then because of the orientation and these kinds of things that we said, it was fun to try and we see potential for it, but we are not ready to ... Probably the students could have done things a thousand times better than we, but since it was a new course and we were just sort of holding on for dear life at certain moments anyway, I speak for me, Steve.

Steve is super chill with this stuff, but I didn't feel like I didn't have the bandwidth to let people sort of run free. I wasn't confident enough myself to let the students run free. And I kind of regret that because I know they could have done much better things. Their imaginations are, their collective imagination is incredible as evidenced by the work they produced, but I couldn't deal with that yet, but it's coming. Steve, would you agree with that?

Steve Varela: Yeah. I think the big challenge in teaching and learning for devices like this is scaling for classrooms and things like that. And we saw this, we've seen the same thing with VR, headsets, the amount of headsets and letting people utilize them. But in the cases of the metaglasses themselves, they're personalized devices. So they're meant to be tethered to you and your phone and your prescription and those kinds of things and not necessarily shared or thought ... They're not designing these with a classroom in mind. They're thinking about that personal use for the most part. And so for us though, we're trying to figure out how can we get a class set for people? Because what I would love is in different labs for students to have the glasses with them and be able to identify chemicals and labels and even ask, if I do this part of the process, what's the next part of the process?

Or what do I need to consider as I go through the next part of this? I think in a lab setting, these could have incredible potential, but we'd have to figure out again as an institution, how would we make that available for classes and how would we support it? And how would we ... There's just some amazing opportunity, but again, it's that push and pull of our own limitations in terms of our infrastructure and guidelines and even pedagogy in some ways. But so I think that's where we've really kind of struggled when we think about this in terms of its impact to students. I think there's probably more opportunity currently with the accessibility aspect of things because I can see us buying sets of these for our accessibility center for Sara Bea and for students to be able to check them out and use them for an entire semester and utilize them that way for their own personal use.

I think that's something that can be done in the immediacy as an opportunity. I think we still have a long way to go to think about it in terms of the direct classroom experience.

Jenay Robert: I'm just so glad that you're doing this work and you're sharing it with people because I know three-ish years ago when we started, ChatGPT really exploded and people started asking what are the implications for accessibility? How can we use this for accessibility? And there weren't a lot of great answers right away.

So now that we're starting to see some of these practical applications, I'm just so excited by it. And I'm also excited by how early, as we mentioned before, yeah, the technology is not where we really want it to be or need it to be yet, but the fact that you're investigating this so early, I think it'll give so much important information to the community as other institutions start to think about how this adoption should look. And I just keep coming back to that idea of intentionality and being planful and strategic. And yeah, we don't have the privacy piece figured out yet, but yet is the key word there. That is totally possible for us as a community to talk through and figure out where we want to go with that. There's a lot of digital technologies that have pretty difficult privacy implications, and we navigate those in other situations.

And so I think what I hope listeners or people who watch on YouTube, wherever you're seeing this or hearing this, that I hope people take away this idea that we can play an active role in the future of these technologies, but that requires the active part and now is the time to get involved.

Sophie White: I think that's such a great point, Jenay. And just we're getting to the end of the time we have. So I'd love to just hear you all are a pioneer in this space, and I know a lot of institutions are keeping an eye on wearable technologies. Can you just share some advice for other higher ed institutions who might be thinking about a program related to wearable technologies, either academic or otherwise, what they should think about as they get started?

Steve Varela: Yeah, I'll start off. And I first had to just express my appreciation, not only to you all for letting us talk about this and the work we've done so far, but folks like Elena and Maddie and the rest of the team that has done this, I think that's one of the starting points for institutions is start early, explore, evaluate, assess, right? Before we start putting in blanket policies and just saying, no, no, no, or we need to consider context and we need to think about opportunity. And I think primarily be truly student centered and how they're interacting with the world. It doesn't make sense in some ways. I make the joke sometimes that it feels like my son's going to go into a college classroom and he's just, it's AI and VR and all these wonderful things. And here we are going, "Hey, here's your chalk and chalkboard." It's just very antithetic to how he's experiencing the world.

I worry about that kind of stuff. So I think that's the key is start early, explore, evaluate, base it all in evidence and stuff, and then start forming the policies and guidelines. Be part of the conversation to guide the thing, to guide how it can be implemented in adoption, as opposed to being, I would say, trying to create hard stops for it or barriers. What do you think, Elena?

Elena Mangione-Lora: Well, I think you said it beautifully, and I very much appreciate your vision in bringing us in from the beginning to have a voice and you are giving people the freedom to acknowledge what some of the pitfalls or dangers may be, but also supporting people in exploring and playing. Something happened during this podcast actually, because I used to say play grounded in intention. And it's just a question of rubbing the lamp and having the imagination to ask the genie the right questions. But actually, having Maddie on this call has changed things for me because I don't remember enough that it's not just a question of play, that the impact is so deep and so important, and I really appreciate that. So I want to thank Maddie for having been part of this and for sharing your stories and your uses, because I feel change, my perspective has changed.

And a note that I made to myself earlier, I wonder if your students' perspectives about technology change because of your modeling, not just what it can do, but what it must do.

Madeline Link: Yeah, thank you so much. And thank you for allowing me to be part of the team that tested these. And I think in terms of other institutions thinking about them, I think as we've been saying about intentionality, intention can range from doing something dishonest and potentially invasive to being able to have some real autonomy as somebody with a visual impairment, for example, to something as simple as, "Hey, I need to check a reference in one of our reference books and I can do that myself." Or, "Hey, I'm at a restaurant and I don't need somebody to read the menu to me 10 times because I don't remember what's on it and I can't make a decision." So I think this technology has huge impacts and it's been fun for me to test it in both my personal life as somebody who lives with this disability out in the world and also as a scholar who is navigating medieval studies is a highly with a lot of our reference materials being, if they're online, the databases are not terribly accessible.

In a lot of cases though, things are still in print or God forbid on microfilm or even in manuscripts today. And while that's hugely exciting, it can be quite frustrating when there is an impediment to accessing visual material. So I'm really excited to see where we can go with these glasses, especially in terms of doing things like reading manuscript hands. I think that would be so exciting. But yeah, I'm so grateful to be here and to test them, and they're only going to get better as we learn how to use them and what they can be used for and get really creative with that. And yeah, I mean, I hope I haven't worn the glasses in my class yet, but I hope to show my students that you can do anything you set your mind to and that we're so, so fortunate and blessed to be at a place like Notre Dame where there are so many opportunities and wonderful people and centers and organizations within the institution that are willing to work with me, in this case, to make sure that I can participate fully in my program and have opportunities like teaching and TAing and researching the same way that my sighted peers do.

Sophie White: Beautifully said. Thank you so much, Maddie. And I'm so inspired by just your role and being open to testing these and sharing your experiences with us. And thank you, Elena and Steve for sharing your perspectives and really being open-minded and playful and willing to try new things as it relates to these new technologies. So thank you all so much for your time, and it was great chatting with you.