S03E24 -Technology and Learning Alchemist Julia Fallon | SETDA | REPLAY

In this episode of Build Momentum, Sarah and Katie are joined by Julia Fallon. Julia, a self-described technology and learning alchemist, is the Executive Director of the nonprofit State Educational Technology Directors Association, where she works with U.S. state and territorial digital learning leaders to empower the education community to leverage technology for learning, teaching, and school operations. Prior to joining SETDA, Julia worked for Washington state’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction for 17 years. In her free time, she runs the Crazy Idea Factory™.

Some Questions We Ask:

• What is SETDA? (00:45)
• What have you discovered about state edtech trends? (05:43)
• What is your organization’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Collaborative? (11:11)
• How does SETDA unify and elevate voices and messages? (15:04)
• What are your views on seeing AI and VR pop up everywhere? (19:15)
• What are your hopes for the future? (26:01)

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

• All about Julia Fallon and SETDA (01:03)
• About cybersecurity and investments in devices and learning management systems (06:22)
• About the Cybersecurity and Privacy Collaborative with the Melinda Gates Foundation (11:18)
• SETDA’s strategies as a learning community (15:39)
• Julia’s perspectives on AI and VR (19:30)
• Her thoughts and hopes for the future (26:12)

Quotes:

“We really believe that states have a role to play. It depends on your state, though, of course—because everybody talks about local control. And that means different things for different regions. But the idea is how can you leverage what other states have already done so you don't have to start from scratch.”

“Technology is here to automate. Had we had the pandemic 10 years ago, think about video conferencing! It used to be like, you had a book a room, and then 14 people got involved, and the thing got plugged in, and you had to show up somewhere. And now I'm in my house talking to people around the world.”

“ [The pandemic] highlighted a lot of the gaps that we had and the reality that there are communities we haven't served and we didn't serve well. And now there are different ways to serve them.”

Connect with Julia:
SETDA Website
SETDA Twitter
Julia Fallon’s LinkedIn
Julia Fallon’s Twitter

Resources Mentioned:
”Human Work In the Age of Smart Machines” by Jamie Merisotis
”The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization” by Thomas L. Friedman 

Stay in touch with Sarah Williamson:
Free Case Study Guide
SWPR GROUP Website
LinkedIn

Stay in touch with Chad Bolser:
LinkedIn

About "The Secret to Transformational Leadership," which Sarah co-authored with Dr. Quintin Shepherd:
Transformational Leadership Secret website
Purchase the print or ebook

Transcript

Katie Lash  00:04
Hello and welcome to Build Momentum, a show where we explore thought leadership and education. I'm Sarah Williamson, the founder of SWPR Group.

Katie Lash  00:14
And I'm Katie lash, the director of the East Central Educational Service Center.

Sarah Williamson  00:17
Together, we explore how to leverage key partners, your constituencies, and the media to authentically impact your organizations and the leaders who champion them. We can't wait to get started. So let's dive into today's show.

Katie Lash  00:32
On Today's episode, we had the pleasure of welcoming Julia Fallon, the executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, SETDA to the show today. Nice to meet you, Julia.

Julia Fallon  00:43
Nice to meet you too.

Sarah Williamson  00:45
Julia. So great to have you. So excited. You could be here. Thank you, Ellen Ullman, for setting us up. Appreciate that. So, Julia, I love how you describe yourself as a technology and learning Alchemist. Will you tell us more about that. And also, yeah, the mission of SETDA a little bit more about SETDA?

Julia Fallon  01:03
Sure, I'll start with the mission of SETDA that because that's the easier part or the sink part. So we are a group of state and US territory state level department of ed folks that are primarily either working with educational technology or digital learning initiatives. Back in the day when we were founded, which is now 21 years ago, titled to part D under No Child Left Behind, basically created the technology and tech funding that we had at the time, and there was directors and they wanted colleagues to chat with and they got together and this is how they were doing this sort of collaborative work, leveraging, in essence, a professional learning community around this efforts and everything else. So we've been doing this for 21 years representing the state level, or the state viewpoint in the policy space and advocacy space. In terms of me, I call myself an alchemist, because I think of like back in my gaming days, like you know, when you're like a mage running around World of Warcraft for those people that understand world Warcraft, but just kind of thinking about how technology and learning work together. And it's kind of Creating Magic, in essence, and helping folks understand what that potential is and kind of pitfalls to watch out for and everything else. But I started off actually back in the day. Now I'm really going to take myself so as an undergrad at New York University was working in academic computing at the time, it didn't realize was really ed tech, but it really was how do you use tools and you know, you have computer labs for people to get projects done, and all of that stuff. And I kind of got sucked in there when I was completing my undergrad degree. And that when the commercialization of the Internet came on, you know, you're already on campus network, you have these skills, I was designing websites, which for those of you that remember WordPerfect 5.1 Reveal codes looks a lot like HTML. And those skills are transferable. So I was able to kind of get in when the internet was becoming the thing. And then helping schools and libraries understand how to use those things. I spent some time with the University of Michigan and helping their backbone network. But I ended up in K 12. almost by accident, I moved back out to the West Coast. I'm a native Washingtonian, and was doing some work with tech prep. So career tech ed, and helping people understand that it careers are not just computer programming, there's web design, there's technical writing, there's database administrators, and helping with students that are learning those types of skills in high school, they were getting college credit, and being a female and a non traditional career also got that thing, the intention of the Department of Ed here and said, Hey, will you come and help our CTE folks understand how this kind of works and how you can develop programs for IT in high schools. And that's how I ended up in the department. I didn't think I was going to be there very long. And then 16 and a half years later, of course, I was still there. But when I came to the Department of it's called the Office of Superintendent public instruction here in Washington State, I came in not thinking I like I said, five years tops, and then working on Hey, everybody kind of needs IT, like digital literacy skills. If you're going to do career, every career uses it. I mean, you can think about a GIS is used by farmers, you know what I mean? We use productivity tools. So that attracted the Edtech folks in our building, saying you should come work with K 8. And I'm like, You don't understand, I really don't understand this thing. I'm just kind of here on the industry side. And that got me interested in Pepperdine, and a master's in ed tech program, which to me was one of the best learning experiences of my life and was 85% online, just by the way that the teachers were facilitating things and everything else. And the next thing I know, I'm part of SETDA, when I came to SPI and again, it feeds that technology and love of learning, like you learn something new every day. It's not boring. And there's a passion there. Right? I feel like if you have the skills to access and participate, you'll go a long way in your life, not just the 18 years you spend with us, you know as from birth to zero, so, 

Sarah Williamson  04:38
yeah, 

Julia Fallon  04:38
I'll stop there. That's a long answer right there.

Sarah Williamson  04:40
That's fantastic.

Katie Lash  04:42
That's really interesting too. Well, we shared right before we started recording we shared that although I never met her personally. Indiana is definitely respects and honors Candice Dodson, who you said you knew very well from your work there at SETDA. So you've been part of the organization for a while.

Julia Fallon  05:01
Yeah, I was there since 2004. But Candice came in probably, I want to say in the mid teens, and maybe the early teens at this point, and she and I became fast friends, I don't know if it was just the love of not goofing around, because that doesn't sound right. But like, you know what I mean, like, you should be having fun while you're doing it, to write some stuff is hard. But it can be hard fun. And, you know, her spirit, her energy and everything else. And I had the privilege when I was Board Chair of SETDA at the time to actually hire into the position as executive director. And I know that the Department of Ed in Indiana, along with a lot of practitioners in Indiana, were sad about that. And I understood that sadness, but we were happy to have her on the stage representing us as state leaders and everything else. And we carry her legacy on and multiple things that we do at the organization and in our community. 

Katie Lash  05:43
Yeah, I think it's a beautiful thing. Again, I didn't know it personally. But everyone says the same things like lovely things about her. So yeah, everyone honors that memory. So also, I wanted to say that I took one coding class in my life, and it was like, that was good, I bombed. But I do love that Ed tech. But I did not realize that when you were describing some of your work, I was like, oh, man, that's give me flashbacks of that really hard class I took. But so the next question for you, I completed a comprehensive report on state ed tech trends. So what did you discover? Were some of the priorities for technology learning? And then what surprised you and we heard you have another, so fill us in on all of that.

Julia Fallon  06:22
So we decided last year to sort of put together our first survey and report right, like what kind of are the trends prior to the pandemic, there's lots of things that we were working on that the pandemic, in essence, highlighted. And I know Candice, and I often joke that we wanted to get I told you so tshirts, when the pandemic initially started, because we're like, oh, these problems have always been here are the gaps, we've been working on them. And now we can actually accelerate and take advantage in some ways of closing some gaps. Like I thought, in my lifetime, I'd never see all of our households being connected, I can actually see that being happening in my lifetime, which is a kind of a cool thing. But to kind of get a sense of what states were working on, like, where is their priorities and everything, we did a survey and we actually had a really great response rate, including from our US territories, if it wasn't from directly our edtech directors, it was from CIOs or state chiefs, or somebody in the cabinet level, or it was somebody in their governor's office working on policy there in the education space, and the things that you would expect to hear in terms of things or people are really concerned about educator recruitment and retention, right, we are showing that we have a workforce that is tired, or they just are thinking that this is not for me anymore, and they're moving on professional learning for those educators. Right, right now, I really believe that the investment we need to make is into our educators to help them really think about how they can design the classroom using technology, sometimes it's technology isn't the appropriate thing to do, but thinking about all students and how you reach all students and how you can extend their learning. So if we just invested in devices and learning management systems, you can still continue to use those even though we're all back in person, it helps the student connect back to their learning and helps them to keep on track and helps them to connect to high quality teachers that helped them connect to high quality materials. So we talked about that, and what professional learning is cybersecurity is top of mind one, because it has a direct impact if there is a breach, right, so you could shut a whole entire school down, you can affect budgeting, you know, I believe there's a story that just came out last week, they paid over a quarter million dollars, right to get their stuff back. And it's just top of mind, we're trying to figure out how we battle it as a sector. And when I say that is like a K 12 education, we're a little bit different than other sectors, you can't just take one business model and kind of put it in apply the same sort of thing, we have a whole population of folks that are under the age of 18. totally different beast, you know, in terms of developmental levels, and you know, password, like thinking about three, you know, like a third graders, their passwords, like it's a whole different kind of approach that you're gonna take and everything else. But you know, basically saying that the states don't have ample funding for cybersecurity, and where do we have a role as a state and kind of helping mitigate some of that stuff. For example, Connecticut has bought DDoS defense software for the entire state. So it's not coming out of a school districts individual budget, they can use that money for something else. That is another maybe mitigation layer for cybersecurity. And the other thing that we found in terms of top priorities is, you know, access to the internet. We're way closer, right? We know that 97, I think is the last time I read 97% of folks are connected, but we still have 3% that aren't, and we still need to work on getting those communities connected. And typically, we're finding it's either geography. So I was talking about the Cascades here in Washington State. If you're in a valley somewhere, you probably have the same challenges for connectivity as maybe the hills of West Virginia and broadband that doesn't necessarily show up in your community because it's just it's not what's there and available. So how do we help get those folks connected as well? So I kind of think those are the top ones. In essence, cybersecurity really caught everybody's headlines, though, just because it's the thing that everybody's really talking about. 

Katie Lash  09:52
Interestingly, like our agency, we help schools with property and liability insurance like as a consortium model and I heard a lot of like the costs of that insurance really, because of like the claims that you were just describing, like those claims drive up the costs for everyone. And so that's a thing that, interestingly does bleed into my day job a little bit. So 

Julia Fallon  10:14
Well, and if you think about it, insurance is actually part of the reason why we're talking about right, we're insurance companies are requiring districts to have better mitigation strategies and everything else, and you have to invest somewhere, right? This is one of those places where preventative is definitely the place where you want to put your money versus shutting down entire school, you impact an entire community. And that, you know, we experienced that during the pandemic, you shut down school, you impact the community as a whole people can't get to work their kids are at school, you know, how do you do continuation of learning, that's not what you want to have happen. And in smaller districts, you don't have a staff, you don't have a cybersecurity staff. It's probably the math teacher who's also running your technology that has to do some sort of security, but it's a shared burden, right? It's a shared thing, we all are responsible for keeping our password safe and not falling for phishing attempts, and all of that kind of stuff. So it's one of those things that everybody kind of needs to know. And those skills actually will serve you beyond the system. If you ever leave the system. It's not like it's only in our sector.

Katie Lash  11:11
So we've talked a lot about cybersecurity, but something specific in your organization's cybersecurity collaborative. Can you tell us about that? 

Julia Fallon  11:18
Sure. So with funding from the Melinda Gates Foundation, we pulled together in essence, what we call a collaborative, it's another way of saying a professional learning community to help our state folks come up with ways that they can leverage and sort of learn from each other because like I mentioned, Connecticut is doing one thing, there's other states doing other things. So how can we leverage and also policy takes a long time to develop sometimes. And in order to kind of ahead of it, you kind of want to talk about the issues, so that way you can advocate for them, and then hopefully shorten the policy development cycle to put those things in place. So we created out of that collaborative, a bunch of free resources actually can go to our OER Commons. One is just a policy brief. It's sort of an I call it a policy brief. And I use air quotes, when I say that is because it's really just a high level, what is the issue? What are we actually advocating for? And then what our state's doing in these areas? So you know, in common definitions, does everybody know what a firewall is? Does everybody know what DDoS mitigation software is? It kind of just gives you a very high level. And it's for us as technology people to give it to the non tech people, right like here. Here's a quick read about why we talked about cybersecurity and why we're advocating for it in also like as a companion to that we have some papers where it talks about incident response planning. So what are states doing collectively around there? So there's examples from different states about how they deal with incident response, planning, procurement, things like that, so that we can actually have some resources. So a state doesn't have to start from scratch. So if a state all of a sudden they say, Hey, we're going to do this, Hey, there's other states. And it's a great way to say so what did you learn? Are there any pitfalls I need to know about? You know, how did you position this or, you know, you can say to your policy, folks, hey, we can do exactly what Connecticut's doing. And I can give you all the details. And that's it's just a great way to share resources. And what we're trying to do is really help states get a handle on it and create common messaging, right, that we can get out there. We really believe that states have a role to play. It really depends on your state, though, of course, because everybody talks about being local control. And that means different things for different regions. But the idea is that what can you do as a state? And how can you leverage what other states have already done so that you don't have to start from scratch. And that's always been the beauty of SETDA. We just sort of did it around cybersecurity and privacy as one of the areas we also have a title to collaborative for those folks working in title two, we also have one for ERate at the moment. 

Sarah Williamson  13:36
That's such a perfect segue. Julia I think that you set that up perfectly. 

Doug Roberts 13:46
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Sarah Williamson  15:04
This show is all about thought leadership and education. And clearly exactly what you just shared is your establishing thought leadership around these key themes. And then bringing people together and systematizing and sharing information, key messages, all the things that we just love and PR so I'm curious, how have you thought about these things from that perspective? How have you thought about unifying your voice through SETDA and really elevating your message elevate your profile? What are the things you're doing aside from some of these coalition's anything? Or is that kind of really the strategy?

Julia Fallon  15:39
The strategy has always been that it's just sort of, but it's also I mean, we do it under the guise of like, we're a learning community. And we just happen to be deep diving maybe into specific areas. But also, we're not expecting our ed tech leaders to be everything right, I'm not going to be the experts. If I leave boxes and wires heavy as we say that I probably know a lot more there. If you lean more instructional than we have folks that you can kind of lean on so that you're not, no one's going to be like the perfect Ed tech director that understands all of the issues deeply. Especially a lot of them are new to the role, right, we have a lot of new members to our space. But also, there's a lot to all of a sudden new offices of Ed Tech, one thing that came out of that state trends report is only half of the states have something that they can call something along there, they call it different things. But in terms of the functionality, only half of them do. And after the pandemic, we realize you probably need to have a little bit more of a coordinated effort. But you know, like we have won around title two. So we have all the title two coordinators, right. And while it's not specifically ed tech, it is a federal program where effective use of technology is built into their allowable uses. And we want them to know and support that professional learning that has to happen. And there's federal funds for that every LEA gets in every state gets that they can use for those things. ERate is another collaborative and those folks, not that they run on their own, they're very self motivated and self led. But the ERate program is the largest amount of monies that districts get for technology. It's not appropriated by Congress, right? Congress doesn't on a whim change it or whatnot, they may have rules that they implement, make the FCC implement, but it's really a lot of money that districts get for connectivity that doesn't come out of them their general budget. So we always advocate for that. And that is that access, right? We want access to good teachers, high quality, and it's no longer just our school campuses. It's also wherever the student is, after school, right? Once they leave our campus, can we get them connected back to their classrooms? So some things that we're thinking of down the pike is research and evidence. We don't really talk about that a lot in edtech. And we need to get better about it. Like what does it mean to be it's almost like better consumers. So like, when we're walking in ISTE conference exhibit hall, and someone says, Hey, I have this great, you know, reading intervention program, we can have a better conversation with them about like, Well, tell me about the results that you've seen? Have you done any research? If you have it? Would you be willing to do it with me? And you know, we can start doing a theory of action. And we can do a lit review and kind of see if it works, because and then how does that research then get more broadly shared so that other people can look at it and either modify it, but the idea is, I kind of have to practice what we preach. And they do that in other industries. But we want to know that technology won't be like the silver bullet, it's never going to be the silver bullet. But then how do you ferret out how an application might have been used? And if it's a great instructional practice that actually think that maybe we replicated more and more, and we don't spend money just for the sake of spending money on technology. So we're looking at research and evidence, we were looking at one around data modernization, which is another fancy word for interoperability and getting systems to talk to one another. So we had a collaborative, it's kind of gone dormant, but we're about to light it up again, with some more work. So it's just feeding and caring those communities, right? Like you think about any online community, how do you feed and curate, they have to come around a common interest. And then you have to kind of give them things to work on until they can kind of go on their own and your nurture them. And every single one has a different sort of flavor. If there's anything culture and everything else, and you want to be able to support those types of things

Sarah Williamson  18:57
Yeah, well, you're doing a great job. 

Julia Fallon  18:59
Thanks 

Katie Lash  19:00
Yeah, that's fantastic. So I've been really fascinated with AI and VR, specifically, after Kristina Ishmael, which we were talking about. We all know her now. I mean, I know her via, you know, the podcast, but we're besties. Anyway,

Katie Lash  19:15
STP! the same 10 people, I learned that phrase last week, and it's so true. Like it the world becomes smaller. But yeah, Kristina from the Department of Education. But how are you seeing AI and VR just up here everywhere? 

Julia Fallon  19:30
Well, I have to tell you, by the way, Kristina does have a connection to SETDA, she was the state member from Nebraska back in the day before she went on to the department event. So we have a definitely a SETDA connection there. And everything AI and VR. So VR sort of, I feel like it's still often like a ring like Saturn, it's just kind of going around AI is the hot topic right now. And what's interesting is, when we did the survey, we said is there anything we should be looking at, right? Because we're trying to kind of gauge what's coming next. I want to know what train is going to come in. And nobody really talked about AI. So we were laughing because we're like, Oh, that's interesting. Nobody really thought it was on the radar on the horizon. And it actually is, I mean, obviously with chat g where the G ta I can't talk all of a sudden,

Katie Lash  20:11
GPT

Sarah Williamson  20:12
 Yeah,

Julia Fallon  20:13
That stuff just came out bar just came out. I think Microsoft just added something to Bing. I mean, like, all of a sudden it's there. We're all talking about it, right? Because the first reaction for most districts, like we're just going to ban it. And we're like, well, good luck with that. It's like banning Google, like, how are you going to do that? 

Sarah Williamson  20:27
Yeah, 

Julia Fallon  20:27
the better conversation that we want to have is how is this going to change? Each instructional practice, what are the value statements that are really going to be discussed? Like, I keep hearing words about academic integrity and cheating? And I'm like, Oh, well, what does that exactly mean? I mean, in our day to day, I don't get in trouble if I go to Google look something up. But do I have the skills to determine whether or not what I'm looking at is correct? Or, you know, like, it's good information? Or how do I verify it? Like it's those critical thinking skills? So I think there's gonna be some conversations around how you harness the power of AI, especially in those applications in your classrooms, and policy wise, like, what is it going to look like? You know what I mean, there's AI that's just spitting out, obviously, algorithms that algorithms are perfect, right? Like, and I think about how do you judge what a kid's looking for a query? Like, because that could give you comprehension to like, Hey, you would have to do something, give me that. So we're trying to figure out what that looks like in the K 12 space. But I think it's really a conversation that educators need to have. And the IT folks just need to be in a position where they can talk about, Hey, these are the pros and the cons, you know, we can't outright ban it, it's going to be hard to outright ban it. So how do you want to figure out how we support it in the classrooms that we have so and helping teachers understand how to harness it, really to harness it, it should save time for people. That's the thing, right? If I need a policy, I can ask it to generate one gives me a seed to start from, but then do I understand what I'm getting back? Or just kind of the lay of the land of AI?

Katie Lash  21:56
No, that's because I was having this conversation with someone the other day, do you think that when spellcheck came around, people thought the same thing? Right? Like that's cheating?

Sarah Williamson  22:04
Maybe? Yes, I bet you they did. 

Julia Fallon  22:06
Yeah. And I keep thinking about like,

Katie Lash  22:08
I mean, this is next level,

Julia Fallon  22:10
It's totally next level. But you think about how much information is out there? What they did is they crawled it and they said, Okay, so what's the predictive? Next word? If I write these three things, what would be the predictive next thing? And they I'd love it in some ways, I'm a little scared about the video portion. Because that like, how are you going to verify whether or not somebody actually like that, to me is like next level, but in terms of like, if a kid can do a really good query and get something and maybe it's an oral presentation, or maybe they have to, you know, there's another ways to assess that they understand what they're reading, and they get it back. So the example that we use today, during our conversation was, we had to memorize the 50 capitals, right? Of all the states. 

Julia Fallon  21:39
It's totally next level. But you think about how much information is out there? What they did is they crawled it and they said, Okay, so what's the predictive? Next word? If I write these three things, what would be the predictive next thing? And they I'd love it in some ways, I'm a little scared about the video portion. Because that like, how are you going to verify whether or not somebody actually like that, to me is like next level, but in terms of like, if a kid can do a really good query and get something and maybe it's an oral presentation, or maybe they have to, you know, there's another ways to assess that they understand what they're reading, and they get it back. So the example that we use today, during our conversation was, we had to memorize the 50 capitals, right? Of all the states. 

Sarah Williamson  22:50
Yeah. 

Julia Fallon  22:51
And is that a good use of time anymore? If they can Google in 2.5 seconds, but then how do they know they got the right thing? You know, how do they know that the information is correct. So they need to know something? But how important is that they need to know the state capitals? Is it because we learned it before? And that's where we share it with our predecessors? Right? Or is it something else that we can show that we have that knowledge, and we can get access to it? And then we can do something? It's a calculator? I mean, I think about the TI calculators, nobody wants to calculators. You still need to know math, though. Whether or not it's kind of giving you the right answer. I mean, I will

Katie Lash  23:20
Full disclosure I talk to Sarah most days of the week, and I don't know her phone number. I do not know it. 

Sarah Williamson  23:26
Yeah, It's true

Katie Lash  23:27
I think it's the same thing, right? My brain doesn't hold her number, but I talk to her all the time. 

Julia Fallon  23:31
Yeah, I mean, I feel like it freezes up for higher level cognitive tasks as humans, and it doesn't devalue the lower level ones. I think that's where people think it and I'm like, it doesn't devalue that. It doesn't mean that what you when you learned it had any less value. It's just that we've evolved. And technology is here to automate. I mean, think about it automates a lot of things. Have we had the pandemic 10 years ago, think about video conferencing, it used to be like, you had a book a room, and then the 14 people got involved, and the thing got plugged in, and you had to show up somewhere. And now I'm in my house, you know, talking to people around the world, and it's okay. And if we didn't have that technology, the pandemic would have been a lot worse than it was, in terms of people being able to access things.

Katie Lash  24:12
Do you know another celebrity in my life? I'm gonna let you ask another question in a second, Sarah, but a celebrity to me is Jamie Merisotis CEO of the Lumina Foundation. Anyway, if you haven't read it, or whoever's listening to this podcast, if I haven't they this book like 10 times, then you should listen to it as a Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines. So it's kind of what we're discussing, right? Is that like training students for I mean, you're talking about like societal level, but I think about the same parallel of training students for like, there's going to be things that we can't automate. So like, let's just kind of acknowledge that some of it is about to happen and prepare for the human work such a good book , if you haven't read

Julia Fallon  24:50
A book I read the Lexus and the Olive Tree, and it's an old, I probably have it on my bookcase back here. It's an old book, but older, like not old, like from New York Times, or whatever. But like probably in the 1990s. It talks about the olive tree which is really about identity, right? We want community we want to know that we belong someplace we don't want to be so vanilla that we look like we're all the same and everything else because there's no identity there. But then you think about the Lexus. The Lexus is all built by robots, right? The Japanese have tweaked that technology so well that it's you know, you have three people on the floor. You don't need 100 people anymore to build those cars and the robots do it and then they're left to design those cars and you know, Make them look pretty. So people buy them everything else. It's that type of work. And we're going back and forth between it automates that to make it easier versus we want identity. And when I think about the pandemic, nobody was crying about the bell schedule, or science lab and the pandemic, they were talking about proms, sports, things where community could come together, where you could see each other and connect. That's what they missed. So the question is, how do we use technology to create that learning community right in our schools, so that people want to be connected? And they can be connected? Even if they're not physically on campus?

Sarah Williamson  26:01
That's so true. Yeah. Good points. I like that comparison. So what are you hopeful about? When you think about the future? Is there anything that really gets you excited and keeps you hopeful?

Julia Fallon  26:12
I think it goes back to their silver linings and the pandemic. And I'm hoping that we take advantage of them. It's highlighted a lot of the gaps that we had and the reality, and there's communities that we haven't served, and we didn't serve well. And there's different ways to now serve them. I'm hopeful that we connect all households. And it's not just for education, it's for everybody, whether you want to check out a library book, or you want to do banking online, or get a job being connected. And the Internet helps us do that. Right. And I believe it's something that in terms of a country economic development, health and well being everything is kind of tied to that. So I'm excited that I believe we're going to get there and figure that out for everybody, right, and get them all connected, hopeful for I don't know, I feel like we're having some really good conversations, post pandemic and ways to capitalize on the gains that we made, you know, getting into the research and evidence kind of piece, like how do we show that there's good stuff here? How do we become better consumers? And we're not just buying things because you know, we had a really good sales pitch or something else. It's also on the developers, right? So this is not just on us. It's also helping the developers understand that accessibility has to be built in interoperability. So built in, right, there's things that we want, as part of the ecosystem and attack is in here. It's not just for schools that have access, and the money is for everybody. It really does make a difference. So I think I'm hopeful about that. I'm hopeful that we came out. I'm hopeful. I'm glad that we came out somewhat looking forward versus looking back in terms of our group. So yep,

Katie Lash  27:37
I said, I've said this on every other episode. But when you're nailing waste, that you need to have broadband, like if you want to do a podcast at home at your house, then you need internet. I'm struggling right now, I can see myself getting grainy, but I live in the middle of the cornfields of nowhere, which I love. But there's just not enough population to justify the cost of running fiber. But all of that to say, I was so good to talk to you, Julia, tell us where people can learn more about you follow up with you. Sure. So

Julia Fallon  28:04
I'm gonna give you the SETDA website. It's www.setda.org. They can find me on Twitter at Julia Fallon. Fallon, like Jimmy, I always say so spelled like f a l l o n like Jimmy Fallon. And you can always reach out there, you can reach out at SETDA on Twitter as well. We're on LinkedIn, I'm happy to connect with people there and everything else and conferences, our seat of staff will be at CoSN will be at ISTE. We tend to wear bright green ribbons. You know, I know that people like that badge candy, we have green ribbons that we put on our we hand out actually to our community so they can recognize each other because sometimes they don't know they only know a name, right? They don't know what somebody looks like because you're either blind as zoom or whatever. And that's why we have our community connect to each other in those spaces, because we show up in those spaces.

Sarah Williamson  28:48
Awesome. Thank you so much, Julia, we appreciate your time. This has been fantastic.

Julia Fallon  28:52
Thanks for having me.

Sarah Williamson  28:55
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