Episode 023: James Smith
Dr. James Smith of York University is an engineering professor with a passion for robots and teaching. His robotic models of the human cervix and of quadrupeds teach us how biomimetic approaches to modeling can constrain our thinking, and how collaborating with students in our research can unlock new possibilities.
Transcript
Cameron Graham: My guest today is Dr. James Smith of the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University. If you check out his Twitter bio, you'll read that he teaches hands-on renaissance engineering. And I am really looking forward to learning what this means. Dr. Smith is a wonderful teacher and his research infuses not just what he teaches, but how he teaches it. His research ranges from modeling human birth to understanding how four-legged robots run. Maybe it's that diversity that leads to the word "renaissance." Let's find out. James, welcome to the podcast.
James Smith: Thanks for having me.
Cameron: I'm fascinated by the overlap of topics in your work. I mean, you're an engineering professor and an engineering researcher, and you work at this intersection between biology and robotics. Just in terms of how you got into this field, which came first? Were you really interested in biology or robotics or how did that develop?
James: I've always wanted to build robots. So ever since I was a kid, I wanted to build robots. I've got old drawings from when I was Grade 2 of little robots I was drawing in class, and doodling and that. I've always loved robots. And so I've just looked for excuses to be able to spend part of my career on it. And that's where it comes from.
Cameron: So how did you approach this? So you started out with this interest in robotics. Did you do any training in biology as well?
James: No. The original training I had was as an engineer. And so I went into electrical engineering, because I thought that would be the best way to approach robotics building and design. At the time, that's what I thought. And then over time, I realized that I wasn't just satisfied with the widgets and the gizmos and that in engineering. And I found myself attracted to things that were more people-related. And so as things went along, eventually I ended up doing a postdoc in sport science, which was very different than the regular sort of engineering. But it's been this progression, I've jumped from one thing to another as my interest has been caught, starting with robotics and seeing where that would lead me.
Cameron: Interesting, interesting. Well, one of the places that it ended up taking you was in your work on human birth modeling. And I just wanted on the record that I find it really, really amazing that two guys can sit here talking about how you robotically model the human cervix. So I'm just laying that out there. Anybody who wants to take issue with the fact that two guys are doing that, I am well open to criticism on this. So I'll take whatever is coming our way. But can you describe the underlying problem that attracted you. I think in your paper on this, you talked about the prevalence of induced births being quite a motivator for this.
James: Okay. So like you, I'm going to qualify all of this with saying, I'm not going to end up mansplaining vaginas to anybody. And that's-
Cameron: Yeah. But you're going to have to explain it to someone who doesn't have one.
James: No, absolutely. And since I don't have one, that's fundamentally, where it's coming from. I don't understand them, is basically what it boils down to. And when my wife and I decided to start having kids-
Cameron: [laughs] You're not alone in that, among men.
James: [laughs] Well, yeah. But when my wife and I decided to have kids, we went through the regular things that you do to have kids, and it dawned on me at some point while she was pregnant, that we were actually going to have a baby. And as an engineer, I like to think of things in terms of the mechanics and I started questioning, "Well, how does this happen? How is the day where labor is going to happen actually unrolled? What's going to happen?" And so I'd start asking questions of the midwives. And how can we predict what's going to happen? Is she going to have to be in the hospital? Can we do a home birth? How long is it going to take? And the deeper I got into this, the more I realized, "I have no clue. I really don't understand."
James: And so I did what I'd normally do with problems I like tackling, and I said, "Well, I got to build myself a model of what this is in order to visualize it, to understand what's going on." And that's where it came from. It was the, "Can I create something three dimensional that looks like" -- and to me at the time I realized the cervix was the linchpin to all of this -- "What does the cervix do? How does it work? And how is it going to open up to let the baby through?" That was where I came at it from. So I started building robots.
Cameron: So yeah, that's... One of the challenges in interviewing someone who's doing robotics work is this is an audio medium.
James: Yeah.
Cameron: And I don't have the benefit either of physical models to show people or diagrams. Now I can post a link on the website to the diagram of the model.
James: Yeah.
Robotic model of cervix, from Smith (2013)
© 2013 James Smith
Cameron: But can you describe it, just for the listener? What is this model that you ended up with? What did it look like?
James: Okay. So-
Cameron: And don't say “a cervix” because that doesn't help many of our listeners.
James: No, no, no. I won't do that, I promise. So the thing to visualize is that when a baby is in the woman, the baby is basically in a balloon, and the balloon's upside down. So it's an upside down balloon full of water. That's basically what it is. And at the bottom end of the balloon, where you put the knot, that's where the cervix is. And the really amazing thing is that a woman for about nine months holds this baby in an upside down water balloon, and it stays in place. And it's all because of this knot-that-isn't-a-knot at the bottom of this water balloon. And so, during the pregnancy, this knot-that-isn't-a-knot , the cervix is, it's about the size of a Timbit. It looks like a Timbit with a hole in the middle of it. That's basically what it is. So if you can visualize one of those Timbits with the raspberry jam in the middle of it, that's what it is.
Cameron: Okay, I'll take your word for it.
James: Okay. And so the way it works is that during pregnancy, this Timbit has the consistency of the tip of your nose. So if you pinch the tip of your nose-
Cameron: Which I'm doing now.
James: Yep. And that's how it feels. That's how hard it is. And then during labor or just before labor, it goes from being that consistency to being the consistency of the tip of your ear lobe.
Cameron: Okay.
James: Okay? So it's not only a question of what it looks like and how big it is, but also how it feels and how hard or soft it is. And so for a labor to go well, what you want is before labor for it to be that hard. And then when baby's ready to come out, there's some processes that kick in and the cervix, this little Timbit, start softening up, and then it opens up a little bit. And then it opens up and the hole in the middle of it gets bigger and then when it's all done, it basically disappears. From a biology perspective, the tissue inside gets basically eaten up and then it goes away. It comes back later. But it disappears into the rest of the birth canal, gets out of the way and then baby can twist its way out and push, push, push. And if everything goes well then you have a happy baby at the end of it.
Cameron: So your model is intended to help doctors understand how this process of transformation to the cervix can be initiated and helped along?
James: Yes.
Cameron: Is that the basic idea?
James: So originally, it was a completely selfish thing, it was for me to understand what was going on. So to visualize things in there. But the more we got into it, the more we realized that when OB-GYNs, so the obstetrician-gynecologists or the midwives, are training, they train on little plastic models. Basically they look like little Play-Doh models that don't feel at all like the real thing. And the end result of that is that when... In the TV shows, you'll hear the doctor will say, "Oh, she's at five centimeters or six centimeters," or whatever that is. They're generally off by 30 to 40%. They actually don't measure it very well. And that boils down to a problem of training. It boils down to an issue with, it's really hard to see when the baby's trying to get out and not. And so doctors and midwives have sometimes some trouble predicting how labor's going to progress and where it's at sometimes. And so one of the questions I was trying to get at was, "Would it be possible to better train midwives and doctors by giving them a better model?" One that's more dynamic and one that actually feels and behaves a little bit more like the real thing.
Cameron: So you were actually able to build this?
James: We did. Yes.
Cameron: Yeah. Because one of the things that's difficult to understand in an academic paper is whether someone's talking about an idea or actually having done it. You actually built this physical thing. And has anybody been using it in training yet?
James: We haven't. So it was originally... And to point out that it was designed, the whole process was designed to be able to work with an off-the-shelf 3D printer. So the idea was that anybody could make these in the end. But no, we didn't end up using it for training. In part because my career shifted at the time that this was all coming to fruition. And so we didn't have that opportunity.
Cameron: Okay. Now one of the other challenges that you're faced with in a situation like this is that kind of cross-disciplinary knowledge. So can you describe, how you worked with people in other disciplines to develop the necessary knowledge to build this thing?
James: Okay. So one of the... It's really exciting when engineers can work with doctors and medical professionals to work on important and interesting problems. One of the issues that we discovered was, it's referred to as Dr. Pull versus Dr. Push, or Dr. Pull versus Engineer Push. Engineers often have a lot of ideas that they'd like to get into the medical field. And what we've discovered or what I discovered, after lots of other people have discovered it as well, is that it's actually really hard to convince doctors about anything from outside of the field. If it doesn't come from them, in large part, it doesn't get accepted. And so I waited to hear from some doctor friends of mine to hear what they were interested in. And then as soon as I pieced together that all that overlaps with what I know and they would like it, that's how we got started. So the initial discussion was with a friend of mine who works at one of the local hospitals. And then that led to a lit survey, a literature survey that I did, related to watching what was going on with the pregnancies with my wife. And then from there, it turned out that the student I was working with on this, her ex boyfriend, her ex boyfriend's mom, was the chairperson in the midwifery department at Ryerson, found out about the project and she asked, or somehow we got connected up that way and off it went. So sometimes it's deliberate, sometimes it's just an accident of being in the right place at the right time.
Cameron: That's often the case with academics, they kind of stumble into things that end fascinating them and their career takes a shift. Now you described a shift taking place after you finished this work. And is this where you started getting involved in the quadrupedal robots?
James: Oh. So that was... Yeah, actually-
Cameron: Was that later?
James: So the original robotics work was the quadrupedal work, that happened during my PhD. And then I got into the cervix and labor modeling after that, while I was trying to figure out what to do post-"legs." So the quadrupedal stuff happened before.
Cameron: Oh, okay. I had it the other way around then.
James: And from the journal publications and that, they're all mixed up together. So it's really hard to know what came first.
Cameron: Okay. So the chicken or the egg in this case was the quadrupedal robot?
James: Yes.
Cameron: So tell me about them now. You're dealing with this really interesting set of problems.
James: Yeah.
Cameron: And I know that in one of your papers you're interested in this notion of yaw, the twisting of the robot as it's trying to run and whether it's going in a straight line as a horse or a dog would. And in another paper, you were looking at the way that the hind legs were oriented. And I think if I read it correctly, because you're using a lot of languages outside of my discipline. But if I read correctly, you actually turn the hind legs around the opposite from what you would expect in the dog. And you found that that actually worked better for a robot.
Normal and transverse hind robot legs, from Smith & Jivraj (2015)
© 2015 Jilin University
James: Yeah. So I got into legged research back in the early 2000s with a professor at McGill who was working on copying cockroaches in robots. And so as part of that research, a lot of it focused on how legs are built and how legs work. And so that's where a lot of this came from. It originated from cockroach research. The-
Cameron: Cockroaches are not quadrupedal.
James: They are not. [laughter] What's really cool about cockroaches is there's this professor at Berkeley, he's got a little cockroach treadmill and he makes his cockroaches run on them. And at the slowest speeds, they are hexapedal, they got six legs on the ground. At jogging speeds, they're quadrupedal, they run on four legs. And this is the scary part, if you can picture this, at highest speed they get up on their rear two legs and then run at you bipedally. So if you see a bipedal cockroach, get out of the way.
Cameron: Oh! This sounds like the stuff of a science fiction film!
James: It totally does. So it was work I did during my PhD and it was fun. It was a blast. And what was really cool about it is that it was like what university research should be. There wasn't a real client for it. We were doing it for the sake of knowledge building and pushing the envelope on things. And so that cockroach robot became a swimming robot and I worked on a four-legged robot that we added wheels to it, so it was a rollerskating legged robot. And part of that research there was looking at how legs are oriented because a lot of the work is grounded in copying what animals look like, for obvious reasons. Animals have legs: you would think that to move around robot legs would be really good as well. And so-
Cameron: This is what you refer to as biomimetics?
James: Yeah. And so it's the, how do you copy things from the natural world into artificial systems? That's basically what biomimetics is. And a lot of the time it works really well as a shortcut to getting a design out the door. So if you copy what a cheetah looks like, or a horse or a bipedal cockroach, you'll often get really good results really quickly. But the dirty secret behind all of that is that generally, it's not the best solution. You'll get good results, but they won't be optimal.
Cameron: Optimal for a robot?
James: Optimal for basically anything artificial. Like an artificial task, a man-made task, a human made task. And one example of that would be flying. So the earliest airplanes or airplane-like things had flapping wings because the assumption was that if birds do it, then we should do it too when we're making the Wright brothers aircraft and that. And the reason why the Wright brothers were successful was because they decided not to do that, making flapping wings. They decided to take a gas engine or a diesel engine and put a rotating shaft on it using principles that came from other industries and not be biomimetic. And that's how we finally got real flying machines. So sometimes biomimetics works out well, sometimes it needs some tweaking to be more true to the underlying components.
Cameron: So what the Wright brothers were doing was breaking down this problem, decomposing it into two parts, which is the forward propulsion on the one hand, and the lift on the other.
James: That's right.
Cameron: Them trying to combine those in one. So is that a way of... I guess I'm interested in what the general principles would be when you're doing this biomimetic research, because is it possible for a robotics researcher to do something that is not affected by biomimetics? I mean, is that way of thinking just hardwired into us as human beings? How hard is it to escape that biomimetic impulse, if you will?
James: I think that we, as human beings tend to do a lot of that, because of the things that we see around us. I think we take inspiration from the objects and things that we find around us. So in the robotics community, we often find ourselves looking to the animal world or the biology world, because... And I think it comes out of frustration, that it's so hard to build a robot from scratch. And then you look around and you see all these other things, these animals that walk around so easily. So you ask yourself, "Is there an easier way?" And I think that's where a lot of the biomimesis ideas or biomimetics ideas come from. Because of that. It's that you see that it's just easier in the biology world.
Cameron: I'm trying to think of what the implications of this sort of thing are and I guess maybe where it leads me to thinking is, how biomimetics affects the way that people in your field divide that field up into different areas. Is there a real distinction, for instance, between people who study four-legged robots compared to two-legged robots? Or is it all just one happy community?
James: It is not one happy community. [laughter]
Cameron: I didn't mean to suggest that it's unhappy. I'm just saying, is there a conceptual divide? The way that you phrased that, suggested it's more than just conceptual.
James: I would break it down to the difference between the engineers and the engineer-scientists. The people that are happier making things, the engineers, versus the engineer-scientists who are happier writing about it and doing the analysis behind it. In the robotics community, it really boils down to a divide between those two groups. It takes a lot more time to do the experimental work. The experimental work tends not to be as revolutionary. Anybody that's been following the folks at Boston Dynamics, making-
Cameron: I've seen those videos.
James: Yeah. So a lot of that work came out of the lab that I was working in at McGill. And when they shut the lab down at McGill, a number of the engineers that were working there ended up in Boston, at Boston Dynamics. And that work has been an ongoing process that started in the late 1970s. And it's taken so long because building actual robots is hard. It's error prone. It's subject to all sorts of modes of failure that you don't see in standard academic papers and engineering science analyses. And so I would say that in robotics, it really does boil down to you've got your experimentalists on one side, and you've got your mathematicians on the other. And both groups will justify or backup their work based on bio-inspiration for different reasons. So I would say they're together on liking to fall back in bio-inspiration as a hand-waving argument for designing something in a lot of cases. But the split is more along the engineers versus engineer scientists.
Cameron: I've seen in your papers, a lot of vector mathematics. Are you in the latter camp among the mathematics-oriented folks or are you hands-on?
James: Not at all? I am a hands-on person. I threw in the math because that's how you get papers published.
Cameron: Well, this is really fascinating to me because one of the things that I wrestle with in trying to understand the academic research is this notion of the role of theory. And I have a soft and loose distinction between the work that I do, and journalism. So journalism is vital to our society. But what I do isn't journalism, and in trying to understand the difference between those, the thing that I keep coming back to is, how does this notion of theory fit into it? I think in my research, I'm trying to not just study and understand a particular phenomenon in society around the use of accounting in certain situations, but to try and draw some lesson from that, that I can abstract from that and it will enable us to study other aspects of society, because we've taken that lesson away. And that's what I call that little transferable bit, that abstract bit, is the theory. It's what we learn that goes beyond the immediate thing that we were looking at. Does that resonate with your field at all? That notion of the word theory?
James: Sure, I guess so. I guess going back to the experimentalists versus the scientists in the field. There are two ways of approaching problems in engineering. One of them is this deductive approach, you set up your math framework, your theory first. And you use that to predict behaviors. And that's what a lot of people are very comfortable doing. And it's what a lot of our education models in STEM make us do. And then there's the people like me who go the other way around, who are less comfortable in the math world. Start with a behavioral view of things and induce rules, the math and the analysis from the observations. And I would say that the inductive approach is in the minority. I think that most of my colleagues are firmly in the deductive approach, the start with the math and work out your behaviors from there. That's how I tend to have my academic worldview in STEM.
Cameron: Yeah. That relationship between the inductive and deductive approaches is really a fundamental part of the way that I teach what I'm doing in accounting. I tell my students that they need to approach it from both ends. If they really want to understand the financial statements of a company with any critical insight at all, then you've got to have some questions that you bring to it, like you know something about this company, about the situation that they're in and what you've heard about. And so you're going to go into those financial statements looking for something that resonates with that. But you also need to turn that around and just look at the numbers that you're seeing there and try to figure out patterns that you're seeing and let that generate questions. And that would be the inductive part, the having the preconception that you go into try to verify or countermand would be the deductive approach. So that's a pretty general distinction in academic research. So in your situation, what you're interested in is how to transfer those experimental observations that you're doing, almost... I don't mean to say this in any sort of negative way, but almost like a trial and error. Right? You're trying stuff out to see what breaks and then you're trying to learn lessons from that. Does that characterize what you're doing?
James: 100%. That's totally how I run things. When I was a grad student, there was literally a box in the lab that was labeled, things that James blew up. Because I'm very much a trial and error person. I don't trust my analytical skills. I trust the results of the experiment. Yeah.
Cameron: So can you tell me a little bit about how work like you do proceeds? I'm really interested in, for instance the importance of funding and whether you need a big lab to do it or can you do it by your by yourself? What are the support systems for the work that you do?
James: The experimental work is expensive. The experimental work-
Cameron: Well, you keep blowing stuff up, James.
James: I do. I do. [laughter] I dip into my wallet every once in a while to pay for those expenses. It's really important to have government support for research like this, because in a lot of cases the return on the investment is way down the road, if at all, and the outcomes for something practical aren't necessarily there. And doing experimental work, whether it's in the medical fields or in biology or in engineering is always going to cost a whole whack of money. And I think it's sad to say that in Canada, we do not value that. That is something that is absolutely not a priority, except in some of the medical fields where there's a whack of money for it. I've tended to find that in the funding models that we have, it tends to side on the theoretical, analytical side. And so actually, it is really hard to run academic work like this, as opposed to say, in the US or in Germany or in Japan, where long-term experimental work tends to be more tolerated and more fundable.
Cameron: So what's the alternative to doing it at a university? And I think one obvious idea would be that we should just get rid of all the researchers at the university and just let entrepreneurs and startup companies do all this work. Is that-
James: Oh, please no! [laughs]
Cameron: But why not? Let me take that devil's advocate approach. Why not?
James: Why not? Because that is founded on a vision that short-term thinking will lead us to something good. Entrepreneurs, in my experience, having dealt with a few of them, are very good short-term: get something out the door, find a market for it and push it. And that's great. And we need that, we really do. There's a lot of really low-hanging fruit out there that just need the right personality to kick in and find a market and develop the market. But a lot of what we need to do needs five, 10, 15, 30, 40 year plans. And that doesn't work with entrepreneurs. They need a return on their investment much earlier than that.
Cameron: Well, I'm well aware that even an established company tends to have a horizon of about three months to the next quarterly earnings announcements.
James: Well, now they do. But they used to not be that way. Back in the '70s and '80s and the early '90s, that wasn't the case. The Xeroxs and the HPs of the world had 15 year plans. They had project development cycles that weren't anywhere near the marketing people. And-
Cameron: And Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, which led to the Apple and everything else.
James: Yep. Those are classic examples. And so right now, one of the only places where that longer term, pie-in-the-sky approach to things can happen is in the university environment. It's a protected environment, with not a lot of money, but enough to be able to push ideas along and to see things maybe with a five to 10 year window. And so I think that there very much is a place for universities to engage in, at least medium term development work.
Cameron: So it is that kind of protected space as you say.
James: Yeah. Super important.
Cameron: Now in terms of the translation of what you're doing into a practical impact on the world, it's not simply through building a robot which could then be say, commercialized or put into the medical field or something like that. There's also that immediate impact on the minds of your students.
James: Sure.
Cameron: And I know that you're quite passionate about your teaching, your award-winning teaching, I might say, just for the sake of precision here. So tell me about the link between your passion for research and your passion for teaching.
James: So the passion for research has allowed me to explore ideas in a nice little safe cocoon that I can, at the right time, transfer into the classroom environment. I used to be primarily a research professor when I worked at my previous school. And I actually moved to York in order to focus more on the teaching. So I'm actually teaching faculty at York. In large part because it's just most of the time more fun, it's more immediate. I get a lot out of the everyday interactions with students. And so I've been lucky, fortunate to be able to take some of what I've done on the research side of things and bring it to the classroom or use it in teaching activities outside of the classroom. So a lot of the work we did on the cervix development, the soft robots using silicon and 3D printing that, that's translated into extracurricular activities that we've done with the students at Lassonde. So we had sessions where we would teach or learn about soldering and 3D printing and things like that, using the biomimetics research, the medical research, as a starting point, as a jumping point. Yeah.
Cameron: So that teaching is what you mean when you talk about hands-on renaissance teaching? Hands-on renaissance engineering?
James: Yes.
Cameron: So it's the hands-on teaching, right? Where you're actually getting students to try stuff out, to build things, to break things.
James: Yeah. So literally the renaissance is about rebirth. It's about restarting. And one of the failures of post secondary education in Canada has been to get rid of the polytechnic model, the hands-on model of science and engineering. And-
Cameron: So this was Ryerson?
James: Ryerson-
Cameron: Ryerson was a polytechnic. And the École Polytechnique in Montreal.
James: Absolutely. Yep. And with the emergence of the engineering science side of things, with the desire for faculty to feel more important by being in a research intensive institution, there are only a handful of polytechnics left in Canada, two of them being in BC. And what's unfortunate is that that went along with diminishing of the college model as well. And so what a lot of us are trying to do within the Lassonde School is to provide more of that diversified hands-on, more application-oriented engineering work. It's actually hearkening back to what engineers used to be in Canada before things changed after the Second World War, which is a whole other story for another time.
Cameron: Okay.
James: But it's this thought that engineers should be good with their hands and they should be able to make things. They should be good with the science and the math and the analysis behind it. But there should be something that they can build, and make and be proud of as a product of their education.
Cameron: Well, I mean someone like Buckminster Fuller was famous for using his hands because as a child, his eyesight was so bad. So he was always trying to feel how structures worked. And that's how he came up with the Geodesic Dome, is because to his hands, it felt more solid.
James: Oh, I didn't realize that was how it came about.
Cameron: Yeah, well, and I'm not a Buckminster Fuller expert, but this is, my understanding of his pattern of work, is to be very, very tactile.
James: And it's important to be able to have education and education models that are inclusive of people who don't fit that traditional model.
Cameron: Tell me about that.
James: There has been... I guess the idea of an inclusive learning environment is a controversial one. On the one side, you have people who want what they call a rigorous teaching model. One that is like it was in the old days. And there's other people like myself who-
Cameron: Theoretically.
James: Yeah. [laughs] Exactly. People like myself who want to open up the floor to people who wouldn't otherwise fit in, to make sure that people who aren't white, middle aged men have access to the same things as people like myself do. And this is why I am so passionate about making sure that we take equity, diversity and inclusion, EDI into account when we set up our engineering school. That we keep it front and center when we bring students in, when we hire. That we're saying, you know what? We've got a big gap in the representation within our faculty, within our staff, within our student body. And we need to fix that in order to make sure that more than just one set of ideas and the training that goes along with that set of ideas, more than that, is available to our students. And that we bring in students that wouldn't otherwise be here, so the ones that are here anyway, benefit from that diversity. That change and difference in thought patterns.
Cameron: Well, I think the research shows pretty clearly that when you've got different perspectives around a table that you end up with better collective ideas, better problem solving.
James: The research says it, but it's very hard to accept. I think a lot of people are more comfortable with being surrounded by people who are similar to them. And so it's something that we constantly have to be talking about, worrying about and working on. But I agree, it makes for a better product in the end. A learning product or a widget at the end of the day when you have more people thinking differently about it.
Cameron: So how does the hands-on approach lend itself to this diversity in the student population? Does it open up the university to a different category of thinker? Or is it-
James: Yes.
Cameron: ... a economic class that's affected? Is there any link between your diversity of approaches, and a hands-on approach, and say gender in the classroom?
James: Yeah. Oh, my goodness. It opens up the potential for doing things better. And I'll bring it back to the cervix model.
Cameron: Okay.
James: So I was trying to figure out how Baby was going to get born and how that was all going to work out. And we were trying to come up with robot models to make that happen, to learn about it. And had I gone with the normal way that I make robots, the cervix would have been made out of aluminum and I would have had giant motors in it and it would have been terrible. And it would never have worked. Luckily, I had a student in my lab, Catherine, who had a fine arts background. She was a biomedical engineering student, one of the best students I've ever had. And it was her second degree, she was a mature student. And she'd heard about the weird ideas I was having about making these robots, and she said, "Well, I've got this training on how to make soft models that we learned about at the art school that I graduated from." And so she went and spoke to a friend of hers at OCAD, down the street, and they got some materials from the art store next door, and she brought it into the lab and she went and bought some egg cups from Dollarama and whipped up a cervix model in an afternoon.
Cameron: That's fantastic.
James: And all I had to do was give her space and an opportunity. And she ran with it in a way that I could not have done.
Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.
James: And so what she did lead to a whole direction of research that affected all sorts of other students, that brought in all sorts of other people that did things in a way that nobody else had ever done. Because she was different.
Cameron: Yeah. Now we have, at Schulich we have a joint Fine Arts and MBA program. We have a handful of students who go through that each year, who have that fine arts background, and I tell you, they are the most fascinating students. And often among the very best students because they come to the course with a real sense of their self. They know who they are, they understand themselves as artists and they are bringing that sense of self to the academic pursuit of a business education. And it changes the way that they're able to ask questions. It changes the discussions in the classroom, and I absolutely love having them in my accounting class. So it's good to hear that they've also got that role in your engineering class.
James: Yeah, absolutely. Having different people in the room is so important. Otherwise, we get stale.
Cameron: Yeah. I want to ask you about a slightly different variation on your teaching. And I think this is a variation from the hands-on level because you've written some stuff about how to teach large classes.
James: Yeah.
Cameron: And I'm talking like 500 students.
James: Yeah.
Cameron: Which I've never experienced. I've been very fortunate in my teaching career to be teaching classes of 60, 65 or less sometimes.
James: Sure.
Cameron: Quite a bit less. But I've never tried to teach more than 100 students and you're talking about the possibility of effectively teaching engineering to 500 students at a time. Please tell me about that.
James: It's hard. [laughs] And I feel really bad for the students that have to come into an environment like that. Which strange, is that we subject our students, our first year students to these massive classrooms. And it is a very different experience than the one that I had when I left high school. I went to college first. And in the classrooms that I was in when I was taking calculus and physics and chemistry, you had 25 students in it. University-level teaching done in a small, high school-sized classroom. And-
Cameron: So just for a moment here, just for the sake of our international listeners, in Canada, there's been a distinction historically between universities and colleges.
James: Yes.
Cameron: Colleges are smaller class sizes, more teaching focused, but often teaching the same content as you'd get in a university course.
James: Correct.
Cameron: Is that correct?
James: Yes, that is absolutely correct.
Cameron: So you're talking about... So when you left high school, you went to a college, so you had the benefit of this smaller class size.
James: That's right. And so when I came to York, I came in wanting to teach more, that was my objective. And they said, "Well, you got it here, teach these classes." And I came in and I said, "Well, we've got to do something. Something different, something to make sure that even in a classroom of 500 students, the learning can happen and we can make this as good as possible." So I realized early on that things like devices in the classroom were going to have to work because students way up at the back, couldn't hear what I was saying because the acoustics were bad. I realized that if all I did was sit or stand at the podium at the front, that those same students at the back, I'd totally lose them. So I started teaching from the middle of the classroom. It was-
Cameron: So literally taking the students' perspective?
James: Oh, absolutely. And so it was actually, I was having trouble with the classroom at one point, and I asked for a colleague to come in. She was from a different department, different faculty, not one of the engineering science departments. And so she came in and she told me straight out that the entire classroom was mine, that it wasn't just the front of the classroom that was important, but it was the back of the classroom as well. So I started teaching from the middle of the classroom and then would teach at the back of the classroom. And you've got a mic on and a device to change the slides and to annotate the sides and that. And that was one thing that I did.
Cameron: Do you carry a tablet with you then, so you can annotate the slides?
James: Yeah, and I've tried different experiments with different tablets and that sort of thing. Tried the iPads, tried Windows tablets, Wacom tablets and that.
Cameron: So those Bamboo [tablets]...
James: Yeah.
Cameron: ... is the brand name, I think?
James: Yep. But at the end of the day, as long as you're active and you're interacting with the students to the best degree that you can, I think that's what's really important. And these classrooms, you find them in all the big schools, these large classrooms. They're here to stay, once we get through COVID, but we don't have to teach them in a boring, one-size-fits-all kind of way. I think it's important to be able to reach out to the students to engage them where they are, to give them different modes of learning as much as possible, add in some lab content, allow them ways of expressing themselves. And there's really great tools for making sure that they're providing feedback as well, live during class. There's a lot of challenges. But a lot of us are up to that.
Cameron: Yeah. Well, those challenges extend into remote education during the pandemic over Zoom. Teaching a class with Zoom, one of the things I've found made a huge difference for me, emotionally, was to try to change the class into a series of one-on-one conversations. To get each student, not every student in the class but one at a time, get a student to share their screen, and to teach me what they see there in the materials that we're looking at, whether it's financial statements or whatever, and just have a conversation with them. And then ask those students if they've got any questions and then get another student to share their screen and talk about maybe a different part of the financial statements and what they see there. And just shifting so that you're not just lecturing to a wall of little pictures of students.
James: Yes.
Cameron: You're actually engaged in a one-on-one conversation, much as we're doing right now.
James: That's right.
Cameron: And it makes a huge difference emotionally for me as an instructor to feel like I'm connected to somebody.
James: Oh, and I think for the students as well, to have an emotional connection is important. You're not just a consumer of knowledge. It's important to feel it in your heart as much as you can.
Cameron: Yes. But also to participate in producing that knowledge.
James: Absolutely.
Cameron: It's not just... I've had students in the past who wanted me to simply write on the blackboard, so that they could record what I had to say linearly, in hopes that that would get them through the course. And it's sometimes a challenge to resist that call to be the source of authority and of knowledge in the classroom and to set that aside.
James: Oh, yeah.
Cameron: Now you go beyond the classroom in your teaching. You are, I think what would be known colloquially as a Twitter warrior. That's certainly how I came to know you. I didn't meet you through the university at first. I saw your account on Twitter and some of the fascinating things that you were commenting on.
James: The rants.
Cameron: Yeah, well, a good rant is good for the soul occasionally. So what's the role of social media for you as a teacher?
James: Therapy.
Cameron: Excellent answer.
James: Look, I got into Twitter when I was working my previous job, because I was having a bad time. And I was working in a toxic work environment. And the people I was working with, were really getting to me. I'm sure I was getting to them as well. I'm sure it was a two-way thing. But at the time, I thought I was alone. I thought that the problems that I was encountering, were just me and sure I've got my own set of individual problems that I'm not going to blame anybody else for. But I reached out, I can't remember who. Yeah, it was one of the people that I knew at my old job, and he was telling me how he was using Twitter and then it connected beyond him to other people in other departments at the same school. And I realized, as I branching out that the problems I was encountering, were actually far more widespread in academia than most of us think. Or at least a lot of us think. And so I started reading tweets from Academic Batgirl and there was a couple of joke accounts, joke academic accounts. And one of them was by a guy at McGill. It was an experiment, he was trying to see if he could gather up counts in the academic world. And they resonated and I realized that there were people who were feeling, maybe not exactly the same things that I was, but were experiencing similar things. And then I realized that I was being selfish. That I was thinking just about myself, and about the problems I was having, and then realized that it was important, especially after tenure, to use my voice to say things about what is wrong out there, and to not let things simmer and continue on. And I guess, similar to maybe the experience that you had, setting up this podcast, that there are things that are really, really wrong in this world, in the academic bubble and outside of it. And academics have, I think, a duty because of the privileges that we're given -- a safe job in this ivory tower of ours -- to call out crap. And to explain why it is. And hopefully we're not going to change people's minds, but maybe to help show to other people who might think in similar ways that you're not by yourself. And there's things that we can do.
Cameron: Yeah. That need for human connection is quite profound.
James: Oh, yeah. Yes, Twitter therapy.
Cameron: Especially in the academy.
James: Oh, yes.
Cameron: It can be very lonely doing academic research. And I don't say that in any way to complain about my job, but simply to point out that if I don't reach out to try to make that human connection, whether it's to my students, or to my colleagues, or through the podcast or on social media, then I soon get a feeling of profound loneliness.
James: Yep.
Cameron: And isolation. So this conversation we're having today is really important to me. I think it's necessary to have these conversations and to have some of them in public because we are public intellectuals because we're public servants, we're paid by the public sector. And therefore we are public intellectuals. And there are a great variety of ways in which that can be expressed. You and I happen to be white guys, so it's pretty safe for us.
James: Oh, my goodness, yes.
Cameron: It's safe for us to be on Twitter.
James: Yes.
Cameron: I don't get attacked. And I know some of my colleagues and other women on Twitter are subjected to horrendous abuse.
James: Oh, it's awful.
Cameron: One tries to be an ally, but there are limitations to that because you simply cannot really understand the experience of being dumped on like that by the vicious attacks that I've seen against some people on Twitter.
James: Yeah.
Cameron: But partly because I feel safe there, I think it's more incumbent on me to say something about the work that I do and to help others like yourself express what you're doing. If you feel safe, then take advantage of that.
James: I agree.
Cameron: Do something useful with it.
James: Absolutely.
Cameron: Good. Well, James, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. It's been a real pleasure to get to know you through the miracle of technology. I really look forward to the day, hopefully not too distant from now when you and I can sit down for a cup of coffee together.
James: Oh, absolutely. Great opportunity to do this, thank you. And yes, absolutely. There's great coffee in Schulich, I will totally come over.
Cameron: Wonderful. That'd be great.
James: No, absolutely. I'm so looking forward to getting back on campus.
Cameron: Yeah. Me too.
James: Yeah. So thank you. This was a nice opportunity. It's nice meeting you a little bit closer than Twitter this way. And, yeah, thank you.
Cameron: Great. Thank you very much.
Links
Research website of James Smith
Faculty webpage for James Smith
James Smith on Twitter
Credits
Host: Cameron Graham
Producers: Cameron Graham, Bert Imai
Photos: INSA Strasbourg
Music: Musicbed
Tools: Squadcast, Audacity
Recorded: May 19, 2020
Location: Toronto
