@TisForTraining 311: Digital Humanity is Choice and Voice

Today we talked with T is for Training regular, Tom Haymes, about his book, Discovering Digital Humanity: A Practical Guide to Creativity and Innovation in the Digital Age or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Technology (2022). Also on the call were Maurice Coleman, Jill Hurst-Wahl, Henry Mensch, and Paul Signorelli.

We spent an hour talking about print books, ebooks, radio, television, printing presses, and so much more. Impossible to capture notes, so listen to the episode on TalkShoe or wherever you get your podcasts.

Book description:

There is no denying that we’re experiencing an unprecedented rate of technological change. This change has resulted in everything moving faster and in a more distributed fashion. Societies, organizations and individuals are struggling to find new equilibria. The missing element is how we fit into the picture. Breathless pronouncements of how technology will change the world focus too much on the technology and not enough on how humans can develop skillsets to help them navigate rapid changes in communication and computation. What we discover time and time again is that there’s really nothing new under the sun. Humans will use technology to fight, to love, to create, and to explore. Discovering Digital Humanity is designed to be a practical guide for organizations, teachers, leaders, and learners to think and rethink how they are using digital tools to achieve positive and profitable outcomes.

Tom’s book is published by ATBOSH Media and available through, Amazon (paid link) and other booksellers. Also check WorldCat to see if you can borrow it from your local library.

On Tom’s website, he is currently talking about 25 Books Every Technologist Should Read, which he mentioned during our discussion.

@TisForTraining 310: Wagner is a great stealth name

Tonight Pat Wagner joined us again. Pat is “closing up one tent in order to open up another.” We’re grateful that she came back to impart more wisdom. Pat was joined by Jill Hurst-Wahl, Paul Signorelli, Diane Huckabay, and Maurice Coleman.

Pat is an educator, not a fixer. She began with a story about a situation that was presented to her which required “training.” When she looked into the situation, she found one where the management had tolerated bad behavior which training would not fix. She is pro accountability. If an organization is not willing to be accountable, it will continue to have the same problems.

Pat, in her storytelling, connected to the conversation we had started early in the show about diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, acceptance, and belonging. That thread of diversity ran through the entire show!

We want to thank TalkShoe for the background noise that they added in. It was like being on an old-fashioned party line, where two conversations were overlapping. Thankfully, we were all good humored about. We also played a game of telephone because Pat could not hear Maurice. Ah…technology!

Remember you can listen to T is for Training on the TalkShoe website or wherever you get your podcast episodes.

Addendum (05/08/2022): Here is a resource that Pat mentioned during our conversation: List of Learning Theories compiled by Richard Culatta.