The Learning Hack podcast

John talks to Mirjam Neelen, Head of Global Learning Design & Learning Sciences at Novartis, and a well-known blogger and speaker. She recently co-authored a book, Evidence-Informed Learning Design, with Paul Kirschner that has been extremely influential in learning and development. The book has plentiful tips, tools and examples to help L&D and training professionals avoid the myths and hype and design effective learning based on solid research. The conversation also covers two controversial and much-vaunted areas for future development in learning: neuroscience and AI. Are they really as useful for learning as some believe? 02:55 - How does she balance practitioner role with 'guruhood'? 05:08 - Why has the 'evidence-informed' message resonated so strongly? 7:46 - The learning sciences and how to approach them 10:40 - How useful is neuroscience for learning really? 15:58 - How useful is AI for learning? 22:36 - Adaptive systems and LXPs 25:10 - What role has tech played in shaping ideas about learning? 30:48 - When Theory met Reality 35:24 - How should people focus their efforts to become more evidence-informed? Mentioned in the discussion [book] How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice By Paul A. Kirschner, Carl Hendrick, Routledge 2020 [Podcast episode] Learning Sciences Weekly: Enhancing learning experiences using AI with Donald Clark https://www.learningscienceweekly.com/student/activity/742575-episode-5-enhancing-learning-experiences-using-ai-with-donald-clark Dick Clark research on AI cognitive task analysis discussed in Trish Uhl Learning tech 2019 talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzOz5shJU5k&t=2657s Mirjam's Hall of Fame Patti Shank Will Thalheimer Jane Bozarth Clark Quinn Connie Malamed Paul Kirschner Donald Clark Etienne Wenger Victoria Marsick Geary A. Rummler Guy Wallace Michael Eraut Thomas Gilbert Follow Mirjam Blog: https://3starlearningexperiences.wordpress.com/ Twitter: @MirjamN LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mirjamneelen Contact John Helmer Twitter: @johnhelmer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer/ Website: http://johnhelmerconsulting.com/ Download the new white paper from Learning Pool written by John Helmer & Ben Betts – 'Data & learning: A new common-sense approach' https://learningpool.com/data-learning-a-new-common-sense-approach/

John talks to Lior (Christine) Locher, a learning consultant, coach, author, and a director of the elearning network. Lior's experience spans journalism, practitioner L&D roles for companies such as McKinsey, Deloitte and the Boston Consulting Group as well as creative work and beer blogging. She has lived and worked on 4 continents. She knows 22 languages and speaks seven to intermediate level. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Learning and Performance Institute. They discuss the dangers of binary thinking and techniques Lior has developed to overcome it. Lior identifies as gender non-binary, and the theme has a personal dimension too, touching on her own struggle to define herself appropriately in a world that all too often wants to put people in boxes. 02:56 - Lifecoaching in the pandemic 04:50 - How can we avoid binary thinking? 08:15 - How does binary thinking show up in her coaching/consulting work? 14:34 - Is creative thinking less binary? 18:13 - How did she get into L&D? 24:44 - Binaries and gender 31:53 - How well does business culture cope with change? 35:58 - Bring on the Roaring 20s – or a lasting change? Mentioned in the discussion Tetralemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetralemma Website https://liorlocher.me/ Contact Lior LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christinelocher Twitter: @christineLocher Facebook: facebook.com/ChristineLocherLeadership/ Contact John Helmer Twitter: @johnhelmer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer/ Website: http://johnhelmerconsulting.com/ Download the new white paper from Learning Pool written by John Helmer & Ben Betts – 'Data & learning: A new common-sense approach' https://learningpool.com/data-learning-a-new-common-sense-approach/

This time we're featuring the pilot episode of a brand new podcast from the Learning Hack team, Great Minds on Learning. In this series, Donald Clark, the internationally famous author, blogger and entrepreneur, joins John Helmer to discuss the history of thought and theorising about learning. It's all here: the inspired, the enduring, the wacked-out weird and the just plain wrong in 2,500 years of learning theory from Aristotle to the present day. This inaugural episode is about the Cognitivists, a group of psychologists who probed the limits and the limitations of human memory, an area of focus that Donald Clark believes is fundamental to our understanding of how people learn. 00:47 Why is memory such an important focus for learning? 02:27 Introducing the Cognitivists 04:08 Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) 13:49 George A. MIller (1920-2012) 20:58 Richard C. Atkinson (1929- ) & Richard Shiffrin (1942- ) 25:41 Alan Baddeley (1934- ) 30:21 Endel Tulving (1927- ) 39:30 John Sweller (1946- ) 48:37 Summing up: the Cognitivists and Behaviourism Links The Blog that started it all: http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2020/08/100-learning-theorists-2500-years-of.html Ebbinhaus bit.ly/2VvoxkX Miller bit.ly/37OaB85 Atkinson & Shiffrin bit.ly/37SEKTK Baddeley bit.ly/37WfFHq Tulving bit.ly/2VmFKNw Sweller bit.ly/2I7Pt2t Contact Donald Twitter: @DonaldClark LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donald-clark-04553022/ Blog: http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/ Contact John Helmer Twitter: @johnhelmer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer/ Website: http://johnhelmerconsulting.com/ Download the new white paper from Learning Pool written by John Helmer & Ben Betts – 'Data & learning: A new common-sense approach' https://learningpool.com/data-learning-a-new-common-sense-approach/

John talks to Toby Harris, Product Marketing Manager at Filtered. Filtered is an innovative company that uses AI to help large organizations deliver relevant learning content to the right people at the right time, using personal recommendations to help build the skills they need. FIltered is rated a 'specialist' in Fosway's 9-grid for learning systems, so where does it sit within the learntech ecosystem? Filtered is all about categorizing information and knowledge for organizations – but is 'learning' really the right category for what FIltered does? 02:43 - How did he get into Learntech? 07:57 - What does Filtered do? 14:07 - How do you ensure relevence and quality with AI curation? 22:22 - Where does Filtered fit within the learntech ecosystem? 26:16 - Is Filtered actually a learning company? 32:50 - Are skills frameworks going to succeed where competencies perhaps didn't? 38:49 - When is a skill not a skill? 41:37 - What excites him about the tech future and what are his fears? Ontology: how entities are grouped into basic categories and which of these entities exist on the most fundamental level. Persiflage: light, bantering talk or writing – a frivolous or flippant style of treating a subject. Toby has kindly contributed these note to the discussion: Benedict Evans: "All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation" as he writes about here: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/1/31/lists-are-the-new-search - this process, applied in corporate training and HR/change, is the grist for our centaur mill here at Filtered. Centaur approach to AI - our own Greg Detre, who has worked with Filtered in various capacities for a while now, explains its benefits here: https://www.graymeta.com/metadatamatterspodcast/howhumansandmachinelearningdeliverthebestresult ... and here: https://www.makingdatamistakes.com/how-to-cheat-at-data-science-with-help-from-centaurs-and-the-wizard-of-oz/ Skills frameworks / ontologies: my colleague Vin describes our process here: https://learn.filtered.com/thoughts/transformative-skills-framework - you can't get away from a movement towards master frameworks, that's just the problem with ontologies, but the point here is there's a process to get to a unique framework, linked to a capability, for a given group of people. Jesper Balslev as the source, in a conversation, for the importance of 'negative technologies' to regulate the explosive and dangerous reality of new tech. He's probably already frustrated by the amount of times I've cited a comment from an off-hand chat with him in public but it's his fault for influencing my thinking so much. He fairly recently finished his own PhD thesis on some of the problems of measuring or even realising the supposed benefits of the digital revolution and 21st century skills in education: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesperbalslev/ And if anyone would like to follow the work of 'academic / Dr Toby Harris', then they may wish to follow my academic twitter or follow me on academia.edu: https://twitter.com/tobiasharrisbbk https://birkbeck.academia.edu/TobiasHarris Otherwise my learning tech thoughts are best followed on LinkedIn. linkedin.com/in/tobiasharris Contact John Helmer Twitter: @johnhelmer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer/ Website: http://johnhelmerconsulting.com/ Download the new white paper from Learning Pool written by John Helmer & Ben Betts – 'Data & learning: A new common-sense approach' https://learningpool.com/data-learning-a-new-common-sense-approach/

John talks to Dr. Gregg Collins, Chief Learning Scientist at NIIT. A Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Yale University, Dr. Collins played a key role in the seminal research carried out at the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) at Northwestern University in Chicago. He was a co-founder of Cognitive Arts Corporation, which was incorporated in 1995 to commercialize ILS and has been consistently recognized as a pioneer and leader in the effective use of instructional design and technology to support pedagogy. This wide-ranging discussion covers the culture in L&D, boring learning and how to avoid it, what LDs can learn from gaming, Curation, AI and troubling news about growth mindset. 02:46 Why does L&D accept criticism so easily? 08:33 How did he get into the learning business? 12:54 E = MC5 21:56 Computer games and learning 26:32 Curation 31:41 A.I. and Learning 40:00 Will A.I. move more quickly in some subjects than others? 43:14 Growth mindset - does it work? Mentioned in the discussion Seymour Papert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert John Seely Brown and intelligent tutoring systems: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intelligent-Tutoring-Systems-Computers-People/dp/0126486816/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=9780126486803&linkCode=qs&qid=1616940715&s=books&sr=1-1 Gregg's videos about Narrow vs General AI (start here): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYNLccMmPfk Contact Gregg LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gregg-collins-54a3971 Twitter: @NIITMTS NIIT website: https://www.niit.com/en/learning-outsourcing/ Contact John Helmer Twitter: @johnhelmer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer/ Website: http://johnhelmerconsulting.com/ Download the new white paper from Learning Pool written by John Helmer & Ben Betts – 'Data & learning: A new common-sense approach' https://learningpool.com/data-learning-a-new-common-sense-approach/

John Talks to Charles Jennings, who is Partner, Strategy and Performance of Tulser / 70:20:10 Institute. Recognised as one of the world's leading experts on building and implementing learning and organisational performance strategies, Charles has led projects for multinational corporations, government agencies, not-for-profits, and other organisations for more than 40 years. He has also held several academic posts. They discuss the influence of knowledge management, the conspiracy of convenience that hampers learning evaluation – and the 6-digit number that has played a significant role in his career, 70:20:10. 02:45 What was his reaction to the success of 70:20:10? 11:17 How has 70:20:10 changed workplace learning? 15:41 How did he come to be in learning technologies? 23:29 Influence of knowledge management on his career 24:45 Aims and thinking behind Tulser 28:31 The Conspiracy of Convenience 36:56 Learning in the post-pandemic future Mentioned in the discussion: The Conspiracy of Convenience: http://charles-jennings.blogspot.com/2010/04/five-barriers-to-effective-learning-in.html The Principle of Identical Elements, Thorndike and Woodworth (1901): https://research-methodology.net/the-principle-of-identical-elements/ [Book] Transforming Performance Measurement by Dean R Spitzer: https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Transforming_Performance_Measurement.html?id=fyX7Frm5DeEC&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y Contact Charles Twitter: @charlesjennings LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/charlesjennings Blog: charles-jennings.blogspot.com/ Website: http://www.duntroon.com/ Contact John Helmer Twitter: @johnhelmer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer/ Website: http://johnhelmerconsulting.com/ Download the new white paper from Learning Pool written by John Helmer & Ben Betts – 'Data & learning: A new common-sense approach' https://learningpool.com/data-learning-a-new-common-sense-approach/

'People imagine that technology's a recent thing in learning, [but] it's always been there.' From its earliest beginnings in cave paintings to today's AI-driven learning systems with interfaces influenced by consumer technology, Donald Clark tells the colourful story of learning technologies in conversation with John Helmer. Donald has been an important part of that history himself. Growing up in the housing schemes of Livingston, Scotland, Donald studied Philosophy at Edinburgh University and Dartmouth College USA, where he first encountered artificial intelligence. Co-founder and CEO of Epic Group plc, which established itself as the leading elearning company in the UK, sold in 2005, he is now CEO of Wildfire, visiting professor to the University of Derby and sits on numerous boards including those of the University for Industry, City & Guilds, Cogbooks Ltd and, LearningPool. 03:36 What were the roots of his fascination with learntech 06:21 The prehistory of learning technologies 09:21 The computer age 14:10 How did tech and theory affect design in the 90s? 17:23 Dawn of the internet era 23:06 The LMS arrives 25:59 Learning goes mobile 29:07 Consumer technology drives learner technology 31:34 Designing for the learner (not the administrator!) 37:43 Important drivers for the future of learning tech 43:46 Is the future of learning tech convergent or divergent? Mentioned in the discussion: Electronic Performance Systems [book] by Gloria Gery Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things [book] by Don Norman Contact Donald Twitter: @DonaldClark LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donald-clark-04553022/ Blog: http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/ Contact John Helmer Twitter: @johnhelmer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer/ Website: http://johnhelmerconsulting.com/ Download the new white paper from Learning Pool written by John Helmer & Ben Betts – 'Data & learning: A new common-sense approach' https://learningpool.com/data-learning-a-new-common-sense-approach/

John talks to Page Chen, CEO of Remote Learner; a learntech business leader with a strong academic background. How does she characterise the development of learning systems in the first two decades of the 21st Century, a period during which there was a good deal of pushback from 'guru' figures and practitioners alike against the admin-focused model promulgated by the industry? Have we reached a place now where the design of learning systems is better informed by learning science? 02:58 How did she get into learning technologies? 07:43 How well do the academic and corporate views of learntech align? 10:26 Development of the learntech industry in C21 14:38 Content & Platform 25:22 Data and modern learning systems 30:54 What is the right balance between supporting learners and giving them autonomy? 37:52 Will L&D have to reskill for an adaptive, AI-driven future? Mentioned in the discussion: B. J. Fogg, behavior scientist at Stanford University: https://www.bjfogg.com/ Remote Learner's website: https://www.remote-learner.com/ Contact Page Chen Linked: linkedin.com/in/pagechen Personal website: pagechen.com Twitter: @pagechenphd Contact John Helmer Twitter: @johnhelmer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer/ Website: http://johnhelmerconsulting.com/ Download the new white paper from Learning Pool written by John Helmer & Ben Betts – 'Data & learning: A new common-sense approach' https://learningpool.com/data-learning-a-new-common-sense-approach/

John talks to Julie Dirksen, a leading expert in instructional design, digital learning and behaviour change. Is it a problem for learning professionals that even when they have supported learners in gaining the knowledge and skills they need to do things right, and to do the right thing, once back in the workplace they so often do the exact opposite? This conversation dives deep into the mechanics of behaviour change, addressing the 'elephant and rider' problem in human psychology, and confronts the tricky ethical questions that effective use of behaviour change techniques inevitably brings up. 03:37 What does the 'elephant and rider' image mean in behaviour change? 12:26 The importance of feedback 16:48 Intent vs behaviour 18:00 Technology & behaviour change 24:28 The ethics of behaviour change 31:18 Is the 'conspiracy of convenience' a behaviour change problem? 39:03 Tips for overcoming resistance to being trained Mentioned in the discussion: Jonathan Haidt, responsible for the 'elephant and rider' metaphor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Damasio https://www.happinesshypothesis.com/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51070630_The_Behaviour_Change_Wheel_a_new_method_for_characterising_and_designing_behaviour_change_interventions http://www.behaviourchangewheel.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_(book) Julie's Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=design%20for%20how%20people%20learn Contact Julie Dirksen LinkedIn: https://wwwlinkedin.com/in/juliedirksen Twitter: @usablelearning Website: usablelearning.wordpress.com Contact John Helmer Twitter: @johnhelmer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer/ Website: http://johnhelmerconsulting.com/ Download the new white paper from Learning Pool written by John Helmer & Ben Betts – 'Data & learning: A new common-sense approach' https://learningpool.com/data-learning-a-new-common-sense-approach/

John talks to Harold Jarche, blogger, speaker and consultant in the closely adjacent but oddly separate worlds of learning and knowledge management. People at work need more than skills training and compliance learning. They have to navigate the complex knowledge environment that technology has given us, using concepts and tools that are part of an emerging field described by figures such as George Siemens, Dave Snowden, and Harold himself. Harold talks about Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM), his own take on this, in a wide-ranging discussion that ranges over sensemaking, wayfinding, the influence of military training and the current state of social media. 02:44 - Is he in learning or knowledge management? 05:24 - Sensemaking and wayfinding 10:18 - Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) 17:40 - How can PKM be supported within the L&D workflow? 23:31 - Is it hard for L&D to think about groups rather than individuals? 27:24 - How can the learning tech stack support PKM? 29:47 - Has military background influenced his thinking? 36:34 - Is the current state of social media less useful for PKM? Harold's website: https://jarche.com/ Mentioned in the discussion: Dave Snowden https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/david-snowden-profiles-knowledge-stan-garfield/ Lilia Efimova https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lilia-efimova-profiles-knowledge-stan-garfield/ The Long Now Foundation: https://longnow.org/ Metamodernism (Metamodernity): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamodernism Contact Harold LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jarche Twitter: @hjarche Contact John Helmer Twitter: @johnhelmer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer/ Website: http://johnhelmerconsulting.com/ Download the new white paper from Learning Pool written by John Helmer – 'Experience: theory, design and supporting technologies for an experience-based learning culture' https://learningpool.com/theory-design-and-supporting-technologies-for-an-experience-based-learning-culture/