It's

been years, and i'm so glad that you got in touch. And especially because i'm so intrigued by your areas of research you've been doing since we had a chance to talk the last time.

Thank you. It's, it's been an interesting journey. I've really always been interested in the idea of what how can we make teaching most effective, make support learning for it to be its most effective? And coming from a science background and working in a medical school, taking an evidence base proch has always seemed fairly logical to me. But i learned early on that that perhaps it's not a view that is universally shared. And so the research we've done is to try and to find a compromise way through some of the arguments about that topic. And and that's where we've got to the papert and talk about to day.

There are so many things that i want to ask you about someone ad try to behave myself. But before you really get into this, when you talk about evidenced based practices, how do people gather that kind of evidencewhat what's the mechanisms by which we decide if something is evidence based or not? What are the kinds of things that people do in their research? So

that's, that's a really fundamental and interesting question. So, and i think et gets to the heart of some of the disagreement n different parties around whether we can even achieve an evidence based approach to learning and teaching. A traditional view of that would be that you gather evidence by doing experiments, and that there are hierarchies of evidence. And so if you've done a randomized control trial with control groups and an intervention, that that's good evidence. And then going all thew down to things like case studies would be some of the weakest evidence. I think what we're trying proposein in the word that we've done, is that many different things can count as evidence, and the key thing is whether or not they are useful for you in your particular context and the thing that you're trying to do, and that's the heart of really h the philosophical approach underpinds at we're talking about, which is pragmatism. Abll talk a bit more about later. But if you have evaluated something using acto research as an individual practitioner, that's evidence. If you share that with someone that's evidence. If you take a systematic review of meter analyses or random as control tros, that's also evidence. The key thing is how useful it is, how much it relates to your own context, and things like that.