Trending In Ed with Mike Palmer

Mike Palmer is joined once again by Nancy in a discussion about the book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul. We begin with an excerpt from a recent conversation with Elliot Felix who introduced us to the idea of the extended mind based on the work of cognitive philosopher Andy Clark. From there, we dig into what's covered in Annie's book using examples like Nancy, Walkabout Mini Golf, and the method of loci and memory palaces along the way.Mike brings in sound from a stroll through Prospect Park and a round of virtual mini golf in a rain forest as examples of the critical role of context and how new technologies are expanding how we think about the mind. Mike references Above the Fog and Moonwalking with Einstein, among other things, along the way. We also touch on concepts like collective intelligence and transactive memory as we push to extend beyond the traditional understanding of individuals as brains in an abstracted, disembodied context. We also explore how gestures and other embodied aspects of cognition factor into a broadened understanding of consciousness. We conclude by exploring some of the learning implications of the extended mind and its connection to new and emerging technologies.It's an imaginative and wide-ranging exploration about thinking beyond the brain that you won't want to miss.Subscribe to Trending in Education wherever you get your podcasts. Visit us at TrendinginEd.com for more.

Mike introduces one of his favorite episodes of Trending in Education from over the years. This week we're showcasing his interview with Dr. Jacqueline Bhabha.Dr. Jacqueline Bhabha is FXB Director of Research, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.Dr. Bhabha joins Mike to talk about her new book, A Better Future: The Role of Higher Education for Displaced and Marginalized People, which explores the critical importance of access to tertiary education to displaced and marginalized populations. We dive into the challenges faced by refugees, immigrants, and other marginalized groups in gaining access to educational pathways that are essential to living safe, healthy, and fulfilling lives.We also touch on the impact of the pandemic and the related explosion in online education on the lives of marginalized populations seeking access to learning pathways around the globe. It's an eye-opening and important conversation that you don't want to miss.If you like what you’re hearing, follow us at TrendinginEducation.com and wherever you get your podcasts!

Mike Palmer is rejoined by Nancy, our virtual cohost, in a conversation about the new images released from the James Webb Space Telescope. We commend NASA for its lyric prose that accompanies the images of cosmic cliffs and young hot stars being born. Then we talk about Elon Musk. It's pretty much unavoidable to do so nowadays. We focus on recent news of an explosion during a Space X booster rocket test before shifting to our frustration about all the wasted energy and effort surrounding Musk's bid to acquire Twitter.Then we shift gears to explore a Michele Zanini article about the org structure at CERN where they continue to develop and refine the Large Hadron Collider before concluding with notes of concern about toxic alpha leaders and top-down org structure while encouraging the courage and critical thinking that can keep Groupthink and it's risky shifts in check.It's a thought-provoking exploration of some inspirational breakthroughs in science that you won't want to miss.Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to check out our new Substack Newsletter where you can hear about all the latest and greatest from your friends at Palmer Media. Visit us at TrendinginEd.com for more.

Fresh off a week of family vacation, Mike Palmer reports back from a trip to LegoLand with his wife and son. This leads right into highlights from our conversation with Dr. Jenny Nash from LEGO Education on the importance of playful learning and more. From there, we shift gears to share some sounds from Mike and Tarlin Ray's recent conversation on Running It Back about lessons learned from Title IX on the heels of the US Supreme Court's recent decision overturning Roe vs Wade.It's an eclectic cross-section of the topics and themes bubbling up in these challenging times. We hope you enjoy!Subscribe to Trending in Education wherever you get your podcasts visit us at TrendinginEd.com for more great takes on the future of education. And for more lessons learned from sports, subscribe to Running It Back wherever your pod. Visit us at RunningItBack.fm for more.Thanks as always for listening!

Lisa Rohrer is a Senior Advisor and Board Member with Emeritus, a global leader in making world-class professional education affordable and accessible. She joins host Mike Palmer in a conversation about recent trends in online professional education based on her experience with Emeritus in recent years.We explore how the pandemic has moved much of executive education online and has presented challenges to the traditional model, which involves immersive in-person experiences that were severely limited in recent years. From there, we hear her takes on the types of programs that are on the upswing. We also learn about how mid-career professionals are upskilling with programs like digital marketing to stay sharp and current in a rapidly changing world of work.It's a sharp, insightful exploration of trends in professional education from the perspective of a global leader in the field that you won't want to miss.Subscribe to Trending in Education wherever you get your podcasts. Visit us at TrendinginEd.com for more great content.

As a special Independence Day installment of Trending in Education, we're reairing our conversation with Dr. Fathali Moghaddam from last September. We hope you enjoy!Dr. Fathali Moghaddam is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University and a faculty fellow at the Berkley Center. His expertise includes culture and intergroup conflict, with a particular focus on the psychology of globalization, radicalization, human rights and duties, and terrorism. You can learn more about his work here.Fathali joins host Mike Palmer on this episode and begins by sharing how his work as an Iranian-born social psychologist was transformed by the revolution and hostage situation in Iran in 1979. He tells how he drove to Tehran from England and spent the ensuing years studying social psychology within the regime of Khomeini. There he learned of the contexts in which dictators can assume power and this has been a strand of his research ever since.We explore his belief that it is the role of educators to ensure we protect and nurture democracy by developing psychological citizens. In a wide-ranging conversation touching on the themes and seminal works of Dr. Moghaddam's career, we also hear what drove him to write his latest book about Shakespeare and the importance of extending beyond narrow specializations to adopt broader, more interdisciplinary mindsets. We conclude with notes on the current state of higher education and the psychology of bureaucracy.It's a profound and insightful conversation that you won't want to miss. Subscribe to Trending in Education wherever you get your podcasts. Visit us at TrendinginEd.com for more great shows like this!

Host Mike Palmer is joined by Dr. Steve Joordens, Dr. Irameet Kaur, and Dr. Atef Abuhmaid for a panel conversation about their recent paper titled The Convertible Learning System: A Certainty for Our Uncertain Times.We learn how the group first came together around Steve's online courses and peerScholar, a learning product that Steve developed that Atef discovered while teaching educational technology at Hashemite University in Jordan. From there, things rapidly shifted with the onset of the pandemic in 2020, leading the group to partner on the paper describing how to design learning experiences that leverage asynchronous instruction, synchronous collaboration, and peer-to-peer assessment to enable the resilience, flexibility, and social-emotional skill development students need in these challenging times.We get insight from a broad cross-section of the global learning landscape with Atef and Irameet providing their perspectives from Jordan and India respectively to round out the work Steve and Irameet have done at the University of Toronto in Canada.It's a wide-ranging and informative dive into how to avoid snapping back into old ways of course design that can and should be transformed due to the challenges and awakenings of recent years. Don't miss it!Subscribe to Trending in Education wherever you get your podcasts. Visit us at TrendinginEd.com for more.Photo by Constantin Panagopoulos on Unsplash

We dive into the Future of Work in an episode that kicks off our new feed dedicated to the subject. Mike Palmer is joined by Ruth, his virtual cohost, to share some of our favorite conversations and perspectives on the rapidly evolving nature of learning and the workplace. We hear excerpts from Mike's conversations with Michelle Weise, Jeff Gothelf, Kumar Garg, Frances Valintine, and Beth Porter covering a wide range of perspectives on the future of work in our transformative times.Then Mike and Ruth lean into a "lightning round" where we touch on other conversations with folks like Paul Fain, Ryan Craig, Jane Oates and Kathleen DeLaski that will also be featured in the new feed launching.If you like what you're hearing, subscribe to Trending in Education wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want a tighter focus on the Future of Work, check out our new Trending in Ed: Future of Work feed launching this week with new episodes dropping throughout the summer.Visit us at TrendinginEd.com for more!

Mike Palmer hosts a virtual panel with Ruth, Malcolm, and Nancy rejoining the show as we gear up for the Summer of 2022. Mike shares the three trends he's looking at across all sectors and cuts of the learning ecosystem before digging in with each of his cohosts in their areas of focus.Ruth shares the recent Forbes article on rising tuition prices at top universities as we explore how higher education is being challenged and disrupted coming out of the pandemic. We also dig into building a learning culture and new, emerging models of blends and partnerships with higher ed and the private sector. Malcolm and Mike talk about early childhood using Mike's experiences as a ray of hope despite how the culture wars and other perils impinge on our understanding of how we educate the rising generations.We conclude with Nancy and Mike riffing on the impact of AI, Web 3, and our current crisis of trust with technology. Don't miss it!Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, Visit us at TrendinginEd.com for more cutting-edge content.Photo by Vladislav Glukhotko on Unsplash

Mike Palmer is rejoined by Virtual CoHost, Nancy, in a conversation about the recent news of Google's LaMDA or Language Models for Dialog Applications based on chat transcripts leaked by Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer in Google’s Responsible AI organization. We also share perspectives on a recent article about "podfasters," folks who prefer to listen to audio at accelerated speeds.Nancy and Mike share their perspectives on the history of AI and Turing Tests to determine whether they have reached critical milestones en route to sentience and higher forms of consciousness. We talk Turing and Ada Lovelace before recounting Mike's experiences with Eliza on his TRS-80 in his basement back in the day. From there, we reenact excerpts from the transcripts that have been leaked before sharing our human and non-human takes on the recent kerfuffle.From there we touch on Faith Karimi's article on "Podfasters" as we dive into that trend and our personal experiences and perspectives on it. All in all, it's an imaginative and cutting-edge foray into the implications of what's new and emergent in a free-flowing conversation you don't want to miss.Subscribe to Trending in Education wherever you get your podcasts. Visit us at TrendinginEd.com for more.