Here at Mind Tools Towers, we love podcasts. We’ve produced our own for six years! But what role do they have to play in workplace learning? This week on The Mind Tools Podcast, Ross G and Owen are joined by Adam Lacey from podcasts-for-learning-provider Assemble You. We discuss: The evolution of podcasts as a technology and as a market The solutions that now exist to organisational security barriers Workplace learning contexts where podcasts are ideal. In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Owen discussed some internal insights from Meta’s development of VR application Horizon Worlds: theverge.com/2022/10/6/23391895/meta-facebook-horizon-worlds-vr-social-network-too-buggy-leaked-memo   Adam discussed decision-making speed, based on insights from the Brain Food newsletter: fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/ Ross G discussed the ‘digital dark age’, recently discussed on Twitter by @CulturalTutor: twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1553789465881202690?s=21&t=aByJZxFkW0QeyyrF1nwcEg For more from Adam, visit: His LinkedIn page: linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/ The Assemble You LinkedIn page: linkedin.com/company/assemble-you/ The Assemble You website: assembleyou.com/ The Power Skills Project: assembleyou.com/podcast   For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.   Connect with our speakers    If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter:  Ross Garner - @RossGarnerMT Owen Ferguson - @OwenFerguson Adam Lacey - LinkedIn

Once upon a midnight dreary, Ross G pondered, weak and weary Whether Ross D might consider him a dry and awful bore— If he proposed some gentle chatting, sprinkled with some caveating, A pod with almost no formatting, on an essay he’d adored. “’Tis about unity of effect in learning design,” he muttered, “by Edgar Allan Poe— Only this and nothing more.” We discuss: why we are dedicating our Halloween Special to the application of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Philosophy of Composition’ to modern-day learning design the impact of ‘unity of effect’ on design decisions how to create an emotional response in learning experiences. To read Poe’s essay, see: poetryfoundation.org/articles/69390/the-philosophy-of-composition To read the full text of ‘The Raven’, see: poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven For The Simpsons version of this tale, see: youtube.com/watch?v=bLiXjaPqSyY In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Ross D shared his insights from his recent marathon. Ross G discussed Paul Fairie’s (@Paulisci) Twitter thread on the many issues caused by bicycles: twitter.com/paulisci/status/1561848479470694403 If you’re interested in the poem that Ross G’s wife wrote, Edgar Allan Poem, see: instagram.com/p/Chwy4eLLecV/ (It inspired this episode!) For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.    Connect with our speakers    If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter:  Ross Garner - @RossGarnerMT Ross Dickie - @RossDickieMT Edgar Allan Poe - @Poe_Quotes_Bot

As learning professionals, we can rely on people always needing support to do their jobs more efficiently and more effectively. We can also rely on the hows, whats, whens, and wheres of that support changing. It's up to us to make sure we have the skills, knowledge and attitude to keep pace with changes in learning science, technology and learner demands.  This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Gemma and her teammates in the learning experience team are joined by digital learning designer and developer Ed McLean to share how they keep pace.  We discuss:  The skills and knowledge we're using now How we anticipate what we'll need to develop in the future How we find learning and development opportunities. In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Gemma recommended The Rest is Politics podcast. You can find this wherever you listen to podcasts.  Ed prompted discussion about the Swiss legal requirement of buying guinea pigs in pairs. You can find out more by reading 'Why it's illegal to own only one guinea pig in Switzerland' in the NY Post.   Sean's fact about the first VR headset came from this 'A brief history of Virtual Reality, In patents' article.  For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.    Connect with our speakers    If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter:  Gemma Towersey- @gemmatowersey  Sean Brown - @Seanbrownhrtech Claire Gibson - @Claireisdigital Ed McLean - @em_learning

English is the world’s lingua franca, but the 400 million native-English speakers are a minority compared to the 2 billion people who learned English in a classroom. With these numbers, it’s no surprise that most people speak English ‘badly’. The problem is that, when people speak with a strange accent, pronounce words wrong, or use unusual grammar, we form an impression of their intelligence and capability that has nothing to do with their actual abilities. So this week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, we’re joined by author, consultant and TEDx speaker Heather Hansen to explore the benefits of speaking English badly! We discuss: Why ‘accent bias’ is a problem How to become better listeners in a global setting How we can better communicate with others. You can watch Heather’s TEDx talk at: ted.com/talks/heather_hansen_2_billion_voices_how_to_speak_bad_english_perfectly Find out more about Heather at: globalspeechacademy.com/  You can also find Heather on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hansenheather/ In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Ross discussed Alan Rickman’s showbiz diaries: theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/24/alan-rickmans-secret-showbiz-diaries-harry-potter Nahdia discussed research into accent bias in Britain: accentbiasbritain.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Accent-Bias-Britain-Report-2020.pdf We opened today’s show with a clip from Mind Your Language. For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.   Connect with our speakers   If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter: Ross Garner - @RossGarnerMT Nahdia Khan - @NahdiaKhan Heather Hansen - @HeatherHansen

How do you set your projects up for success? Does the SME and learning designer relationship really follow the buddy cop movie trope? In this episode of the Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Claire, Sean, Tracey and Ross G share their experiences of working with SMEs and their insights into what makes a great working relationship. We discussed:  How to build a solid learning designer and SME relationship Ways to engage SMEs effectively The power of positive challenge In WILTW, Sean shared some facts linked to the latest Frozen Planet. Tracey told us about her planet-gazing, join her in finding out more facts about Jupiter on the NASA website.   Ross talked about recent Economist article he’d read which introduced the new phenomenon of ‘champing’ camping in churches. You can read it here, ‘Britain’s empty churches are turning into campsites’. Claire mentioned the SS Explorer currently docked in Leith, check out the preservation society page here. For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.   Connect with our speakers   If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter: Claire Gibson - @Claireisdigital Ross Garner - @RossGarnerMT Tracey McDonald – @TraceyMcDonald Sean Brown - @SeanBrownHRTech

How is it possible to learn faster than external world changes? What do we need to do to purposefully protect ourselves against irrelevance?   Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Gemma and Ross G are joined by author of Learning at Speed, Nelson Sivalingam, to discuss how organisations, L&D teams and individuals can upskill and reskill efficiently.  We discussed:   What learning at speed means  The barriers to learning at speed  How we can overcome those challenges   Nelson’s book, Learning at Speed, is available from the Kogan Page website or any other good bookseller.  To plug into Nelson’s podcast, L&D Disrupt, find it wherever you get your podcasts, or visit the HowNow podcast webpage.  At the start of the podcast, Gemma referenced The Economist article, ‘The tech winners and losers of the pandemic’.   Nelson mentioned Andy Lancaster’s Driving performance through learning. This is available from Kogan Page or any other good bookseller.  Michelle Parry-Slater’s The Learning and Development Handbook also cropped up in the conversation. It’s also available from Kogan Page and any other good bookseller.  Nelson recommended reading Sapiens: A brief history of humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. Get a copy on Amazon.  Nelson talked through the ICE framework, a scoring method created by Sean Ellis. Find out more here: productplan.com/glossary/ice-scoring-model/  Additionally, Nelson advocated using the principles of ‘Jobs to Be Done’. To read about the practices involved, take a look at Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice. You can find it on Amazon.  Ross referenced the Agile Manifesto. You can read it and the 12 principles on agilemanifesto.org.  In WILTW, Ross talked about the percentage of American subjects in social psychology studies as discussed on the Freakonomics podcast episode, ‘The U.S. is just different – so let’s stop pretending we’re not.’   Gemma mentioned ‘Kopfkino’, a word that appears in Susie Dent’s new book and appeared as Word of the day on her Twitter feed.  For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.      Connect with our speakers    If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter:  Nelson Sivalingam - @thatnelsondude  Ross Garner - @RossGarnerMT   Gemma Towersey – @gemmatowersey 

Our brain is a ‘prediction machine’ that responds to and interprets reality based on what we expect. This is the claim of science writer David Robson and, this week on The Mind Tools Podcast, Ross G, Owen and Nahdia plan to exceed your expectations by discussing it in our book club.  We discuss:  examples of the ‘expectation effect’ in action  the strengths and weaknesses of Robson’s argument how we can experiment, personally, with managing our expectations.  During the discussion, Ross referenced the Freakonomics episode ‘I Don’t Know What You’ve Done With My Husband But He’s a Changed Man’: freakonomics.com/podcast/i-dont-know-what-youve-done-with-my-husband-but-hes-a-changed-man/  See also our podcast on Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset: podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/grit-and-mindset-emotion-at-work-crossover-special/id1114862726?i=1000470741181  In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Owen recommended Bob Sutton (@work_matters) on Twitter, and specifically his Tweet about the ‘feedback sandwich’: twitter.com/work_matters/status/1565064130574241793?s=46&t=z7JQmmhA9bhpOPtQuc1RLQ  And Ross discussed the shortest day for 40 years, June 29: theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/01/midnight-sooner-earth-spins-faster-shortest-day  For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.    To take advantage of our special offer on a Mind Tools Membership, visit: mindtools.com/september-subscription-sale   Mind Tools enterprise customers can hear our exclusive interview with David Robson, author of The Expectation Effect, as part of their toolkit. If you're not already a customer or subscriber, you can listen to an excerpt in our blog: mindtools.com/blog/expert-interview-blog-david-robson/ Connect with our speakers    If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter:    Ross Garner - @RossGarnerMT   Nahdia Khan - @NahdiaKhan  Owen Ferguson - @OwenFerguson 

This week The Mind Tools Podcast team are travelling through another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop: Extended Reality. In this episode, Ross G and Nahdia speak to technologist, TEDx speaker, author and designer Myra Roldan about how new technologies are shaping the way we interact with the world, and with each other. We discuss: VR, AR, XR and mixed realities Applications of XR for learning The impact of XR on empathy. During the discussion, we discussed several VR experiences: Five Nights at Freddy’s: oculus.com/experiences/quest/3162101440489458 Vader Immortal: oculus.com/vader-immortal/?locale=en_GB Richie’s Plank: oculus.com/experiences/quest/1642239225880682/ For more on how The Mandalorian was shot, see: youtube.com/watch?v=gUnxzVOs3rk For Myra’s TEDx talk on VR, see: ted.com/talks/myra_roldan_vr_changing_world_views You can find Myra on LinkedIn at: linkedin.com/in/myraroldan In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Nahdia discussed the recent flooding in Pakistan, the impact of glaciers, and the effects of climate change: bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62758811 Myra discussed her TikTok channel, learnwithmyra: tiktok.com/@learnwithmyra And for something completely different, Ross G shared old Hollywood bloopers: twitter.com/NonsenseIsland/status/1550562796458352641 For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.   Connect with our speakers   If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter:   Ross Garner - @RossGarnerMT Nahdia Khan - @NahdiaKhan Myra Roldan - @MyraMade

What’s the evidence telling us about effective questions for learning? How can we apply it?  In this week's episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Gemma is joined by fellow Custom team members Ross Garner, Sam and Alison to discuss key takeaways from Patti Shanks’ book, Write better multiple-choice questions to assess learning.   We discussed:   The role of questions in learning   What makes an effective question  How to overcome challenges in writing them.  We talked about how we used open questions as part of a project with Scottish Enterprise. Find out more about the project here: Award-winning blended learning for Scottish Enterprise case study.  In WILTW, Ross excitedly told us about the five attempts (and injuries!) that Bond’s stuntman took to nail the crocodile shot in Live and Let Die. You can watch them on Twitter: twitter.com/michaelwarbur17   Gemma’s discovery about the Summer Time Act came from an episode of the BBC’s podcast You’re Dead to Me called ‘The History of Timekeeping’.  Further details came from the BBC article, “The Builder who changed how the world keeps time”.  For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.    Connect with our speakers    If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter:  Ross Garner - @RossGarnerMT   Sam Brown - @SbrownMT   Alison Perrott - @allyperrott  Gemma Towersey – @gemmatowersey 

Will avatar-based training replace virtual classrooms? Would it make any difference if L&D didn’t even exist? In this week's episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross D, Owen and Nahdia tackle these questions from listeners Ian Younger (@ian5611) and Craig Taylor (@CraigTaylor74). In WILTW, Owen mentioned the article ‘Good’ posture doesn’t prevent back pain, and ‘bad’ posture doesn’t cause it by Peter O’Sullivan, Leon Straker and Nic Saraceni. The episode of the Ezra Klein Show which featured a discussion of ‘Larping your job’ was The Office is Dying. It’s Time to Rethink How We Work. For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.   Connect with our speakers   If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter: Ross Dickie - @RossDickieMT Owen Ferguson - @OwenFerguson Nahdia Khan -@NahdiaKhan