The Learning Hack podcast

John talks to Bob Mosher, champion of workflow learning and the Five Moments of L&D Need. Bob has been an active and influential leader in the learning and training industry for over 30 years and is renowned worldwide for his pioneering role in new approaches to learning. Based in South Carolina, he is CEO and Chief Learning Evangelist at Apply Synergies. Previously he was with Microsoft, as Director of Learning Strategy. Bob is also a Maisie Fellow.   00:00 - Intro 02:40 - What are the 5 moments of L&D need? 09:22 - What progress has he seen in the 20 years since the 5 moments were defined? 14:37 - Are vendors building the right tech for workflow learning? 20:55 - Why haven’t we seen EPS systems emerge as a discrete product category? 23:01 - How do we stop workflow learning being an interruption? 27:45 - Which learning theorists have shaped his ideas? 35:02 - Where can people follow his ideas? 37:27 - Next time on the Learning Hack …   Mentioned in the discussion: Gery, G. (1991). Electronic performance support systems: How and why to remake the workplace through the strategic application of technology. Tolland, MA: Gery Performance Press.   Dr. Conrad Gottfredson: https://www.5momentsofneed.com/conrad-gottfredson.htm   Dr. Alison Rosset: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Allison-Rossett   Robert F. Mager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Mager   Contact Bob Mosher Twitter: @bmosh LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bmosher/ Website: https://www.applysynergies.com/ Bob's podcast: https://performancematters.podbean.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 – Suite Dreams: The Past, Present and Future of Learning Systems https://learningpool.com/suite-dreams/

This special edition of the podcast features interviews with two people who have each in their different ways played important roles in the effort to vaccinate the world and free us all from the menace of Covid-19.   Marc Howells is VP & Head of Global Talent & Learning at AstraZeneca, developers of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine AZD1222, one of the leading weapons in the fightback against global pandemic.   Reda Sadki, President of The Geneva Learning Foundation, is an old friend of the podcast. He leads a Swiss non-profit that connects learning leaders to research, invent, and trial breakthrough approaches for new learning, talent and leadership, with a focus on immunization and other critical issues in global health.   03:43 - Marc’s role & priorities at AstraZeneca 04:34 - What has the last year been like for the team in AtraZeneca? 07:52 - What skills issues has this rapid rate of change given rise to? 14:02 - What’s driving your increase in learning during the pandemic? 17:10 - How much of the shift to digital in AstraZeneca will be long-lasting? 22:10 Hopes (& fears) for the future? 26:26 Reda Sadki interview starts 34:52 ACT-A and COVAX 39:21 Leadership and immunization 42:52 Are we learning fast enough to beat the virus?   Watch the unedited livestream of John's conversation with Reda Sadki here: https://youtu.be/s8fH9gyFMms   Follow Marc Howells LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-howells-3002598?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_profile_view_base_contact_details%3BiVuw%2BAmoQcSZG%2FZxhl80qw%3D%3D   Follow Reda Twitter: @redasadki LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/redasadki?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_profile_view_base_contact_details%3BYIFVZmEfQxiPNGnbhBXmxg%3D%3D Geneva Learning Foundation website: https://www.learning.foundation/   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/

Cognitive load theory tells us that we have to do our best to make things easier for learners. But Bjork says that 'necessary' (or 'desirable') difficulties are an essential part of the process. Should learning be easy or difficult? Is there a simple way to resolve this apparent contradiction – or is it a matter of trade-offs?   John talks to Stella Collins, one of the 'Brain Ladies' and also Co-founder and Chief Learning Officer of Stellar Labs, based in Belgium. With degrees in Psychology and Human Communication, she is an enthusiast for our growing knowledge of how the brain works. Starting with the issue of difficulty, the discussion ranges widely over the applicability (and otherwise) of brain science to how we can best support learners.   02:38 - Can psychology help us make things easier for learners? 09:25 - ‘Desirable difficulties’ 13:03 - How do you balance desirable difficulties and UX? 17:26 - What drew her to a career in learning? 24:47 - How useful is neuroscience for learning? 32:45 - How applicable are insights from science to practical situations? 36:33 - Sleep and learning   Contact Stella Twitter: @stellacollins LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stellacollins Website: stellarlabs.eu (Company Website)   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 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/