Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Join the Nerds!
Welcome to the funtastic world of the Fabulous Learning Nerds! Scott Schuette and Daniel Coonrod and Zeta Gardner are Learning Executives with over 50 years’ experience between them. Together they share new ideas, learning tools, approaches and technology that increase learner engagement and impact. All while having FUN! To participate in the show and community please contact them at learningnerdscast@gmail.com
The nerds are all about creating a community of learning, innovation and growth amongst educational professionals: Instructors, facilitators, instructional designers, learning and development professionals, trainers, leadership development professionals, learning metric gurus, sales enablement wizards and more. So, if you want to learn, connect, grow and have a good time doing it, The Fabulous Learning Nerds Podcast is for YOU!
Scott: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome to another amazing episode of your fabulous learning nerds. I'm Scott Schuette, your host and with me, my amazing co host, Dan Coonrod. Dan the man. Oh yeah, Dan.
Dan: What's up, man? How you doing?
Scott: I'm super tired, man. It has been a long couple of weeks, right? So we had one month this week.
Scott: It has..
Dan: How was your Halloween? My Halloween was excellent. So I live in the middle of nowhere. I'm like the only house on my street and every year I put four or five laptops because someday I will get a trick or treater and when they show up, I'm going to hand them a laptop.
Dan: I'm like, here you go. Trick or treat. And I'm waiting for that time because I live in this great house Right in front of a spooky set of woods on an old spooky road Like someday someone will be brave enough to ring the doorbell and say trick or treat I'm gonna be like here's a bag full of candy and here's a laugh.[00:01:00]
Dan: Did you buy candy? I always have candy. I'm a fat guy. Of course I have candy to give out. If they don't, if nobody comes to get it for Halloween, boom, look at that. A month's supply of candy. I'm great. I'm great. Candy.
Scott: Candy's great. Love, love candy. Candy's awesome. Candy is amazing. I have the opposite problem, which is why I'm exhausted.
Scott: Exhausted. We had close to 1200 kids this year, which is a new record for us. And they were here till 10 o'clock and yeah. Yeah. It was unbelievable. And I spent three days setting up my deal and then an entire day tearing it down. I was just dropped about 30 pounds, which is cool. Yeah. I, and, but I, as much as I love Halloween, the amount of work that I put into it to, give an experience to a handful of kids that love it.
Scott: And a majority of kids. That have no respect or [00:02:00] values whatsoever is kind of getting to me. You know what I'm saying? It's I don't know. Okay. So tell me this, if you are trick or treating and you went to somebody's house when you were a kid, Dan, and they had set up all this cool stuff as a display, would your parents allow you to
Dan: like mess with it?
Dan: Oh, would they allow me to mess with it? No God. Now I will say this. I feel. Man, I'm going to say boomer stuff. I feel like Halloween, not yet, not yet getting there. I feel like Halloween has gotten safer, but more entitled. Oh, there's my,
Scott: there's
Dan: my, now I'm old. I'm officially old now, right here. Mark the day.
Dan: I think it's a November 6th when we're gonna sell, boom, I just turned old right now.
Scott: That's okay. Congratulations on turning old, my friend. It's a, not a bad club to be part of. So like, when I was a
Dan: kid, when I was young [00:03:00] and trick or treating, I don't think I caused too much mischief. That being said, I definitely did cause some mischief.
Dan: Right. Would I have messed with somebody's stuff directly? No. But when I was growing up, people's houses, not by me. Got egged and toilet papered way more tp'd way more than I even see now Like I'll drive around the day Halloween night the day after and it's like nobody's got yards full of toilet paper Nobody's house has gotten egg stuff on it, which is good.
Dan: That's good But to your point, I feel like it was like every two minutes. I'm yelling don't touch Oh, that sucks. Well, yeah, dude, we should post on the website, your Halloween display.
Scott: Oh yeah. No, it was a great display. Because
Dan: it is, it
Scott: was
Dan: epic.
Scott: It's not bad. It's not bad. It was fine. It's all right. But it was a one last story.
Scott: Actually, you know what? I'll save the story because I want to bring in the Duchess of design. Do it. Also with us tonight. Zeta's in the house. Everybody.[00:04:00]
Scott: Zeta. How are you? My friend?
Zeta: I am a little bit sad that now that Halloween is done, but, everything else is pretty good.
Scott: It's pretty good? That, that, that is awesome. I love it. I love it. I love it.
Excellent! Yay! Things are pretty excellent. Would you allow your
Scott: children to mess with somebody's very pricey, yet epic Halloween display?
Zeta: I would not, I would not. No, of
Scott: course not, because you're a good mother, that's why.
Zeta: I do, I try. I know, it's great. But I will say one thing. I, maybe I was different, but when I was growing up, my parents didn't go with me when I went trick or treating. It was me, my brother, and like the other neighborhood kids, we like went as a group.
Zeta: And then we would go on this huge like route And you know hit all the houses that had the lights on We wouldn't actually go trick or treating when the [00:05:00] lights were on like during the day We would wait until the sun went down and then we'd go trick or treating So I know it's kind of changed from when all of us were growing up to where it is now And you have more trunk retreats.
Zeta: You have more, you know upscale areas that have like cooler displays So it's definitely different It's And I will say that I, When I went trick or treating when I was a kid, I never saw anything near a school. As what you had set up, Scott.
Scott: That was very cool. Again, took a lot of work and I'm old. I'm older than you, Dan.
Scott: And so that's the deal. One quick story. And then I want to get to our special guests. I swear to goodness, I'm going to tell the story and be done. Like people were more interested in getting selfies than candy. Honest to goodness. Like they would go into the thing and they would create this backlog. I should create this little trail around my front yard with animatronics and cool stuff.
Scott: And they would. Get the perfect selfie, which would create this [00:06:00] backlog of kids and parents, whatever. Eventually it's nine 30 at night, nine 30 at night. And this woman comes to the deal and I have this like big haunted archway, right? It looks like a haunted house. Right. And she had a maybe nine month old baby at nine o'clock at night, nine, nine 30 at night.
Scott: And she sat the baby down inside the archway to get the perfect selfie. And I got a. Crowd of people waiting. And I'm like, what the are you doing? And I looked at a gentleman next to me and I said, you know, JC Penny would charge a hundred dollars for this shot. I should charge a hundred dollars for this shot.
Scott: And then the guy goes, Oh, you totally should. And then. Proceeds to take his daughter when the baby is done 10 minutes later and do the exact same thing. So I might take next year off and do Halloween Horror Nights in [00:07:00] Orlando and turn off all the lights and enjoy Halloween myself for once. You should go trick or treating next year.
Zeta: Yeah, you definitely should.
Scott: I could.
Zeta: You could. Alright. Make it fun, Scott, make it fun.
Scott: Well, maybe. Yeah. At any rate, that's the that's the deal. We've got a very special guest with us who's probably not going to spend the rest of the evening talking about Halloween. And we're going to learn all about him in a little show we call, What's Your Deal?
Scott: Hey man, what's your deal? Peter! Hey. What's your deal, my friend?
Peter: I've thought about this a lot and I just want more good and useful learning. I want learning to be really, really helpful to people in their lives. And I want there to be a lot of it. It's available to a lot of people. And I've spent the last, actually, I'm counting it up.
Peter: It's like the last 15 years. Both [00:08:00] trying to make that happen in the world, a bunch of different ways and a bunch of different roles. I've been a technologist. I've been a researcher. I've been a learning scientist. I've been an instructional designer. And I've worked at startups being a product manager, trying to create products that help that happen.
Peter: So I've got a lot of different lenses to look at it. I've got a lot of different angles on what good and useful learning is. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of opportunities out there to have better and more useful learning. And let's be honest, there's a lot of stuff out there that isn't as good or useful as we would want it to be.
Peter: So that's my deal. I want more good and useful learning.
Scott: Yeah, no I hear you. I think you're preaching to the crowd. Let me ask you a question. How did you get from there to here? Tell us a little bit about your journey. You mentioned you did a lot of stuff. Yep. How did you get to this point?
Peter: So I really started out as an an instructional technologist and designer helping to set up online learning programs at universities. And then I transitioned into [00:09:00] instructional design and instructional technology at the University of Washington. I spent 10 years, all told, at the University of Washington, trying to help put in place different technologies, different designs, advising faculty, talking with teachers about what better learning is, and working with students, asking them a bunch of questions about what would be useful and helpful to them.
Peter: During that time, I started a PhD program because I figured, If I was going to be helping people create better learning, I should know what better learning looks like, what, why it's better learning, what the evidence is that it's better. And so that turned into a PhD while I was working full time and advancing my own career became director of learning systems and assessment for the University of Washington Continuum College, which is their, extension that serves anything that isn't your traditional undergraduate program.
Peter: So worked with degree completion, graduate degrees, online learning [00:10:00] 150 something certificates, including machine learning and data analytics setting up the technologies for that, teaching teachers how to teach in new contexts and with learners who have a full time job. And as I did that work and this was part of where there was a really big lens shift for me.
Peter: I came to realize that I would, I could have a bigger impact with what I knew. I got behind the scenes and started setting up, helping to create the programs that those teachers use. So that's where I transitioned into being a product manager, a product owner, director of product, different startups and works really on how to create software for those teachers.
Peter: That that creates an informed learning while I finished up that degree and published research in a couple of different publications open praxis journal of equitable learning, a couple of different peer reviewed journals that I I managed to get research into while I'm finishing that PhD.
Peter: Wow. That's quite the
Scott: journey. I'm super excited to tap into this vast, [00:11:00] beautiful chasm
Peter: of knowledge that we
Scott: have.
Peter: And I forgot to mention that I was lead instructional designer for an HR payroll transformation that. Replace the HR pay, a 33 year old HR payroll system. So if you think about, if you think about the ways that HR practices are baked into a 33 year old system and that those practices are from that initial setup and then everything that was kind of globbed onto it and replacing with a whole new completely online system.
Peter: And so I, built the trainings for that. I worked with a team to build, all the materials for that and did some fun, cool, agile stuff with that too, that I'm happy to talk about. But I've done a number of different things and roles and it's all been super fascinating. Well, let's get to it.
Scott: Let's hear all about it in our topic of the week, everybody.
Scott: Hey, this week we're talking about more good and useful learning. [00:12:00] Peter, we've got a lot to talk about, but before we do, I just have one question for you. So, what? What? Yeah, so what, so why is this important? Why should we be listening to you today?
Peter: I don't know, Scott do you like being around intelligent, well informed people?
Peter: That's a rare thing for me, but
Scott: No, I'm kidding. No, I love being around intelligent people because I always learn from them.
Peter: Yeah. That's, that's why that's why you hang out with Dan and Zeta, right?
Scott: They're super smart. Way smarter than me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how they were selling.
Peter: And, and, you know, I've got this weird feeling sometimes it's, it comes and goes that like we can all be smart in different ways and know different things.
Peter: And if we can all learn different things and then be able to contribute that learning of different things to creating things together, we can make better things together and we can create whatever we want to create, whether it's better bridges or better learning [00:13:00] programs or better software or better roads or better medicine.
Peter: If we have a bunch of really well informed, really knowledgeable people who are constantly learning and able to constantly learn. We'll be able to build better bridges, roads, medical programs, learning, whatever we, software, whatever we want to build. And I don't know, I want to live in a world that A is filled with interesting people who know interesting stuff and I get to talk to, and B is filled with people who get to make like things I like driving down good roads, but I also like.
Peter: I also like seeing people who are really able to give their gifts to the world. Who are really able to have that moment. They go, you know what? I've got a really, really insightful, I've realized something about the way to cure a disease, and then I'm going to be able to get that into a medication.
Peter: And then I'm going to be able to get that medication through the approvals that it has to go through and through the research and testing. And I get to get that to patients. And I get to see. The [00:14:00] insight that I had through the learning that I did, I get to see that change the world and make it a better place for a bunch of people.
Peter: People in my experience, love giving their gifts to the world, and I love enabling that through learning. And so that's a big so what for me? Well, the rest of it's really important, but that's a really, really big one.
Dan: Yeah, I think that's a pretty big one.
Peter: That's
Dan: pretty big. Oh yeah.
Zeta: Oh yeah.
Zeta: Like it's almost like a mosaic of minds, right? Like if you have all these specialists. They can all be their own little punches of color that can make this beautiful picture and that can send ripples out, like you said, to help influence others.
Peter: Yeah. And it's, and in, in that mosaic, right. It's also enables it, it further enables the rest of the mosaic, right?
Peter: If I can get better medicine, I can do a better job creating awesome learnings and awesome software. If I'm not, you know, frankly, If I'm able to get from point A to point B, if I'm able to get to a meeting on time, that enables me to give my gifts to the world, right?
Oh yeah, it
Zeta: makes it more efficient.[00:15:00]
Yeah.
Scott: One of the things that I think is really important, like you say, I want more good learning. Begs a question for me. What is good? What, what does good look like? Right? A lot of us say, Hey, take a look at this learning. I created awesome, but is it good? So help us understand, help our audience understand.
Scott: How do I evaluate if my learning is good? Yeah.
Peter: Really, like I said earlier, this is one of the questions that's really inspired my journey. And I've had a number of different perspectives on what good is. And there's, so there's some main things that I've come to through looking at the practice and looking at the research.
Peter: I would say good learning is useful. And I think there's really simply, if someone doesn't get a chance to do something with what they've learned, even if that's just have a better conversation with a, in a relationship with a, with a partner, have a really fascinating conversation that they enjoy having.
Peter: That's [00:16:00] useful. Cool. But if they don't do anything with the learning that they've that they've gained, that's that's not good learning. And I, I honestly, I think that there's a lot of not useful learning out there that disappears. That someone forgets before they ever get to use it.
Dan: . There's so many times just in like corporate America where it's been like, okay, cool, take this training. Okay, cool. Will I ever use it? No. Okay, cool. Why am I taking it? Oh, because our legal team wants you to take it or because our HR team wants you to take it, which is great.
Dan: I get those trainings. Like they serve a purpose, but I can't tell how many pieces of training I've taken on like legal compliance and like, Hey, we can't do this and this. It's okay, cool beans. Yep. I hear you. I hear you. And then that training is gone because I never use it.
Dan: It's not useful to me in my day to day. Okay. Somebody was like, Oh, check a box, let's move on. So a hundred percent. I love it. Yeah.
Zeta: , Oh yeah, because if you can't apply what you've learned, it doesn't be, it doesn't crystallize in your long term memory, right?
Zeta: It's in through one ear out the [00:17:00] other. It's not useful. It's not relevant. It's not pertinent. Doesn't translate. So you don't actually apply it. It's not going to stay. It's not going to stick. If you want something that sticks, yeah.
Peter: Yeah. I spent a lot of time thinking about what education would look like.
Peter: If we taught habits, we really thought about teaching habits. Like how many economics teachers are there that are going to tell you, Oh yeah, you should be, putting your money you should take a certain percentage of your income and you should put it in a retirement account and it should, just match it to the market and go dah, dah, dah.
Peter: Uh, How many schools actually measure and give students the opportunity to practice that habit of investing for in a retirement, right? It could be dollars. It could be five bucks a week. I don't care. It could be a dollar a week. Just make it a habit where every week there's some little ping in your brain that goes, you know, in that long term memory that you're talking about.
Peter: And, and it like in the habituation that goes, Oh, you I should do that. And I think that's true of a [00:18:00] bunch of habits. I think it's true of the habit of learning, right? Investing in ourselves in our careers and going, I don't know, what did I learn this week? What did I reflect on? The habit of reflection.
Peter: And what does it look like when we, when redesigned learning to think about instilling habits, not just memories.
Zeta: And not just habits, but useful habits, like you were saying. Useful habits. Yeah. Right. Right.
Scott: I feel we've done ourselves a disservice, Peter, when I think about the industry, because we spend so much time really focusing in on mastery, right?
Scott: So we designed this course. We, you need to get 80 percent to pass. Do you understand it? And so we focus all this time on mastery when our focus really should be back to what you're talking about competency. If I focused in on competency. Everything changes, right? And so that's what I love about the beauty of is it useful, right?
Scott: So as we design our learnings, like how do we get, [00:19:00] not just to mastery or understanding, but what's going to be new, better, or different, what are the behaviors that are going to lead to the results that we're looking for, how do we get to competency?
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. I love that way of saying it.
Peter: What are the behaviors you're looking for? How do we measure whether those behaviors are happening? Yeah. Yeah. Did more of that, we would have more useful, better learning.
Dan: Yeah, I told you, I think too often, like Scott, I think he said it, but like too often, like the goal is like, Hey, pass this quiz with 80%.
Dan: Yeah. Like that's not a goal. That's proof of knowledge transfer. The goal is to change in behaviors, but too many people like to get hyper focused Hey, did they score 80 percent on that quiz? Yep. Everybody did. We got a hundred percent pass rate. Great. Are we still doing those red flag behaviors?
Dan: Are we still doing those things we were supposed to? Yep. Everybody is.
Peter: Exactly. Exactly. And I've seen this, like part of the reason I'm, I bring this up is because I've seen it at all the different points of career of people I've worked with where I've seen. Very junior people who cannot put into practice some of the very basic habits [00:20:00] of responding to clients on time, right?
Peter: Like kind of super important in a lot of businesses a little hard habit to put into practice, you know, and these people could take a quiz. On, should I, how would I respond to a client and get a hundred percent, but like when it comes to the actual how to doing it and all the way up to, I've worked with people who.
Peter: Absolutely would have, I'm going to be real honest, would have outstanding scores on a, diversity, equity, and inclusion training. And then turn around and have been let go for yelling at staff members in totally inappropriate ways. And they had the knowledge, they had the information in their heads.
Peter: But like you were saying, Scott, right. Did somebody, did somebody actually understand The activity of that the doing of that in the real world and help make that translation. And I think that's a, such a huge piece and it's such a huge piece to even think about how we would measure.
Dan: , I'm [00:21:00] teaching a class on instructional design and everybody's favorite part of the course obviously is Bloom's taxonomy. There's a nerdy drop. No, but kidding. But but when I'm teaching it, I'm like, Hey, listen, we're going to focus a lot on the cognitive domain.
Dan: We're going to focus a lot on what, because the industry focuses a lot on what, and you guys will need to be able to speak to what but right after that, we're going to talk about effective domain. We're going to talk about how this makes you feel, how this taking this course is gonna make you feel, how you feel coming into this course, because that's the why, and if all you do is spend all day with the what, no one will care.
Dan: And so they won't do what. You want them to do. And yeah, I think there's a, that's a whole shift that the industry, our industry needs to really start like working towards.
Scott: I think about measurement and I talk about measurement all the time. Love our industry, love the people in it. But sometimes I think when we take a look at our learning management systems, we do ourselves a disfavor because it allows us to get measurement, but [00:22:00] measurement on what it's all about mastery, it's all about, Hey, we had a hundred people show up.
Scott: And 90 percent of them passed the quiz. I'm doing my job, right? But if it doesn't lead to the right behaviors, then. Just like Dan mentioned, we've got a real problem and a lot of that might be the why problem. What we forget to do is create the opportunity for practice. That's why I feel like I was talking with Steve Corny just the other day about this idea, he did a presentation on hybrid learning, right?
Scott: So that's the idea of we're going to go ahead and have this CBL that everybody goes through. But when you're done, you're going to actually go out and practice it because that's where the real learning comes in. A really good example, Dan, you talked about compliance training. At an organization I used to serve, we would do compliance training on phishing emails.
Scott: Well, I know what a phishing email is and I can pass this test real quick. I'm done. But what our it [00:23:00] department did very sneakily was send out incredibly devious. Relevant phishing emails to everybody randomly, right? And they were very painful because if you were to go ahead and, you know, click on the link that was in it and there aren't nine times out of 10, it would be something that was important.
Scott: Oh, to check on your stock options, click here. Well, I'm going to check on that. I'm going to click on that and click on that. Boom. You've been phished. Take the test again. So I would have to go take the test again. I'm like, okay, great. And then sure enough. A few days later, here comes this other rather relevant phishing email that our IT department put out that nine times out of 10, I would get wrong and then just beat my head against the wall.
Scott: This is not as easy as I thought it was, but gosh, darn it. If I wasn't more careful with everything that I read in it led to the behaviors that the organization was looking for. Round that all together, built in [00:24:00] practice. In the flow of work, built in practice in the flow of work, totally useful.
Scott: Totally great. Figure that out. Oh, measurable too, right? Hey, we sent out that email. 99 percent of the people clicked on it. We get work to do, right?
Peter: Right. And that gives you feedback. I love that because it gives you feedback too. On what meets you, right? If you send that email out to 5 percent of your organization, this would, this would be outstanding.
Peter: No one ever gets there. But if 5 percent of the organization clicks on that phishing email or clicks through that link, you know, you probably don't need to spend a lot more time on that training. But if 90 percent does. You probably need to spend a lot more time on the training. That's something we did when I was doing the HR payroll rollout with university of Washington, build our trainings with activities in them.
Peter: And it just small activities. Okay, great. How would you set up benefits for this person? We were training in this case, HR [00:25:00] managers. How do you set up benefits for this new hire? And we had people go through this relatively specific case where it's, okay, here's a new hire, here's, here's their classification, here's a bunch of different information about them.
Peter: How do you go through and set up benefits in the new system? And if we got 90 percent of people setting up those benefits, no problem. A week after they got the initial training on it, then we knew we were fine on that one and we could focus on other things and we could not spend our time giving people information that they need, but if they got So I have a, so one of the colleagues that I worked at the University of Washington who is most skilled at designing activities is a professor named Scott Freeman in a really incredible team that he's built around himself.
Peter: I sat down in one of his classes and I, within 15 minutes, I saw students do A talking activity where they talk to each other, a drawing activity where they drew the biology of a cell, and a quiz activity where they responded to a question. And I loved seeing, within 15 minutes, all three of those [00:26:00] activities about the same thing.
Peter: And the students, prompting the students to apply that to a new activity. Right. A new domain, a new way of expressing that knowledge in this iterative way was really awesome. But what he said about this in particular, he says a good question, a good activity and I think activity is another element of good learning.
Peter: A good activity has a 25 percent success rate. A 25 percent pass rate. That's his metric. If he gets a quiz question in class where students, where more than 25 students are, sorry, more than 25 percent of the students get it right the first time, he throws that question out and doesn't use it again. Love that.
Peter: I imagine doing that as a learning designer going
Zeta: more than
Peter: 25 percent of the people got this right. I'm teaching to the choir. I'm going to chuck this question and I'm going to find a new one. Okay. They can actually teach them something that they don't know yet.
Zeta: I can actually challenge them.
Dan: Yeah. I'm going to be like super nerdy and just it's that thing in like [00:27:00] video games and like game theory and just all these other things that just dovetail into this, where it's like, if failure is its own motivator and you can use failure in a positive way.
Dan: We've talked about this before and like failing, failing is awesome. And getting people motivated by failure is like. Key part of good learning. We're talking about what makes good learning. And I cannot tell you how many times, when I was a young facilitator, just my first time, my first like year in it and like everybody, like I'd be going through and doing review and everybody would know the answers, I'd be like, yep, I'm pretty awesome.
Dan: I'm going to pat myself on the back. I'm pretty great. And then they like take the test and they do fine. They get to the floor. Like I was doing call center work. And the class would fall apart. Like 50 percent attrition, everybody's gone. I'm like, oh, I'm the worst. And I would go to people.
Dan: I'd be like, I did everything right. They knew all the answers. They knew what to do. The in class, everybody was going through. We just snapped right through [00:28:00] material. What did I do wrong? And it would, it took years until when I would ask somebody like, I still don't get it. They're like, oh, then, you know, if everybody knows the material, Are you teaching?
Dan: To your questions, are you teaching to the role? And I remember just being like, ah oh, that's a great question. And I just now realized I've been doing this wrong for two years.
Peter: And let's be honest in that, right? A lot of the people that we are building learning experiences for have been trained their entire lives.
Peter: That if they don't get it 90 percent right, they're failing and that's a problem with them and it's super discouraging, right? They have not been trained to, they've not been Encouraged to approach it like a game, right? You, if you get night, if you play, get nerdy, if you play Super Mario and you, 90 percent of the time you succeed, right?
Peter: 90 percent of the time [00:29:00] you're never fall down one of the pits. You never run into a Goomba. You never have a problem. It's actually kind of a boring game. You're pretty demotivated by it, but we have the opposite expectation for learning. And it comes frankly, from you got 12 years of training, at least.
Peter: To go, Hey, if I'm not getting it 90 percent right, I'm a failure and I'm going to be super discouraged and frustrated with the experience instead of going, I'm here. I'm actually excited about, yeah, I'm getting something that I don't, that I don't haven't got before that I haven't. And think about, I like thinking about sports teams.
Peter: This is, I'm a nerd. I'm kind of that weird nerd that nerds out about sports team. Think about a sports team that practices. Yeah. For the next game and in their practice, their goal is that they're going to, they're going to work on things that they're already 90 percent right. Yeah. I almost guarantee you [00:30:00] that sports team will lose 90 percent of their games.
Peter: Right. The slug team that challenges itself and builds in, nerdily, what I would call zone of proximal development, which is. So we have a whole other podcast talking about Lev Vygotsky, but the zone of proximal development, something that's challenging enough that it's hard, that you have to work to get there, and that you need someone else's help to get there.
Peter: But it's close enough that it is achievable if you stay there, if you stay in that challenging, hard, exciting zone where you don't know it yet, then you get the really cool stuff, you get the learning, and you come out of it, and you, then you can go out and you can, if you're a sports team, you can win, if you're a business, you can perform, if you're a student, you can learn things that you can then take out into the world and actually, Why to, in, in the biology students that I was working with in, in becoming a doctor, becoming a biology researcher.
Peter: Yeah. And that's a huge part of the exciting stuff, but the activity can be super discouraging because we don't come in with that mindset.
Talked a lot about [00:31:00] learning, being good, learning, being useful. What else can we point
Scott: to as being good when it comes to learning?
Peter: I think it's hard of being useful, but we've talked about it being useful. We've talked about it being active where you're actually asking people to do things and I'll just add another comment there, like you, Scott, love flower industry, love the people in it, but how often are we asked to just give information, right?
Peter: That's the, create a piece of material to give out, which is the opposite of that kind of measurement that you're talking about. I think one other. One other feature of good learning, if I want to call it that, that I want to call out, that I've seen time and time again, that catches people off guard and, and trips people up is that it is often specific and practice is what I'm going to call in learning scientist parlance transfer.
Peter: Dan, you already talked to this. This is where, you know, people get great information and they take a quiz and then they don't know how to [00:32:00] actually practice it in the situation, in the actual call center floor and I like, again, kind of sports nerding on this. So I love ice hockey. I play ice hockey.
Peter: I live in Vermont. There are some amazing athletes, some amazing people with general athletic ability, could run and swing a bat and do all kinds of things. And then you put ice skates on them and you just laugh. It's the funniest thing. They are so used to being able to outperform everyone. And then they fall all over themselves and I get off.
Peter: I skates and try to run and I'm trying to run like I'm skating. And I am, I'm just, you know, dying, falling all over myself. And it's the same. It's it, I think it is more than we think, it is the same thing. In the learning that we're creating, time and time again, I've seen people think that, okay, the students learned about, Newtonian physics.
Peter: Now they can go and work in a in a lab that's dealing [00:33:00] with a quantum physics problem. Well, quantum physics is not Newtonian physics. And in fact, you go a level deeper, right? And I, so I'll speak to a domain I know. If you work with neuroscientists who study fMRI and you have them work with EEG studies of the brain, they're going to make a bunch of bad predictions because they don't, right.
Peter: That it doesn't transfer as easily as you think it will. You go, Oh, it's a neuroscientist, neuroscientist, neuroscientist, right? But it actually is harder than you think to transfer that just like people who know call centers really well. Might struggle to transfer from a call center to an email, right?
Peter: That written word can be different than that spoken word. And I think that there's a bunch of different cases that we could point to in all of our experience where that specificity that's missing. And if you don't know what specifically to assess you're going to be, you're going to be measuring, you're going to be hiring hockey players based on their running ability, which is a, it's a really dumb idea.
Zeta: And you can't [00:34:00] trade friction for inertia. Like you can't, it's not the same. It's not the same playing field. So yeah, definitely knowing what outcome or what you're looking for is very, very important.
Peter: Yeah, there's been some really interesting studies just to speak to that one. We often assume that there's some underlying general intelligence or general feature that's behind it.
Peter: So like in the sports science world right now, one of the things that's big is VO2max. You measure everyone's VO2max when you're doing, you know, when you're drafting players. Turns out that if you're doing a VO2max test on an assault bike, if you're having them, you know, bicycle, you actually don't get a good read on what their VO2max is for running because it's a different.
Peter: The usage of the limbs in that different way, and it's not a great transfer to skating. And so even that thing of like, you think you're measuring the lung capacity and you're not measuring all the parts that are connected into that lung capacity, that influence their ability to use it in that specific situation.
Peter: So you transfer that over to something that, you know, [00:35:00] we probably interact with or our colleagues interact with like diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings. Right. To be honest, and I know that this is a tricky subject, but practices and the specific habits that you might want to form when dealing with different groups with different, you know, backgrounds of equity and inequities that they have faced look pretty different.
Peter: It might actually require some different skills and some differences in how we think about approaching that, right? You might need to think differently about. How you approach someone who has English as a second language, then someone who has English as a first language, but comes from a family background where their great grandparent was enslaved, like that might actually be a really different, it might require some different skills is all I'm saying.
Peter: Yeah, exactly.
Zeta: That's exactly why we need to be more specific. I think with the [00:36:00] outcomes that we're wanting. And to also have active practice so we can start working through and making those mistakes and like learning from those mistakes and getting to a better place. Right.
Peter: Yep. And this is a really interesting example where like, how, how do you practice?
Peter: Right. Like, this is a, it's a hard, hard question. It's just like surgery, right? You want to, you want to make surgery practice as like the real thing as you can. You want it to, you want it to, to the kinds of certain surgeons these days are a great example of the specificity. You wouldn't ask a surgeon who works mostly on people's wrists to do neurosurgery.
Peter: It'd be a terrible idea, right? Unless you prototype it. Right. And you want to prototype it. You want to practice it in as real a scenario for that specific case as possible and get that practice and get that feedback with that, without doing any damage to anyone's wrists or brains. Right. And so like, this is the other.
Peter: Opportunity. It's a challenge. It's a real challenge, but it's a [00:37:00] great opportunity in our field to figure this problem out and to build technologies, practices. People who can do this work and also systems, right? Systems where hopefully leaders are asking for us to do this work and asking asking us how we're measuring it, right?
Peter: How great would that be? I think in some of our cases to, to have a business leader come to us and go, yeah, but how do I know this is actually making the impact I want it to have in my business?
Scott: Yeah. I have a solve for your surgeon thing though.
Peter: Please. Yes.
Scott: Yeah, for sure. We get a board and we put this.
Scott: Put the silhouette of a man on it with a red nose, know where going, and then you take out the tweezers, you know, and you go for the funny bone. And if you hit the sides, it get me. Yeah. It should shock you. Perfect of a buzz. It should
Dan: shock you.
Scott: it for sure.
Peter: Except if for specificity. I need a one of the like.
Peter: Laparoscopic robotic surgeons and you can use your hand, Scott, and I'll, I'll play you I'll, yeah I'll play that game with you, but I get the fancy [00:38:00] modern robot.
Scott: Well, I think that's awesome. I, those are opportunities where VR and AR training become really relevant.
Scott: Yeah. And I think that's fantastic. If you ever have the opportunity to go ahead and build some of that, it's really wicked cool and fun, but for most of us that style of learning would necessarily be relevant for what we're trying to accomplish.
Peter: With VR and AR becoming much more inexpensive and much more accessible.
Peter: How soon is it going to be before we have the opportunity to practice a consulting engagement in a VR environment that feels enough like the real thing, that it's a really good practice.
Zeta: And with an AI consultant to where you can do proper role play and you can have it tailored and adapted to the situation.
Peter: And I'm going to nerd out on you here. I totally think that's somewhere in our future. And I do think that there's huge value to that. And honestly, like when I talk about the DEI stuff, right, if you think about Not putting someone in the situation where they're constantly having to [00:39:00] train people on challenges that they're facing.
Peter: In the DEI realm, you might want an AI, a well trained AI on that., but there's actually some really cool stuff. And there's really cool stuff about pure learning where you can trade off being that client. And there's really, really cool research about people who review other peers who go, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to play the role of a, in my case.
Peter: So this is some of the research or it's some of the research I based some of my PhD work on where you had students who were pending to be the the editor of a textbook and other students were writing chunks of the textbook, the students who edited the textbook. Learned just as much, if not more and improve their own practices.
Peter: And so if you can do the AI thing, or you can go, Hey, if you want the solution right now, we're each going to take a turn being the consultant and we're each going to take a turn being the client in this VR space. And [00:40:00] then we're going to give each other feedback about, Oh, you know, putting myself in the position of the client.
Peter: I felt this, I, I was worried about this. I think you, you didn't speak to this thing that was really important to me. And then the person who played the client actually gets to, buy that buy that practice and comes a better consultant and does better in their consult practice too.
Zeta: I love that. That's awesome. Yeah. It's like both sides of the coin.
Scott: We should rename this show nerding out with Peter,
Peter: I would be I'm having a lot of fun in this conversation, but we all, Scott, I think we all know that you're the one we're all nerding out with. We're just here to nerd out with you.
Scott: Sadly, you're coming up on that time, we're actually over time because it's been so great nerd now with you, Peter. And so as we begin to wrap things up, what are a couple of things you want to leave with our audience when it comes to more and good learning?
Peter: Yeah, I would just say thank you to everybody listening to this, thinking about how you might apply it.
Peter: There's a [00:41:00] lot of, for each of these, there's a lot of really, really great research out there. There's also a lot of opportunities, and I think we've talked about them to just try small experiments, right? It doesn't have to be a big thing. It doesn't have to be a whole research project. You can think about how can I, in a little way, build in the habit of making a learning a little bit more useful, a little bit more measured in that specific way, a little bit more active and interactive.
Peter: Can I build in a little bit more challenge for my learners? And how can I make it a little bit more specific to their situation? I think if we just, if we build that habit of making it a little bit better each time, that's going to be a huge transformation over time. And I would say, if I can say this for myself, I would love to network with more people who want to do that, who are interested in doing that, who are excited about it.
Peter: If you're just going, Hey, Peter, this, it's interesting, but not really applicable to me. That's okay. You don't have to reach out, but if it sounds awesome and if you're Hell yeah, about it, then I'm reasonably easy to find, search for me on [00:42:00] LinkedIn Peter Wallace, and.
Peter: Always happy to chat.
Scott: Amazing stuff.
Love it. Love
Scott: it. Love it. So Peter, where else can they find you? Just on LinkedIn or any other place where they can connect with you?
Peter: So yeah. And I will say my, the spelling of my last name is a little tricky. So Peter Wallace, W A L L I S, you do that search on LinkedIn, you'll probably find me.
Peter: I am also at Wallace, W A L L I S, W A L L dot Peter d@gmail.com and Wallace Peter d on LinkedIn. So if you do the LinkedIn slash in slash wallace Peter d you'll find me. Either of those places are good places to reach me. I try to keep the channels a little bit narrow just so that I'm not checking slack, discord email, spending all my time checking different sources rather than rather than doing the work.
Peter: Yeah. Excited to hear from you.
Scott: That's great. We'll [00:43:00] reach out to Peter, nerd out with him. Talk some groovy stuff. Thank you so much, Peter. We'll have you on again real soon. Daniel san. Yes, Scott. Do me a favor. Could you let our audience know how they could connect with us?
Dan: Absolutely. All right, party people.
Dan: You guys know the drill. Email us at nerds at the learning nerds. com. This week, we would love to know what you are doing to make good learning. Are you making it, are you making it active? Are you making it useful? Are you making it specific? We'd love to know. We want to know! It'd be awesome! If you're on Facebook, you can find us at Learning Nerds for all of our Instagram peeps, Fab Learning Nerds, and lastly, for more information about us, what we do and updates, www.
Dan: TheLearningNerds. com Back at you, Scott.
Scott: Thanks, Dan, everybody. Do me a favor, hit that like button, hit that subscribe button, share this amazing episode out to all of your friends and do me one more favor, please, please, please with cherries and apples on [00:44:00] top, leave us a review, either on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts, it helps us do a better job and improve and innovate.
Scott: And it also helps get more of this information out to all of you. And with that, I'm Scott. I'm Dan.
Zeta: Zeta.
Scott: Peter. And we're your fabulous learning nerds, and we are out.