David Kelly is a sought after speaker and writer on technology in learning and also Executive Vice President and Executive Director at The elearning Guild. He’s huge experience of working in the elearning industry but doesn’t see it as the only tool for learning. Dave is generous with his insights and knowledge and as well as being a recognised and valued speaker on the Learning and Development circuit he’s active in numerous digital conversations about learning.
David Kelly is a sought after speaker and writer on technology in learning and also Executive Vice President and Executive Director at The elearning Guild. He’s huge experience of working in the elearning industry but doesn’t see it as the only tool for learning. Dave is generous with his insights and knowledge and as well as being a recognised and valued speaker on the Learning and Development circuit he’s active in numerous digital conversations about learning.
Welcome to the Stellar Labs podcast. Future learning today. At Stellar labs, our mission is to bust the technology skills crunch with effective, measurable engaging training. We consult on design and deliver the technical and people skills and competencies you need in business. In these podcasts, you'll hear from industry experts and practitioners from the worlds of technology and training. They'll share their experience, insights and inspiration and their visions for the future with you. Keep listening to start your future learning, here today.
Stella:Hello, I'm Stella Collins, Chief Learning Officer at Stellar labs. Today's podcast episode was recorded live at the Learning Technologies Conference 2020. David Kelly is a speaker, writer and Executive Vice President and Executive Director at the eLearning Guild. Dave is a generous sharer of ideas and always has his finger on the pulse of the latest ink technology. He's practical, pragmatic, and an engaging speaker. We first met through Twitter where he's called@LnDDave and it was great to meet him in person at a learning tech conference about three years ago. Here he is again. Dave's come over from America and I think you pretty much come every year to Learning Technologies, don't you Dave?
Dave:It's been at least five or six years in a row, yes.
Stella:I think every time I've been here, Dave's been here, but we met on Twitter originally, I seem to recall.
Dave:Yes, absolutely, as many of us here have done.
Stella:I think it was through one of the learn chats or something like that, wasn't it? And you were a very excellent kind of re-tweeter, commenter, conversationalist. So the first time we actually met, I felt like I already knew you.
Dave:One of the beautiful things about Twitter, is sometimes you just meet people in person, you feel like you've already known them and you're like, Oh wow, it's the first time we've actually met in person.
Stella:Yeah, that's great. Good. So welcome back to the UK again.
Dave:Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Stella:So I've got a question for you, which I hope you'll understand because it's an English phrase, but I think you understand it across America. What's the biggest bee in your bonnet, right now?
Dave:Oh, there's a lot of different things that I'm following. I mean, this is not a reflection of necessarily the weight that it gives in the industry, but my personal interest. I am very engaged in the conversations around AR and VR and how those technologies are being used and how they're emerging, both in the normalization on the consumer market and what that means for us as opportunities for learning. And I think they are both in their own unique way, powerful tools that are going to enable us to solve problems that we haven't been able to solve before in the work that we do. And I also just find technology like that extremely fascinating. So it's a unique experience that we haven't had available to us before. I enjoy those types of experiences and I am enjoying the opportunities that that that is opening for us in our field.
Stella:And are you using AR and VR yourself?
Dave:Oh, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I love about my job these days, is that I can find a new shiny object and justify it at home by calling it"research". So I have a lot of research things at my house and the AR and VR space. So I enjoy checking out the technology, see how they emerge, see how they advance and seeing the types of experiences that people build with them.
Stella:I've seen VR particularly used in various different ways, but what do you think are the kind of challenges of VR, but where is it really beneficial as well?
Dave:Well, I think VR is not going to be the silver bullet. I think that a lot of people in our field are always looking at new and emerging technologies as if it's the silver bullet or to use my geeky Lord Of The Rings reference:"the one tool that's going to rule them all". And that's not what it is. It's just another tool in the belt, but it is a very powerful tool that I think is going to have an extremely powerful but narrow use case. You know when you have a need that the risk of failure is literally life and death, like firefighting as a good example of that, there's a lot of virtual reality applications today. The opportunity to practice those skills in a safe environment becomes extremely powerful and VR can create those experiences in ways that just looking at a static screen can't. And to see those use cases emerging now is really exciting I think for L&D.
Stella:I remember seeing one of my colleagues taking part in VR that was about climbing high sort of masts and she was absolutely terrified. She had her hand gripped on the chair and though she knew she was just sitting on a chair, she could feel the chair, she could not let go of the chair.
Dave:Yep. The world that I associate with virtual reality that does really well is it gives you a presence that you can't get any other way.
Stella:And do you think, I mean it's very kind of visual at the moment. How much better do you think is going to be in terms of the physical or other kinds of input?
Dave:So yeah, it's definitely a predominantly a visual medium right now. There are a number of different technologies that are emerging that get into other senses. Some of them are really gimmicky. I've seen masks that you can associate that gives you the smell associated with things, which just, I don't see that getting really much traction. But the haptics are really exciting. Like there are gloves that give you the feeling of what you're seeing in VR. Even more exciting is the ability to not have ones at all. Like one of the technologies that's out now, the most popular device in VR in the consumer level, is the Oculus quest, which is the standalone VR device and they just recently released an update where it has hand tracking where it can just, without you holding a wand, can see what your hands are doing. It's very basic navigation type stuff, but it's able to just recognize where your hands are. I always tell people if they have the opportunity to experience different types of VR, there is location-based free roaming VR centers where you're actually wearing a backpack with your computer on it so you can roam around a room in an environment, and your hands are free and you pick up objects and you're picking them up in VR. It's an extremely compelling use case of how VR can add to that presence beyond just the visual of the helmet.
Stella:And I will be quite curious to know how the smell stuff does work because we know the smell and memory are really strongly linked.
Dave:Well like the headset that goes on your face that seems a little gimmicky, but the location based stuff that I was talking about there, you're basically walking into what's essentially a physical blank room, but you're seeing an environment within the VR headset. I've been in some of these location things where you're in a room that is on fire and you smell the burning. So you're seeing the fire, but they're pumping air that smells just like smoke, which just makes that immersion that you're having with instant experience, that feeling of presence that much deeper.
Stella:I can definitely see that being really powerful. Okay. That's really interesting. What's the best technology do you think? I mean, we've already said that there isn't the perfect technology, but for you, what's the best technology that's been invented so far? Or do you want to be invented?
Dave:That's an interesting question. I mean the low hanging fruit answer is always: the best technology is the one that's solving a problem you can't solve today. But that's not a personal answer for me. I mean, we talk about AR and VR as two separate things, which they are, but as augmented reality continues to evolve and if you think about what augmented reality is, it's essentially a digital overlay on the real world. But if you overlaid everything that's in front of you, in the real world, essentially it's VR. If everything was overlaid, now you've got a digital environment, it's just a different portal going through it. So I think eventually we're going to get to a point that the headsets that we're doing are true mixed reality in a sense that they could do an augmented reality experience or a virtual reality experience and this differentiation is going to go away. And as that technology evolves, and I see the trajectory that AR and VR are on and how it reaches that end point, is kind of fascinating to me.
Stella:Okay, interesting. Here's a more of a personal question for you? What's something that you've never learned but you would like to?
Dave:I have not yet learned a language other than my native one that I really wanted to do. I'd like to be able to speak another language as fluently as I speak English I mean, it's very relevant to me now. I was in Paris last week for the other show that they had. As much as it was a fascinating experience that I was able to talk to people through technology. I mean just having my phone out and saying something and having a translate in French and having the other person listening and vice versa. It was fascinating how normal that felt. It still wasn't me talking to people. I'm walking around and I'm hearing people talk and it's, it's almost like music to me, but I don't understand what the words are, hearing that. So yeah, I would always love to just allocate the time to just learn another language.
Stella:And being a learning specialist. What would you do to learn?
Dave:Well, you know, immersing myself in it is the first thing. I mean, again, I go back to last week. There were times where I intentionally did not pull out my phone to try to at least get to be able to answer the question. Like the big questions of where is the restroom, where's the train? And things of that sort. I tried to not use the phone at times just just for that experience of what's this going to be like? And really in some cases just didn't pull out the phone unless I saw that the person was bothered by me. Like,"Oh, I don't know what you just said to me, but it's not what you think it was!" So, I try to just immerse myself in it where I could just learn by doing and if I had more time, I would've loved to have been able to do that more.
Stella:That's definitely been my experience of learning. I've learned Spanish and I'm now in the process of learning Dutch. You know, and it's that immersion. It's seeing every day, hearing e very day. Simple things like I can actually say"hello""please" and"thank you" i n quite a lot of l anguages, b ut I c an usually say"push" and"pull" as well and"entrance" and"exit" because you see those signs all the time. When you go to a foreign country, you're getting that repetition a nd that constant presentation with it. So, okay, a new language, what language would you choose?
Dave:I would probably go with Spanish, mainly because it would be the most useful for me where I live. I mean that's probably the second most common language around where I live. So it'd be able to interact with people where that's their native language. That would probably be my best opportunity to have that sort of experience where I could practice more. Yeah.
Stella:And probably more opportunity to immerse yourself at least a little bit. Okay. And then one sort of final question. Quite tough conversations around this at the moment about using evidence-based learning. Obviously as far as I'm concerned, using neuroscience within learning. And I'm interested in your thoughts on that as well,
Dave:In terms of the use, I don't think we do it enough. I think that a lot of the challenges that exist in the practices in our industry, are not that people have bad intentions in any way, but I think that there are too many decisions that are made because it feels right and it seems logical, that this is what we should do. You know, the most obvious myth that people always go to and this whole learning styles thing and the idea of catering an instruction to the fact that someone prefers to learn a particular way. That seems like it makes sense. I mean, it sounds logical. Why wouldn't you want to do that? But people don't take the time to follow through on. But is it evidence-based? Is there research to back up what I'm doing? They act on how it feels rather than what the research is telling. and that leads to bad practice and leads to some of these myths that are existing in our industry. So I think we need to be respectful of it more. I also respect the fact that there's a gap sometimes, you know, not everybody has the interest or the stamina to sit down and read an academic research paper. It's a hard read for a lot of people, myself included. So the ability for those people that are out there, that can distill that into something that is easier to digest and easily or more importantly to put into practice. Those are the people that people like myself who work at conferences, to give those people a platform to share that with others. That has the ability to impact our field.
Stella:Yeah. I think it's just important for people to start questioning what they hear and they kind of blindly accept learning styles. Whilst everybody says it's sort an easy myth to believe, but actually you've got to really think about it quite simply and think, if I had the learning style of being a visual learner for instance, I need to ride a bike or learn a language, I am never going to manage it using that. So whilst very quickly it seems like it might be conceptually interesting. You can very quickly bust the myth if you just think about it just a little bit.
Dave:Yeah. I think, I think as a general rule of thumb, it falls under a broader heading that I would say just think before you hit that share button. Think about it before you start spreading it. Because that's where a lot of this stuff happens is, people see the headline, it sounds good and they hit share.
Stella:And we all know that science has to be made simpler for us to understand it. I mean, I've read through many research paper, but they're not something I love to read through. They're jolly hard work. Okay. Well, thank you very much for sharing with us today. It's been really interesting to hear what's in your bonnet and we look forward to seeing you again.
Dave:Thanks again. Bye.
Stella:Thank you for listening to today's podcast. Please share it with your friends and colleagues and visit our website, stellarlabs. eu to learn more about what we do and how we do it. Tune in to the next episode.