Hello everyone, I have not been recording podcast episodes for over a year. This is because I started a company this year, Panglot Labs Ltd, and I've had to put all my energy into it. This looks like it will continue for at least the medium term, so I've decided to formally state that I'm not going to be adding new material to the podcast regularly anymore for the foreseeable future. At Panglot Labs we make language learning apps for minority and endangered languages. We're currently working wit...
Dec 31, 2024•48 min
In order to understand learning, we need to understand the result of learning - expertise. This is much easier to approach in so-called "kind" domains, such as chess, where the rules are fixed and all information is available. However, there exist more "wicked" domains than this, such as tennis (where your opponent changes each match) or stock market investment (where the world is different each time). How do we study the development of expertise in fields such as these? Chapter 22 of The Cambri...
Jan 25, 2024•43 min
There has been a ton of research on how experts see things differently than novices. (Like, with their eyes.) Everything from where they look, how long they focus for, and their use of peripheral vision, to their ability to anticipate what is going to happen through picking up subtle visual patterns. In this episode, I summarise and discuss this research. Enjoy the episode.
Dec 18, 2023•42 min
Mindset was the first thing I spoke about on this podcast. I even did a separate episode going into the controversies surrounding replication of Carol Dweck's original work. Then there were stress mindsets, introduced by Kelly McGonigal in her book The Upside of Stress. (I happen to have also covered a book by her twin sister Jane, Reality is Broken , about applying the motivational principles learned by game designers in wider life situations). But now I've encountered another kind of mindset: ...
Dec 11, 2023•30 min
I haven't spoken on the podcast yet about my personal experience learning dancing. At university, I took part in dancesport, which is competitive ballroom and latin dancing; and in the last few years I have been learning to dance tango. I am struck by the differences in philosophies, skill sets, values, and learning cultures between these dance styles, so I wanted to share my experience with you. Enjoy the episode. *** Music used in this episode: Uno by Anibal Troilo https://open.spotify.com/tra...
Nov 26, 2023•1 hr 17 min
This is my first ever attempt at a VIDEO podcast. If you just listen to the audio, you should be fine. This was a video produced for the STEM MAD conference in Melbourne in October 2023. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the conference, so I made this video to introduce the panel discussion on the role of generative AI in education. Enjoy the episode.
Nov 19, 2023•8 min
This is a quick review of where I am now after 150 episodes and just short of 8 years of Education Bookcast. Thanks for all of your support! Feel free to leave a review of the podcast, or, if you wish, support me on https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast . Enjoy the episode.
Nov 13, 2023•36 min
Since I've now reached episode 150, I've decided to do something I've never done before - discuss a fiction book. (This episode contains spoilers.) A Wizard of Earthsea is a fantasy novel from 1968, a time when the genre was still not very well-developed. Ursula Le Guin deliberately wanted to contravene some trends she saw in the existing genre, including the main characters being fair-skinned, and war as a moral analogy. In this book, the key issues are internal to a character, a fact that beco...
Oct 26, 2023•59 min
A lot of the classic expertise research, especially the research about deliberate practice and the "10,000 hour rule", is inspired by K. Anders Ericcson's study of violinists at the Berlin Conservatory. However, we have seen before how misleading sampling a particular culture and generalising the findings over the whole of humanity can be. Thankfully, Lucy Green's How Popular Musicians Learn gives us something of an antidote to this classical music bias. Green's book is based on interviews with ...
Oct 23, 2023•47 min
Any teacher in a Western cultural context knows that classroom behaviour is the most challenging part of the job. A lot of the time, it seems like crowd control is the main issue, and "teaching" is secondary. Unfortunately, teacher training courses don't do a good job of preparing teachers for this reality, with behaviour management rarely instructed at all. Bill Rogers has been helping teachers develop their classroom behaviour management and discipline skills for decades. He has brought his ca...
Aug 18, 2023•1 hr 13 min
Dr Guy Emerson (a.k.a Guy Karavengleman) is a computational linguist working at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. In this episode, we discuss issues surrounding LLMs such as ChatGPT, GPT-3, GPT-4, and Google Bard. Guy is concerned about misinterpretations of what the technology does and is capable of. As a computational linguist, he works on language models with a focus on semantics and human language acquisition, and thus questions of linguistic meaning and understanding are particu...
Jul 24, 2023•1 hr 11 min
In the second part of this two-part episode about lessons learned from my time working in the education technology sector, I wanted to share a very significant quantitative finding to improve learning: what I call the "90% rule". Desirable difficulties is a concept that many know about and try to apply to teaching situations, but there is a question of how difficult one should make things. Surely there is a level at which things are too difficult? In which case, what is the perfect level of diff...
May 07, 2023•31 min
I've now been working as a data scientist in educational technology for over four years. In that time I've thought a lot about various educational concepts within edtech, and I want to share some of what I've learnt. In the first part of this two-part episode, I want to talk about what I call the Fundamental Duality of Educational Materials. The Fundamental Duality is that we use our content to measure our students / users (e.g. what they know), but we also use our users to measure our content (...
Apr 30, 2023•48 min
This is the second part of the message for my friend Guy about becoming a better lecturer. In this part, I go over 27 practical techniques and tips for improving lecturing (as well as improving the way homework exercises are designed), referring to the principles and theory outlined in the previous part to explain how and why these work. To be completely honest some of the suggestions are more general pedagogical suggestions rather than being specific to lecturing, but I decided to throw them in...
Apr 22, 2023•1 hr 7 min
Another in the series of "really long voice notes from Staś". My friend Guy is a lecturer in natural language processing. He asked me if I could give him some tips about how to lecture better, so I told him I would record a podcast episode about it. I've divided the episode into two parts. In this first part, before we speak about practical things to do, I will discuss what the basic aims are, and some important preliminary framing questions - what are we trying to achieve? How does learning wor...
Apr 22, 2023•56 min
Benjamin Bloom is best known for Bloom's Taxonomy, a scheme for categorising ways of thinking about or interacting with learning content on a scale from less to more sophisticated. However, the project he led investigating the lifelong development of expertise should be much more famous. The book's full title makes it feel as though it was published in 1685 rather than 1985: The dramatic findings of a ground-breaking study of 120 immensely talented individuals reveal astonishing new information ...
Apr 15, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Cover image: horse and rider by Nadia, age 5. The nature of talent is something that I dealt with near the beginning of the existence of Education Bookcast, reviewing books like Genius Explained, Outliers, The Talent Code, and Bounce. The general consensus was that talent is an illusion - people simply get better at things through exposure and practice. My confidence in this assertion was shaken when reading the IQ literature, but now, in the book The Road to Excellence edited by K. Anders Erics...
Mar 19, 2023•1 hr 9 min
Season 2 of the Pedagogue-Cast is here! The Pedagogue-Cast is a separate podcast project I share with Justin Matthys, founder of Maths Pathway. We discuss the kinds of questions that teachers might have about good practice which touch on cognitive science, making sure both to make the most of the research findings while also making it practical for use in the classroom. In this new season, Justin and I are going to discuss music, flow, focus, student choice, social & emotional learning inter...
Mar 11, 2023•36 min
After my last episode on behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism ("A Message for Zoë"), I heard back from Zoë herself, and also heard from Malin Tväråna, an education researcher in Sweden. I decided that it was worth recording an episode relating what I heard from them, and my thoughts about it. Enjoy the episode. ### REFERENCES Miłosz, Czesław (1953): The Captive Mind . Radford, Luis (2016): The Theory of Objectification and its Place among Sociocultural Research in Mathematics Education....
Mar 10, 2023•45 min
My friend Zoë (hi Zoë!) is taking a course on learning design. In it, she heard about Behaviourism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism, and while she said that she found it confusing, her main takeaway is that "you need a bit of each". I recorded this episode to help her have a clearer sense of what these three words really mean, and that "a bit of each" is emphatically not the right message. I thought that others might benefit from the same summary. This is a frequent topic in education courses, a...
Feb 25, 2023•44 min
In the previous recording, I was speaking about political economy using the example of prison gangs, taken from David Skarbek's book Social Order of the Underworld. In this recording, I give the example of 18th-century Atlantic pirates, as discussed in Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook. (It's a pun on Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the market".) We may have an image of pirates as fearsome, but this is at least somewhat deliberately manufactured by the pirates themselves. They wanted to have suc...
Jan 30, 2023•43 min
Please be advised that this episode contains mentions of violence and may be unsuitable for some listeners. I'd like to flesh out what I've been saying before about the power of economic analysis in explaining people's actions. Whereas when we normally think about motivation we think in terms of psychology, economists naturally think in terms of incentives. This kind of thinking is generally missing in educational discourse. There are two books that I found particularly fascinating and instructi...
Jan 29, 2023•1 hr 10 min
Education Bookcast released its first episode on the 1st of January 2016. I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about some of the big things that I think I've learned in that time. I speak about: Psychology is overrated - the replication crisis and the bias in cultural sampling, and therefore the importance of anthropological evidence; Psychology is underrated - how amazing the field of cognitive architecture is, and how little known it appears to be as a field; apparent resistance to scient...
Jan 01, 2023•50 min
This is the second episode concerning self-related beliefs taken from chapters of The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. Here I talk about self-efficacy, which concerns how much you believe that you can do something specific, e.g. solve a particular kind of maths problem. Self-esteem, self-concept, self-efficacy - it's easy to get confused with so many "self-words" flying around. There are even other words which aren't used by academics but are in common parlance, such as self-belief...
Nov 14, 2022•34 min
Among the huge academic tomes that I've been ploughing through recently is The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. I've long felt that my understanding of motivation is superficial and incomplete, and I wondered whether motivation was understood at all by anybody in the academic literature, or whether remained a mysterious and convoluted problem. The Handbook has shown me that there is much good research that has been done that sheds light on motivation, interest, curiosity, and how t...
Oct 31, 2022•55 min
In this interview, I have the honour to speak with Professor Christian Lebiere, researcher in cognitive architecture, co-author of The Atomic Components of Thought , and one of the main developers of the ACT-R architecture. We talk on a range of topics relating to cognitive architecture, cognitive modelling, and psychology. My questions are listed below, by theme. A note on cover art: this is a diagram of ACT-R version 2.0 from 1993. More modern versions of ACT-R contain somewhat different compo...
Oct 16, 2022•1 hr 46 min
I have recently discovered the field of cognitive architecture. I have been reading around the area for the last couple of months, and I would like to introduce it to my audience. It's an area of study with incredible achievements which revitalises my belief in psychology as a field, but which for some reason is not at all well known, even in education circles where it deserves to be known to all as the most impressive set of theories of cognition and learning ever produced. I particularly focus...
Oct 11, 2022•43 min
One of the patrons of the podcast wrote to me on the forum that while I have covered the research on learning to read in a fair amount of detail, I'm yet to speak about learning to write, and he would really like to know more about this since he teaches writing day to day. I happen to have been reading Cambridge Handbook on Expertise and Expert Performance edited by the late great K. Anders Ericsson (among others), and there is a chapter entitled Professional Writing Expertise which I thought mi...
Oct 10, 2022•1 hr 8 min
In this episode, I have Judith Millecker on as a guest. Judith is the author of the Philosocats series of books, which aims to help children ages 4-10 to engage in philosophy. It is an outgrowth of her work running philosophy for children sessions in London. We discuss her most recent book, social and emotional learning, critical thinking, and how pedagogy might vary by domain. Enjoy the episode.
Oct 05, 2022•1 hr 10 min
I was reading the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance edited by K. Anders Ericsson yesterday, and after going through a chapter on medical experts, something struck me about the nature of expertise, automaticity, and Kahnemann and Tversky's System 1 vs. System 2 (also known as dual-process theory , popularised by their book Thinking, Fast and Slow ), which joined together what I know about chess players, doctors, and how literacy works. I'm excited to share it with you today. ...
Aug 20, 2022•49 min
