Podcast chat with Steve Wheeler, Author, Digital Learning in Organisations
What if ALL employees benefited from training?
This transcribe is taken from The Voctech Podcast; Subscribe and listen by searching for “The Edtech Podcast” on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, and Google.
Sophie: I’m really, really, genuinely, deeply delighted to be here because I’m sat in a wonderful English garden, just outside of Plymouth city center, surrounded by flowers and in the sunshine, and I’m here with Steve Wheeler. So welcome, Steve.
Steve Wheeler: Hi, Sophie. Nice to be here.
Sophie: And we’re in your father’s garden, and it’s absolutely delightful. We’re in the dappled light, under an apple tree.
Steve Wheeler: Yeah. You can reach up and pick the apples, can’t you, from here.
Sophie: You could. I’m going to let them grow a bit bigger, but-
Steve Wheeler: I would. They’re a bit sour at the moment, I think.
Sophie: Yeah. But just for our listeners, if anyone’s been living under a rock or anything like that, as an introduction. So Steve Wheeler is a Learning Innovations Consultant and former Associate Professor of Learning Technologies at the Plymouth Institute of Education, where he chaired the learning for futures group and led the computing and science education teams. He continues to research into technology supported learning and distance education, with particular emphasis on the pedagogy underlying the use of social media and Web 2.0 technologies, and also has research interests in mobile learning and cyber cultures. He has given keynotes to audiences in more than 35 countries and is author of over 150 scholarly articles, with more than 7,300 academic citations.
Sophie: An active and prolific edu-blogger, his blog, Learning with ‘e’s, is a regular online commentary on the social and cultural impact of disruptive technologies and the application of digital media in education, learning and development. In the last few years it has attracted 8.5 million unique visitors, and Steve’s latest book, which I’m about a third of the way through, is Digital Learning in Organizations: Help Your Workforce Capitalize on Technologies, which is absolutely perfect for our new series.
Sophie: So, welcome again.
Steve Wheeler: Thank you very much. That sounds a bit like me, what you just read there. I think it’s on my blog site, isn’t it?
Sophie: Oh, absolutely. Just a copy and paste, the worst kind. Over the next 30 minutes hopefully we’ll fill in all the gaps as well.
Sophie: So, Steve, we met for the second time last week during the Learning Technologies Summer Forum, and I was lucky enough to buy one of said books. What I thought that I’ve really enjoyed it is, it’s full of personal anecdotes, which I love, and one early on in the book is about your fledgling career as a marmalade maker. So can you expand for our listeners what the underlying message was on training being an investment versus a cost, in your experience there?
Steve Wheeler: Well, I mean, you know the story about the two managers outside the boardroom and one says, “Training’s really expensive. What if we train them all up and they leave?” And the other one looked at him and said, “What if we don’t and they stay?” It’s how much cost is ignorance, over what we should know as employees, and I think I made the point last week when I was talking about personalized learning at the Summer Forum in London that, actually, the whole point about training is to invest in your most important asset which is human capital, surely. I mean, if you can’t see that, then maybe you shouldn’t be in business.
Steve Wheeler: So I think people are the most important part of society, they’re the most important part. We do everything for people don’t we, really? And if we don’t invest in people, if we don’t train them up, if we don’t help them to learn, if we don’t give them the opportunities to get the best performance out of themselves, then what are we doing in business, what are we doing in education?
Steve Wheeler: So the story about the marmalade maker, it was me, I was the marmalade… I was supposed to be on this production line making marmalade by taking huge cans of orange pulp and shoving them into a vat and then it was being wheeled away, and then I’d start over again. And the whole point of that was, yes, it was dull work. I was only a kid at the time, I was still at college, and I was trying to earn a few extra quid during the summer holidays, but they didn’t tell me the whole story. They told me half the story, and when I opened one of the cans, it opened up and a million black flies flew out and the whole factory was infested for a whole day, and there was a whole day of production downtime and that was a costly error. They just didn’t tell me what to look out for. It had probably happened before.
Sophie: So… buzzing. It reminds me of… I grew up in the Isle of Wight. There’s a lot of growing cherry tomatoes down there so we’d just be packing those and you have the bare minimum training and get the job done.
Steve Wheeler: Well, I think they thought I was just a kid, he’ll get on with it and get bored and go away. They didn’t invest in me. They saw me as only being casual labor, so therefore… But everybody who’s in part of an organization has an important part to play, even if they’re casual, I think. So that’s the story behind that one.
Sophie: And then you write in your book about the need to learn, and refer to how almost all processes start with some form of creative destruction. Could you expand on that notion as well?
Steve Wheeler: It’s a weird thing, isn’t it, that, creative destruction. It sounds like an oxymoron or something that contradicts itself. But I think it was Picasso who said that to create something you first have to destroy something, and what he meant by that was, you have to mix pigments or you move stuff around on a piece of paper. There’s always a transformation that takes place, it can look disruptive. And I think the point I was trying to make with that was that not only do we have to learn things, we also have to unlearn certain things, if we can relearn other things.
Steve Wheeler: For instance, the prejudices that you see at the moment, the racist and the xenophobic stuff that you see coming out of the States and the U.K. at the moment, all the… I don’t know, this misplaced zeal in, “We are Britain,” or “We are the U.S.”, it’s all based on prejudice and that is based on bad learning. It’s based on false views, views that are prejudiced which tend to divide rather than unite, and that’s just a classic example of stuff that we really need to unlearn before we can relearn what we need to learn.
Sophie: I think that’s really interesting because I had a podcast recently and the guest was Tara Westover. Do you know her?
Steve Wheeler: No.
Sophie: She grew up in an extreme Mormon environment where exactly this. She wasn’t really encouraged to be schooled in any way and so eventually she persuaded her parents to let her go to a Mormon university and then she broke away and made the really painful decision to leave her family, but came and studied at Cambridge. But all of her ideology really was based around this, and so she was extremely homophobic because that was just normal to her and she had to do… She talks about exactly this, having to really break down everything that was socially constructed for her, and she’s got a really tangential view on everything as a result, a kind of candid example of how these things are built up around us, I suppose.
Steve Wheeler: Well, you see, the thing is, in the age of social media and communication at the speed of thought, which really is the case now, everyone’s connected to each other, I think we tend to gather people around us who think the same way and speak the same way and look the same way as we do, and that gives us an echo chamber effect. We get into a bubble, like your Mormon friend did, and I think that’s unhealthy. I try to gather people around me who maybe will challenge me or disagree with me as well, and, yeah, occasionally have arguments with them because that’s the best way to learn. I think, Hegel nailed this 200 years ago or more when he talked about antithesis and synthesis, bringing together ideas through disagreement and disruption and creative destruction.
Sophie: Hegelian dialectic brings me back to my English literature days. I read a Washington Post article recently about Amazon spending $700 million on re-skilling learners, they’re actually yet to do this, and one of the lady’s referenced in this article was Jane [Bozarth 00:07:57], who’s also mentioned in your book and sounds pretty formidable about taking no prisoners, in terms of learning and development. I just wondered if you had personal experience of what she’s like and if you could [crosstalk 00:08:11]
Steve Wheeler: Once you’ve met Jane you never forget her! We’ve shared several stages together over the years, and notably once in Brussels a couple of years back when I think both of us fell off the stage at one point. Mine was deliberate.
Sophie: Oh, really?
Steve Wheeler: But Jane-
Sophie: In shock at what someone had said or something?
Steve Wheeler: No, no, no. I mean, she fell off the stage accidentally and I mimicked her, just for a laugh really. I shouldn’t have done it, but there you go.
Sophie: Empathetic.
Steve Wheeler: We know each other quite well and we can have a good laugh. We often have a joke together. Jane is… yes, she is formidable. She’s got some formidable ideas about what learning should be, what development should be like, how education should look. I think she’s got some great ideas, because she’s like me, very much the idea that the people are the center, the person is at the center of the learning, so why should we think about it any other way?
Sophie: This is quite interesting because it got me thinking about conferences like last week. So people go to them. When you’re on your own, you are really inspired by perhaps the forward thinking things people are saying because you’re in that environment of learning, but then you have to go back to your organization and actually regaling what was said and actually trying to create change is much more difficult. So do you have any tips on how to then go ahead and implement some of that?
Steve Wheeler: Well, it’s easy when you’re at a conference or in a gathering of people who are like-minded to enthuse and to be evangelized and to be inspired. But you’re right, when you go back, it’s bump down to Earth, isn’t it? Back to base, and you’re back in the same old environment where you’ve worked for the last umpteen years and suddenly things aren’t as easy to enthuse about, and the pressures of work and the pressure of relationships and so on get on top of you.
Steve Wheeler: So for me, there are fundamental, I think, ideas. One of them, as I’ve already mentioned, is the person at the center. Another one is to stand up for what you believe is true and actually stand your ground and even if you’re being heavily criticized, be that positive deviant, be that person who makes that different idea happen in the work. Be that person who is courageous and doesn’t deviate from the pathway that they know they’ve got to step up to.
Steve Wheeler: I got into trouble a few times when I was working at Plymouth University, but it wasn’t trouble in as much that they’d look at me and think, oh, he’s done it again, because they knew that I’d get results. So although they would criticize me, they wouldn’t be able to sanction me because they knew that I would get the results by doing things differently.
Sophie: So it’s beg forgiveness not permission type thing.
Steve Wheeler: That’s exactly my mantra, yeah. It’s exactly the way I worked. So, for instance, I took it upon myself to change the assessment mode on one occasion. I didn’t ask for permission, I didn’t go through any paperwork, I didn’t go through any regulations, I just changed it. And I said to the students, “Okay. You’ve got a 5,000 word assignment to write for me. I’m going to tell you thats equivalent, and that means that you can do other things as well.” So someone said, “Can I do a video?” I said, “Yeah. Come up and discuss with me what the equivalency would be in terms of 5,000 words and make sure that you apply the assessment criteria and we’ll be fine.” Someone else said, “I’ll do a series of podcasts.” It may have been you actually, but it wasn’t. And somebody else said, “Can I do an exhibition?” And I said, “Yeah, fine. Look, whatever you want to. Be creative in it and go off and do it.” Somebody did a series of blogs. Others created a Wiki space and got people to comment on their work.
Steve Wheeler: And at the end of it all, the admin staff said to me, “Okay. Where are all the printouts of all the assignments?” I said, “I’m not going to give you printouts.” They said, “What? But the assessment needs… the regulations state that we need printouts of everything.” I said, “Well, good luck printing out a video. You can’t do it.” And they said, “Well, the external examiner’s going to go up the wall about this. He’s going to go ballistic.” I said, “Give me the phone.” So I picked up the phone and I spoke to him and I said, “Doug, what do you feel about this?” And I went through all the ideas with him, and he said, “Brilliant idea. I applaud you for doing that.” He said, “Break out of the mold. Let’s do something different.” And eventually the admin people, the professional services, as they call themselves, they ran out of complaints, they ran out of objections and they had to let me do it, and now across the whole university lots of people are doing alternative assignments.
Steve Wheeler: It takes somebody, I think, to stand up with the conviction and the courage to actually do something different and I was down the road in my career and, for me, what could they do to me? Could they sack me? Well, maybe, but would I care? So in the end I had nothing to lose and a lot to gain, and it worked.
Sophie: I love that. It makes me think of… not that I’m relating you to an old lady on the bus, but when they’re there in their Nike Air Maxs and they’re like, I just don’t care, I’m going to wear whatever I want.
Steve Wheeler: Yeah. Don’t give a monkey’s. And I think sometimes that is the way to be. That’s the way to implement change. It does take just sometimes just one person who is an opinion leader, or someone who is senior enough to be able to get away with it. I wouldn’t recommend it to everybody to do that because some people might lose their jobs over it.
Sophie: It depends on the circumstances.
Steve Wheeler: It does. It’s about context.
Sophie: On that basis, is there a skills crisis or are we crap at utilizing existing talent? For example, female professionals and those without traditional qualifications.
Steve Wheeler: That’s a really big question, isn’t it? I mean, we talk about the divide between academia and vocational training, and often I think the root cause is found in secondary school. I’m not lambasting secondary school teachers, my wife is one. I have a lot of friends who are secondary school teachers. But sometimes secondary education gets it wrong and they push children into academia when, in fact, maybe they should be sending them down to the local FE college to train as a bricklayer or a hairdresser or somebody who wants to work with their hands rather than work with their minds. Not every child, not every person, is suited to academia. Hence, we do get a problem now where there’s a lot of unemployed graduates in this country and other countries in the western industrialized world, and there’s also a lot of skills shortage because we haven’t trained enough people up in the manual and the technical areas of our society.
Steve Wheeler: So I think there is a skills shortage probably because… that’s one of the reasons. I think it’s more complex than that and I’m maybe distilling it down into something simplistic, but I think that’s one of the reasons.
Sophie: And there’s all these inquiries. There’s another inquiry announced this week about lifelong learning, and I saw someone comment that it was like we need an inquiry about why there’s so many lifelong learning inquiries without an outcome. I mean, it’s been talked about for so long, hasn’t it, and it’s sort of…
Steve Wheeler: I think we’re a very outcome based society and that’s based on metrics, which is based on successive governments’ desire to show that they are better than anybody else in the world. I mean, one of the things I guess we could point the finger at there is PISA, the post 16… well, it is a sixteen year old… they test 16 year olds in maths and in literacy at some point during that year and then they post those results in a national grading system, and that’s PISA, P-I-S-A, look it up. But the thing is-
Sophie: I’ve interviewed Andreas Schleicher, so, yeah.
Steve Wheeler: Well, Andreas Schleicher is actually a proponent of that, isn’t he, whereas I’m an opponent of it and I’d happily sit down and talk… I’ve never met the guy but I would happily sit down and talk to him about it and discuss this with him in great detail because, for me, this sounds like… well, it’s setting everybody up for failure really. I mean, there are very few nations that rise to top each year. I mean, Singapore and Finland have always been near the top. Singapore, their system is completely different to the Finnish system, but the thing is, Finnish teachers have a lot more freedom than British teachers. Singapore teachers do a lot of didactic type of teaching because that’s what their society requires.
Steve Wheeler: It’s a very complex area to try and unravel and to try and analyze but personally, my view is that we should not be putting children through such high stakes testing at such an early age, adding stress onto stress onto stress for them and their parents and their families and the teachers in the school and the administrators, just to satisfy government’s whim on, we want to be at the top of the table.
Sophie: And on metrics in the corporate training world, what’s your view on where people focus on compliance versus performance, and then just going back to Jane Bozarth, trying to nurture that individual employee and how they may personally develop as well?
Steve Wheeler: Oh, gosh, again, this is such a complex area because, yeah, you need some compliance training. I mean, even things like diversity training. These are things that are important because people need to be informed, people need to be safe, people need to be well versed in what is required of them to improve their performance, but that’s not the full story. I mean, there’s so much more learning that can be done which is probably informal, or personal learning as I call it, rather than personalized learning, and it’s stifled because people just haven’t got the time to do it. They’re constantly bombarded with regulations and constantly bombarded with jumping through this hoop and that hoop. It’s a wonder people have got time to do their work these days really.
Sophie: And that’s an interesting one, isn’t it, because it’s like the big driver seems to be productivity and that’s why the training seems to get slightly sidelined by it.
Steve Wheeler: There’s a company in Australia, I’m trying to remember their name. You can probably look it up because it’s quite a well-known case, but once a month, they have one single day when they say to the employees… it’s a software developing company. They say to their employees, “You can go off and for the next eight hours create what you want. The only thing we want from you is come back and show us what you’ve devised at the end of the day. If it’s nothing, then fine. Nothing’s gained, nothing’s lost. But if you’ve found something important, come and show us.”
Steve Wheeler: And they have discovered that that one day of un-productivity, if you like, has become the most productive day in the whole of the month because these people go off and they pursue their passion rather than their compliance or their performance. And they go off and they pursue their passion and they look at stuff that they’re really fascinated with, stuff that they really want to know more about, and they go off and they found out in great detail about it, they create things, they create software fixes, new apps. There’s a whole range of stuff that they do which would never be on the agenda for that organization.
Sophie: It’s having that mind space to think about it.
Steve Wheeler: It is. It’s simply that. And Google do the same thing, and so do other big, I suppose, tech giant companies. They give their staff space, head space, to go off and create, and there’s your creative destruction again.
Sophie: I read your chapter on learning myths. Pedagogically, do you think the average learning and development department is slightly behind formal education? Well, formal could be a contentious word there, but I meant schools and higher ed and so on.
Steve Wheeler: Do you know, I’ve always said that in the four sectors, primary, secondary, tertiary and learning and development area in organizations, there’s always one that comes out in front, and surprisingly it’s the primary school. It’s primary sector because there’s no high stakes testing there, they’ve got very few risks to take, so they become the most innovative of all of the four sectors, in terms of the pedagogy that they create.
Sophie: So sad, isn’t it?
Steve Wheeler: Well, it is because by the time children get into secondary school, at the end of it they’ve had it all knocked out of them because it becomes very formalized then, to use that word that you used earlier on. But by the time they get into tertiary education, they’re now being spoonfed. They want to be spoonfed because that’s what they’re used to, and if they leave there, or take that route through into an organization, they’ve been conditioned. I mean, Sir Ken Robinson talks about this. Stephen Heppell talks about this. All the way back in the history of time, John Holt, Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich. I could go on and on mentioning all these theorists from the last century as well who talked about the problems with formal education and the need for un-schooling and de-schooling.
Sophie: So if any L&D people are listening in, say no to VAK is the…
Steve Wheeler: V-A-K is… well-
Sophie: [crosstalk 00:20:30]
Steve Wheeler: … Neil Fleming is a lovely guy. I’ve spoken to him a couple of times. But the idea of putting people into categories and saying, “He’s a visual learner, she’s an audio learner,” that does a disservice to all of them because what you’re doing is, you’re robbing of them of the chance to expand their repertoire. Nobody fits into one single category. It’s been proved time and time again. You read the work of people like Kathryn Ecclestone and then people like… trying to think of the guy’s name now. It’ll come to me in a minute. The people who have done the reports, the meta studies on all of the learning styles, inventories, and all of the categorization cult, as I call it, and there’s not a single shred of evidence that these learning styles actually exist. Most of us are all of those, and we change according to context. Now that’s a fact.
Sophie: Yeah, yeah. Well I know that from personal experience because sometimes are like, “Why don’t you do video?” And it’s like, well, when I’m walking along I don’t want to look at a video either.
Steve Wheeler: Well I think we all have to learn to multitask in today’s society. We all have to do many things at once, and we’re all different, we’re all unique. At the Summer Forum last week I showed several slides and asked people to decide what they saw in front of them, and the first one was the color blindness test. We determined that in the room there were three or four different types of color blindness, including mine.
Steve Wheeler: We all have these differences in our visual capabilities to begin with, but then you look at the perceptual capabilities that we have. The final one was a [Rorschach 00:22:01] ink block test and everyone saw something different in it. 50 or 60 people in the room and they all saw something different. So it just shows that we see things differently, we perceive things differently. How can we all be treated in the same way? One size does not fit all.
Sophie: So are there any companies that you think are being really smart about their learning development?
Steve Wheeler: Yeah. The Royal Mail, for a start. I mean, I mention this in my new book, that the Royal Mail has actually developed, with a local software company called Sponge, which is based four miles up the road here, developed AR and VR, augmented and virtual reality applications which can be used on the spot. So as a postal worker is delivering a package, they come up against a problem, they can open up their app on their smartphone and see instantly, without having to phone to anybody or go back for more training or to divert their performance, they can look straight through the app, through the screen, and it will overlay information for them as to what to do next. This, for me, is direct learning transfer. This is situated learning. This is authentic education and training.
Sophie: So I absolutely love this example and actually am quite excited because… So I’m interviewing the MD at Sponge and they’re hopefully putting me in contact the Royal Mail about using VR with the… about aggressive dogs and how to handle them.
Steve Wheeler: Yeah. We laugh but it’s a serious thing because you get an injury, you could be off work for a long time. You could lose a hand. It’s a serious business, and the more we can do to assuage that kind of problem and to obviate what they go through the better, really.
Sophie: Well then you think about what sometimes they’re delivering, they probably think, for this piece of junk, I’m-
Steve Wheeler: Well, yeah. I mean, some of the parcels they deliver these days, I think we’re sending less and less letters but more and more heavy objects through the mail. Amazon and Ebay and so on, all these online companies are sending out these huge parcels and, of course, who delivers it? Postal workers.
Sophie: I don’t know if you know this person’s work. So I came across the work of David Graeber, is it? Or Graeber? Bullshit Jobs. Have you seen this?
Steve Wheeler: No.
Sophie: So, yeah, The Guardian summarized it as, “Is your job one that makes the world a better place? If not, it’s probably bullshit, part of a system that is keeping us under control.” And this author and academic was on… I think it was Joe Rogan’s podcast, and basically, his premise is that lots of people, especially in organizations when they get so big, are literally in a department doing a job that they’ve just been told to do, no-one actually knows they’re doing it anymore, and they’re just doing it because that’s what they’ve been assigned to, and it’s really unfulfilling for them, and they know that if they didn’t do it it wouldn’t make any difference one way or another, but essentially, it pays their wage. What do you think about that?
Steve Wheeler: It’s like the Catch-22, the soldier in white. Have you read that book? Joseph Heller’s book?
Sophie: I’ve read Catch-22, yeah.
Steve Wheeler: Well, in Catch-22, there’s a soldier and he’s completely encased from head to foot in white plaster, and his arms are up and his legs are up, and they’ve got a tube running into the top of him and a tube running out from the bottom, and every so often they change the tubes around.
Sophie: That is gross.
Steve Wheeler: That is an allegory, I think, or a metaphor, if you like, for what you’ve just mentioned. So, yeah, I guess in large organizations there are people who are doing jobs that they think perhaps, and maybe they are, maybe they don’t actually make a difference. But I would contend with this guy… was it David Graeber, was it?
Sophie: Yeah.
Steve Wheeler: I would contend with him that not all jobs have to make a difference to people, make our lives easier. I think there are aesthetic jobs. So musicians and artists, for instance, and I have both of those in my repertoire. I trained as a graphic designer and a fine artist, and I’ve also been a professional musician for seven years. So, for me, that’s not making people’s lives easier but it entertains and it gives them an aesthetic belief in something better that they can aspire to, for instance. So not all jobs have to make people’s lives easier.
Sophie: Well, it’s like the whole university debate about value and is it just about creating a job, or is it also fulfilling in that way as well, and the wider civic value and that kind of thing.
Sophie: So one thing that last week also made me think is, how much of our discussion around learning and development still has in mind this idea of going into an office and then training being for a team that go into an office, whether that’s one office or offices around the world, and for perhaps younger employees, and increasingly any employee in distributed teams, or working for themselves, or being freelancers and that kind of thing. For those people, and those employees, would you have any advice around how they can also keep themselves sharp and trained and motivated?
Steve Wheeler: Yeah. It’s about following your passion again, isn’t it, really? It’s about breaking out of the mould. It’s about seeing things slightly differently to the way that you’re used to seeing them. So forcing yourself into unfamiliar situations, forcing yourself almost to argue with people who you feel uncomfortable being with. I’ve had several heated exchanges on Twitter and one or two notorious ones with well-known people who don’t agree with my views, and that’s fine, they’re allowed to disagree, but it’s the outworking of the discussion and the arguments that you have, and scoring points off each other, that’s the important thing because that gives you a broader perspective on what your life and what your work should really be about.
Steve Wheeler: Do you remember Second Life? It was about what, 10 or 12 years ago, it was quite popular. It was a multi-user virtual environment which you could go into for free and move around it and create things and so on, and they sold land off to various universities. I don’t know who’s in them now, it’s probably a ghost town. It probably died a death because it was so difficult to use. But the thing was, a lot of universities went in there and created virtual campuses, and do you know what they did? They created buildings with ceilings and floors and walls and seats, in an environment where you can force the weather into anywhere you want it to go. So what they were doing was perpetuating the always done it this way kind of myth.
Steve Wheeler: So when I went in and created my multi-user virtual environment, we had an open air auditorium with massive butterflies flying around, which you could ride on, seats that you sat on and bounced, they were like toadstools but they were in the air. And we had a sky box where you could go up and have a private conversation. You could transport, teleport yourself up, and so on. And we did that as an HIV and AIDS information space, and people used it because it was different.
Sophie: Because it was fun as well.
Steve Wheeler: Because you could do it. It was fantasy but it was also reality. It was grounded in reality and it was about people talking about their health issues, it was about people wanting to have a confidential chat with an expert. And people flocked to it, and I think we wrote the first research paper on it back in 2007. It’s still out there somewhere. It’s had a lot of citations because it was the first one. But we discovered a lot about breaking the mold there and about changing the status quo and doing something different, being the positive deviant again.
Sophie: So your blog’s called Learning with ‘e’s. I’m sure it’s not a reference to The Shaman and Ebeneezer Goode’s… or is it?
Steve Wheeler: No. It’s just a silly play on words and I thought, well, I might as well use it before someone else does because it sounds catchy and it’s certainly caught on, and the book came out based on that, of course, about three or four years ago. So, I mean, Learning with ‘e’s, a lot of people have said, “Is this to do with Ecstasy, or whatever?” But, no, it’s just simply a play on words, and I think we should learn with ease because we are natural born learners and technology helps us to improve that farther and extend our abilities, extend our capabilities. Andy Clark calls us natural born cyborgs, and we are. We use technology as an extension of our senses and of our body and of our mind, so to learn with ease… But that doesn’t belie the fact that also learning is in the struggle, so it’s a balance really. So learning with ease is fine but learning also with a struggle now and again I think is important.
Sophie: You recently wrote on a blog post called Second Chance OU50, “I left school with nothing. No qualifications. Not a sausage. Most of the teachers in the schools that I attended, I was a forces kid and went to nine during my school years, didn’t seem to care and failed to motivate me to study. I simply wasn’t interested.” So for our listeners, can you tell us how that story finishes?
Steve Wheeler: Well, there were one or two teachers there, both Americans actually. An American high school was my last school, in Holland. Dad was based in the Royal Air Force there. So for two years there, although I did nothing, I was bored solid, and I often just didn’t go to classes because I was being talked at and told to sit in a chair and not to moved around when, in fact, my way of learning is to move around a lot. So these two teachers both inspired me because both of them turned a blind eye when I sneaked into the back of their lessons to learn. One was the art teacher, one was a music teacher.
Steve Wheeler: Back in them days, the curriculum wasn’t balanced. As a boy, you could not do art and music, you could do one or the other. Girls could do both, boys could only do one. Girls could only do one science, boys could do three. It was ridiculous and outrageous gender-ized kind of environment, and I kicked against that. So I used to sit in the back of the music lessons. And Larry, as we called him, he let us use his first name, and a really liberal arts teacher-
Sophie: It’s always the arts teachers, isn’t it?
Steve Wheeler: Yeah.
Sophie: They’re often like this though, at the outlet, the-
Steve Wheeler: Well, Larry was a great musician and he used to sit me in the back. He’d say, “Sit in the back. You’ll be fine,” he said, “I won’t tell anyone and if someone asks were you there, I shall deny it.” “Fine, okay.” And he said, “You can’t take the exams,” he said, “But you can actually take part in all of the productions.” So I took part in several musicals, Fiddler on the Roof and various other musicals that we did. Oliver, I think we did. And a part of the rock choir that we had there, we did all the latest rock songs as a choir, and we played lunchtime gigs and I learnt to play the guitar while I was there. And it inspired me to go and follow my dreams.
Steve Wheeler: But the thing is, because I left school with no formal qualifications, and then I went to art college, they accepted me on the basis that I had an art O’Level. That was the only thing I went out with, an art GCE, as it was at the time. They accepted me on the basis of that, and for two years I went to Herefordshire College of Art and trained as a fine artist and then as a photographer and a graphic designer.
Steve Wheeler: That took me into another job at a place called Marjon’s, which is up the hill here, which is a teacher training college, when I moved back to Plymouth. And from that I got introduced to a brand new discipline called educational technology and it was just starting at the time. This was in the 1970s, the mid ’70s, so ’75, and there were very people involved in that area because it was such a brand new area. And at the time we were looking at things like the emergence of video. Personalized computers hadn’t arrived, they wouldn’t arrive for another three or four years. We were looking at things like classroom technologies. We were looking at things like recording and editing and projection facilities, those kind of things, and the early theory behind all that. Even distance education was quite new then.
Steve Wheeler: But at that point, you mentioned the Open University, when I was about five years, six years into that, my wife and I had met and we’d started to have children and I thought, I’m in a dead-end job here, I’m in a technical job here which I’ve got no hopes for promotion of, I’ve got a wife, three kids and Plymouth Argyle to support, and really, how am I-
Sophie: They were probably doing better then than they are now.
Steve Wheeler: They were doing better then, yeah. And the thing is, what am I going to do with my life? And so I thought, I’m going to have to go off and do something different. And so at that point I started teaching the nurses, I was now in the NHS, I started teaching nurses how to use computers, and my boss who was very far-sighted, she said, “You should go off and train as a teacher.”
Steve Wheeler: So I did an evening class for two years, got my Cert Ed, which in them days you could do before a degree. Nowadays, you do the PGC after a degree. So I did that first and then I thought, I want to go and do a degree now, and so I went off and I paid for myself to do a degree at the Open University, in psychology. And they said to me… ever the positive deviant, they said to me, “It’ll take you five years to do it.” I said, “I’ll do it in three.” They said, “No, you won’t.” I said, “Yes, I will.” They said, “You can’t. It’s impossible to do it in three years because the workload is too much.” I said, “Well, I’ll show you three ways that I’ll do it differently,” and I did, and I got a first class honors degree because I was determined. I followed my dream. I was thinking about Larry again, the music teacher, followed my dream.
Steve Wheeler: And then the university took interest in me and said, “Would you like to come and work for us?” And so they said to me, “What would you like from us?” This is a research program, and they said, “What would you like from us?” I said, “I’d like to do a PhD please.” They said, “Welcome.” And there it is.
Steve Wheeler: And from that point on I was a member of the Plymouth University staff, two years later, in fact, after the research program finished, and I managed that research program. That was breaking new ground as well because we were setting up tele-learning centers. This was in the… I suppose, the mid ’90s, and we were setting up tele-learning centers across the rural areas of southwest England in places where they’d never set up these things before. So we had fast internet connections and video conferencing and digital satellite transmissions, all very, very new stuff in them days. And my job was to go in and set it up and then research it, and that’s where most of my publications, early publications came from. And then, of course, in ’98 I joined the faculty of education, as it was then, as a full-time lecturer. So there you are. So-
Sophie: So [crosstalk 00:36:05] as well.
Steve Wheeler: It’s a convoluted story, but follow your dream is the-
Sophie: Didn’t ever other people tell you where your limits are?
Steve Wheeler: No, I’ve never let people define me. I define myself. I am the captain of my own ship, and-
Sophie: Good naval reference.
Steve Wheeler: Well, it is, yeah. We’re in a naval port, aren’t we?
Sophie: Yeah, yeah.
Steve Wheeler: But the point is that if you steer your own ship, then sometimes you’re going to get into difficulty and you’ll need people around you to help you and advise you, and never negate that, but you are your own destiny and if you decide you want to do something, then go and do it.
Sophie: It is funny what you mentioned about going into the art class because at my school, a lot of my friends were doing art at a different time to me, so I’d go in and hide under the desk, and the teacher would come in, and he was like a family friend, and he’d be like, “Sophie, I can see you under the desk,” and I’d have to come back out.
Steve Wheeler: Was that a kind of performance art, was it?
Sophie: No, no, unfortunately… Well, I wasn’t a very good musician. Unfortunately I wasn’t hiding well enough. You have a whole chapter on simulation for learning in your book, which is one of the chapters I didn’t make before interview. We’ve looked at simulation previously on the podcast in relation to surgical training, empathy building and nuclear power plant training, but what was the chapter about and-
Steve Wheeler: There’s a combination, isn’t it?
Sophie: Yeah, yeah.
Steve Wheeler: You could all three at once!
Sophie: Not all in one, not all in one.
Steve Wheeler: It’d be complicated, wouldn’t it? I think that simulation is quite an interesting idea because it puts you into the situation before you actually reach the real situation. So, in effect, it’s like rehearsal, but it’s rehearsal that’s a kind of immersive rehearsal.
Steve Wheeler: So I think one of the first things I was involved in was, just across the road here there’s a big railway junction, and sometimes you can hear the trains going by, and the idea behind that was that the NHS at the time were going to simulate a major disaster, with all the services involved in it. So what happened was, the NHS said to me, “Would you like to come over with your crew and record, capture it all on video?” I said, “Yeah, when is it?” They said, “Sunday morning at 7 o’clock.” “Blinking heck! Right, okay.”
Steve Wheeler: So I got an assistant with me and the two of us went over and we sat there and waited, and they called people out as if it was a real incident, and the point being that it was a shock effect really. And what happened was, they all arrived, there was something like about 20 ambulances there, 15 police cars, a whole load of fire engines. And when they arrived there, they had the casualty union there and all these people were dressed up with wounds and broken legs and things, people screaming in agony, and it looked quite realistic, blood everywhere, gore all over the place. And these people had to go in as if it was real and actually solve the situation, resolve it, rescue people, cut people out. They had the cutting equipment there. They had an old carriage which they cut up and so on. And I filmed the whole lot of it. Now that was a simulation.
Steve Wheeler: From that, the video was used as a training resource. We edited it down and created a 20 minute training resource with questions that popped up in it and so on. So, in effect, it had two effects because firstly it was a simulation, and secondly it was an archive, an archive resource, and that was a very powerful thing because it gave people insight into things that they could and maybe shouldn’t do, the micro and the macro effects of a major accident. So that was one form of simulation. But there’s so many other ways you can do this.
Sophie: That’s interesting. So we’ve got a recording coming up with one of the L&D leads for the NHS, from an overview of all the Trusts, as it were. So if you were doing the recording, what questions would you ask, so I can steal them?
Steve Wheeler: The questions I would probably ask is firstly, what do you want to achieve with your employees? So obviously it’s to inform them of all the possible issues and problems. Safety first, obviously, be safe yourself. Then, when do you intervene? How do you intervene? What do you intervene with? Who else is involved? All these kind of questions, I think, are logistical questions but they’re also operational questions that will make the difference to maybe saving someone’s life.
Steve Wheeler: But also there are other issues around this like what do we do with the general public? How do we-
Sophie: Because now everyone stands around filming the thing, don’t they?
Steve Wheeler: Well, yeah, they do these days, yeah. In them days, video was expensive and nobody had cameras. Nobody had phones, definitely. So there’s lots of questions like that. Questions around… I’m not talking just performance here, I’m talking about saving lives now. So that’s the really important thing, isn’t it?
Sophie: You’re a keen music enthusiast, even titling some of your chapters with David Bowie references… Bowie, Bowie. What are a couple of your favorite vinyl, if that’s your medium of choice, or is it more the process of digging around for good music that you love?
Steve Wheeler: I’ve got a radio show called Just Vinyl, and it goes out every Wednesday and Sunday, down here and also in the Midlands, I think, as well. It’s got a couple of northeast… got a couple of syndicated versions of it. It’s called Just Vinyl. It says what it says: I only play vinyl. So I play stuff from the ’70s and ’80s mainly, maybe the ’90s. I like a lot of stuff. I am a rock musician. I’m rock through and through, but within that there’s so many sub-genres. I like blues. I like jazz rock actually. I mean, Brand X and Phil Collins. Genesis, obviously, were one of my inspirations. I’ve got everything they ever did. All the way back to The Beatles, actually, the ’60s vinyl.
Sophie: Genesis just reminds of American Psycho, in the… he always references Genesis.
Steve Wheeler: Yeah. Well, yeah, but that’s an anomaly because most people who like Genesis are very nice people.
Sophie: That true. I will take your word for it!
Steve Wheeler: I love a lot of the progressive rock, people like Supertramp, and I play them in the car all the time. But I like the latest stuff as well. I’m into people like Ed Sheeran and Rihanna and some of the latest bands. Arcade Fire, have you heard them?
Sophie: Yeah, I’ve seen them live.
Steve Wheeler: They’re phenomenal.
Sophie: Yeah. They’re quite good live.
Steve Wheeler: Everything Everything. Have you heard of them?
Sophie: I have heard of them but I don’t know them so well.
Steve Wheeler: Get into them. It’s kind of indie rock but it’s more than that, it’s got the zeitgeist within it. You listen to it and you get a keen insight into what’s going on. And Stormzy. Love Stormzy’s work.
Sophie: Yeah. That Glastonbury performance was pretty amazing.
Steve Wheeler: I mean, his headlining set at Glastonbury was just amazing. And-
Sophie: I found out the other day that Mark Martin, or Urban Teacher, used to teach him.
Steve Wheeler: Did he?
Sophie: Used to teach Stormzy, yeah.
Steve Wheeler: Did he really? Well, he did a good job. Apart from his potty mouth! But, anyway. So we can look at-
Sophie: Pull your trousers up.
Steve Wheeler: We can overlook that, yeah. Pull your trousers up, yeah. We don’t do that today. But the thing that I think my kids are surprised about is that I listen to a lot of synesthesia and house stuff as well, a lot of what we used to call European dance music, but now it’s synesthesia and chill out stuff. So my tastes are quite eclectic, actually.
Sophie: And are there any good record shops in the southwest people should know about?
Steve Wheeler: The vinyl shop that I go to occasionally is on Bretonside. That’s the only vinyl shop that I know in the southwest. Normally I go elsewhere. So I know a lovely vinyl shop at the top of the road in Sheffield. When I go to Sheffield University to work there, there’s a vinyl record shop up near one of my favorite curry houses, and I often go in there and rifle through and buy discs. Yeah, I’m a real vinyl freak, yeah.
Sophie: Okay. Well, we’ll know what present to get you next time, after your pin badge. And just finally, what’s next for you? First of all, if people want to connect with you, find out more, where should they go? And then, what’s next?
Steve Wheeler: Well, steve@steve-wheeler.net is my email account, and steve-wheeler.net is also my professional site. But the blog site is steve-wheeler.co.uk. That’s where most of my writings appear. So I’ll be doing a special blog post tomorrow for the 50th anniversary of the moon landings, which I remember seeing as a 12 year old.
Sophie: That’s bonkers.
Steve Wheeler: So you can work out my age. And I remember watching that and getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning, as a 12 year old, in the Shetland Islands of all places, in a little croft where there was no running water. We had electricity obviously because we could watch television. Black and white telly, and I sat up and watched the ghostly images of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon, and I’d already built a-
Sophie: A replica.
Steve Wheeler: … a replica of the Saturn V rocket, which was taller than me.
Sophie: Wow. What did you build it out of?
Steve Wheeler: It’s was an Airfix kit. It cost a lot of money, I think. I had to buy it in stages. Get it? But the point is, these things inspired me, so that’s the kind of stuff I write about now. So that’s how you get hold of me.
Steve Wheeler: And, what’s next? Well, I’ve got a new job actually. It’s only a part-time job, but I wanted to get back into teaching after a couple of years away. So I can announce officially that I’m about to join Marjon’s again, the Truro site, as a masters tutor on the research modules, and I’m looking forward to that. It’s only part-time, as I say. It gives me time to do loads of other things. I’ve got various contracts with larger companies and smaller companies that I’m working with, either as a professional writer or as a consultant. So there’s a few things on the horizon. And I’ll probably write a new book, but I’m going to give it a year or so.
Sophie: A still lifelong learner.
Steve Wheeler: Always.
Sophie: Always.
Steve Wheeler: You never stop learning until you’re carried out feet first.
Sophie: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Steve. I really enjoyed that.
Steve Wheeler: Thank you.
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