I was thinking about the context for this, and I realized the
perspective from cognitive science, from understanding how our brains work,
uh, cognitive science was an integrative, uh, way
to start pulling together different people thinking about thinking— philosophers,
neuroscientists, uh, cognitive psychologists, anthropologists—
more learning science emerged from that, similarly
trying to pull in instructional design and, and educational psychologists
and cognitive researchers. And that perspective
isn't, I think, well known and used enough. And yet it gives us
insight that's really powerful like that, the properties of media.
And so that's the broader perspective I'd like to share is that this is coming
from a way of thinking and looking at the
world that gives us really useful handles. And I found it extremely
useful. I have the ability to give people insights that
they wouldn't have gotten in other ways just because of that understanding how
our brains work, which I think is, increasingly going to be important because that's
where things are going. We're going to find out what technology can do, what brains
can do, and we need to understand that really well to figure out where we
fit in this continually evolving world.
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are and wherever you're watching from.
We're revisiting an episode we recorded 2 years ago with Clark
Quinn. When we recorded this episode, AI video
tools weren't creating content in seconds. Today you can
generate a video with a prompt. You can clone your voice. You can
build an entire training series without ever even turning on your
camera. Pretty amazing. Maybe. But it also
makes this conversation even more important. Just because you can
generate video in seconds doesn't mean video is always the right
medium. And I say that as someone who loves video. I
work at a company that builds tools for video. I
believe deeply in its power. Video connects, it
teaches, it builds trust in ways few mediums can.
But it's not the only tool in the toolbox. Screenshots
matter, images matter, diagrams matter. Sometimes a
static visual communicates something faster and more
clearly than a 5-minute video ever could. And today,
with short-form video dominating feeds with reels and shorts and constant
motion everywhere, The question isn't just, should I use
video? It's what kind of media best supports learning?
And even more specifically, what kind of video best supports
understanding? And that's why this conversation with Clark
Quinn feels even more relevant now than when we recorded
it. Clark challenges us to think beyond format and into
cognition, how our brains actually process information.
Static versus dynamic, concept versus context,
diagram versus animation versus video. In a
world where creating content has never been easier, choosing the
right medium has never been more important. So
hopefully you'll listen with that lens, not just how do I make more
video, but how do I help someone understand better?
With that said, here's our episode with Clark Quinn from
February of 2024. Uh, Clark, I, I, we always like to start
the show with a kind of the practical approach and you know,
you obviously you're not necessarily a media creator. I'm sure you've created
media in throughout your career, but as you think about from a learning
perspective, what's, what's a tip you would give to folks out
there who want to use video? They want to use it for helping people to
learn. Is there a tip that you would give them to help them to be
maybe more successful or, uh, maybe have that hit the mark a little bit
more? I guess my
perspective is don't use video
for video's sake, for making it more compelling or
more interesting. What you should be using video for
is to convey dynamic stories.
Um, too often we use video when we don't have to, and it's a
high bandwidth and high production cost, uh, effort in many
times, in many cases.
So, I would like to reserve using video for
when it makes the most sense, not as a panacea and end-all.
We'll talk today about the specific ways in which certain
different media most opportunely support
certain types of learning outcomes and cognitive outcomes,
and then we can dig into, you know, How can you swap them in and
out for variety and a variety of other things? Well, I, I
appreciate that as someone who, uh, you know, I use a— I make a lot
of videos. I work for a company that promotes tools that you make videos.
I, I appreciate the advice though, because I do think there's, there's this balance there,
kind of time, cost, effort, and always, I, you
always got to ask, is it the right medium to deliver the
message? So I appreciate it. No worries.
And it's just our brains have evolved to, uh,
collect certain types of information in certain ways and process it in certain
ways. And we want to
ideally match for that, particularly when we're, you know, trying to convey
the most important message. There are, you know, video can
capture us talking like I'm doing right now, and we can
communicate thoughts and elegantly And, but
too often we can overuse it. We can use it without
controls. I just saw an example of this the other day where
they were providing things and they didn't really give you pause and restart
options. You could go back, play the whole thing, but
it didn't automatically just say pause it because, you know, somebody's
just come in the door or something. We need control over the media.
But think about, Um, Ken Burns and the
Civil War, uh, movie he made,
it was a whole bunch of static images sequenced together.
Those static images were what they had at the time, but they also communicated
in powerful ways when he sequenced them together. We don't— we can
communicate those stories in multiple different ways. We can use graphic
novels, we can use narrative prose, we can use
sequences of images linked together with audio or
text, or we can use video. When does each make sense?
That's the important issue for me. Yeah,
I love that. And, you know, I mean, we, we often refer to Ken Burns,
and he's such a master of doing those things, right? But those are not,
uh, not outside the scope of anyone's capability. People can use imagery and they
can tell stories, and that— so I love that. Um, and we could probably talk
about just that alone for a long time, but I want to get into this
idea of cognitive properties, because when you— when you— we—
I connected with you and you said, hey, here's some things that we talk about
this, and I'm No, um, but I think we need to do a
little defining up front because my guess is most people listening to this
are saying, cognitive properties? What
does Clark mean? And so lead us down this
path of like, what is this idea of cognitive properties
and as it relates to, to media, right? I was
actually thinking you were going to ask me to define the different types of media
because people describe those differently. Oh yeah. So I actually
want to start with that because it's at the front of my mind right now.
What— I have left of one. Um, when you think of,
uh, diagrams, and that was one of the things we talked about discussing,
they communicate conceptual relationships via
spatial relationships. So when you say
up here is this and down here is this, and we have a linkage between
them, and the other things are linked this other way.
We are communicating information. That's not video, that's a
static image. And two things, um, cognitive properties I want
to separate out now are static versus dynamic.
So there's information that exists, you know, the relationship between,
um, roots and, and branches. There is
dynamics that the roots feed up and grow the branches, but the static
relationship is that, you know, the roots are the nourishing from the
groundwater, whereas the branches are exporting the leaves, which get energy
from the sun. And together they put those together.
Then we have the more dynamic story of an environment
where, you know, the, the water cycle, uh,
evaporation, condensation, precipitation,
and whatever the word is for where it
flows down the hill and gets up in the, in the body of water to
evaporate again. We have that. Cycle. That's dynamic.
And sometimes we need to communicate one, and sometimes we need to
communicate the other. When do— so
I like to distinguish between diagrams and
animations. And when I say animation, many people think about, you know,
cartoons moving around. I'm thinking specifically of animating a
diagram. Mm-hmm. And then we have
photos which capture context. And
videos which capture dynamic context. Then we
have text, which captures, uh,
prose, you know, is a narrative, and then we have audio, which is also
a narrative, and each of those are different.
Diagrams and animations capture the conceptual.
They're not tied to real context, they're an abstraction,
whereas videos and images capture the actual
context. So you can see behind me what my room looks
like because it's actual context.
We could just have an abstraction— I mean, a cartoon with a blank background
or some arbitrary abstract background which could communicate something
different. There, what I begin to talk about the
cognitive properties, and when you want to communicate
context, a photo or a video makes sense.
But when you want to communicate a concept, you may be better off with a
diagram or an animation. —and when you want to communicate
narrative, you may want to tell a story. You can— now, the
point I mentioned earlier about, you know, having still photos together become
a, an, a story, um, video can be used
to communicate narratives and is— why do we watch movies and
TV series? But we're showing the context
as well, and we don't have to infer the concept.
Unless we were laying it over. So, from
a learning perspective, the cognitive properties we're talking about are: we
communicating concept or context? Are we
communicating it dynamically or statically?
Relationships? Those are the things— the cognitive properties I'm
talking about. And then we need to start thinking about which
we need to communicate and what media makes the most sense. And then, of
course, we then think about And then how do we mix it up so it's
not completely dull and boring the whole time?
Well, okay, so there's, there's a lot here and, and those are—
I think we're, you know, you're doing a great job at simplifying what is
a very complex kind of concept in terms of,
you know, there's these properties, these media, this media, these types of media that are
good at typically doing. So if I, if I'm at
the, the, you know, I'm the instructional designer or I'm thinking about
creating media for, for learning,
I'm hearing what you're saying. And so now I'm thinking like, okay,
what are maybe the questions or decisions that are going to
help me down that path? Because like you said, I— if I'm always using a
diagram— diagrams are great, they do a great job with the thing. But if I'm
always trying to use a diagram, it feels like, like you said, the— you
get fatigue. Like, I— we actually struggle with this in video, right? If
I see— put a video up online and it looks the same as every other
video, people say, I've already watched that video. Or,
you know, so I'm curious from your perspective because there's the, the
practical application here going from this like understanding of these cognitive
properties to now I've gotta, I gotta make stuff. Like
a lot of our, our, a lot of our roles is as instructional designers, particularly
if you're doing, uh, really good in-depth design is say
understanding those things, but then Now it's like, okay, what do I do with it?
So what, what would you say? How do we translate this to— what,
what can someone do now if they understand these things?
Well, two different takes on that.
So let's talk about the traditional instructional experience first. You
should be presenting an underlying model. Cognitively, models
give us good basis for, uh, comparing our performance to
what the model predicts. It gives us a basis to make decisions You know,
models help us explain what happened, uh, or predict
what will happen. And then we can say, if I did X, the model says
this would occur, and if I do Y, the model says that will occur, and
this is better than that, so I'll do this. The model tells us that.
So we want to communicate a model, and the diagram makes sense, but then we
want to show how that plays out in context. We have evidence,
research-based evidence from cognitive load theory and the like, that
showing examples before we give people opportunity to practice
makes it easier to then take it on yourself. You
see and abstract a few examples and it gives you some guidance.
Examples need context. They show how the model
plays out in the real world. So suddenly we're talking about watching a video or
seeing a static image or a sequence of images telling a story.
Examples work best 'cause they really are stories that show,
I faced this problem, I applied this model, and this was the outcome.
That's a story, that's a narrative, and we could use video
or, or st— sequence of static images to convey that.
Then we need practice. We need to immerse the learner into
an environment and give them opportunity to make choices. Interactivity is something
I haven't mentioned in terms of the cognitive properties here. This is
more for the media instead of the interactivity, but then we need to allow the
learner to make choices and see the consequences of those.
So suddenly we're switching again to— and we might— one
of the things I didn't talk about in my elicitation of the types of media,
I talked about, you know, video and our,
you know, context with photos or video. And I talked about concepts with diagrams or
animation. I talked about narrative with prose or audio, but I didn't
talk about graphic novel formats and comics and those
types of things where they're semi-conceptual and semi-contextually
because they strip away some of the details of context.
And yet provide enough that the learner can recognize the context, but that
allows the opportunity to layer the concepts on top of it as well.
And so we might mix this up. We might have a graphic novel
format of an example and a video for an example, and then we put the
learner, and it might be photorealistic, or we might start with a graphic novel. So
we're mixing up the media to tell the story. Now, I said
sort of two different pedagogies. One was sort of the traditional, you have a model,
example, practice. The other one is you put the learner in the situation.
This is more a problem-based type of approach where you specifically
chosen an important problem and you provide scaffolding. You've simplified it in
certain ways early on, and later on they take on more capability.
But we might make resources available in the environment so you can
pull up a diagram or you can pull up a little
example. We might embed that in the story. So there—
the environment in which you're performing in might have a library
of, that has the diagrams, and it might have
a history of case studies that the organization has done in the past that
you pull up that are really examples. So we are mixing
up media to meet different needs because for
learning purposes, we have different cognitive roles at different points in the
experience. So we avoid boredom in that sense, but
then we should be thinking about how are we making sure we're communicating each at
the right point in time.
Wow. Uh, you know, what I'm thinking about is, uh, so I've noticed this trend
and, and, you know, obviously we can talk about instructional designers, corporate learning all, all
day long. I've noticed in, in the world of non-instructional
designers, there's a lot of people out there making training content.
It's, you know, we would, we would probably balk at it a little bit what
it is and, you know, but they're on YouTube, they're YouTube creators, they're
teaching, uh, cooking or fix a car.
But what I— in that first, particularly in that model, right, where you've got, uh,
you know, you got— you're gonna put these things together, right? Model, example,
practice. What I've noticed that they're really good at on YouTube, if they're doing
well on the channel— so not everybody's good at it, but you know, the ones
that are really good, they, they, they hook you with
that. Here's the problem, right? They somehow draw you in, but
then they, in a lot of ways, they're essentially doing this, right? They're modeling something.
They're Showing the example, but it's not a linear boom, boom,
boom. They— it's almost like a lot of loops because they're coming back to
the, like, the thing. Here's the problem. Here's, here's something you could do that
then the next thing. Um, and I'm
curious if you thought about how you might like, because obviously you could say
like, do these 3 things and that's all you ever do. Is it something that
we should be looking at if we're creators? So we're creating instructional
content. To like build this into, you know,
almost templates that we could then repurpose? Or is that
too structured and it's like everything is going to just— because a lot of times
it's like, well, it's so specific, it's going to just be different every time. But
are there kind of general frameworks that you, you've built out or you think we
could build out from, from these kind of this
approach? Um, there are templates that, you know, there are
structures for what good instructional design is. Saying, giving the model, then
give examples, then give practices emerged from empirical
research, and that serves as a good template. We want to avoid too
much templatization. I remember a company, uh, many years
ago was following David Merrill's dick tips, and they created this
very rigorous system that you talked about the type of objective you had, and then
it limited the types of things you could do all the way through. And it
made really rigorously accurate instruction, and
you'd rather pull your eyes out than actually go through
it, or That was unpleasant.
So, um, but you have to be careful because some of the—
you know, I repaired my dryer with a video from YouTube. I have
no idea what I had. It wasn't a learning experience, it was performance
support. It led me through the steps and diagnostic and figure out what to
do. And then— but I didn't— I haven't had to do that again for years
and years. It would have been silly for me to learn anything from it. It
was just perfectly propor— sport. And
you pointed out a bit of a, a
evolutionary selection process going on, that the good
videos are the ones that get viewpoints because there are people who naturally
draw upon some of these principles, um, and, you know,
that iterative cycle you were talking about. They're showing this step and talking
about what leads to it, and in their narrative they talk a little bit about
the models that gave them the guidance. And Andrew
Schoenfeld at Berkeley did some of the greatest stuff of
talk— actually going down the way and talking about the thinking
behind each step, which experts often don't have
access to. Um, cognitively, the research at the University of Southern California's
Cognitive Technology Group by people like Richard Clark showed that 70% of what
experts do, they don't have conscious access to, which is really
problematic for instructional design because you've got these experts doing things and they don't even
know what they're doing. They can tell you what they but they struggle to
tell you what they do and you really have to work hard to pull it
out. These people, somehow, the best YouTube
providers are managing to articulate the underlying thinking and then showing
how it plays out in context, step by step by step through
a process. And you may learn something from it if it is something you
do frequently and you go back and view it several times each time until you've
sort of internalized it.. But we have to think
a lot about what is the context, what is the need, how frequently— when
you look at the principles of, you
know, designing instruction, the criteria that determine how much practice you need and
how much articulation tend to be, it's how inherently complex is it, how frequently
you perform it in the real world, um, how important is it
if, if you get it wrong. That will determine a lot of
these factors that are sort of not
articulated explicitly in these YouTube videos and the selection between them, but
end up playing a big role in whether you're talking about performance sport
or act— you know, are you happy leaving the information in the world? Did
you absolutely have to put something in the head? And if so, what and
how? Well, I, I appreciate that distinction because I think it is
one that, uh, and it's not as nuanced, but it becomes kind of— is this
learning? Is this performance support? And there is a lot of things that
are just performance support, right? Just show me how to do it. Don't— I don't
have to, I don't have to know it. I don't have to, you know, draw
on that knowledge at a later point or build necessarily build
from that, that framework to understand this other framework. Um,
so I think I want to call that out because I do think that
is a really insightful point. And I, and I, I know
the difference, but like hearing you say it's like, oh yeah. Duh, a lot of
this is not instruction. It's, it's really that. So,
um, I'm, I'm curious because we've covered— I feel like we've covered a lot, but
what else are we missing, or what else do we need to know to, again,
to kind of keep us moving forward here with this understanding of the,
you know, cognitive properties of, of, of using these things in
a way, uh, because I, I do think we sometimes get into
this cycle of it, particularly instructional design world where it's, you know,
there's an academic field for a reason. And it's— academics are good, I think,
and we need those, we need that work, that research.
But oftentimes then, uh, you know, just in even my own experience, I'll be reading
a paper and saying, okay, these are good things, and I— the application of it
is like, well, I don't know, it doesn't maybe try to make the bridge
the gap to like what I actually can do, or how would— how I do
it, or even how my audience responds comparatively to
the, the the study, you know, the body of the study of the people that
went through it. So is there other things we need to understand
as about cognitive properties?
Yes. So I, um, suggest that, uh, really
learning science is, is rocket science. So the brain is
arguably the most complex thing in the known universe, and
trying to systematically get changes in it by, you know, you know, sort
of random perturbations is not the way to do it. We have The
research you're pointing to, we have very good prescriptions in general
that have teased out the importance of practice and the importance of
deliberate practice and spacing of practice and a whole bunch of nuances. But
putting it together for any specific circumstance that you're
designing to support, there will— won't be one study that tells you how
you should do that. What you're doing is putting
together different aspects. Which is why, by the way, you're starting to see also
a move towards more iterative approaches. Um, so
you need to create your best first guess, but then you should test it
and say, oh, this part's working, that part's not, let's tune it
a little bit. Okay, it's working better, let's
do it, you know, but fine-tuning this thing, look, it's doing
it. And you look at Michael Allen's SAM, Successive Approximation
Model, or the Megan Torrance's LAMA,
lot like agile management approaches. They're
moving to more create a first draft. Even David Merrill
has moved from, uh, bone splay theory to ID2. Now his Pebble in a Pond
is very much, you know, focus on the core practice first,
get that right, to— testing and tuning, and then add
other stuff around. So, you know, the point I'm trying to
make is that research gives us good prescriptions. We need to apply it
in a creative way. Focus on engagement as well without violating
the principles, and then test it and tune it to see
what's happening. Um, because we're not like concrete, we don't
have totally predictable properties. Our brains can even change, you know, a little
bit of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, right? Uh, when
you're observing people doing things, it changes their understanding of what
they can do. Many people have created— built technology solutions and tested
it and found that the people go, oh, well, now that I can see this,
I want you to also do this and get rid of that. I don't need
that now that you can do It's like, whoa, this is
a dynamic process. That's cool, but it does
require paying attention. Yeah, I, I feel like the, the pushback
that then comes— because I, I completely agree, and I can remember being
in my master's program, you know, working a lot of theory, a
lot of study of, of different models for learning and things like that. And of
course, uh, you know, one of the— we had a journal we had to keep
and we'd write ideas, and so Very— this great process, but I
remember trying to create my own models, thinking, how am I gonna create my own
models? You know, but I, I remember one thing that is, is common is that
kind of that iteration, right? That there is, there
is no real learning process without like getting better
at developing without iteration. And I think I wanna draw back to the, the conversation
with the creators as well, because I think that's where they get us. They're really
good at this. They, they are testing stuff all the time. Whereas I think in
a corporate setting particularly, or even maybe in an educational setting,
it's really hard to do that. And I know just from my own experience, if
I have to make a video or some kind of piece of media
that's gonna go out, the, the, the cycle time for me to
come back to iterate on that is probably
not very quick. It might be a year, it might be 2
years. And so, you know, from a practicality standpoint, What advice would
you give to folks who are saying like, yeah, I love this idea of iterating,
but I can't iterate that fast because all— there's,
you know, 400 courses that they want. There's these pressures, that
pressure, you know, it's just the reality of, of the work is that these
things take time, cost money, things like that. So I'm not expecting
like for you to have a silver bullet because I don't think there is one,
but I'm curious, what, what advice do you give to folks like
in that situation? I, I give a varied forms of
advice. The, the problem is, is we put ourselves in this position or allowed
ourselves to be put in this position where this expectation where if
we give you PowerPoints and PDFs, you can pop it in this program and turn
it out on the web with a quiz and we're done. They have
unrealistic expectations of what learning is. They have unrealistic expectations of what the
process needs to be. And they have unrealistic expectations of what
learning can do. If we give people information, they'll change their behavior and
we're done, right? Which empirically isn't true.
We're not formological beings. Otherwise, if we get— got new information, we change our
behavior, but we don't. It takes practice. It takes a lot of development.
It takes getting rid of old things. We don't unlearn them. We
learn over them. Uh, sorry, can't resist addressing a myth along
the way, but
we need to Uh, change the perception, and that's going to
be hard. So I've told people, you know, do a little
bit of— it's easier to get forgiveness than permission.
Focus most on making more meaningful practice. Just make
a better written multiple choice question that's
just a scenario, mini scenario, where there's a situation they
have to make decisions instead of asking them to respond
to pull out new information. We actually
have evidence that, um, just pulling out information doesn't lead to behavior, but
actually making decisions. You don't even need— there was always this belief you needed
to make sure you knew the information before you applied it. It turns
out that requiring people just to make the decisions requires them to pull that
information out of memory and supports the learning as well. So you only need
the high-level questions. So it's, it's a dual
our, our multiple front attack. We need to change people's
expectations, help them understand what learning is better, why we need to put less in
the head and more in the world when we can. That's a much more effective
solution. And we need
to be subversively, um, creating, uh, learning that's more
effective within the constraints we work in, but also start
measuring and showing that by making these changes, we're making a bigger impact. I
know we resist evaluation a
lot, and yet it's going to be the key towards
moving ourselves forwards. Well, I, I've got a quote for my, for my day: less
in the head, more in the world. I love that. That is,
uh, that is— that's, that's, that's a great statement. So, uh, no,
thank you for that advice. And I think that, uh, what I
think we'll, we're gonna— we'll end our formal conversation on that. I want to get
to speed round here in a second, but I just want to say that I
love that, right? That there's this process that we've got it, we've got to just—
you got to do it, ask for forgiveness and otherwise we'll never move forward and
we keep— we'll keep delivering the same things. And I, I love that advice because
I think it applies to this conversation. I think it applies to a lot of
conversations I have around video and what's true about like how
people are making video, what types of videos they're making. So, uh, Clark, thank
you for that good, good piece of advice.
I, Appreciate it. No worries. Okay, so we're gonna, we're gonna jump into speed round
questions. If you're new to the show, these are quick, uh,
fast answers to questions that we decide by rolling a dice. So we're gonna play
our stinger and we'll see you in
just a second. All right, Clark, here we go. We're gonna bring up our dice
cam because that's right, we have a dice cam and we're gonna roll for— we
got a 12-sided die, 12 different questions. And the first
question is number 7. So here we go. Question
number 7: What's a hobby or interest you've always wanted to pursue but haven't
had a chance to as of yet?
Oh my goodness. Um, you have so much free time with all the things
that you're doing. Hey, um, hobby I've always wanted to do but
haven't had to— I don't know,
it might be, um, Uh, paddleboarding. Oh. Because I'm kind of old to
jump up on a surfboard anymore. Haven't done that in a while. And I'm thinking
maybe moving to a paddleboard would be a good
way to keep the ability to go out in the ocean and ride without having
to paddle and jump to my legs anymore. But I haven't had a chance to
really give that a go. Yeah, that's— it sounds super fun. Got a
friend that does it on Lake Michigan and she, she absolutely loves it. She'll
go out though sometimes. She actually tries to surf in Lake Michigan. Last time I
knew it was like October, November, and
it was cold. So— very cold. But they do get some waves there. So they
absolutely do. So, all right, let's go back to our dice cam. Here
we go. Second, second roll. And the dot is at the bottom, so we know
that's a 6. I'm teaching people dice— what it means, how to read the dice.
So number 6, uh, share a piece of advice
that you've received that has had a lasting
impact on you. I'm impervious to advice.
I just do it. Uh, I guess it's to—
I try really hard at this and I'm not good enough at this, but this
is, I believe, really important and lasting advice
is to talk less, listen more, ask
more questions. Sure, I care about
learning. I just sometimes get so tied up in my head that I forget to
stop and go, wait, let's check the context. So that would be my—
the advice that's persisted with me, although it's more a case of do as
I say, not as I do. I love it. It's another, it's
another great, great piece of advice because it is easy, especially
when you're— your expertise is in an area, it's easy to,
to run. All right, let's do one more here. So
dice towers up. And we're going to go to question 4. So your last
speed round question. Ooh, this is a fun one. What's a
guilty pleasure song or movie that you secretly
love? Is there something that you, you love
music-wise or movie-wise that maybe we wouldn't think about? Oh,
movie— rennity. I love the TV show Firefly. It was a
mashup of West and sci-fi, and the movie is one of
the ones I keep on my iPad to watch if I have a long flight,
which I haven't had in a long time. And now they have movies Sprout's easily
available on planes, but it's just, to me,
fun. Uh, it's not high cinema, um, but I love the
message. I love the story. I love the, the humor.
I just— it's fun. It's my guilty pleasure. Perfect. I love
that answer. Great answer. Well, Clark, it's always a pleasure to
talk with you and, and, and learn from you. I mean, I've, I've
enjoyed many, many sessions sitting in your session, just picking up tidbits
and ideas and being— having my own concepts challenged. So if
someone else wants to learn from you, connect with you, where should they look? Where—
what would you point us to? Um, I'll, uh,
point you to quinnovation.com, which is fortunately under my name there
on the— in the video. Um, and I think
out loud, as you mentioned, at learnlets.com. That's
my blog. And, um, I try and— I've now pretty
much devolved to posting once a week Tuesdays, uh,
there. And it's sort of my random thoughts, but it tends to be what I'm
involved in, what it's going— and sometimes it's more theoretical and
sometimes it's more pragmatic. But, um, those are the two
places that are best track me. I'm on LinkedIn as
well, um, so that I'm somewhat active there
in multiple forms of my activities. Perfect.
I definitely recommend people go out and follow you, find you, read your stuff. It's
always good. As we wrap up today's show, we always ask our guests Clark for
our fi— their final take. So Clark Quinn, what's
your final take? My final take is I was thinking about the context for
this and I realized the perspective from
cognitive science, from understanding how our brains work, uh, cognitive science
was an integrative, uh, way to start pulling together different people thinking
about thinking— philosophers, neuroscientists, uh,
cognitive psychologists, anthropologists— more Learning science
emerged from that, similarly trying to pull in instructional design
and, and educational psychologists and
cognitive researchers. And that perspective isn't, I think, well
known and used enough, and yet it gives us insight that's really powerful,
like that— the properties of media. And so that's the
broader perspective I'd like to share, is that this is
coming from a way of thinking and looking at the world that gives
us really useful handles. And I found it extremely useful. I have
the ability to give people insights that they wouldn't have gotten in
other ways just because of that understanding how our brains work, which
I think is increasingly going to be important because that's where things are going. We're
going to find out what technology can do, what brains can do, and we need
to understand that really well to figure out where we fit in this
continually evolving world. Love it, and excited to see what we continue to
learn because the brain, like I said, is— it is more complex
than rocket science, I'm pretty sure. But, uh, It's good stuff. So Clark, thank you
again for joining me on the Visual Lounge. A pleasure, Matt.
Thanks for having me. Absolutely. All right, everybody, you heard it.
Clark drops new content on Tuesdays. You can go read and
learn, become a better creator of
instruction, understand these processes so that you can develop training that has
better impact. You can create a better message. If you're not an instructional designer, you're
saying, oh my gosh, there's so much out there. Absolutely. There's— there's people who've
learned about this and you can apply it to your stuff too. So with that
said, you know, we love it if you like or subscribe to the show. Of
course you can leave comments and reviews that helps us to know what we can
do better. And if you've got suggestions, you can email us, got an email,
old school, thevisuallounge@techsmith.com. We're also now on TikTok, which is crazy. So
you can see some of the great quotes if you just want to follow us
over there as well, because we'll take these— this shows, get some of
the best quotes, put them up there. Uh, makes it easy to stay in touch
if you don't wanna watch all the entire show. With that said though, we
hope that you take the things that you're learning and apply it to your lives,
apply it to your practice, get better at what you're doing, and take some
time to level up every single day. Thanks everybody.