Full transcript: Geoff Stead on London Real
5:09 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. This is Nick G Abel, and joining us today is Mr Geoff Stead, who’s the head of mobile learning at Qualcomm, based here in Cambridge in England. He is an internationally regarded thought leader on emerging technologies, and works for a company that was actually started in my hometown of San Diego. I remember when Qualcomm was like 100 engineers, they’re just jamming, and now there are 24,000 employees, right?
5:51 Yeah, wow. Welcome, thank you very much. Good to be here. You know, what is mobile learning? I’ve seen a few things about what you do, but it’s not obvious what that is right away.
5:59 So could you kind of give us a rough idea of, yeah. Well, I guess the quick answer is taking mobile tech things that are around you all the time and taking people’s desire to improve their lot in life, learn more, build their skills, and see if you can weave those together in some way. That’s pretty cool. So, like, a misunderstanding is that it’s a bit like kind of e-learning, or sort of structured courses or something, which is possible, but that’s a bit lame.
6:24 Mostly what it is, it’s about trying to Yeah, match those two things together, match the emerging tech. It’s appearing anyway, and I need to improve ourselves or or so. If someone’s reading a book on their Kindle, they’re in effect mobile learning. Kind of. Yeah, although all that’s probably and that’s a kind of nice example to talk about, but that’s pretty much modeling a non-book book equivalent, right?
6:46 So that’s cool, and that probably counts as mobile learning. But where it gets exciting is if you do something different. So maybe you’re marking up the book, and then you share the marks, and other people can share those marks and comment on it. So then, when you’re reading the book, you’re just not reading the book, but you can go online and pull down other people’s comments about that particular section in the book, or so, you know, that right? You can share, you can markup things, and then share your markup, so you can go and see what I don’t know what Seth Godin thought when he was marking up some book that’s out at the moment.
7:12 Yeah, there’s like a list of the most marked up books on Kindle. It just shows how interactive people are with them, I think, and I guess that’s where, yeah, and that’s kind of the bit that starts interesting me, because you start going beyond sort of existing metaphors or existing models of how you read or how you consume information or how you teach, and you think about what you could do different. Would your job exist without touchscreen technology? Probably not.
7:33 Okay, so well, certainly not a Qualcomm, just because Qualcomm right now is doing huge things with touch phones and smartphones. Smartphones are kind of the main place they’re at, but nobody’s saying that’s going to be the way it’s lasting. It’s just the way right now that people are interacting. Okay, so there’s a ton of other kind of metaphors for gesture and voice control and things which are equally interesting. It’s just the right mouth kind of tablet and phones are dominating how consumer tech do you think voice control will ever become a de facto standard in interacting with technology?
8:06 I think what’ll become a standard is that there’ll be lots of standards. So I think voice will certainly, but where it’s got really strong roles to play is where other things are hard. So if it’s an assist of technology, or people who don’t have the ability to do something else because of their job or because of what they’re doing, they’re, I think, totally. But whether, I don’t think there’ll be one that will dominate. I think it’s sort of interesting.
8:27 The touch is dominating so much now, but I don’t, I think it, I think, if anything, it’s going to diversify. So there’ll be multiple ways of interacting. That makes sense, you know. Sergey Brin from Google was recently had a picture taken of him on a New York subway, and he’s wearing that Google Glass, you know, which I’m curious what you think of that technology. I guess it’s not interactive in the way that, say, a tablet is, but I mean, it’s becoming a reality where these glasses are out there.
8:50 Where I don’t know, is that mobile learning? Well, the technologies themselves, on mobile learning, it’s kind of what you do with it, right? So assume you’re getting heads-up information as you’re moving around. Google Glass is a great example, or there’s various other approaches to that. You can kind of look through your camera and see real life with images superimposed on top of real life.
9:11 You can do, you call that augmented reality? That would be augmented. In fact, all of these things are kind of augmented reality, where you’re getting triggers to do with where you are now. It could be audio triggers. It could just be a sound thing as you walk around.
9:23 It makes noises. There was a great project in Dartford, I think, in West London, where East London, where kids were walking around on the ground trying to map where a river used to flow underneath, and it would give them audio sound. So as you were closer to where the river was, it would beep or make a noise, and you further away, it’d be quieter, and they were trying to figure out, you know, how the city just built itself over the river, and the river keeps flowing underneath.
9:44 So all of these are augmented. There’s a ton of different technologies all eating into that space. But, so, back to the goggles, Google Glass type thing. I think there’s a ton of fascinating stuff that happens if your technology understands where you are or what you’re doing. And at the moment, the applications are kind of fairly pedestrian.
10:03 It’s, show me a nearby takeaway, or where is a good coffee shop, or it’s sort of just because we’ve got that data to hand. But if you think about kind of improving yourself or learning or dating or meeting other people anything like that. There’s a whole layer of stuff you could do if your technology started to understand a bit more about where you were or what you were trying to do at that moment. There’s sort of scary versions of it, which is sort of Big Brother, all-consuming, and this kind of user-empowered version, where you could, it helps you know more than you know now, be more confident or grow some new skills you don’t have at the moment.
10:36 So I guess my piece is trying to steer away from the scary bit and try and empower people to think about how you, you know, how you would adapt to these things or how you would change learning. So what happens if you’re a teacher and you’re trying to teach, I don’t know, you’re trying to teach a subject that involves moving around and looking at things, you’re looking at trees or plants, or you walking around a museum and looking at stuff. So what would you do differently if you could trigger information as you were going around?
10:59 You kind of, you know, you used to just have a maybe a temperature gauge or a camera or particular things to sample stuff in the ground as you’re walking around a forest. But what if you could overlay what this looked like 100 years ago or a thousand years ago, and you could kind of flick through that on a screen as you’re moving around. Sounds awesome. How would that be? How far, how far away from these sort of technologies are, like, concrete applications that actually work all the time?
11:22 So the BM now is that we, there’s little bits of it everywhere, but it’s in no way kind of standardized, and it’s in no way mainstream, but there’s fragments of that in what we’re doing now. So I think when they come, they’ll come very rapidly So already you’ve got lots of augmented reality apps sort of on your phone, where you look through the screen and you pan around, and stuff pops up to do with knowing where you are or recognizing images, and it doesn’t. It’s almost no leap at all to be putting that onto goggles, rather than having it on there so it’s really not very far away, the ability to do it.
11:56 It’s just that there’s no kind of broad standards to, you know, to roll it out widespread. Do you guys have a piece of technology that’s competing with Google Glass or is that not? Does Qualcomm not go head-to-head with that? So we don’t, we play in that space we don’t really build that sort of stuff. We mostly build the chips or the bits that are inside, so we’re fascinated by that stuff because we want to make sure that our chips can cope with it when it comes.
12:17 Can you explain the technology of Google Glass, or, you know, do you know much about it? Or I’ve seen the tech, but is it like a little screen that’s just oriented to where you’re looking, or so? The Google Glass, it’s literally that I don’t know if you’ve seen it. It looks like kind of glasses without any glass on it and a tiny little screen on the side, but there’s a ton of different approaches as well. So you get the head-mounted displays.
12:38 There’s a few different head-mounted displays for gaming at the moment, where you can have sort of a 3D game experience. Pilots use them in cockpits quite often. They’ve got sort of display, either on the screen looking out the window, or literally on the inside, inside the goggles as well. Fighter pilots, them inside the goggles, and they’re all versions of the same thing. So Google Glass is cool because they’re trying to push into mainstream consumerism and make it at a real low price point, but the kind of data use that they’re using it for at the moment isn’t that far off just Google Search, right?
13:06 It’s just looking for information that’s out there already. So what comes into is trying to make sure that when you do that, that they’ve got ways of powering the processor that’s inside your glasses. So they worried about the detail. So we have a thing called Vuforia, which is a kind of free software kit for any developers who into doing augmented reality on phones. So you can make any app where you look at stuff on your phone, and as it pans past a particular picture, something pops up and talks to you.
13:32 In fact, most of the most of the sort of mainstream apps that are doing this kind of thing are built on our stuff. That’s interesting. So there was a quite cool one in the Science Museum. James May did a sort of augmented reality tour around the Science Museum. So if you walk around at the moment with an app, you can pick up the app and look at some of the exhibits, and he pops up, and you see a 3D version of him talking.
13:53 I’ll show you afterwards, when the podcast finished, on your phone, or on your phone, on your phone you see the picture of the thing through your phone, and you see him standing there talking. You kind of move it around and you see him from different angles. But, Geoff, do you think this is going to make our life better? Like, say 10 years from now, everyone’s walking around either holding up their phone or wearing glasses, and it’s adding yet another layer of abstraction between us and reality.
14:14 I mean, and then you meet someone, and instead of talking to them, you start like pulling up their online profile and analyzing them through that, instead of having a clear one-to-one interaction. So that’s your choice, right? So if you’re saying should it, it’s going to happen anyway, whether it happens or not. The technologies are racing forward. They’re like a kind of big wave.
14:34 It’s just flooding, and it’s going to happen anyway, and it’s not particularly being driven by your well-being, your future wellbeing. It’s been driven by a ton of other stuff. Can we sell stuff? Is it cool tech? Will people buy it?
14:44 Will they buy something through it? It’s been, there’s a ton of drivers, and they’re not necessarily drivers that look after you, the individual. I mean, Facebook doesn’t look after you, the individual, right? It, you get joy out of it, but it’s actually selling this whole social graph. That’s what that’s what selling.
14:59 Um, so you know, Google makes its money by you clicking on a link and buying stuff, even though that’s not their focus. They focus on giving you all these seemingly cool tools and useful things that you weave into your life, but actually they want that so that you occasionally click and buy. So it’s happening anyway, and our choice is how you deal with it, right? So the one approach is total denial, just don’t engage with it at all, which is cool. You know, life’s pretty comfortable like that.
15:23 The other approach is to try and say how you would use that stuff for good, how you would use it to help me be smarter, or how you’d use it to help me get over a hangup I’ve got, or give up smoking, or you know, whatever, some sort of behavioral stuff you want to change. How you going to do it? Use it for good. So part of our mobile learning thing is to try and go to schools or young learners or people who are involved in education, and try and help them think differently about what they’re teaching you.
15:50 So you should be being taught at school right now about this stuff, and try to have your own views on how you’re going to use it. And so you’re using it, and you’re not just sort of being consumed by it as a trendy gadget. I just want to say you had some experience with some young youth offender programs where you brought some of this technology and it really got them out of their shells. Is that what you’re talking about, like using this for a real benefit?
16:13 I guess I’m talking about that. So yeah, we had some done some quite fun projects. We did the sort of Outreach programs for pregnant teenagers, trying to help them sort of talk about some of the sexual health issues that they were previously kind of quite withdrawn and not talking about, and we’re using phones and using some information about sexual health on their phones to try and help them admit that they don’t know stuff and find out more in privacy instead of having to confront their peers and say they don’t know what they’re doing.
16:41 It was huge success. So we um, I guess a bit like that. I’m all, but I’m also thinking a bit in the future. So right now you’re going through school. You get to, I don’t know, you’re doing your A-Levels.
16:52 You narrow down. You’re just picking three subjects, four subjects. That’s it, right? Whereas if you think about what you’re going to need to survive in the future, it’s not three or four subjects. It’s generalist skills.
17:01 It’s skills in communication, skills in setting up a business, skills in in collaborating with other people, teamwork, kind of being a global citizen. Those are actually the skills that are going to help you get a decent career. It’s not having got a very good math A-Level and having had to exclude geography and French and all these other languages. So I think the whole school system is still a bit stuck in a sort of excelling over a few individual subjects, whereas what helps you succeed in life is a broader skill set.
17:29 And I’d argue that you should be using tech to try, as just a stimulus to try and help you rethink why you’re teaching things. The schooling system is stuck in like the 18th century. You look at some of these, you know, I walk by this school over here, and there’s like 30 kids looking up at the screen, and there’s one adult trying to command their attentions. They’re all learning at different rates, you know, which means you probably have maybe 20% of the class engaged at what you’re teaching at that moment, and it just seems like a big waste when maybe you could get them interacting more, get them, you know, I don’t know, maybe with these mobile devices or something.
18:00 You know, I mean, I’m not a I’m not a schools expert by any means, and I know a lot of teachers feel really stressed by exactly that. They feel there’s a sort of vicious circle where they feel constrained by the sort of tests that happen and very fixed curricular that they have to teach to. So that, so, and the school feels constrained by the fact they’re being measured against other schools by people like us. The very parents are deciding which schools we send our kids to, so they’re all trying to just focus on getting good results, and they end up not focusing on well-being for kids or future-proofing them.
18:29 They focus on the exams they get this year. I’d kind of like the school to be measured on 10 years after kids left, who did the most interesting things, you know, who climbed Everest, who did the really unusual things, who’s in a career that didn’t exist when they started at school, and, you know, that would be a cool measure of how good the school was. Right, right, but I think they’re all stuck in a bit of a cycle. So it’s unfair to blame the teachers, in the heads, you could kind of blame the whole assessment regime, and you know, scoring schools a bit.
18:58 I guess, yeah, no, I mean, I’m kind of stuck in that same cycle. It’s like, oh yeah, you want to have the Montau effect, but then again they got to get these grades, otherwise they’re not going to get to the next level. It’s just like this Antiquated version. So which is, I kind of like starting at the other end and saying, all right, what makes the ideal citizen, make what makes the ideal future skills. What would you like if you were recruiting 20, I don’t know, 25-year-olds, 50 of them, what skills would you want if you wanted to just set up some awesome futuristic business.
19:28 So is it techie, is it engineering, is it science, is it kind of creativity, is it innovation skills, and work back down the system and education system, and say, what can I do to stimulate that. So in the tech, a good example, just pulling it back to the technology, a good example is the um, that a large number of school IT training kind of courses tend to be teaching you to use software, how to use Word, how to use Excel, how to use PowerPoint, which is kind of useful, but it’s really just a, the communication tool, right? Right, whereas there’s some quite nice kind of grassroots charities and stuff trying to teach kids to build computers or to write software or to code things, or to use them to solve problems, trying to build robots or, and there, yeah, some quite cool outfits out there working on that, and try, trying to do that sort of from the grassroots level, which I really rate.
20:19 I like that make a movement type of thing, because then you’re taking the tech that’s out there and harnessing it for something that you wanted to do with it, instead of being more kind of a passive consumer, doing what you told. Somebody I talked to somebody before Christmas and they were going to get their kid, they weren’t going to get him an iPad, but there was some device out there was like a piece of hardware where the kids would actually have to be able to build it or hardwire it to get it to do a lot of the operations that are just a given on an iPad, and that way they would actually have to try to figure out how computing, if they would build it, then it would answer the questions they wanted. And, uh, it just seems like a great idea, because otherwise you just hand a kid the iPad and they’re just entertained for hours, but there’s quite, there’s quite a movement around that at the moment.
20:57 So there, there’s a couple of them. There’s one called Arduino, which is like a kind of board computer board you wire stuff in. Another’s called Raspberry Pi. Yeah, that was the Raspberry Pi guys are in Cambridge who set it up, so we know them. I mean, they’re kind of part of our social scene.
21:11 So what is the Raspberry Pi? I mean, just to give us an example. Um, it’s like a massively stripped-back computer, which literally arrives as a little board, a little kind of board of electronics, with a couple of adapters around the side that you can plug things into, but it’s, it’s quite high powered for video and stuff, so you can plug a TV screen into it, it’s, and an internet connection, and you can be a web browser, or you can use it as a media player.
21:33 You can be running kind of video through it, and it decompresses and plays the video quite, quite fast, so it’s quite powerful. The graphics in the process are pretty powerful, and it’s, I think, 25 bucks or something to buy. So it’s trying to just, just go massively, you know, um, massively cheap, massively huge market, and just encourage kids to wire stuff together that’s so cool. Just to get them into, like, interacting a bit more with their tech, as opposed to, like you said, just, yeah, totally.
21:58 So, you know, I mean, iPad’s easy to point fingers at, but it’s also done pretty awesome things, because it’s got so, it’s got so global and so mass market that it’s really driven a lot of the touch interface and thoughts around interface and apps, but it is also a very closed system. It’s not really geared up for you to be building and creating it. It’s been geared up for you to be kind of consuming and communicating with others, but but so, so it’s fantastically slick apps, very wide number of apps, but yeah, it’s sort of the opposite end of the spectrum to this whole maker DIY type.
22:29 You know, I, they did some study and they found, like, autistic kids, like when when they were, they were responding to the iPad, like they were never responded to anyone in the classroom, and like they gave this autistic kid, like, an iPad, and he, like, knew what an octopus was, and he knew all this other stuff, and the teachers were like, how the hell is he know what that is? But he could just never communicate to them that he knew, because maybe he didn’t want to deal with the social elements. But I mean, I guess, I guess one of the, one of the, one of the, the things that people get excited about is that it, it takes one, it takes one more barrier, a couple of barriers out the way between what I want to do and what’s on that computer, right?
23:03 So if you’ve got a mouse and a keyboard, there’s already a couple of extra barriers between how you’re operating and what you’re actually seeing, whereas it just, it’s just flattened those out, so you’re touching what you’re seeing. It’s, it’s, it’s more there. And I guess back to your augmented reality, Google Glass type of thing, that’s another example where it’s just taking some of the, some of the existing things out the way to weave it in a bit more tightly with your life.
23:26 It’s you still got to figure out for yourself how, me, how meaningfully you want to use that. It doesn’t work for you, does, you know, maybe it’s just too much tech, and it’s not helping you, and it’s a massive pain in the butt, but, but maybe it can be something that can really augment and support you. I mean, Nick has a good point. I mean, well, Nick has a good point, ’cause he knows I’m always telling him to stop looking at his phone when when we’re together.
23:44 So like, let alone jealous that I have people trying to contact me. Yeah, that too, but like, let alone if you got something in your eye now that you’re constantly checking, so I could be looking at you and you could be checking your text, which is true. And there, there’s also kind of good examples of people doing skilled things, like flying planes and stuff, who do something stupid and crash the plane because they’re so dependent on the devices around them that they, they’re losing their ability to know what’s going on.
24:08 When I, I’m, I’m kind of got a, a love-hate relationship with satnav now, with the GPS in my car, because actually, when I use it, I, I blank out a bit on how I got there and finding my way, and I like to know where I am. I’m quite happy to be dumped in the middle of nowhere and just explore. I kind of like that, and I, I think I lose my ability to explore when I’m relying on this voice telling me what I should do next, argument that saying technology is making us more stupid.
24:31 I think Brian and I have spoken about it before on the show, but for example, when I was a little kid, I could remember I had like 10 good friends. I could remember every single one of them, one of their phone numbers, you know, and now that part of my brain just has stopped working, because I just type someone’s number into my phone and never have to think about it again. Well, maybe you’re just getting old. It could be. It could be, but imagine if every single function that you use your brain for is eventually mapped to some external.
24:54 That’s totally true. So, so, what, what I’m not, I’m not coming and saying you need to love technology and, and B your common sense. Right, I’m saying it’s coming anyway, whether you like it or not. So what we need to do is figure out how to use it helpfully and supportively without losing things. So I guess it’s a bit of a trade-off.
25:10 So you do give up on some of your common sense with it, but you hope that in as, as the other part of the trade-off, you get a whole lot more. So you, you can be connected to your ailing mother who lives in another country wherever you happen to be. She doesn’t have to wait for you to happen to be at home and have agreed time to contact each other. So you know, it’s giving you new stuff too, and you just need to make sure the trade-off works in your favor.
25:30 Double-edged sword. Ultimately, I think you have to be very vigilant about it, you know, and that’s why like when you know, when I go out with people and stuff, I just make sure I keep the phone away in my pocket, because you have to be super vigilant, otherwise it’s ultimate distraction. But those are also, those are also just social skills. So, so some, some of the skills you need to learn now is, that’s how you deal with that, and you know, kids in schools, that would be a cool thing to teach them, how to, how to, how to manage when you’re getting a text and you’re busy meeting some people you’ve only just met, and it isn’t really rude to sit there and disconnect from the people around you, because you’re looking at your phone.
25:58 Have you heard about this new system, when you go out for a meal with a group of friends, everyone stacks their phones on top of each other, and the first one who picks it up pays for the round, pay the meal. I like that a lot. I think that’s quite cool. I like that too. Yes, I’m, I’m, I’m a big tech fan, but then I also quite happily lose it all and go off in the mountains for a couple of days, and I love that, like to shut down for a while.
26:15 Yeah, we spent New Year up in the Alps, Austrian Alps, in a caravan, totally snowed in, kind of snowboarding in the day and just camping out in the caravan, playing board games at night. It was awesome. So how, how’d you know when it was the new year? You have a watch? Got a watch to watch.
26:29 Okay, I think the whole concept of Google Glass in a city like London would be just insane. I mean, you could walk around and be like, Jack the Ripper f***ing this person up here, and this happened here, and this happened here, and this happened here. I mean, it could be really intense. You know, I think it would just be like, yeah, I guess I, I personally just, like, I mean, I noticed in my own life, coming here on the tube, I was playing on Facebook on my phone, not on the tube, on the on the overground, and, uh, at one point I stopped and I was like, [expletive] dude, look out the window and notice how awesome the snow looks, and just look at the scenery and enjoy it.
27:00 Stop, and I just, I’m kind of concerned. I’m also very excited by the prospect, but I’m also kind of concerned that I’ll turn into that, that Android guy who’s walking around processing information 24/7 and not really enjoying himself. But that’s, that’s the skill you need to learn as a person, right? I mean, you, you, this, the tech will keep coming. It’s not going to slow down because, because it’s it’s unhealthy for us.
27:20 It’s coming regardless. So, so, so for example, my, my son, he’s 11, and their school allows them to bring in their own phones and use them. They can listen to music. They can play games during the break. They can use them to look up stuff in class, and so of course it all goes.
27:34 It goes horribly wrong to start with. Right? Nobody’s paying any attention, and everybody’s kind of using their phones inappropriately. Then they have to figure out some rules for themselves, how they get, how it’s going to work, and they haven’t got an answer yet. They, the school’s trying to figure it out, but at least you’re figuring it out now, when you’re 11, and not when you’ve kind of got your first job and you piss your boss off because you’re looking, you’re checking Facebook when you should be when you should be doing some work.
27:57 So I guess you either go into denial or you kind of embrace it enthusiastically without questioning, or you sit somewhere in the middle and you say, all right, how how can I use this for good? So can I, I’m teaching my kids about Nazi Germany. How about we connect with a school in Germany and talk some of the issues with kids that are living there? That gives you suddenly a global perspective. Right?
28:18 That’s, you do that with tech too. So it’s kind of about figuring out. I mean, we couldn’t do this show without tech from five years ago. Even, we just couldn’t have it distributed in real time on iTunes. Even on YouTube, it just wouldn’t exist.
28:32 So that’s really sobering. You know, what blows my mind is to hear that 11-year-old kids have smartphones now. When I was a little, when I was 11, I remember one of my buddies, his dad bought him a little handheld TV from Japan, and we were all like, I, it was the thing I wanted more than anything else in the world. I considered, like, hitting him over the head and taking four channels on. And now, like, compare that to every kid’s got an iPhone or an Android phone, which is infinitely cooler than that.
29:00 It’s a pretty cool time to be a kid. My son’s a bit bummed with me because a lot of his mates have got smartphones, and I’ve just given him a really basic kind of not-cool phone. It’s got a torch on it, so you can find stuff, and it’s cheap, so if he loses it, we just get another one. A torch on your phone is not cool. He likes the torch, but he’s bummed.
29:17 He can’t play decent games. Dude, 11-year-olds don’t need smartphones, do they? Jesus. You know, Geoff, I saw one of your lectures and you had this word that you put up, and it was, uh, Ubuntu, and I was wondering if you could explain what that is. Ask Nick, see if he knows.
29:31 Is this like a South African word or African word? I don’t know. It’s a South African word. Um, it’s a, there’s a few different explanations, but the basic meaning is that I am me because of all of us. So my value as a person comes in part because of how I relate to the people around me and how I help the people around me, and they help me.
29:51 So my humanity is kind of connected to everybody’s humanity. And it’s the name of a project we’re quite involved in, in South Africa, kind of schools outreach project, kind of trying to find ways of helping teachers improve their skills. Um, but it’s also a really nicely expressed philosophy of how you’re not individuals. It’s not, so, I mean, Africa does quite a good job of kind of talking about the value of the group, the value of the larger humanity, not just individuals.
30:18 So the opposite extreme would be kind of super commercial capitalism, where it’s all about me doing well by screwing other people. And I guess the idea would be that that doesn’t work. If you screw other people, you’re kind of hurting your soul, or you’re hurting yourself. Your completeness comes from working inside your community to help the whole lot be complete. Now, is this a naive question, but what does that have to do with learning?
30:41 So, it’s the name of a particular project that we’ve been working on in South Africa. Okay. And there, they gave it that. I didn’t name it that. It wasn’t founded by me.
30:50 I’m, I’m kind of the big tech guy, and I’m supporting it. They gave it that name because they were trying to get the teachers to work with other teachers just to figure out how to improve their teaching. So the problem that they were facing was that, particularly in the more rural schools, there’s a very, very low level of teacher qualification. The teachers don’t have particularly strong skills at all, often quite poor motivation, typically might not even be pitching up to school, and the teaching is quite hierarchical and quite old-fashioned.
31:19 So there’ll be a kind of senior teacher in the school who has been teaching the same way for 30 years, and kind of gets really upset if the junior teachers who come in don’t do exactly the same thing. So it’s very, very rigorous, and legalistic, and structured, and, um, which makes it very hard for any teacher with any new ideas to bring those ideas to bear. So what we did is we got a whole lot of secondhand smartphones, refurbished them, put ebooks and put various tools on there that we felt would be useful, and then worked with the teachers, so that they would, we kind of connected a bunch of schools together, but without particularly dictating how, what you should do, and tried to encourage the teachers to talk to other teachers about how to make use of this stuff.
32:04 And because it was coming in sideways, it wasn’t fitting into the existing structure or existing ways that you should teach. They had to think of new ways to teach, and it freed, and the senior teachers would sort of delegate to the more junior ones to figure it out. The junior ones were working with other peers, and it gave them an excuse to express insecurity, because it’s not insecurity of themselves as a teacher. It’s insecurity of this new tech, but actually, rarely, it was wanting to improve their teaching skills.
32:31 So we connected all these teachers together, so they got quite a lot of news press because of these gadgets and going into poor schools, but actually the real sort of, it was like a Trojan horse, right? The real thing was getting teachers in a slightly awkward position where they’re not familiar with how to cope with this stuff, and giving them a peer network to talk to others to try and figure out how to make use of it. You think, do you think learning has to take place in a community setting?
32:57 I mean, you’re a real macro type guy with what you do as a job, but when you think learning, do you think community or not? I should ask you. I should, I’ll turn it around to you. Right? So what, think of two or three really interesting things that you’ve learned personally.
33:11 So how, how have you learned those? I mean, is it about people? Is it about you individually reading a book? Is it about talking to someone? How, how is it usually?
33:20 By doing things. You know, it’s usually by going out in the real world and trying something out and experiencing something, and I usually learn more from that than, say, reading a book. I guess maybe I’m answering that. I don’t know. I think so.
33:31 I mean, I think a lot of, you know, you go and read the book. If you’re really motivated to find out something, but you normally don’t know why, you only get motivated to find it out by people around you in communities. I’m quite big on community, so I know, I know. Tech can be isolationist as well, right? You can have somebody just sitting at home just being on tech, and sometimes they really are alone.
33:52 Sometimes they’re not alone. They’ve just got a group of peers that are more dispersed, so you know, interesting things in like Australia or mid-states, where you get these vast open spaces, and so kids spend a lot of time communicating with other kids. Even the schools can be virtual, distance kind of schools. Um, and you can do kind of interesting things there, but in the end it’s all about people. Some fantastic experiments with distance learning, kind of things where people, like, that, where people are only ever remote, and the learning results, quite a high drop off, you know, reasonably okay but not great.
34:26 And then they set up some, some meetings. So right at the very beginning, people were forced to come together for one week, and in the middle, again, for another week, forced them to come together, and all the rest of the time they were just remote at home, dialing in on their phones or connecting on their laptops, and hugely better, improved, hugely better results, hugely better engagement, way lower dropout, because you knew the people, who were that little icon that you were kind of talking to. Okay, so huge improvement by just trying to add a bit of social, or bit of kind of people into the mix, and you can’t replace that with a Skype call.
34:59 But if, but if you know the person, you can make do with only 10% of the real and 90% of the Skype call, because your brain’s quite good at filling in the gaps. Right? It makes you know, you can have this real pixelated picture of somebody, but if you know them, actually you almost don’t see the pixelated picture. You can kind of, you almost see them there. Your brain is good at filling in gaps with things like that.
35:18 So that’s where tech can kind of help, because you could maybe only meet up face to face occasionally But actually, and tech can kind of help fill the gaps between. Wow, what’s a typical week like in your job? I’m like, like, or, you know, what are you trying to figure out in the next 10 years or five years? I mean, it seems like you could get really stuck in, like, a, um, Ivory Tower, and, like, you know, be thinking about things that’ll probably never exist.
35:42 So how do you keep, you know, keep it practical but also think outside the box? I really like working with, um, teachers or educators who’ve got a particular mission that they’re trying to solve, whether it’s a particular way of teaching maths, or particular group of learners they’re trying to reach. So kind of working with real groups of learners, trying to solve problems on one side, and on the other side, the office I’m in is full of guys who are building things like this VR, or things that you would use if you were using Google Glass.
36:17 How would you interact with it? Would you talk to it? Would you wave your hands? Would you, you know, how would you tell it to go to the next page? So I’m surrounded by people who worry about that kind of thing, which is, you know, several generations ahead.
36:29 And so I guess it’s trying to balance the two off, right? So it’s speaking to those guys and trying to see whether there’s an educational angle and what’s coming there, but then it’s also being grounded by working with some real students. What are your thoughts on cybernetic implants? Do you ever see it going that way? I think there’s some fantastic opportunities with medical stuff there.
36:47 Right, so, so um, you know, if you need your blood glucose levels monitored and small, tiny drip injections that go in exactly when needed, rather than waiting till you can kind of, you’re feeling a real down and you need to add some sugar back in. Things like that. I think, I think it’s awesome. Little, little tiny things that can track your heartbeat and give you just a little pulse when you need it, when your heart’s starting to flag. So those are already there, and I think, I think those are awesome.
37:13 You know, it’s the same as the text story before, right? Do you want to take over your life and be some sort of robotic Android? Totally not. Would it be useful? I don’t know.
37:22 I’m desperate to give up smoking. Desperate to give up smoking. I’ve been trying for ages. So at the moment there’s various patches you can put in your, myself, but why not some sort of small implant which would take, take my cravings away at exactly the right moments? Or, you know, maybe a better way to phrase the question is, perhaps in 5 years’ time, your son comes home from school and says, “Dad, all the other kids have got Google chip now, and I want to get Google chip.”
37:46 What would you say? What would, initially, say no? Fair enough. I think I’d say no, because I’m not, I’m not a… although my job is to try and think about what’s coming, I’m not a slavish enthusiast about everything that’s coming. Okay.
37:59 I think I, I think I want to, I want to be ready for it and I want to know how to make use of it to help my life be better, but I don’t, I don’t want to just kind of sleepwalk into it. So fair enough. But most people can’t imagine going a day without their mobile phone. I mean, if people walk outside the house and there’s no phone with them, I mean, like, everything’s screwed up in their day. They don’t know what’s going on.
38:18 Who might be trying to call me? Usually nobody’s called to call. But you know, it’s this whole, was this a personal kind of, but I mean, uh, you know, what is that going to be different than just having an implanted device in 5 or 10 years? Like you said, it is going to happen, isn’t it? People are going to opt for these things just to be part of them.
38:35 Right? So I don’t know the answer to that. I really don’t know the answer to that. I mean, what I, what I’d like, maybe, I’m repeating myself. What I’d like to do is make sure that when that comes along, the people who are being confronted with this have got some ways of thinking about whether they want it or not, and how to use it for good.
38:54 Right, that’s a really cool answer. That’s a really, really cool answer. Geoff. Well, thank you. What is, um, is it, is that this, is that one of the concepts of the singularity, that we are going to basically merge with technology?
39:05 Well, it’s, um, there’s two major definitions. One is that technology will become self, wereare, AR artificial intelligence will become self-aware and sentient, and the second is it’s the fusion of human consciousness with machine consciousness. Is that correct, Geoff? Would you, are you clued up on the singularity? Not massively.
39:23 No. Uh-huh. That’s what I, that’s what I… so I spent, I I had, I sat next to one of the, um, Skype founders, um, at a meal couple of months ago, and he was, he doesn’t do Skype anymore. He’s just obsessed about the dangers of machine intelligence, sort of artificial intelligence rapidly taking over humankind. And I think I’m not, I don’t, I don’t subscribe to that.
39:48 You know, I think what will happen is we’ll just, we risk becoming lazier and lazier and more and more dependent on it. Right? But, but I don’t know. You do your, jutsu. You don’t have to.
39:58 You could be taking a taxi around everywhere in London and not do that kind of stuff at all, but you do it. You do it because you’ve made a choice. You know, this is, you get these big metropolises, but it’s full of individuals doing their own individual thing. And so I, I don’t, I don’t subscribe to this kind of total merge of the two, but I do think as humans, we need, we need to use tools where they’re useful and where they’re not useful. You need to kind of do your own things.
40:22 Um, you know, there’s a Buckminster Fuller quote. I can’t remember exactly what it is, but he was expressing the sentiment that we are living in an age where only one in a thousand, or 1 in 10,000 people actually would really need to be doing hard manual labor, because technology could take away the grind out of our existence, and that that horrible need to survive at all costs, and we could, the rest of us could just spend the rest of our lives enjoying and creating and playing. And maybe that’s a different way to look at technology.
40:51 Maybe I’m looking at it in too much of a light kind of, uh, filter, and maybe a better way to think about is all the amazing things it can do for us, the way it can free us up to. But they’re both true, right? So it’s pointless being idealistic about either perspective. You know, I, I like these guys who get into baking bread with their hands and make really nice bread. I don’t really like factory-made bread.
41:10 You know, and I kind of, you, I like to go to the barista where you get this dude who’s all fanatical about his coffee and how he makes it and roasted it himself locally. I mean, it’s fun. I dig that stuff, right? And that’s about people. That’s not just about the machines that could be doing that.
41:24 So you make your own choices, I guess. So another example is, I’m, I kind of, I’m, I’m in a team of about 60 people around the globe, and we all, we all tracking up. We’re having a competition between each other at the moment. Got put that up for the camera, right, in front of you? Yeah, what is that?
41:37 It’s on on his wrist. If you’re listening on iTunes, it’s a… oh wow, okay. It’s like a, so it’s telling me gray wristband with it’s telling me find a good one. It’s telling me how many steps I’ve walked, 26,137 steps today. I think it’s, I think it’s got confused.
41:53 I think it’s given me two days at once because I haven’t gotten that many. Wow. And it’s, but it’s, it’s really pleased with me. It says I’ve achieved my, my go. So, so, so this is tracking all the steps, and it, it’s trying to figure out how much energy I’ve used.
42:06 And so I’m, I’m just, you know, went for a jog this morning, and you just carry it around with you all day. But there’s 60 of us around the world. We’re little teams of, of six or seven each, and, um, and we’re competing. So the end of every week, it all gets uploaded and logged, and one woman looks and compares them and sees which team’s done the most exercise and who’s improved the most since the last, the last time. So that’s kind of tech, and it’s lighthearted.
42:27 It’s stupid, you know, it’s not really tracking. And if I, I could strap it on my 11-year-old and I’d kind of double my score in a day, but, but, but it, but it starts making you think of it differently. So I went to Covent Garden today, and I walked up and down the steps, and I, why would you want to do that? But you do it just kind of, because the bangle on your arm, you, because the bangle was telling me. Right?
42:44 So, so that’s a you know, it’s lighthearted, it’s playful, but it’s introducing a bit of kind of tech gamification sort of vibe into your life for no real reason. It might be at the end of the month that some of the 60 of us do more exercise because of this experience, where actually it was, you did it to compete, but actually in the long run it modifies your behavior a little bit, and there might be one on your wrist in 5 years. It says, okay, you’ve loved your wife 233 units this month, you know what I mean?
43:09 It might get to that point, which is a part that kind of scares me a little bit. Yeah, I think that’d be cool device to have. So I just, I just have to try. You know, I’m a kind of a guy who likes to try things out. You have, you have to experiment.
43:21 You have to try. Right? Otherwise you don’t know. So wearing it, for wearing for a month or two and then I see, I’ll probably stop wearing it after that, but it’s kind of fun. You do end up checking it a couple of times a day, and how many steps?
43:32 All right. Nice. Yeah, ’cause most people think, like, oh yeah, last month I went to the gym the same number of times. But if you could just pull it up, if it had a heart rate monitor, everything, you could be like, okay, this is what you did or didn’t do, and this is like your weight, or you could just look in the mirror in the morning and see if you look fat or not. But your brain, people’ve been doing that for thousands of years.
43:49 Your brain’s really good at tricking you, right? I mean, that’s the deal. So you look, it’s got you, very, it permanently reconstructs your history to be something that fits your own personal narrative. So I mean, there’s famous stories around depression. So you have somebody goes to the doctor and says, oh man, I’ve been seriously depressed the whole month.
44:07 Didn’t you have any up time? No, it was, you, it was down the whole time. But actually, if you take it, keep a diary, and if you fill it in every two hours, every morning, every evening, every lunchtime, you know how you feeling? It’s not down all the time. It goes up and down and up and down.
44:22 And so, but your brain just filters, because you’re feeling down, you filter out all the up bits, and you come in and go, man, was sucked. And there’s huge benefits in getting people to log every two hours or after every meal how they really felt, and then you can look back at it. Actually, you know, when I’ve been eating regularly, I’ve actually been feeling quite good, and you realize there’s triggers to how you feel, but you don’t even see those triggers when your brain kind of filters it out.
44:45 So you’re quite, we’re all quite rubbish at knowing our own narrative. Looking backwards, we kind of retranslate all the time. You know what, I’ve, um, on that exact note, Brian, my buddy and I were speaking about this the other day, and he said to me, I’ve realized I just cannot trust my own mind. And you just, you literally cannot trust your own mind. You can’t even trust your own, um, recollection of past events, because it’s not true.
45:07 So you just have to know that about your brain and just be like, like I said. Also, you have to be so aware of that personal narrative, because you can tell yourself whether you’re going to have a good day or a bad day. You know, you can tell yourself whether you’re being a victim or not. I mean, so that’s why the brain is pretty awesome, right? And so, so so, and that kind of calls the question, the whole tech augmenting your thinking kind of piece, you know, because if you, if you start dumbing your brain down and wearing, so, so, one of the, one of the kind of commonly spoken by applications for the Google Glass type augmented goggles is, it’s filming everything.
45:36 There’s a few apps, there’s a few systems out there right now that log your entire day. They film what happens. They recognize images. They catalog it backwards, so you could say to it, where are my car keys, and it could kind of track back and find the point where it showed you car keys. But actually, do you want the changes that might happen to you if you have that?
45:55 You know, I kind of like the, the light romance of rewriting your history backwards. I mean, most poets or people who kind of get creative about stuff, they’re doing it probably because they’ve got a misguided view about what really happened, you know, about how beautiful this woman really was, that they’re writing this epic poem for. If they could see her, maybe they think differently about it. So, you know, you kind of want to encourage that sort of creativity.
46:14 You don’t want to kill it. That’s interesting. That’s cool. Geoff, I was wondering what people or what companies out there in the tech sphere really impress you? Who are the ones to watch?
46:22 Do you think it’s a great question. Um, I, I’m interested by some of the, I’m still interested by some of the big guys, some of the Googles, or like my own company Qualcomm, the big tech guys, because they’re earning enough money on their mainstream work that they’ve got quite deep pockets to be more playful, so they kind of, they’re not just investing in the things where they think there’s a clear outcome or a clear goal or clear financial goal. They’re just being a little bit more playful with it, and sometimes it’s focused on do good, and sometimes it’s not focused on do good at all.
47:01 It’s just because a group of engineers get enthusiastic about it. And I quite like that sort of, this fertile, fertile piece around the outside. Um, I know the Google employees used to be encouraged to take, like, eight hours a week and work on their own projects. I think that might have gotten kiboshed, but it used to be, yeah, just work on your own thing, and then Gmail came out of that program. He did.
47:20 Yeah, okay. Yeah, we, we used to do that. Um, I’ve done that in my previous, with my previous team as well, and it’s always worked quite well. I was fairly happy with it. It’s hard to sustain it, though, when times are lean and tight and you’re all stressing about deliverables.
47:31 It kind of just quietly drifts out the door, but it’s a, it’s a cool idea. So I like that. I also like artists like Milla. Remember them? They used to make the browsers.
47:40 Yeah. So they, they, to, they turned into a kind of not-for-profit small outfit, but they’ve got these real enthusiastic, almost zealous people encouraging kids to build web pages, people to make stuff, do stuff. Again, this is the whole making use of the web to do stuff thing. So they’ve, if you search online, there’s a bunch of different Mozilla universities or Mozilla courses about how to build HTML 5, how to build your own web page, how to do and they’ve got these, these champions who stand up and try and encourage kids to make, you know, I, I think quite fascinated by that, how an organization kind of turned itself around from being something that made the browser and maybe lost a bit of traction, and that to an organization that’s about empowering people to make use of web.
48:20 Um, that makes sense. I haven’t given you two enlightened ideas, though. It’s not bad, though. It’s a decent start, and the next question I wanted to ask you is, I mean, you work in Cambridge, yeah, and, but you’ve obviously been probably to Silicon Valley. You’ve been to San Diego and Qualcomm.
48:36 What’s the biggest difference, do you think, in the mentality or that the different tech sectors, say, from Cambridge to, like, geograph, geography, no, just, no. What is it? No. What do the people like, or what is the culture? How is the culture different?
48:51 So I really like the Californian, and I guess you get the same in Israel. I haven’t been to Israel, but I guess you get the similar vibe there. You get the similar vibe in some of the some of the sort of North African, like big cities, um, of just hunger to create and make and do, and real appetite to just dive in and do stuff. You get a bit the same around this, this area. You’re, this Old Street area here, you get the same sort of vibe there.
49:13 And I, I like that energy, that idea that anybody can do anything if you’re just enthusiastic enough and get a few of you together and you can make something happen. Um, so I like, I like that kind of whole energy. I, um, does that energy exist at Cambridge? In Cambridge, it does, but to a lesser extent. So Cambridge is, the university casts a big shadow there.
49:31 So there’s a bunch of really interesting tech businesses, but a lot of them in the kind of the biotech end of the spectrum, interesting, very interesting outfits, and there is reasonable amount of venture capital, but it’s not quite as buoyant. It’s, it’s sort of more, um, maybe slightly more academic or slightly more, more, more stayed. Okay. So, um, I really like that West Coast California thing, although I was surprised in San Diego, the difference between San Diego and San Francisco kind of Silicon Valley area.
50:01 So Silicon Valley feels much more multinational and, um, kind of bubbling, and, um, whereas, whereas the San Diego didn’t quite get that feeling. So I mean, obviously Qualcomm is a great place to work, and it’s huge. It dominates. So there’s a whole section of the town which feels like Qualcomm City, but I, I didn’t, I didn’t, maybe I just haven’t hunted out far enough. I didn’t see as much of that kind of startup scene.
50:23 San Diego’s funny. It’s, it’s a border town. It’s actually quite conservative. When you go around the States, you get down to these border towns, and, yeah, the conservative people come up. Like, getting medical marijuana in San Diego is, is almost impossible, but go, you go to LA, in Venice Beach and they’re literally giving it away.
50:38 So it’s how do you know this, Prime? Uh, ’cause I was in Venice. Um, you know, Geoff, I wanted to ask you, do you think Apple has peaked? Do you think they’ve started their descent, because I’ve been hearing more and more rumors, or reading more and more rumors on the Internet, or more, more articles. saying that they’ve reached that point of inflection on the curve where their era of dominance is over, and it’s, it’s time for one of the compe.
50:58 I, I don’t know. People love to get excited about these kind of wars. You know, it’s the Google versus Apple, or the Android versus iPhone, or the people get very worked up by it. You know, is is BlackBerry totally out? Is the, and but I think on the whole people spend far too much time agonizing about that.
51:16 I don’t, I don’t think it really matters so much. You know, I think as long as there’s two or three people really innovating and competing with each other, it’s going to keep racing forward. It doesn’t, it almost doesn’t matter. So go back to your question. I think they’ve got deep pockets.
51:31 They’ve got a bunch of very smart people. They’re scarily competitive, very scarily competitive, when you kind of lift the bonnet a little bit. And they’ve got fantastic kind of, um, brand awareness. They, they’ve, they’re having huge improvements in China at the moment. They’ve started going quite wide, widely into China.
51:50 I, I don’t think they’ve peaked. I, you know, I think the stuff that they make actually lives quite a long time. Will they keep being the top dog? Maybe move to second dog position. I’m not sure, but I, but I think it’s easy to get overworked up by these competitions, and actually reality just does its own thing.
52:08 Sometimes. Fair enough, everyone’s winning with that competition, right? I mean, tablet technology has gone massively forward because ofan sucess, right? But yeah, totally, totally. So I don’t know.
52:17 You know, I’m not sure necessarily I’m the best person to make that judgment call either. So I, I was convinced that that, when Nokia partnered with, um, Microsoft, that would help them turn around, and actually they just went straight down after that. So I’m not necessarily the right idea. God damn, that was Nokia’s awesome stuff. You know, they still It’s still really good stuff, and if you look in different countries, there’s still big, so, so we’ve got a, a big office in India, and large, large number of the staff there are using Nokia, and it’s their, no, it’s their Nokia loyalty that’s driving them to move to the Windows Phone, the latest Windows phone, because they, to, they’re totally convinced that Nokia’s Reust works well, good for fit for purpose.
52:52 So you get, it’s easy to also get a, a sort of skewed viewpoint from the nation that you happen to be sitting in. What do you think of these online education programs, like iTunes U, or like a lot of these universities are putting all their education out there? Do you think anyone’s doing it right, or doing it wrong, or good question? So, so that’s a, that’s a great example of a lot of hype. So these MOOCs, or these massively open online courses.
53:14 So there’s a bunch of those. There’s like edX is one and Coursera is one. Um, a UK one’s just been released called FutureLearn by the, by the Open University. Yeah. So I think they, I think they’re super cool, because it’s about openness of content and openness of the information they’ve got to spread out to massively diverse audiences, quite often free to access.
53:35 I think that’s massively egalitarian. It makes the same information available if you’re in Laos or if you’re in, kind of, Johannesburg, or if you’re in Brazil. So, so, so I think that’s awesome, and I think it, it changes how teaching might be, because you could be a fantastic coach-type teacher but not a good subject expert, and you could be using this fantastic subject matter stuff that comes straight out of MIT that you’re using to coach your, to, to teach, you know, to teach in your particular class, who’s sitting in, sitting in a, you know, somewhere in the middle of Africa.
54:07 So I think it’s, it’s hugely kind of egalitarian, and I’m, I’m very big and very much in favor of that, but people get very excited about it and tend to forget that all you’re really getting is broadcast from a lecture. So you’re getting stuff that’s designed in a sort of fairly old-school, maybe done very well but fairly old-school approach of sitting in an auditorium and being presented stuff and given homework, and you go and do homework and come back again. And if you had to say, how would you construct a learning experience for people trying to learn this subject, and you want to hit a million people, you’d probably do it in a different way.
54:41 What this is, is a broadcast from a fairly traditional mode of teaching. All, almost all of those, those online big online things are doing exactly that. They’ve got at the heart of them some other paid-for course that’s happening, and this is kind of a spin-out of it. And that’s the complaint. You might get this great MIT professor lecturing you on, you know, electronic physics, and then you’re just watching him, and he’s just in a room, and it’s like this one-way information flow.
55:08 Yeah. So, so it’s, so I think it’s it’s fascinating. It’s really interesting. It’s, it’s really important that that sort of stuff is open, right? A lot of the a lot of the money that flows around education is locked into prescribed textbooks or prescribed publishing that’s around particular courses.
55:22 And there’s a parallel movement of teachers writing their own textbooks, open publishing, writing and sharing, sort of co-writing their own textbook, so that, so they’re not, rely on, to one of the big publisher textbooks, who try and sort of break the reliance on that, which is also equally interesting about this, of openness of content. Right? Um, but but that’s not the end of the story. That’s just a, it’s a piece of the puzzle. So the next piece is, and maybe you’re a local university using some of that content as part of your course.
55:50 That’s cool. That kind of brings in the people bit again. Um, another next piece is, that maybe you, so, so there’s other websites. There’s one called, um, I think it’s called Coding University. I suddenly can’t remember the name, um, which is about learning to do software programming, and so that there’s some teaching bit, but then there’s some doing bit.
56:07 So there’s a, you actually on the website, you’re, you’re trying to write some code, and it tries to process the code and falls over and doesn’t work. And so suddenly that’s added a new dimension, because you’re actually doing something, you’re not just consuming something. Um, and, and they’re slowly trying to work out what, what the pieces are. So one of the challenges was, if you want to set coursework, how do you mark it? Right?
56:28 It’s not just multiple choice. What if it’s writing an essay? How do you mark that? And so it’s a very cool research project. It’s just finished, where they got the students to mark each other’s work.
56:37 They went through this sort of an anonymization thing, and they had this sort of algorithm that asked people, the same work got marked by several different people, and then they had sort of, they could track all the different markings of all different people, and, and, and, and tweak them slightly, so one person always over-marked. It, they, kind of lower it a bit, and, um, and the results were pretty much exactly the same as, as real, J experts marking them. So, so, so they, you know, I think it’s cool, because pushing at the edge of, of how things are being done, but it’s not the answer yet by any means.
57:09 It’s just, it’s a sort of, it’s a step along the way. Wow, sorry, it was a long answer. No, it’s a good answer. If someone is listening out there who’s like 20 years old and they want to be you when they grow up, uh, you know, what advice do you give them? You know, don’t do it.
57:21 I don’t do it. I like what we know. What path do they have to take? I mean, you know, I’m expecting you to say something like, you know, go to Austria and climb the mountains, but, you know, they probably need, you know, need to learn how to program and SE, and all this other crazy stuff. Or do they?
57:35 I don’t know. So I guess, um, I guess one of the reasons I do what I do is that I can do the tech, and I’m enthusiastic about that, but I can also do the, the sort of thinking about why you use it and what you’re doing with it, and, and, and I’m enthusiastic about aspects of it. So I think that multidisciplinary kind of thing is really useful. So, so, so, not in, in the, in the sort of venture capital startup world, I meet a lot of people who are very good at talking enthusiastically about the tech, but as soon as you ask more than two or three technical questions, they kind of fall apart and call their, call their pet techie, and I think that’s a bit of a mistake.
58:16 I think you really want, you want everybody to have enough of an understanding of the technology that’s underneath it. So if you wanted to have my job, I think you’d need to know some of the tech, enough of it to understand what’s going on and be enthusiastic about how you’re planning to apply it. And so what career path, that is, that a traditional university, they would go to, and then what after that? Well, tech, a tech, a, I think an unusual thing, because a lot of people who are doing very well in technology didn’t go through a classic university course.
58:43 I, I did. I did computer science at university. Wasn’t sure, just because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I only really figured it out after university, but technology is very much about what you’ve done in the last five years. It’s not about your qualification.
58:57 So as long as, you typically, you might be asked for, for a. So for example, Qualcomm, it’s a lot of engineers, and so they do expect a sort of level of academic rigor to your engineering. This, but most of the really interesting tech that’s out there hasn’t necessarily been done by people who’ve been at university. People who are deeply engaged in it right now. So I think it’s quite a nice career, because you can have you can have gone via several detours to get there.
59:21 And do you think someone should go and work for, like, a big company like Qualcomm, or do you think they should go straight out of university and go into a 10-man startup, or, you know, what do you think? I, I don’t know the answer to that. So startups have this huge cool factor, but they’re also kind of abusive, because particularly, I think, for, maybe, for everyone, but I think for the tech guys it’s quite abusive. There’s, I’m endlessly meeting people in a startup who are looking for a tech person to come and work virtually for free for the hopes of some shares in some possible future, you know, outcome, and normally they’re the guys actually at the bottom of the pile, who, but they’re the ones the whole idea is sold on.
1:00:01 So I think you need, they need to be a totally key part of the idea and a willing partner rather than just somebody who’s tricked in the door. Um, is it a pyramid scheme? Yeah, I think so, to a certain extent. No, so I really, I really don’t know what the right answer is there. So for me, for me, um, I found it really, the path I’ve taken was to be working at a small, very niche publishing company, particularly specializing in places where education doesn’t work.
1:00:27 And I did that for 10 years, and for me that was massively formative, because I was learning from real gurus about education, about reaching people who can’t be reached, about, like, Paulo Freire, this awesome South American kind of educator from, I don’t know, 80 years ago or something like that, very politicized, what about informal education, adults with no skills, not teaching them Janet and John and the Red Dog, teaching them to have a political voice, starting kind of with a political voice, with protest, with discussing issues like abortion, the votes, equal rights, start teaching them to read and write with those words, with their own words, getting them to have arguments and discussions, and then writing what they said down and teaching them those words to read those words first, so very politicized.
1:01:14 Um, and for me that was awesome, it was really kind of formative. So it was very much, I guess, back to your learning from people around you. So if I had had any advice, it was find people who inspire you and kind of track them as closely as you can. And if you had to give some advice to the 20-year-old you what would you tell him? Do it, do it, do what?
1:01:35 I don’t, I’m not, I’m not sure I’m the right the right kind of, I’m not, I’m not sure I’ve got any of the answers, right? ‘Cause you all just work, walk your own paths. So I, I did a classic university degree, came out fairly well qualified, and then just, you know, worked for a year or so at that, and then blew it off and thought, no, no, no, this isn’t me, and spent another year or two traveling around and working as a lifeguard and a river-rafting guide, and, you know, just doing other stuff, and actually can see that in you.
1:02:02 I love that. You know, it was really, it was really, really cool, and it just made me realize, looking for something slightly broader. So, and that’s, I guess, what got me into the education space. I didn’t realize I was particularly into that. Okay, um, that’s good advice.
1:02:16 Um, how do people get a hold of you, Geoff? What’s the best way? Uh, Twitter, @geoffstead. I guess I still have a, a blog that I’ve been writing for years, but it’s a little bit quiet. It’s called molearn, M-O-L-E-A-R-N, at Blogspot, blogspot.com.
1:02:30 Um, I still write that for Qualcomm, so that’s anything with emerging mobile tech and education. I think there’s a link on your Twitter to that. That, probably is. There probably is. Yeah, they had some, like, you had some, like, virtual reality video on there.
1:02:43 It was like, a, was like an automotive engineer or something. He was going in to change some parts on, like, a car, and he put the glasses on, and it was like telling him exactly what to do. Like, do, undo these screws, and he was just like, that, that was pretty cool. Yeah. So we’re quite interested in how it changes work.
1:03:00 Right? So, so, was talking to, um, I forget who it was, a chief learning officer of a big American engineering company, and he was saying it’s, it’s changed their employment profile. So they used to have real problems recruiting engineers. How, how many years they would have to train engineers before they could send them out on site to go and fix stuff, because there was such a backlog of old stuff that they might come across. They might need to learn to fix.
1:03:24 Now, when they recruit new guys, they, they train them while they’re on the road. So they, they give them some initial training, but they don’t need to know about everything. They just have a tablet with animated diagrams about all sorts of historical stuff, and they plan out that they’ve got more time when they, when they’re traveling around, and they make it clear to the customers of the pitch up that they, you know, that they’re experts at knowing, looking up how to fix it.
1:03:45 They’re not experts at knowing every piece of equipment that’s out there. So they train them in the current stuff, but in the old stuff they’ve just got a bit more time, and they look it up on the iPad that they carry around with them, to, to sort of figure it out as they go along. And for them, it’s, it’s really transformed their ability to recruit, kind of, young new people coming in, instead of being totally constrained by people who already had the expertise.
1:04:04 So they’ve woven learning into actual the service, how they, how they do work. So it’s not quite as state-of-the-art as the, as the BMW goggles. It was BMW Labs who did that, who did that, did that thing. I guess you could also argue that then they’re not learning to craft by doing that. They’re just kind of doing what.
1:04:20 But yeah, but it depends what your, what your craft requires, right? So it’s not saying you should. It’s maybe emphasizing some of the customer service pieces of your craft, and some of the explaining to the people you’re meeting what you’re about to do. Maybe that’s more important, and the remembering historical bit of kit is less important, so so I guess it just shifts the profile. Yeah, that’s fascinating stuff, man.
1:04:41 I love that. Um, you know, Geoff, has, was been really, really awesome talking to you. Um, you know, is there anything we missed, or anything you want to leave our viewers, that as a thought? Or do we cover, guess, I guess the main thing when you’re thinking about education, you think about technology, make sure that you’re not letting the technology be just a Victorian machine, just like the sort of old-fashioned, old-school education. Don’t, don’t, don’t let it be a sausage machine that puts in facts and somehow churns out some knowledge at the end.
1:05:07 Rather, think of it as tools. So right now, look around us, there’s cameras and mics and all sorts of stuff, but they’re tools to help you guys do something with it, right? They’re not, they’re not driving what you do. You’re using them as tools, and I think that’s the thing to bear in mind, is when you, when you when you’re using tech for education, make sure using tools to help you achieve something, and not just put in a sausage machine and you’re being given facts and being asked to test at the end about it.
1:05:30 Okay, I guess that, think about technology maybe in a creative way when it comes to how you can do it differently with the tech. Asos. Absolutely, yeah. Okay, I’m convinced he’s going to be a cyborg next time. He, I really am.
1:05:41 Actually, the real Geoff is sitting in the Bahamas right now, sitting in San Diego, on this is my avatar, right? You notice I didn’t shake hands with you. It’s a Qualcomm model one. That’s creepy. Um, that was awesome, thanks, Geoff.
1:06:00 I appreciate that. I was, uh, it was really cool. I, thanks for inviting me around. Enjoy that insight. Awesome.
1:06:05 Um, well, cool. Uh, I don’t know what else we’ve got going on. If you, uh, if you love the show, um, just leave us a quick review on iTunes. Uh, come visit us on YouTube if you want to see how extremely good-looking Geoff is. We’re on London Real TV, and of course we’re on Twitter and Facebook as well, and retweet about London Real TV, so other people find out about it.
1:06:24 These guys are on a good mission. You got to help them. Could said it better myself. Awesome. Um, thanks, guys, and until then, it is about the journey, indeed.
1:06:32 Thanks, guys. See you. And flip it into a to-do. So like, using email game, for instance, or Gmail offline. I actually use Gmail offline a lot to process Gmail, um, because you don’t then get stuck.
1:06:50 I think many people, when they check email, get stuck in the top 10 email, because what happened as you go in
