CEP009 – Meta Learning Electronics with Mike Cheich and Phil FitzGerald

About the guests/host
- Mike Cheich runs Programming Electronics academy. He has also been on Chris’s other podcast in the past.
- Phil FitzGerald is an educational coach via The Compelling Message
- Chris teaches at Contextual Electronics
Discussion topics
- Teaching how to make a sandwich
- Is the knowledge in reach and is it relevant?
- Most people that are in Programming Electronics are hardware hobbyists who want to get into programming, usually through Arduino
- It can be intimidating learning electronics because of the breadth of knowledge required
- Phil-ism: Accreditation, certification, celebration.
- Self evaluation matters at the beginning of education
- SME = Subject Matter Expert
- Analogy of creating a map within a city (mapping out London)
- Selling people on the end point of a learning journey
- Learners normally don’t care as much about the specifics of the journey
- After the fact, learners will rose c0lor the specifics of how they got to the point they’re at
- DITLO = Day in the life of
- Chris struggles with how traditional education was teaching electronics
- Mike likes finding the guiding principle within the electronics universe
- Two tracks – thinking (theory) and doing (practice)
- Designing your own 5 year map of curriculum
- Phil-ism: You can’t show it if you don’t know it
- Extending your knowledge of how maps work by being able to create a map in a new city
- Creating lists of things to do, or not to do
- Mike is learning how to 3D printing, which was a new learning journey
- Facing failure and understanding what you should do when that happens
- Drawing your map so you understand what you do and don’t know
- Keeping notes is so you reinforce your own knowledge. In Phil’s example, this might take the form of a map. Phil explains in more detail in the video below:
- The Dunning Kruger Effect
- Make It Stick by Peter Brown
- Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset
- Removing barriers to learning when a learner experiences a problem (QR Code example)
- Sleeping on a problem (or stepping away from a problem)
- Accreditation is someone verifying you know what you claim to know
- “What comes before that” is an important question when mapping out the steps required to learn something
- Maps start as post-it notes
- Creating analogies
- Breaking down individual elements of the learning process and relating it back to that analogy
- How do you quantify “show it to know it”?
- Chris is a proponent of “Build Logs” (which is also a section on the CE Forum)
- What do you notice in the thing you want to build?
- Thinking about the steps that indicate you’re about to get to the next step? (ie. Which stop comes before the stop you’re going to get off at on the train)
- Dewey Decimal System
- Sometimes courses try to constrain the possible paths of research, as that can get overwhelming
- The downside to learning in the modern day is how many sources of distraction there are (ie. phones)
- Guided path examples
- Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck
- Learning something well enough to teach is holding yourself to a higher standard
- Check out Phil’s site The Compelling Message and check out his book!
- Mike teaches electronics on Programming Electronics Academy