Education Innovation

Failure Is An Option: Ideas and Failure In The Open Model of Education

What do you get when you combine education with the books Here Comes Everybody and Wikinomics, with Lego, Saddleback Church, new ideas, a website for solving problems, failure, and a mining corporation? Let's put them in the Education Innovation blender and see?

Adding to my previous posts (1 and 2)  on what I call the Open Model of Education. Why is the open model so powerful? Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, discussed the advantages of open models. In this case, open source movements. Open source movements have several powerful advantages that education could leverage to improve itself. 

One advantage of the open source movement is that it is not an organization in the typical sense. It doesn’t have employees, it doesn’t make capital investments, and it doesn’t control resources. The advantage is that it highly tolerant of failure. Open source reduces the cost of failure because so many ideas are brought to the table.

“…open source relies on the ‘publish-then-filter’ pattern. In traditional organizations, trying anything is expensive, even if just in staff time to discuss the idea, so someone must make some attempt to filter the successes from the failures in advance. In open systems, the cost of trying something is so low that handicapping the likelihood of success is often an unnecessary distraction.”

In the Closed Model of Education that I have discussed previously, education is limited because the ideas that a school or district can consider can come from only a limited number of sources, usually teachers, administrators, and consultants. A great deal of thought must be put into the consideration of ideas because the time and cost of failure are so high. Time spent with meetings, staff training, and materials, has a cost. This means the filter for ideas is very high. Only those ideas that seem to have the most benefit will be implemented, though there is no way to know in advance that one of the ideas picked will bring the desired benefit, and one of the ideas left on the table could be the most effective and beneficial.

The Open Model of Education draws its ideas from a greater number of sources, including, and most importantly, the student. A wider net is cast for ideas, more ideas are implemented, and the ones that work will receive more resources, while the ones that fail can be quickly dropped. Because resources are only directed at proven ideas, this model essentially allows failure to cost nothing. Failure for free. But the chance of coming upon a better idea is increased due to the shear number of sources and ideas.

“Open system, by reducing the cost of failure, enable their participants to fail like crazy, building on the successes as they go.”

The open system has the advantage of exploring multiple possibilities.

“…the idea is that for any problem or goal, there is a vast area of possibilities to explore but few valuable spots within that environment to discover. When a company or indeed any organization finds a strategy that works, the drive to adopt it and stick with it is strong. Even if there is a better strategy out there, finding is can be prohibitively expensive.”

Our current Closed Model of Education is clearly locked into a few strategies and models that drive everything. Teaching takes place at a designated place and time, and it provided by designated people.

The Open Model of Education blends the sources of teaching to focus on the learning of the student. Learning, as opposed to teaching, can take place anywhere, at anytime, and can be provided by many people. It is this system that can bring many more ideas to the table. The current education system judges many ideas on whether that idea fits within the current construct of the education system. If the idea does not fit, the idea is not adopted. Those ideas that are adopted have been severely filtered in the hopes on ensuring success.

The Open Model of Education, or Clay Shirky’s open system, allow for many more participants, lowers the filtering of ideas, and is much more tolerant of failure because of the flexibility of the system. Ideas that fail are dropped instantly, and new ones adopted. It would be hard to say that failed ideas are dropped as quickly in education. Usually failed ideas have personnel attached to them, causing union issues, and resources that have been purchased, and possible even capital costs. This makes ideas difficult to drop on a dime.

Further because the Open Model allows participants from many areas to participate, the chances of great ideas and solutions are increased. In the book Wikinomics: How Mass Collboration Changes Everything, the authors describe in detail how organizations from Lego to mining corporation Goldcorp have opened their systems to the public and reaped the benefits that come from this openness. Websites like Innocentive.com open problems up to others to help solve and give cash rewards. Could you imagine what would happen if education opened itself to the public and gave cash rewards for great ideas?  Saddleback Church says to its member, if you have an idea, let’s do it. They offer help where they can, but they allow the member to come up with and implement the idea. One member had an idea for a ministry from people struggling with addictions. That ministry has become a worldwide ministry called Celebrate Recovery. Other ideas went nowhere and failed. But in allowing many ideas, having a low filter, they hit upon one of the most successful ministry ideas in recent years. It is the organizational model and mindset that is described in Wikinomics and displayed in Goldcorp, Lego, and Saddleback Church that education should look to.

The Closed System of Education does not tolerate failure, therefore restricting the quality and quantity of ideas and the chance for a superior idea. The Open Model of Education is much more tolerant of failure which results in a greater number of ideas and a greater chance of finding the superior idea.

Catalytic Questions:

How might you come at this issue from a different direction to get a different response?  What underlying principles are at work here?

In what ways could you shake the thinking of those in the education establishment? What might this look like?

What examples could you substitute to get your message across?

In what areas do you see opportunity for developing more openness in your school or your district?

Who is going to resist these ideas? How can you prepare for and mitigate their resistance?

Who is going to support these ideas? How can you leverage their support of these ideas?

Where could you focus your energy and ideas to make change?

In what ways could you use the disadvantages for of the Closed Model as advantages for support of the Open Model?

If your school or district were to be transformed into an Open Model school or district, could you let go of the past and adopt the new way of thinking? Does you answer impact your thinking or support for either model?

What problems might more openness create?

The Brain Rules School For Long Term Memory: Brain Rules Part 9

What do you get when you combine the brain, long-term memory, MTV, the Magna Carta, homework, school schedules, and grade level standards? Let's put them in the Education Innovation blender and find out.

More from Brain Rules by John Medina: Chapter 6 Long-Term Memory

We want our students to remember everything we teach them right. Of course, we do, but John explains that the process of transforming a memory into a one that can be remembered for years to come can take years to complete. This process is called System Consolidation, and it can take years to complete. So, maybe you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself next time you ask your students a question and they can’t remember. It’s not you or them; it’s their brains’ fault.

John also explains that forgetting may actually be a good thing. Forgetting allows us to prioritize events that are essential to our survival. If it is not important, we make it less of a priority. We forget them. So, maybe you can’t blame a kid for forgetting the date the Magna Carta was signed. His or her brain may not consider that information important for survival. Knowing the names of every band on MTV’s TRL show maybe important to his or her survival. (His or her social peer group survival)

John puts forth some ideas for the school of the future that would help increase long-term memory.

The Brain Rules Schedule:
“In the school of the future, lessons are divided into 25-minute modules, cyclically repeated throughout the day. Subject A is taught for 25-minutes, constituting the first exposure. Ninety minutes later, the 25-minute content of subject A is repeated, and then a third time.”

All classes would follow such a schedule and classes would be extended into the summer to account for the necessary time required to follow such a schedule.

The Brain Rules Content Review Schedule:
“In the future school, every third or fourth day would be reserved for reviewing the facts delivered in the previous 72 to 96 hours. During these ‘review holidays,’ previous information would be presented in compressed fashion. Students would have the chance to inspect the notes they took during the initial exposures, comparing them with what the teacher was saying in the review.” 

The Brain Rules Homework Policy:
“It is quite possible that such models would eradicate the need for homework.” Why? Because homework, which serves to repeat exposure to content would not be necessary if the student is being re-exposed to the content in the school day.

The Brain Rules Grade Level Standards Changes:
“Today, students are expected to know certain things by certain grades. Curiously absent from this model is how durable that learning remains after the student completes the grade. Given that system consolidation can take years, might the ideas of grade-level expectations need amending? Perhaps learning in the long view should be thought of the same way one thinks of immune booster shots, with critical pieces of information being repeated on a yearly or semi-yearly basis.”

This is one are that John seems to me, to be off the mark in his assessment of education. In my experiences, critical ideas are re-visited through the grade levels in elementary school. Possibly junior and high schools need more re-visiting of important concepts.

Catalytic Questions:

Could you rearrange your school’s schedule to accommodate the Brain Rules school schedule idea?

Who would resist it? Who could assist you with it? Who would support it?

Do the Brain Rules ideas remind you of anything that you could draw on to adapt these ideas? Could you adapt part of these ideas?

In what ways could you modify these ideas to work for your classroom or school?

If you looked at the end result of these ideas, could you work backwards to develop a plan that would enable these goals to be reached in a manner suitable for your school?

In what ways are you already doing things that could be modified or adapted to the Brain Rules ideas?

What further information do you need to make these ideas a reality?

Based on the Brain Rules ideas, what activities are you currently doing that you should stop doing?

Are you mentally criticizing these ideas without giving them a chance to be thought through or explored?

Could one of these ideas serve as inspiration for something you are dissatisfied with?

Is there a role for technology in these ideas? If so, how might that look at your school?

Recommended Reading: 

Tips and Techniques for Memory Enhancement

Working Memory Capacity, Encoding, and Retrieval from Long-Term Memory

Learning About Swimming Takes Place Best At A Pool: Brain Rules Part 8

The Golden Moment of Learning: Brain Rules Part 7

Great Teaching and Presentation with the Brain Rules Lesson Plan: Brain Rules Part 6

Are You Paying Attention? -- Brain Rules Part 5

Theory of Mind-- Brain Rules Part 4

Billions of Inetelligences? --Brain Rules Part 3

Student and Teacher Relationships: Brain Rules Part 2

 Increase Test Scores with Exercise:Brain Rules Part 1

Open Model of Education vs. Closed Model of Education

What do you get when you combine a starfish, Napster, Kazaa, home-schools, spiders, organizations, internships, the Department of Education, and e-learning? Let's put them in the Education Innovation blender and take a look?

In my previous post, I explored the idea of what I call the Open Model of Education (OME) and the Closed Model of Education (CME).

Oddly enough, I began re-reading a book I read last summer, The Starfish and The Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom.

 

As I dove in, I was happily surprised to see right in Chapter 1, a discussion that tied in directly to my thinking on OME vs. CME.

“A centralized organization is easy to understand. Think of any major company or governmental agency . You have a clear leader who’s in charge, and there’s a specific place where decisions are made (the boardroom, the corporate headquarters, city hall). Nevins calls this organizational type coercive because the leaders call the shots."

Education today, attempts to control where students learn, what they learn, when they learn, and whom they learn from. Our educational system is the very definition of a centralized organization. The federal Department of Education tells the states what to do. State departments of education tell the counties what to do, counties tell the districts what to do, districts tell the principals, the principals tell the teachers, and the teachers tell the students. It is very structured, very systematic, very controlled, very rigid, and very closed.

“In a decentralized organization, there’s no clear leader, no hierarchy, and no headquarters.”
“Nevins calls this an open system, because everyone is entitled to make his or her own decisions. This doesn’t mean that a decentralized system is the same as anarchy. There are rules and norms, but these aren’t enforced by any one person. Rather, the power is distributed among all the people and across geographic regions.”

If you view the student as a leaders of their own learning, then they have the ability to decided for themselves the what, when, where, who, and how of their education. They must follow and meet certain expectations and norms, but they are not controlled by a centralized organization. A student is free to blend normal brick-and-mortar school, with home-school, with e-learning or virtual learning, occupational or trade schools, with other opportunities such as travel, trips to museums, internships, volunteering, etc. This blend is what I call the Open Model of Education. It closely matches the spirit of what the authors describe in the decentralized organization.

“Flexibility-shared power-ambiguity”

The time has come to stop resisting home school, occupational school, e-learning and virtual schooling, and view them as partners. Resisting is not going to work, and can create a situation in which each is working in isolation and competing against each other. Think of the recording industry fighting sites like Napster, Kazaa, or eMule.

The time has come to see all of us as sharing a role and a responsibility in the education of our students. We should be partnering with each other, not resisting or fighting against the other. If education or the student is the goal, there are multiple routes and means of reaching that education. If teaching is the goal, we will all fight for the limited resources or money, materials, time, and most importantly, the students themselves.

The time for the blended model of the Open Model of Education (OME) has arrived.

Catalytic Questions:

In what ways can we view each other as partners in the education of a student and not rivals in the teaching of a student?

What mistakes have we made in the past that we can learn from to improve education in the future?

What hunches do you have that can be applied to improving the future of education? How might things change or look like if your hunches are correct?

What “sacred cows” must be sacrificed for the betterment of our education system?

How might your persistence make a difference?

How might reversing our/your current approach or philosophy to education make an impact?

In the current era of education bashing, what is still viable and productive? In what ways could be take the good and throw out the bad?

In what ways are our typical approaches and view getting in the way of what could be possible?

What unintended consequences might come from the implementation of the OME? What unintended consequences do we already suffer from in the CME? What can do be done to prepare for or repair these consequences?

What underlying principles are at work in this discussion?

Recommended Reading: 

The Questions We Choose To Ask and Answer: The Open Model of Education

The Tutor Mentor Connection blog

The Starfish and The Spider wiki

Book Review: The Starfish and the Spider

The Starfish and the Spider:

Education for the 21st Century: A Charter

Idea Jar - Reach in and take one out - 7/23/08

DyKnow 5.1 adds new features and enhances the user interface!
Great software for monitoring collaborative note-taking and student screen monitoring
Thanks to ePirate

Lesson Writer Helps Teachers Quickly Conquer an Often Menial Task
Interesting software for writing lessons digitally.  Thanks to Mashable

Take two Matisses and call me in the morning

Harvard and Mount Sinai Medical colleges have begun taking its students to art museums. The goal: To improve young physicians’ observation and diagnostic skills. Thanks to Dan Pink

Labeling is Bad For Creativity
Creativity, EQ, and IQ in education. Thanks to Achievement Radio blog

Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
Check out idea 13, but they are all interesting. Thanks to Y Combinator.com

Alternative Assessment through Exhibition
Exhibitions as a valid means of alternative assessment. Thanks to Teacher Leadership Today

Social Notworking
Social networking sites banned in Mississippi district. Thanks to The Core Knowledge blog

Targets and Guidelines
Thoughts on standards, standardized testing, and NCLB. Thanks to The Faculty Room blog

14 Trends Of The New Educational Reality (Part 1-Trends 1-7)

What do you get when you combine a meatball sundae, home/school communication, brand management, the New York Times best sellers list, Google, homework, outsourcing, and the definitions of literacy? Let’s put them in the Education Innovation blender and find out.

In his book Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin describes 14 Trends of New Marketing. I put these trends under the lens of education and call them the New Reality.

Trend 1: Direct Communication and Commerce Between Producers and Consumers
Consumers demand speed. Businesses need to respond quickly to consumer demands or the consumer will go elsewhere. Consumers can now connect directly to the top of an organization. They expect a response. Technology is changing the way organizations and customers interact.

Our students and parents live in a world with the ability to communicate with an organization and expect a quick response. Is the use of technology in your school changing the way you interact with students and parents? Are you responding to the needs of your students and parents and communicating that response effectively? If students and parents can communicate directly with the school, how important is the response you give back? How quick do you respond? Do you view it as a burden or an opportunity to spread your educational vision and message?

Trend 2: Amplification Of The Voice Of The Consumer and Independent Authorities.
Every interaction with a consumer is an interaction with a critic (or potential critic).
Everybody, student, parent, community member has a voice that can be amplified through technology. What are they going to say about your school?  What are they going to say about your educational brand? (You do have a brand, whether you like it or not.)

The web remembers forever. A poorly written email can be posted in minutes to the web.  Blogs allow students, parents, and community members into instant publishers. YouTube allows them to become movie producers. What are the publishing or producing about you? You may have a point of view on an issue, but who is better able to get their message out, you or the student run blog posting pictures, YouTube videos, and podcasts? Your schools reputation is always on the line and on-line. What is being said about you?

Trend 3: Need For An Authentic Story As The Number Of Sources Increases
Stories spread, not facts. So what stories are being told about your school and your teachers? A story is a symbol of who you are. Do you know your symbol? Do you care? Why would anyone want to go to your school? What makes your teachers so great?

Technology is allowing for students and parents to share their stories about you. Are you sharing your own stories? Do you have an educational brand that you trying to spread? What kind of message is your school trying to spread? There is a story about your school, the question is, is it your story or somebody else’s version?

Trend 4: Extremely Short Attention Spans Due To Clutter
There is a multitude of choices and a deluge of interruptions for students and parents. Commercials went from a minute to thirty seconds to, in some cases, three seconds. A bestseller was on the New York bestsellers list for 22 weeks, now it’s on the list for two. Books are shorter. Not enough time to read the book, listen to the audio version in the car. YouTube has over 7 million video. Most are only watched for less than 10 seconds. If it’s not good we move on.

That is the world you student is living in. If the don’t like it, the switch it, drop it, or change it. They don’t have to wait for something better. They are in control.

What about in the classroom? How much time do you get to grab their attention, make it meaningful, and engage before they drop you? They may be forced to sit there, but they aren’t forced to learn. The world is catering to their desire to move on. Your teaching can’t afford to be good enough. It must be great or it won’t cut through all the clutter or the world they are living in. You can’t count on their attention and engagement. You have to compete for it and win it.

Trend 5: The Long Tail
“Any market of people with sufficient resources will get very pick on you.”
People want choice. Students and parents want choice. Education does not have to provide that choice. (For now) Students have to go to school. They have to go to school in your district. They may be allowed to move within your district, but for the most part, they are assigned to you. You didn’t have to earn them, they were just sent to you. But you can’t rely on that forever.

Your students and parents live in a world where they can find nearly any book they want at Amazon. More of them are watching YouTube videos than the top ten television shows. Online they can find a hundred times more inventory than a retail store. You can find nearly anything on Google. The digital world means products are easy to store and easy to customize to the individual need.

So, if they can find nearly anything they want or need online and have it customized to their needs, what makes you think they need your school? They can find the learning they want online, learn what they want, when they want, where they want, and at the pace they want. So why should they want you? What is it about your educational brand or story that makes them want to choose you?

Trend 6: Outsourcing
You assign the project or the paper and then your student goes home and out sources the work online to some student in India or Sri Lanka. Why not? A report you want, a report you shall get. It costs your students and parents to connect with people in any part of the world to share skills, abilities, and resources. Homework for sale via the Internet is a reality. There is not sense trying to stop it, it’s already out there. The question is how can you adjust your assignment to make them meaningful and engaging so the student won’t outsource the work.

It’s not just assignments. When I can hire online tutors, watch educational videos, or get language lessons through my web cam, outsourcing teaching is here too. What are you doing about that reality?  Maybe just you are just going to rely on the old model of, “You have to go here. You live here.”  That may work for you, but that is not the world your students are growing up in.

Trend 7: Google And The Dicing Of Everything
Having the teacher in your classroom is no longer a reason to believe that is where the teaching and learning is going to happen. Students are a few clicks away from being connected to people all around the world who are willing to teach and tutor.

Google has allowed us to find any piece of information or facts we would ever want to know. In fact, in the new reality, it is not the piece of information or fact; it’s how to find it. Students don’t want to memorize names, dates, formulas, etc., that they can just look up in Google. Why? Why memorize what is right at my fingertips? They key is learning how to find the facts or information. Google has changed literacy? It not longer memorizing the “what”, but knowing where and how to find the “what.”

We will look at Trends 8-14 in a later post.

Catalytic Questions:

How might your view of parent/student communication change if you knew it was being used to judge your school or yourself?

In what ways are you using technology to communicate with students and parents to spread your educational vision and brand? 

Is it effective? What might you change, add, or subtract from what you are currently doing?

Do you know what is being said about you and your school online?

Do you have an educational brand and are you managing it effectively?

In what ways are you or might you leverage technology to communicate your educational brand and your school’s story?

What is your school’s story?

How might your teaching change if you understood that you must compete and win your students’ attention?

What might this look like in the classroom?

Are you relying on the current lack of choice parents and students have, or are you thinking and preparing yourself for the power of choice they will soon demand?

If students and parents could choose, why would they choose you?
How might your thinking on assignments change based on the knowledge that students can outsource the work?

What might you do differently?

In what ways might the definition of knowledge and literacy change based on what Google has provided to every student?

Recommended Reading:

Literacy in the 21st Century

Why My Gym Is The Future of Education

The Questions We Choose To Ask and Answer: The Open Model of Education

The Future of Education

The Future of Education: Send the Lecture Home

Here Be Dragons: Exploring The Map of Critical Thinking

"Unknowns are frightening."
"With a made up concept and a few words, the unknown becomes simple and satisfying."

So goes the introduction to this very interesting video on Critical Thinking.
Thanks to HeyJude for sharing. (About 41 minutes long)

The Questions We Choose To Ask and Answer: The Open Model of Education

What do you get when you combine PLC's, a book on Creative Problem Solving, the V.F.W, home education, Seth Godin, PBS, and educational models? Let's put them in the Education Innovation blender and find out?

Schools, teachers, and school districts are always asking how it can increase student learning. Teachers and administrators alike ask themselves how we can increase student achievement, increase test scores, and improve teaching.

Grade level and department PLC’s focus on the five questions that DuFour created.
1.    What do we want to students to know?
2.    How will we know if they know it?
3.    What will we do for those who don’t know it?
4.    What will we do for those who already know it?
5.    How can we use our SMART goals and evidence of student learning to inform and improve our practice?

These are great questions. They help to direct teaching. But are they Catalytic Questions?
Tim Hurson, author of Think Better: An Innovator's Guide To Productive Thinking, says, "In my experience, one of the most common reasons that programs, products, and change initiatives don't work is that the wrong question has been asked."  The right question is what Tim calls the Catalytic Question. It was Tim who inspired me to put questions at the end of many of my posts. So, are we really asking the right questions?

The questions that education and DuFour ask come from what I call the “Closed Model of Education”, or CME. The questions we need to start asking are the questions of what I call the “Open Model of Education”, or OME.

And those questions are very different because the questions of the CME above assume one very important thing…

The teaching and the learning will be done in the classroom at a school.

The OME makes some very different assumptions, thus, asking some very different questions.

I view the OME something like this…

OME is about learning, not teaching. When you think about teaching, you limit the learning to what the educational organization supports. Think about it. If I asked you, “How can we improve instructional practices and teaching?” you would come up with choices and answers limited to what can be done at a school.

If I asked you, “How can students increase their learning?” then you are free to come up with any idea that can help a student learn. And students in the OME can learn, anywhere, at anytime, from anyone, using multiple models.

This is just a sampling of the differences.

A focus on student learning means that we have to allow for the fact that students can learn at home, on-line, on a job site, in a classroom, at a museum, at a lab, in a factory, and just about anywhere else that a student can think of.

Core knowledge is still essential, but student should be free to come up and seek out other learning opportunities. The OME allows that a student could learn just as well about the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq wars from a teacher, watching PBS, or visiting the local V.F.W. A student can learn about science in the classroom, but he or she can learn about science at a lab at a local company or hospital.

If student learning is the goal, then no source of student learning is off the table for the OME. While the CME must force fit everything into its highly regulated, top down control, standards based model. I ask you, which is more authentic and aligned with the current realities of the real world?

It simple comes down to the questions we decide as a nation and society to ask and answer.

How can we increase student achievement, test scores, and teaching?

Or

How can we increase student learning?

As Seth Godin says in his book Meatball Sundae…."It’s not an organization, It’s a movement."

Recommended Reading:

Are 21st century skills a solution to a problem that may not exist?
Check out the comment section of this post for a great and lively look at 21st Century Learning.

When Students Design Their Own Learning
ASCD blog. I am a member and highly recommend it.

A Whole New School

Future Overwhelmed

Digital Education Revolution: School Development Day - Teacher Professional Learning

Seek Innovation or Seek Greatness?

What does a Harvard business blogger, bad meals, school plans, parents, and innovation have in common? Let’s put them into the Education Innovation blender and take a look.

In his recent blog post at Real World Innovation, Harvard Business blogger Scott Berkun thinks about Why Innovation Is Overrated.

“When was the last time you, as a customer, called the support line for a product you own to complain about its lack of innovation? Or sent a meal back to the kitchen at a restaurant because it wasn't innovative enough? In the course of ordinary life the word innovation doesn't surface much, and this is good. Innovation, as a word, a concept, or an agenda, is entirely overrated. It's a vague, subjective term that distracts from what you're really trying to do: enjoy your life. Or in the case of a business: profit by making good things.”

Or, in the case of Education, trying to educate students. But, what Scott asks is true. When was the last time a parent came to your classroom or office and complained about a lack of innovation or original thinking? Students often complain that they are bored, but I have never had a student complain about a lack or creativity or innovativeness in my approach to a lesson or assignment. I have real several school plans, but I have never hears of anyone complaining about a lack of creativity or innovation in the plan.

As Scott says…

“The truth is making really good things is difficult -- it requires a commitment to craft, an attention to detail, and a love for work that has always been rare. And while we'd never call these three attributes innovations, it's the success of creating an organization that rewards these things that leads to the products we often herald, after they're done, as innovations.”

So maybe education lacks innovation because to be innovative is not rewarded, and in fact, may be ignored or punished. Maybe, education is so focused on ensuring that all the boxes are checked, the paperwork is in order, and, if anyone ever asks, you can provide that piece of paperwork. A commitment to details!

The fact is that the people in education I meet are generally committed to the craft of teaching and love their work. However, the bureaucracy of education is committed to measuring growth, monitoring programs, and maintaining itself. Innovation is not something large organizations do easily. Large organizations spend much of their time maintaining the organization and less time on innovation in the mission.

So, maybe as Scott says, the idea or concept of innovation is overrated and distracts us from what we are supposed to be doing. But, I ask, if what you are doing is not working something needs to change. Further, what if what you are doing is not aligning with or preparing your “product” for the needs and the reality of the society in which you are operating? Sounds to me like that organization needs some innovation…or whatever other words you would like to use.

Scott ends it with this...

"Instead of asking 'How can we be innovative?', a toothless and vague question with mostly useless answers, we should be asking 'How can we make great things?'"

Catalytic Questions:

When was the last time you felt truly innovative? What were the circumstances of that feeling? Can you reproduce those circumstances?

In what ways is your school or district committed to or supportive of innovation?

Thinking about a current problem or issue at your school or in your district, how might that problem or issue become a source of innovation?

How might a Peter Drucker, Seth Godin, or Edward De Bono think about your issue?

In what ways might asking “why” impact the problem or issue?

How might believing you are innovative help develop some new ideas?

In what ways might you be able to overcome the underlying principles of the educational bureaucracy to make things truly great?

What might that look like at your school?

Recommended Reading:

Do you doubt that anything is possible?

Tales from the Wonder Emporium: Visual and Creative Thinking

Why is visual and creative thinking such an accepted business strategy? Why not education. Take a look at this sllideshare. Don't you wish your school or district thought this way?

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Teach Students to be Pirates and Plagiarists?

So, what do you get when you combine a book on youth culture, a futurist, Thomas Edision, Disco, pharmaceuticals, Hollywood, the iPod, and school research reports? Let put in them in the Education Innovation Blender a take a look.

Is it piracy and plagiarism, or is it creativity and innovation?  Which do you suppose we should be teaching our students to do? My two previous posts have inspired this discussion.

Plagiarism and Pirates

Plagiarism Is A Good Thing?

We live in an age where anybody can produce, mix, or repurpose information and ideas.

When we pirate information and ideas, we may just be innovating new ideas and creating new ways of doing things.

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and musicians viewed it as piracy. He was pirating their music, recording it, and selling it. They feared the end of live performances, instead an entire industry was born, the music industry.

MP3 players existed prior to the iPod, but the iPod pirated that technology and created it’s own phenomena. Music lovers, wanting to share music with each other without paying, created digital music sites like Napster. They were pirating their way around and outside of what the music industry existed to do. Steve Jobs figured out that to beat the pirates he had to compete with them and built iTunes. The pirates ideas had become mainstream and put old music sellers out of business. It is piracy or innovation? Is it plagiarism or creativity?

The iPod itself is just a combination of pre-existing ideas; the battery, operating system, hard drive, screen, MP3 technology, etc.

Reggae, Disco, and Hip-hop music demonstrate that we can repurpose music into something new. The pirate old songs and create new and innovative versions. These versions become so popular that they create entirely new music genres. It is piracy or creativity?

Moviemakers, not wanting to pay high fees in New York pirates their way around the system by setting up studios in California. Today we call it Hollywood.

India reverse engineers drugs for the poor pirating what they themselves could not afford to do. Drug companies, sensing the good public relations they can benefit from, begin selling their drugs at huge discounts an in some cases giving them away. They respond to the pirates by creating an entirely new approach of serving the poor of the world. Piracy or creativity?

So, is piracy and plagiarism just another way of being creative and innovative? Are they are source of new ideas, methods, and models. Are there links to each other or are they mutually exclusive? 

A senior business executive needing the most current research on a company or economic trend asks his junior executive to find the best and most current information. The junior executive doesn’t start his or her own research project, rather he or she Googles the information looking for the most current research on the topic that has already been done by the most respected and knowledgeable experts. He or she copies it, rips it, digitizes it, scans it, re-purposes it, integrates it, synthesizes it, and puts into a usable document to give the senior executive. This is what we call good research.

In the classroom we call plagiarism.  So, it is plagiarism or creativity?

Most of the examples I shared, which come from Matt Mason, would be examples of plagiarism and cheating if they happened inside a classroom.

Doesn't there seem to be a disconnect from what we do in the classroom and what the real world expects of them? I know most of you are saying it's about the process. But if that is true, then why do we spend so much time evaluating and grading the result?

If it really is about process then Pat Dixon has an idea;

• Give the students a question they know nothing about.
• Give them 30 minutes to put together a 3000 word report on that question.
• Grade for Correctness in the answer
• Authoritativeness of sources used
• Uniqueness of of the pieced together report. 

Catalytic Questions:

In what ways could you re-purpose your research report assignments to develop real world skills that focus on the process, the correctness, the authoritativeness, and uniqueness of synthesis?

What might that look like in your classroom or school?

How does your current understanding of technology, business, and innovation impact your thoughts?

How might your students be better served with the assignments they work on?

In what ways have you been successful in the past in adjusting assignments to meet the changing needs of the students and the world they live in? How might you draw upon that experience?

In what ways does the discussion of plagiarism and pirating vs. creativity and innovation force you to think in new ways?

What are the underlying principles at work in this discussion and how does it/they impact your approach to education?

What if you were to reverse the process and have students examine existing reports and determine how well they meet the criteria for a good research report?

Which assignments could you substitute with these new ideas?

Recommended Reading: 

Where's the Respect? A 21st Century Learning Question

I Wish My School Building Looked Like This

Film Noir at the Innovate Building in Greenville, South Carolina, USA
Originally uploaded by olympusjgreen

http://www.cooltownstudios.com/

Why My Gym Is The Future of Education

What do my gym and the future of education have in common?  Let’s throw them in the Education Innovation blender and find out.

I belong to a gym is called Snap Fitness. Their motto is “Fast-Convenient-Affordable.”

They describe the Snap Fitness experience…

“Drive up, walk in, and work out whenever you want. Just minutes from your doorstep, our club is like a having a private gym in your backyard.

“Use your personal keycard for instant access to a safe, clean, comfortable facility packed with state-of-the-art exercise equipment and value-added services you’d never expect from a club our size.

“Enjoy the same workout experience as at those big-box health clubs – but without the crowded parking lots, long waiting lines and inflated fees.

“Time-saving convenience, money-saving value and fat-burning workouts – just another way we deliver a better experience and better results…”

I think the future of education will be similar to my gym. First, education in the future will be fast. It will be fast because students won’t even have to leave their house in many cases. E-learning and virtual learning will provide students the opportunity to learn right in their own homes. Teaching and content can be delivered at the speed of an Internet hook-up all over the world.

It will be convenient. Students will be able to learn anywhere or anytime that makes sense for them. Much like Snap Fitness says, “…our club is like having a private gym in your backyard,” the same will go for education. The web will bring learning to the student, regardless of where the student is and at a time that the student chooses. What could be more convenient?

My gym uses the personal key card to get into the gym, while our students will simply use their passwords to log into the personal learning portals. The learning will be of a quality similar to what they can get in the classroom, if not more so, because students will be able to pick and choose classes that best match their learning styles.

Great workouts at my gym are the great teaching and learning of the virtual school. Imagine the wealth of resources, including expert teachers, video, audio, interactive websites, podcasts, social networks, etc, that the virtual school can bring to students.

My gym says it is affordable (which it is), but so to will virtual education and e-learning. Think of the amount of money that could be saved if teachers taught from their homes or places of work and students learned from home or their places of work. No costs for building buildings, no costs for utilities, no need for busing, for maintenance, etc. Virtual learning could save districts money. Why open a new high school, when you can start a virtual one?

My gym and the future of education both share one other thing. You have to put in the hard work to get results.

Catalytic Questions:

What excuses are teachers, schools, and districts giving to avoid e-learning and virtual learning opportunities for your students?  How can you answer them?

In the same way I have hunches about the future of education, what hunches do you have and what are you doing about them?

In what ways might some “sacred cow” be holding up e-leaning in your school or district?  How can you overcome those beliefs?

In what ways might virtual learning be made more attractive to teachers and administrators in your district?

What is your sense of things to come: More of the same or big changes? In what ways are you preparing for what is coming?

How might you start developing the tools and methods that will be needed to succeed in an e-learning or virtual learning environment?

How might Professional Learning Communities change is such an environment?

What are the unintended consequences of these changes?

What analogies or metaphors do you see?

Recommended Reading:

An education is…

Get an MIT or Yale Education Free

eLearning Technology

Fear of Virtual High Schools

A Recognition of Genius?

Teachers Doomed To The Fate of The Ancient Scribes?

What does Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody, scribes, the printing press, teachers, web technology, virtual learning, and a barking robot all have in common?  

    

Let's put them into the Education Innovation blender and take a look.

What ever happened to scribes?  Scribes were one of the most essential of professions in the 1400’s. Few people could write, and it was the scribes that hand copied existing written work. If not for scribes, the loss of ideas, wisdom, and knowledge would have been lost through the ravages of time on existing written work. The scribe was crucially important and irreplaceable, for it was the scribe who was able to preserve and pass on the knowledge of the past and current.

Then, one day, scribes became outdated. They had been replaced by movable type. It didn’t happen all at once of course. For a time scribes worked simultaneously with publishers using the printing press, but the reality was that the society in which they labored had fundamentally changed. The protestant reformation and the printing of bibles in many languages were transforming the society in which scribes and printers worked.

Scribes, not wanting to lose ground to the printers, published a very eloquent defense of scribes. The hypocrisy of it was that they used the printing press to publish it. Times had changed. The society was different and the technology of the day, the printing press, allowed for those changes to continue and spread. Scribes were no longer essential as they had once been before, swept out in the revolution of the reformation and the bible in many languages. The printing press was the technology that made it easier, not the cause.

As Clay Shirky writes, “Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary times, because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession. In most cases, those threats are also threats to society…”

He continues, “But in some cases the change that threatens the profession benefits society, as did the spread of the printing press…”

Education and classroom teachers are in much the same situation as the scribes of the 1400’s were. How is that you ask?  Simple, we are in a revolution of how our society connects, communicates, and in many regards, how it functions. The technology of the web has changed how we communicate. It has made it possible to communicate and teach from virtually anywhere. Learning is no longer limited to the teacher in the classroom or the brick and mortar school. Learning can take place anyplace and at anytime with web technologies. Online courses, online schools, etc. have arisen and benefited from the revolution of our 2.0 society.

The train has left the station on virtual education. It may not be heavily adopted yet, but it will. Why wouldn’t it?  We in education can resist, fight it, and even argue against it, but like the scribe of the 1400’s, we are living in revolutionary times and we are working along side virtual schools, teachers, and classrooms. The shift is already beginning, the question for us becomes, adapt to it and adopt it, or go the way of the scribe. I think we are much too smart not to do the former, and far too important to do the latter.

But so did the scribes.

Derek Baird at his excellent blog, Barking Robot has an excellent post in which he summarizes some of the most current research on e-learning. Take a look.

Catalytic Questions:

In what ways might your old beliefs or assumptions about education need to be eliminated?

How might you combine web based technologies and virtual learning opportunities into your educational plan?

In what ways would you need to modify your existing instructional model and methods to meet the needs of online or virtual teaching and learning?

If you imagined yourself as a student, what sorts of things would you want in online education or virtual learning?

How might you allow your school or district’s virtual teaching and learning programs develop? In what areas might you need to force the action?

In what ways might you adapt the online-based technologies you use frequently to develop your online education plan?

What else might you need to think about?

Where else can you look for ideas, methods, and models for online or virtual learning?

9 Signs of a Losing Organization

Does this sound like education?  Could this be your school or district? 

From the Idea Management Systems blog comes this post The 9 Signs of a Losing Organisation

1. Fuzzy Vision
2. Lack of Leadership Skills
3. Discouraging Culture:
4. High Bureaucracy
5. Lack of Initiative
6. Poor Vertical Communication
7. Poor Cross-functional Collaboration
8. Poor Teamwork
9. Idea and Knowledge Management

Do any of these jump out at you?  One of the least obvious for education is number 9, Idea and Knowledge Management. Too many teachers are spending too much time in their rooms and not enough time sharing their ideas, knowledge, and wisdom. Too many principals and educational managers are not encouraging or putting in place systems for formal sharing of ideas and knowledge.

No school staff knows how much they know until they know what each other knows. (Read it again!)

Catalytic Questions:

What places are you failing to look for ideas or answers to problems?

In what ways could you get curious about what your staff knows?

How might your assumptions about knowledge and ideas be getting in the way of learning from your staff?

What if you were able to know everything your staff knows. How might that change instruction at your school?

What might you have done in the past that could be applied to Idea and Knowledge Management at your school site?

What resources or solutions are available to you that you may have overlooked?

Idea Jar - Reach in and take one out - 7/14/08

Video Casting Lectures, The Future of Academia?

The 21st Century banana

Summer Online EL: Thinking Skills Now

Why Educational Change is Hard

Developing innovative minds

Walkthroughs and Learning Objectives

SearchMe: Visual Search Engine

Repeat to Remember, Remember to Repeat

How to decide which ideas are best for you

Top 10 Learning Tools

Innovation Dashboard...