Education Innovation

Bringing A Purple Cow To School

"We run our schools like factories. We line kids up in straight rows, put them in batches (called grades), and work very hard to make sure there are no defective parts. Nobody standing out, falling behind, running ahead, making a ruckus."

 

"Playing it safe. Following the rules. Those seem like the best ways to avoid failure. And in school, they may very well be."

"We've been raised with a false belief: We mistakenly believe that criticism leads to failure. From the time we get to school, we're taught that being noticed is almost always bad. It gets us sent to the principal's office, not to Harvard. Nobody says, 'Yeah, I'd like to set myself up for some criticism!' And yet...the only way to be remarkable is to do just that."

Seth Godin from Purple Cow

Lateral Wisdom

"Some of the people you think will not be able to help you in any way know people who can help you in ways you cannot believe." Kimbal Musk

Social Media and The Role of Personal Branding In Education

I believe we live in a time when Education Brand Management is quickly becoming a skill all educators will need. Others agree.

Dan Schwabel of the Personal Branding Blog has recently had a great series of post on the use of Social Media and the importance of understanding Personal Branding in education.

In part 1, they discussed why blogs are important in classrooms and the advantages of using blogs as a learning vehicle.

In part 2, they talked about the relevancy of “Blackboard,” which is an online teaching center that many colleges use and how the teachers are actually using social networks, blogs and wiki’s for their class.

In part 3,they talk about the concept of Personal Branding in education

 "The idea is that we can think of the identities we project onto others as our own brand and that we can apply advertising and marketing principles to shape what we want others to think of that brand - all within ethical guidelines of course. That means we shouldn’t abuse the anonymity of the Internet to present a self that has nothing in common with our true self. Instead, we should put our best self forward and think about the impressions our online actions will create."

"In an age where the boundaries between private and public life are becoming increasingly blurred and personal (and corporate) reputations are defined by Google results, it is crucial to monitor and define our online identities. We need to start thinking of those Google results as our resume and clean up anything that doesn’t belong there. Unfortunately, students oftentimes don’t think about the implications of their online actions until it is too late and their reputation has been damaged. The latest figure I’ve seen suggested that 75% of employers Google job candidates before making a hiring decision and that roughly 1/3 of recruiters have eliminated candidates because of what their search turned up. That alone should be reason enough to learn about personal branding!"

I previously wrote...

As readers of this blog know, I believe that technology, education, marketing, and brand are on an eventual collision course that will create Educational Brands for teachers, schools, and districts. Teachers, schools, and districts will have marketing brands created by students, parents, test scores, and any number of available data streams in the coming years. Much as business has had to come to terms with their brand and reputation, so too, I believe, will teachers, schools, and districts have to comes to terms with the need for brand management.

I call this Educator Brand Management. Dan calls it Personal Branding. The point is we are on the road to being de-privatized as educators. Think about the recent story of L.A. City Teachers being evaluated with publically available data by private researchers and then having the story printed in the L.A Times.

(Los Angeles Teacher Ratings)

The recent Education Nation T.V. special on MSNBC has demonstrated that education has lost control of the narrative and are being defined by others. Perception, as they say, is reality--even if it isn't. Education's brand is currently being defined by people outside of education, rather than educators.

We need to begin to think about what that means for us on-line and off.

Recommended Reading:

Should you be on Facebook?  David Truss says yes: When facing the issue of Facebook,
our students are there, and we should be there too!

Beth Holmes deals with the personal implications of David's idea.

The Groundswell and Your Educational Brand Management

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

Education Brand Management

How Strong Is Your Educational Brand?

 

Lateral Wisdom--Steven Johnson on "Where Good Ideas Come From"

The Missing Courses- 14 Courses For The Future

The newest edition of Wired magazine has an article that details 7 essential skills that, “You didn’t learn in college.”

“It’s the 21^st Century. Knowing how to read a novel, craft an essay, and derive the slope of a tangent isn’t enough anymore. You need to know how to swim through the data deluge, optimize your prose for Twitter, and expose statistics that lie…. Call it the neoliberal arts: higher learning for highly evolved humans.”

Here are Wired University’s course offerings

1.   Statistical Literacy- Mathematics

Why Take This Course?

We are mislead by numbers and by our misunderstanding of probability.

What You’ll Learn:

How to parse polls, play the odds, and embrace uncertainty.

 

2.   Post-State Diplomacy- Political Science

Why Take This Course?

As the world becomes evermore atomized, understanding the new leaders and constituencies becomes increasingly important.

What You’ll Learn:

How to practice statecraft without states.

 

3.   Remix Culture-Humanities

Why Take This Course?

Modern artists don’t start with a blank page or empty canvas. The start with preexisting works.

What You’ll Learn:

How to analyze—and create—artwork made out of other artworks.

 

4.   Applied Cognition-Neurosciene

Why Take This Course?

You have to know the brain to train the brain.

What You’ll Learn?

How the mind works and how you can make it work for you.

 

5.   Writing for New Forms- Composition

Why Take This Course?

You can write a cogent essay, but can you write it in 140 characters or less?

What You’ll Learn

How to adapt your message to multiple formats and audiences—human and machine.

 

6.   Waste Studies-Economics

Why Take This Course?

Waste is the single biggest drag on our productivity—and it’s everywhere.

What You’ll Learn?

How to become a smarter consumer, investor, and conserver.

 

7.   Domestic Tech- Vocational Studies

Why Take This Course?

We’ve lost touch with the act of making, repairing, and upgrading physical objects.

What You’ll Learn:

How to apply hard science and engineering to everyday life.

 

So that is Wired’s list. What would you list look like? With thanks to Wired magazine, what follows is a list of the 7 class offerings at my University of Education Innovation.

8.   Psychology and Management of Change- Industrial Psychology

Why Take This Course?

Change is a constant in our organizations and our personal lives.

What You’ll Learn

The CiNO—Change is Normal Organization—built on the premise of change and the psychological tools to deal with personal change.

 

9.   Questioning 101- Philosophy

Why Take This Course?

Great results start with great questions.

What You’ll Learn

How to ask the right questions that lead to the right answers.

 

10.   Art of Edge Craft- Multi-disciplinary Studies

Why Take This Course?

Edges are the fertile ground where innovation is found by discovering unmet needs and unexploited opportunities

What You’ll Learn?

How to find innovative ideas by searching the “edges” of your current knowledge, operations, and field of expertise.

 

11.  Network Management- Humanities

Why Take This Course?

Networks enable people to act together in new ways and in situations where collective collaborative action was not possible before.

What You’ll Learn?

How to form up physical and virtual teams of experts and non-experts and leverage different types of relationships and collaboration.

 

12.  Digital Habitat and Ecosystem Engineering- Computer Science

Why Take This Course?

Technology is increasingly allowing for cross-age, pro-amateur, and self-directed work in multiple environments.

What You’ll Learn

How to learn, collaborate, and interact via technologies across the multiple habitats of home, work, local and global.

 

13.   Philosophy of Lateral Wisdom- Philosophy

Why Take This Course?

You will discover the power of omni-directional wisdom

What You’ll Learn

How to develop, share, or attract ideas through individual creative thinking and creative problem solving, the great minds of history, wisdom of teams, groups, networks, and the crowd.

 

14.  Design Thinking- Arts and Sociology

Why Take This Course?

Because our society is facing more Wicked Problems for which current solutions are inadequate.

What You’ll Learn?

How to design for the human experience through empathy, ethnography, and integrative thinking.

 

For Further Studies:

"The Making The Change" Program

Scott Belsky: How To Avoid The Idea Generation Trap

Your School's Secret Change Agents

School change is a challenging, necessary, and sticky business. Too often though, it begins with the search for the negative. Putting on, as thinking expert Edward de Bono would say, our “Black Hat.”

It’s a story that has been told a thousand times. A school needs to improve, to “fix what is broken” and it is up to the principal to identify what isn’t working, develop a plan to improve or repair the issues, and maybe hires a few consultants along the way to help.

What if, we started with de Bono’s “Yellow Hat?” Might the search for solutions began with finding those people at the school who are already succeeding and thriving in spite of the challenges and obstacles they face?

Because, as Harvard Business Review authors Richard Tanner Pascale and Jerry Sternin in their article “Your Company’s Secret Change Agents” point out….

“Somewhere in your organization, groups of people are already doing things differently and better. To create lasting change, find areas of positive deviance and fan their flames.”

Here is an “uncommon sense” approach to school change adapted from their article.

 

Traditional Approach To School Change	Positive Deviance Approach To School Change
Principal or Administrator as Path Breaker Primary ownership and momentum for the school change comes from the principal's office. Teachers and staff leave it up to principal to discover what isn't working and fix it.	Leadership as Inquiry Principal or administrator facilitates search; the school staff takes ownership of the quest for change. The teachers look around for positive deviance, those teachers, departments, or grade levels that are doing it differently and better.
Outside In Outside consultants are hired to identify and share best practices.	Inside Out School staff looks for and identifies preexisting solutions (what is working) and amplifies them across the school.
Deficit Based Principal deconstructs common practices and recommends best-practice solutions. The implication to teachers is "Why aren't you as good as your peers?"	Asset Based Teachers and staff leverage preexisting solutions practiced by those teachers who succeed against the odds.
Logic Driven Teachers "think" into new ways of teaching and instructing.	Learning Driven Teachers teach and instruct into new ways of "thinking."
Vulnerable To Transplant Rejection Resistance arises from ideas imported or imposed from outside consultants and or district office.	Open To Self-Replication Latent wisdom and knowledge of teachers and staff on site is tapped within the school walls to circumvent the school's culture/social reaction to outsiders.
Flows From Problem Solving To Solution Identification Best practices are applied to problems defined within the context of existing parameters.	Flows From Solution Identification To Problem Solving Possible source of solutions is expanded through discovery of new parameters.
Focused On The Protagonist Engages school stakeholders who would be conventionally associated with the problem.	Focused On Enlarging The Network Identifies school stakeholders beyond those directly involved with the problem.