Education Innovation

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

Plagiarism and Pirates

In a previous post I asked if Plagiarism Is A Good Thing?

What about piracy?  That is the question Matt Mason explore in his book The Pirates Dilema: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism.

He shares some very interesting thoughts in this video about why pirates are a good thing. Remember, our students are the future pirates.

| View | Upload your own

Education Innovation Is A Stop On The Post2Post Virtual Book Tour

On Monday, July 14th, Education Innovation will be the first stop on the Idea Sandbox Post2Post Tour for the book Jack's Notebook  a business novel about creative problem solving by Greg Fraley.

Please make sure you come back to read Greg's interview on Monday, July 14th. 

July 2008

Jack's Notebook

by Gregg Fraley
Author Site | Amazon US | Amazon UK

Site	Date
Education Innovation by Rob Jacobs	Mon, July 14
The Naked Idea by John Lepp	Tue, July 15
Marketing Fresh Peel by Chris Wilson	Wed, July 16
InnoBlog	Thur, July 17
The Brand Chef by Andrew Clark	Fri, July 18

See you on Monday!

Immeasurement: Sign of a Misearable Job- Part 2

Part 2

The Three Sings of a Miserable Job

Immeasurement

“Basically, a job is bound to be miserable if it doesn’t involve measurement.”

As those of us in education are acutley aware of, measurement means test scores. Test scores, after all, are a valid measurement. They are used to generate data which, in turn, is then used to direct instruction. While the public considers these valid measurements of who were are as educators, I certainly don’t measure myself by one test taken by students on a single day or a single week. I don’t judge the quality of my work by student test scores. I hope you don’t either. So the question becomes, how do we measure ourselves as professional educators?

“…if a person has no way of knowing if they’re doing a good job, even if they’re doing something they love, they get frustrated.”

How many times have you driven home and wondered what kind of job you did that day?  Principals and administrators rarely visit your class frequently enough or long enough to give you feedback that is meaningful each day. What I am talking about is being able to answer honestly to yourself each and every day how you are doing as an educator. We each need some objective criteria to measure ourselves by.

“Employees must be able to gauge their progress and level of contribution for themselves. They cannot be fulfilled in their work if their success depends on the opinions of whims of another person…”

We can’t wait for infrequent visits from administrators or end of year test scores to tell us how we are doing each day.

“It’s about lack of feedback.”

We each need to develop our set or list of criteria that we can measure each day. Don’t we all want to know how we are doing? It’s human nature to want to know how we doing? We want to know we are doing a good job. We want to know that we are doing it right.

“…objective evidence that tell you you’re doing something right. Even supposedly exciting jobs get old when there’s no way of measuring progress.”

Take this example from Hollywood. People who work on films don’t know if they have done a good job because, “by the time you know what the ratings or ticket sales are, it’s months and months after you’ve finished the project.” 

Imagine it. Every day they worked on the film, they had no way of knowing if they were doing a good job. They had to wait until the film was released, ticket sales measured, and reviewed by critics before they knew if they had done a good job.

“…if you don’t get a daily sense of measureable accomplishment, you go home at night wondering if your day was worthwhile.”

What to measure? “…always measure the right things. If you measure the wrong things, people still lose interest.”

Here is a list of things that a principal might measure their day by.

How many classrooms did you visit today?
How many PLC agendas or minutes did you take a look at today?
How many or who did you coach today?
What articles/books/resources did you provide to your staff?
How many parents did you talk to?
How many teachers did you affirm?
How many students did you spend time talking with?
How much time did you spend out at recess or lunch?
How many/much one-on-one coaching/training did you have with your support staff?

How would you measure your day?

Rob

The Great Debate on the Multi-tasking Virus

My previous post Are You Paying Attention? -- Brain Rules Part
discussed the issue of the brain and it's ability to pay attention and how we can better hold our learners' attention.

I came across this post from one of my favorite blogs...

The multi-tasking virus

Nick quotes from an essay written for Tim Ferriss's blog, by Josh Waitzkin, the former chess champion who was the subject of the book and subsequent film Waiting for Bobby Fisher. He writes of his recent experience in returning to his alma mater, Columbia, and sitting in on a class taught by Dennis Dalton.

"Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief). From my perspective in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes!

"When the class was over I rode the train home heartbroken, composing a letter to the students, which Dalton distributed the next day. Then I started investigating. Unfortunately, what I observed was not an isolated incident. Classrooms across America have been overrun by the multi-tasking virus. Teachers are bereft. This is the year that Facebook has taken residence in the national classroom. Students defend this trend by citing their generation’s enhanced ability to multi-task. Unfortunately, the human mind cannot, in fact, multi-task without drastically reducing the quality of our processing."

I found this very timely considering my previous post. However, the most interesting part of Nick's post is happening in the comments section. There is some great ideas being shared and a  wonderful debate about the quote. I do hope you will take a look

Protect Your Rep!--Teacher Brand Management

As they say, “Image is everything.” So I was struck by a story I watched on the news the other day. The story reported that many teachers are posting pictures of themselves on their Facebook sites. Not a big deal, but these pictures showed the teachers engaged in hardcore partying (shots, beer bongs, etc.) or pretending to be arrested, grabbing others in “those” places and generally acting wild and crazy. I have no problem with their acting wild and having fun. I just question their judgment in posting the pictures to Facebook or Myspace. In the age of transparency it’s about teacher brand management.

In this technology driven era, parents, students, your peers, and your boss are viewing these sites. These sites are part of who you are as a teacher. This technology driven, open communication era, where everything is being digitized, shared across the net, and commented on by others is a reality you must deal with. Your personal teacher brand is at stake. Anything you don’t want your superintendent to see or read, better not go up on the net. What parent wants to see pictures of their child’s teacher beer bonging or doing belly shots? What teacher wants their kids to read, “I teach math, but I suck at it myself?”

Brand management is the name of the game. You are going to have to learn the rules of the road in managing your personal teaching brand. Everything you post on your Facebook or Myspace accounts, everything you blog about or comment on, your test scores, and any other piece of information about who you are and how you teach that is on the net is going to shape your personal brand. You must brand yourself, craft your image, or, it will be done for you.

These teachers may have assumed that their private lives were their own. But, the minute they posted photos of themselves on the net, the private become public and their brand was impacted. Your personal teaching brand will be impacted (positively or negatively) by everything you do in the 2.0 web landscape. Which sites do you save to del.icio.us, which blogs do you comment on, what did you Twitter about, what pictures did you post on Flickr? It all adds up to your brand as a teacher. You may not like it, but it is reality.

The public is becoming more and more savvy consumer of education. Examining the teachers who teach their kids is becoming part of it. You have a brand, the question is, are you in control of it?  Do you know what your brand is? 

Early Innovation and Creativity Education

Gordon MacKenzie is sort or a personal hero of mine. Though he has now passed away, I still turn to his book In Orbit Around the Giant Hairball for inspiration. In his book he relates a famous and oft repeated story about a trip to visit an elementary school.

As he meet with each grade level, he related to them that he is an artist. He would look around the room and notice all the student work and then wonder aloud who had created all the wonderful artwork.

He would then ask, “How many artists are there in the room.”  “Please raise your hands.”
The responses were very telling. In kindergarten and first grade class rooms, every student threw their hand up in the air. In second grade classrooms, about three-fourths raised their hands in response. In third grade, only a few students help up their hands, some very timidly. So it went, each grade a little worse than the one before it until he finally reached sixth grade. In response to Gordon’s question, most students looked around to see if anyone would admit to being an artist, as if such an admission was a violation of group norms.

In the span of Kindergarten to sixth grade, students had un-learned their naturally tendency to be an “artist.” Why?

Sir Ken Robinson has been the rage lately on the web. He gave a talk at the T.E.D conference several years ago about how schools systematically kill student creativity. I posted a clip of his talk several months back. You can find it here (Is Creativity As Important As Literacy). I am hoping to finally get to his book one of these days.

But there are so many people who seem to get it. I was very interested in what Doreen Lorenzo had to say at frogblog in his post Innovation Needs to be Nurtured Early.

He says…

“I believe that the emphasis on this frantic search for innovation is a result of our inability to foster this concept starting at the elementary school level. Shouldn’t we all be innovators? Part of what makes us human is our ability to think and reason. With that in mind, innovation should be part of our fiber. Why can’t children maintain their creative innovation past the 2nd grade? At some point the concept of innovation is ripped out of their souls. They are told to follow the rules, prepare for the standardized tests and think about getting a good job that pays well.”

In an age where standardized tests are the measuring stick by which schools and students are measured, we are creating an environment where we can’t afford to spend the time necessary to allow children to be as creative as they can be. We focus on getting the one right answer for each question because this is what the system has forced us into.  Politicians do not brag about the quality of educational programming, or how school X has made growth over time. Newspapers can’t print growth over or quality teaching. They can print a test score. The can print it next to the scores of other schools. It is very neat and orderly. Who is good and who is bad is a matter of running your finger up and down a column of scores.

Doreen goes on to say…

“Finding great creative talent continues to be the biggest issue in our world where in reality it should be the easy part. However, since schools begin to dismiss the notion of creativity once a child leaves kindergarten, the pool of applicants gets very small by the time they actually enter the workforce. How can we shift the focus to allow kids to explore, think bigger, reward their drive and ambition as not just an anomaly but a must-have in today’s world? Instead, creative kids are often labeled ‘creative,’ which means ‘different.’ And different is too often not a good word for a child.”

Education is beginning to have the conversation, but with much in education, the wheels turn very slow. Doreen’s voice is another to add to the growing call for change. I for one believe in Tom Peters call for NO INCREMENTALISM. But that is the prerogative of the idealist. I hate to wait.

Also check out these posts.

Free Your Mind

Color Within The Lines

Do We Limit Our Children's Creativity?

21st Century School Design

From Flux..

“Why do schools look the way they do? Why is there a chasm between widely acknowledged best practice principles and the actual design of a majority of school facilities? Why has the disconnect between learning research and learning places been so difficult to repair?”

"These  are some of the questions posed by American architects Prakash Nair and Randall Fielding – who call themselves both School Architects and ‘Change Agents for Education’. Nair and Fielding’s take on the built environment is that it’s not only the place of learning but also ‘the psyche of learning’, impacting people’s emotions, relationships and behaviours and ultimately the teaching and learning methods that are employed.

"Nair and Fielding feel that one of the biggest barriers to innovation in school design is the lack of a common design vocabulary that all school stakeholders can share. They’ve developed an approach and a resultant book called The  Language of School Design: Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools."

The school of the 21st century might be composed of various designs to meet specific needs. The authors listed 3 example terms that help identify the concept.

• Cave Space –       places for individual study, reflection and quiet reading
• Watering Hole       Space – places to learn from peers
• Campfire Space       – places to learn from experts and storytellers

Working at a school site that is over 50 years old has created some interesting problems. The layout, design, and infrastructure are simply not able to meet the needs of the 21st century education.

I was intrigued by this article on the Economist website. It seems that architecture is going through a change to meet the demands and needs of the 21st century.

“The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is ‘a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces’ such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously ‘a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces’”.

Could you imagine a school campus that looks like this?

“FRANK GEHRY, a celebrity architect, likes to cause aesthetic controversy, and his Stata Centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did the trick. Opened in 2004 and housing MIT’s computer-science and philosophy departments behind its façade of bizarre angles and windows, it has become a new Cambridge landmark. But the building’s most radical innovation is on the inside. The entire structure was conceived with the nomadic lifestyles of modern students and faculty in mind. Stata, says William Mitchell, a professor of architecture and computer science at MIT who worked with Mr Gehry on the centre’s design, was conceived as a new kind of ‘hybrid space’”.

“This is best seen in the building’s ’student street’, an interior passage that twists and meanders through the complex and is open to the public 24 hours a day. It is dotted with nooks and crannies. Cafés and lounges are interspersed with work desks and whiteboards, and there is free Wi-Fi everywhere. Students, teachers and visitors are cramming for exams, flirting, napping, instant-messaging, researching, reading and discussing. No part of the student street is physically specialised for any of these activities. Instead, every bit of it can instantaneously become the venue for a seminar, a snack or romance.”

I can hear directors of Maintenance and Operations groaning now. I am sure janitors across the country are reaching for the Excedrin. Principals are readying for the ulcer from all the worry that this architecture design will create. Or, maybe, we could see past the potential problems and embrace the potential benefits of the architecture of our schools meeting the needs of the flexible, cooperative, collaborative, tech-savvy students of the 21st century.

Do Those Who Teach, Learn and Innovate?

No organization should be better at learning than the organizations that teach people how to learn. Therefore, it would follow that education should be the best organization in terms of learning ability of capability.

On his post (Innovation = Learning) on his blog, Keith Sawyer discusses an article in the Fall 2007 issue of Sloan Management Review, by Joaquín Alegre and Ricardo Chiva. They studied organizations high in organizational learning capability (OLC) and identified five core features of high OLC companies:

1.    Experimentation
2.    Risk taking
3.    Interaction with the external environment
4.    Dialogue
5.    Participative decision making.

Keith shares some of his thoughts from his research on each of the five core features.

(1) Experimentation:
“Experimentation as defined by these authors, produces a flow of new ideas that challenge the established order.”

Does education tend to toward challenging the established order or supporting the established order?

(2) Risk taking:
“Risk taking is just what it sounds like: the tolerance for ambiguity and errors.  And as I’ve found, innovative organizations foster idea generation and tolerate failure.”

Does education posses a tolerance for ambiguity and errors. Does education foster idea generation and in what ways does it to do this. How about tolerating failure? Where does education fall on the spectrum or encouraging or discouraging ideas with the potential to fail?

(3) Interaction with the external environment:
“Interaction with the external environment is what I call “collaborating with customers” and is associated with innovative networks that I call collaborative webs in my book Group Genius.  Deborah Ancona, in her 2007 book X-Teams, has likewise discovered that successful teams have an outward focus, and strong social network ties with people outside of their team.”

Has education developed an outward focus? In what ways has education collaborated with its “customer base?” How has education fostered strong social networks with people outside of their classrooms, schools, and districts?

(4) Dialogue and (5) participative decision making:
“Dialogue and participative decision making are what I call improvisation–a style of communication and an organizational culture that is egalitarian, open to flows across status levels.  Improvisational organizations excel at a type of dialogue that opens up possibilities, a style of conversation in which new and unexpected ideas emerge.”

In what ways has education embraced dialogue and participative decision making? How could education benefit from a greater use of dialogue and participative decision making? Does education encourage idea sharing across job functions and management levels?

Keith concludes by saying, “I firmly believe that organizations high in learning ability are more likely to be innovative organizations, and I’m delighted to read of this fascinating study confirming the link.”

I too hope that education has developed a high learning ability because we need all the innovation we can get. I think the jury is still out whether we who are high in teaching ability are also high in learning ability.

Please take a look at this great post on the
Freakanomics Blog-  How Can We Measure Innovation? A Freakonomics Quorum

HOW Week Part 2: Reach Out and Trust Somebody

Part 2

HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business (and in Life)

By: Dov Seidman

Do you know your purpose?  Do you have a purpose? 

Most in education would say their purpose is to make a difference for kids or to reach a child. Whatever your purpose is, we all feel called to do or be apart of something greater than ourselves. We want to connect with others. We want to help! What does it mean to connect with others and help?

Dov Seidman says, “We help strangers as well as those we know. This behavior- called altruistic helping—is one of the things that separates us from most other animals.”

Seidman cites a study conducted by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The study found that children as young as 18 months helped an unknown adult complete a series of tasks. According to Seidman, “Children with barely developed verbal skills were able to tell the difference between an individual needing help and one who made a decision that made help unnecessary. From their study, Warneken and Tomasello concluded that, ‘even very young children have a natural tendency to help other persons solve their problems, even when the other person is a stranger and they receive no benefit at all.’”

In education, depending on the situation we would call this cheating or small group. What is clear is that students need time to collaborate and share ideas with each other, maybe more than we would assume.

As I posted previously, this idea is especially true in the digital age.
From: David Weinberger- Everything Is Miscellaneous
“Nor could the disconnect get much wider between the official state view of education and how our children are learning. In most American households, the computer on which the students do their homework is likely connected to the Net. Even if their teachers let them use only approved sources on the Web, chances are good that any particular student, including your son or daughter, has four or five instant messaging sessions open as he or she does homework. They have friends with them as they learn. In between chitchat about the latest alliances and factions among their social set, they comparing answers, asking for help on tough questions, and complaining. Our children are doing homework socially, even though they’re being graded and tested as if they’re doing their work in isolation booths. But in the digital order, their approach is appropriate: Memorizing facts is often now a skill more relevant to quiz shows than to life.”

Just like you, our students want to reach out and connect with others. Why do we spend so much time trying to prevent it?

All people, students, teachers, and administrators want to connect, and we want to trust. When is comes to the famous saying, “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.” Seidman says, “First impressions, it seems, do count. Humans are biologically hardwired to make snap decisions to trust or distrust others.”

Think of the implications of this. According to Seidman, students are hardwired to make a snap decision about trusting the teacher. Teachers are hardwired to make snap decision to trust their administrator, or vice versa. The question becomes, how does one gain instant trust?  What must one do or not do?

Seidman says, “It would seem that humans, at a very early stage of mental development are hardwired with the ability and desire to connect with and help others, despite the fact that doing so engenders great risk and returns no obvious reward.” 

In other words, it is all about relationships. We want to connect with others and help even if we get nothing from the relationship. It is simply part of who we are. To do this we must put our trust on the line. We give the other person the opportunity to misuse this trust. But imagine if we all operated the other way. Only help those who have proven trustworthy and when you get some reward from helping. Not a world any of us would want to live in I am sure.

So to connect with our students or with our staff, we must seek to connect with them and trust them FIRST, knowing that they can abuse this trust. We must be the first to put it on the line to make that connection, give that help, and seek their trust.

The good news, Seidman cites medical research conducted by Paul Zak, chair, department of economics at Claremont Graduate University, adjunct professor of neurology at Loma Linda University, and founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies that shows, “when you trust someone, their brain responds by making more oxycotin, which allows them to trust you in return. Reciprocity—doing unto others as they do unto you—seems therefore to be a biological function; trust begets trust.”

But you have to trust first. You have to risk it. If you want your students and staff to trust you, you have to take the risk and trust them first. It is the “HOW” of our relationships.

“We feel in our guts that keeping promises and connecting with others are what gives our lives meaning, and most of us seek meaning in our lives. These connections give our live significance. That is why, both biologically and culturally, mastering ways of building better interpersonal synapses with the people around us by getting our HOWS right is so germane to our success today. If we live now in a world more connected that ever before, shouldn’t we all find ways to connect better?”

How can we as educators connect better with our students and with each other?  The answer to this question may be one of the keys to changing education for the better. So how do we do it?

Reach out and trust somebody!

Rob Jacobs