In August I wrote about the Deloitte Center for the Edge and the Shift Index. Yesterday the ITBusinessEdge wrote up an interview that they conducted with John Hagel the director of the Center. They suggest that the real opportunity is in moving beyond product, technology and even process innovation to institutional innovation. As I understand it, this will require a more holistic approach that involves everyone in an organization increasing their Edgility.
Here are are a few quotes that I found interesting...
"One of the issues I think is preventing companies from responding more effectively is they tend to divide their labor forces into knowledge workers and everybody else. One of the things Toyota did was take the front-line assembly workers and converted them into creative problem solvers."
"The real purpose of the firm is to provide an environment where you can learn faster than you could on your own."
Games that connect online social networking to the real world allow us to have fun while we learn to leverage the power of networks (increasing our edgility). This ABC News story provides a great example - very innovative.
My question is... will the Educate to Innovate campaign encourage innovation? Or will the focus be on science, math, and technology for science, math, and technology sake.
I like the President's rhetoric of children "getting their hands dirty." And I like the fact that Obama had the Myth Busters in the audience - those guys know how to tinker (true innovators).
But I see faults in some of his comments. First, I believe that athletes should not just stand side-by-side with scientists. They should learn to tinker with scientists to innovate. It is this crossover of cultures (robotics/science geeks & athletes, e.g.) that will create an ecosystem for innovation. If you can be a creator in a sport such as football - it may become cool not by association (scientist standing next to an athlete) but by being an athletic inventor (there is a big difference).
Also, the robotics demonstration is nice - but being a robotics "geek" is not going to attract crowds of kids. Furthermore, we have already attracted the robotics kids. It is the other 80-90 percent that need to become interested in innovation based on their interests. This innovative drive will lead them to math, science, and technology.
Over the past year I have been fortunate to observe Anne Smith and Maura Moritz as they teach using their multimedia fishbowl process. They not only allowed me to observe them in class but committed their time over the summer allowing me to interview them about their engaging instructional activity - the multimedia fishbowl.
Furthermore, we are now published! Yes, our article was accepted and is now published within the Journal of School Educational Technology. I have included the citation and abstract below for those who are interested.
Folkestad, J., Smith, A., & Moritz, M. (2009). Phenomenology of a multimedia fishbowl: A learning ecosystem that encourages individuals to innovate through collaborative discovery. I-manager’s Journal on School Educational Technology, 5(1), 66-80.
Abstract: The success of each nation will depend on the agility of its citizens to acquire and utilize knowledge. In response to this imperative governments have crafted and followed rigorous educational strategies. For example, the European Union’s Lisbon Agreement outlines an agenda for education and training focusing on educational benchmarks and indicators. The United Kingdom outlines their national strategy in “Every Child Matters” and the United States defines rigorous learning goals within “No Child Left Behind.” Despite almost a decade of work to transform the quality and reach of education, these strategies have proven insufficient to significantly raise citizens’ academic performance.
The problem is that “top down” strategies themselves are part of the systemic issue. In the old industrial system, benchmarks and indicators were sufficient to encourage school-level improvements. However, we need to move beyond promoting/demanding innovation from the local schools and teachers (via benchmarks), to engaging each individual learner to innovate their scholarship. This phenomenology examines an innovative use of streaming video, live-blogging, and discussion to create an ecosystem that places the student at the center of the learning, allowing them to use the Internet and freely-available collaborative tools to acquire new information and to work together in discovery.
I have been attending the LearnTrends 2009 conference for the past few days. I am intrigued by a process that George Siemens was using to conduct his online presentation. He wanted to move from being the "sage-on-the-stage" to more of a collaborative presentation tapping into the collective intelligence of the online LearnTrends crowd (around 120 attending at the time). Basically George used several blank slide titled with questions and then opened up the "white board" in Elluminate letting everyone contribute to the conversation and therefore presentation.
While viewing the live demonstration a participant shared this blog post on the process. Within this post titled "Presenting with live slides" Dave (the author) provides a brief theoretical background and a detailed description of the process including a video of the live presentation.
This is a simple process that is experimental. I believe this process shows us what leading thinkers (like Siemens and Cross) on collaborative learning are doing and what the next tools and processes may be in increasing our ability to learn and innovate (Edgility) using collaboration.
