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E-Learning Argentina posted an XPLANE XPLANATION of Informal Learning. The 8000×3000 image can take some time to load on a slow connection, but it is worth the wait. In particular, the connection between seemingly chaotic new ways of collaborative learning and the “payback” (results) is done well.

(Thanks to Cristóbal Cobo for the forwarding this link!)

Jeffrey Phillips asks:

Here’s a challenge for you. Find me a firm, any firm, that isn’t telling it’s people, it’s customers and it’s investors that innovation isn’t important. Can you imagine that? Telling these constituents that innovation isn’t important is like telling people that oxygen isn’t important. So, let’s take as a given that most firms advocate a bias toward innovation.

How about schools or colleges? How often do we bring up innovation (or discussions of creating pathways toward continuous innovation) with educational leaders only to receive a response of, “oh, we’re already doing that?”

Too often.

In my experience, I would say that perhaps 10-20% of school leaders I’ve talked with believe that they’re “already innovating” or are “innovating enough.” Innovation, by definition, means doing something substantially different, and it’s something that everybody can do. Perhaps what educational leaders are telling us is that we’re failing to define what innovation is and means what we need to do in educational contexts.

Can leaders see the pink elephant in the classroom if they’re looking at their organization through rose-tinted glasses? It’s time to start looking at our institutions differently.

As touched upon lightly a couple weeks ago, the blogosphere is getting easier to navigate. Both Alltop and Blogged offer editor-picked/-rated indices of blogs, sorted by topic. These goes beyond the usual scope of blog/news aggregators by incorporating human elements of review.

1. Receiving generally-positive initial reviews (including a thumbs-up from me), Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop venture provides a consolidated “magazine rack” of many of the top blogs, editor-picked, and sorted by subject. (For education-related blogs, click here.)

   

2. Another resource, blogged.com, launched last month, and provides editor reviews as well as allowing registered users to post reviews. This allows for weighted crowdsourcing of ratings and reviews, which helps to filter out blogs that are used for spam or are simply outdated. The site also provides recommendations for related blogs to readers that might not otherwise be visible through a traditional blog search, based on its categorization system. (Thanks to the editor who gave Education Futures a 9.0/10!)

   

Bigger or more complicated is not always better. Scott Anthony wrote an article in Harvard Business on the perils of “too much innovation.” He writes on over-engineering innovations:

There is something about human nature that restlessly seeks to improve things. But instead of asking “Can we?” innovate to improve what exists and create what doesn’t, companies need to ask “Should we?”

[...]

Overshooting happens in just about every industry. It tends to start in the least demanding tiers of the market and creep up to more demanding tiers. Overshooting creates conditions that encourage the formation of disruptive attackers who change the game through simplicity or low prices.

Simplifications can be innovations, too. The success of the iPod and iPhone can be credited to their simplistic designs. Likewise, the minimalism movement transformed the post-WWII design world. Education systems, in the meantime, have transformed into highly-engineered organisms.

Can simple work in education, too?

Driven by a New Paradigm of globalization, rise of the knowledge society and accelerating change, the education sector is in dire need of innovative transformations. Rather than over-engineering solutions to the challenges we face in education, are there simple, yet seemingly elegant, pathways to successful futures?

The StarTribune reports that the town of Chaska, Minnesota, is planning for a new higher education campus, built by an outfit called “EdCampus.” What makes the site unique is that it is being built without a sole tenant in mind:

The company plans to erect classrooms as shells, line up higher education institutions as tenants to fill them, then customize the rooms for satellite classes or lectures offered by as many colleges and universities as it can line up.

“They could lease space to anyone from Harvard to North Dakota State,” Chaska Mayor Gary Van Eyll said.

According to the Mayor of Chaska:

EdCampus located in Chaska. It is hard to explain this facility. It will be an innovational educational model that leverages the power of combining dynamic students from diverse institutions into a single campus – outfitted with customizable classroom space and student-centric services.

EdCampus will offer state-of-the-art technology, never seen before in post-secondary education.

Since secondary education institutions develop a tremendous amount of educational technologies, I’m not sure what technologies have never been seen before in post-secondary education. (Also, does this high tech EdCampus have a website?) The real innovation, however, is that such a “campus” concept allows higher education institutions to create a presence in a community without outlaying a huge investment. Some institutions may wish to try certain communities/markets before making a large investment in facilities. Others will appreciate the pathways for rapid egress afforded by lease arrangements.

What does this ability to enter and exit new markets rapidly mean for land grant universities, which are intended to create lasting presences in the communities they serve?

I was amazed to see Czech animation shown on the Mojo HD channel last Wednesday. Pavel Koutský’s Duel highlights the importance of early childhood education –and, for a critical approach to early childhood education. The National Film Board of Canada sums up the film best:

At birth a child is placed on an assembly line that symbolizes the passage of time. Objects representing knowledge - books, magazines and printed materials, videocassettes and compact discs - twirl around him. Suddenly, two hands fasten a funnel on his head. From now on, all the information that reaches him will be sorted, grated or shredded. The child grows up and his thirst for knowledge annoys the censors. They want to make him a model citizen, like the others who come off the assembly line. Outraged, the young man begins an unrelenting duel with the censors. Attacked by an army of cutting tools, he counterattacks by bombarding the enemy with huge quantities of information. The army of scissors beats a retreat. Ecstatic, the young man has won the first battle in his struggle for freedom of expression. But crouching in their corner, the scissors are still a threat… An animated film without words for twelve to seventeen year olds.

I found the film on YouTube (the actual video starts at around 00:51):

Contrary to the closed access environments University of Iowa graduate students advocate, I believe that “intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.” Therefore, before the giant hairball of a banana that is my doctoral dissertation over-ripens beyond its useful life expectancy, I am releasing the document as a free download.

More information on my study, “A New Paradigm of Knowledge Production in Minnesota Higher Education,” is available at http://www.educationfutures.com/dissertation.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Iowa students pedal backward on the global trend of opening access to information and knowledge:

The University of Iowa has backtracked on a plan to post all graduate students’ theses online and make them freely available to the public. The reversal came in response to vigorous protests last week from students in the university’s prestigious graduate program in writing…

More at: http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/03/2152n.htm?utm_source=aw&utm_medium=en (registration/sacrifice of first born child required)

For those of us who will not be at the AERA conference in New York City, we can join the Applied Research in Virtual Environments for Learning (ARVEL) special interest group’s launch party via Second Life:

Monday, March 24, 7:00 to 9:00 pm

slurl.com/secondlife/EDTECH105/132/24

Or, in person:

Hilton New York - Petit Trianon, 3rd Floor
1335 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019
(212) 586-7000 - http://tinyurl.com/2bttwd

More in this flyer…

Several U.S. states plan future prison build-outs based on second or third-grade reading scores. But now this trend of tracking young children for a career in crime is spreading to other nations? The Guardian reports that Scotland Yard’s most senior forensics expert, Gary Pugh, want elementary school kids to be “eligible for the [national] DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.” From the article:

‘If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,’ said Pugh. ‘You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.’

[…]

Chris Davis, of the National Primary Headteachers’ Association, said most teachers and parents would find the suggestion an ‘anathema’ and potentially very dangerous. ‘It could be seen as a step towards a police state,’ he said. ‘It is condemning them at a very young age to something they have not yet done. They may have the potential to do something, but we all have the potential to do things. To label children at that stage and put them on a register is going too far.’

What’s next? Requiring DNA samples from second graders who underperform in a reading test so they can be easily identified by future forensic criminologists?

These trends seem like a variation of a theme derived from the dystopias of Minority Report’s pre-crime and Gattaca’s eugenics and genetic discrimination, with an added element of the growing omniscience of the state. Because of the threat of discrimination, any embrace of genetic determinism by the state could have tremendous negative impacts. What would it take to expand GINA to protect U.S. students in educational settings?