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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.

Version 2.0 of the open seminar/co-seminar “From information to innovative knowledge: Tools and skills for adaptive leadership” kicked off this evening with its first meetings. The second version of this training program continues the main characteristics of co-seminars: international, bilingual, and supported with Web 2.0 technologies. The course is designed to enhance learning, utilizing methodologies based on the principles of collective intelligence, troubleshooting in complex environments, and the intelligent and purposive use of information technology.

More at the Open Seminar 2.0 website (View English translation)…

Caption: Working late into this evening, the instructional team in Minnesota, Mexico, Ecuador and Chile (that’s a span of nearly 9,000 km among the conferencing sites!) tests various video and audio conferencing connections.

The co-seminar “From information to innovative knowledge: Tools and skills for adaptive leadership” begins this Thursday evening. Our first open conference with three FLACSOs and UTPL will take place on January 31, and additional conferences will take place every other Thursday evening through May. Minnesota students can contact us for details on the course and for information on how to register.

Here’s my presentation from this morning’s La Universidad en México en el año 2030: imaginando futuros conference at UNAM in Mexico City.

(Click here for the Spanish version.)

This paper introduces how the convergence of globalization, emergence of the knowledge society and accelerating change contribute to what might be best termed a New Paradigm of knowledge production in higher education. The New Paradigm reflects the emerging shifts in thought, beliefs, priorities and practice in regard to education in society. These new patterns of thought and belief are forming to harness and manage the chaos, indeterminacy, and complex relationships of the postmodern.
(Read more …)

MoneyLaw’s Jim Chen (a former University of Minnesota law school professor and new dean at the University of Louisville) posted his take on Tom Sullivan’s defense of tenure related to the University of Minnesota’s quest to become one of the top three public research universities in the world (see also last week’s EF note). He wrote:

It is not inspiring but rather demoralizing for university leadership to speak of “top three” status when the real task at hand is simply trying to do better than eleventh in the Big Ten.

Bonzo at the Periodic Table adds:

Let’s hope that soon we can have a realistic conversation about “ambitious aspirations to be one of the top three public research universities in the world [sic].” We need to put this nonsense behind us and chart a course that will lead us to being in the top half of the Big Ten.

Ouch! …and probably spot on. It’s one thing to sound like a leapfrogger. But, it’s an entirely different thing to actually leapfrog.

Grant Smith, who wrote the brilliant essay challenging University of St. Thomas president Dennis Dease to embrace the values it taught in its now defunct Master of International Management program, dropped me a note stating that he received a reply from the school:

I am beginning to agree with your blog posting: University of St. Thomas needs a new president

Dease returned my diploma (intact with the “return to sender” stamp) and a letter with his official statement, but no comment on whether the whistle blowing hero of this saga will be reinstated.

I am really, truly beginning to believe this guy “just doesn’t get it”, which unfortunately, is a sign of the times.

Outrageous.

Click here to view a copy of Dease’s letter and click here to view Grant’s response.

Grant’s right. UST “continues to lack the leadership values America so desperately needs.” The school desperately needs new leadership. Seeing that the school’s board of trustees includes a candidate for U.S. Senate, can we expect to see any leadership on the issue from Mike Ciresi?

Ciresi’s campaign slogan is: “Many promise change. Mike delivers.”

Mike, when will you deliver?

My doctoral dissertation, A New Paradigm of Knowledge Production in Minnesota Higher Education: A Delphi Study, is available for purchase online or for online preview:

• Click here to preview the first chapter
• Or, purchase a PDF download or hardcover copy of this document online at the Education Futures store

SPECIAL:

Download now and save! For the month of September, the PDF edition is available for download at the discounted price of $30.00 $15.00 (50% off)!
(Read more …)

Youth Futures: Projecting the Roles of Disruptive Technologies, Anticipatory Knowledge, and Continuous Innovation

Summary: This session highlights the Global Youth Policy and Leadership Program at the University of Minnesota where faculty and students of all ages (kindergarten through graduate school) crafted scenarios, composed alternative futures, and explored other various futures methodologies. In this session, particular emphasis will be placed on the construction of future histories that can be used as alternative visions and maps to help youth of different backgrounds and experiences visualize and discuss the future. This session is conducted ‘salon style’ with audience development of the ensuing future-histories. Session feedback will be provided via Education Futures to all audience participants shortly following the conference.

Today’s list discusses how U.S. education is failing to create students that will succeed in creative, knowledge- and innovation-based economies. Not surprisingly, No Child Left Behind heads-off this list as failure #1:

1. No Child Left Behind. NCLB is producing exactly the wrong products for the 21st Century, but is right on for the 1850’s through 1950. NCLB’s fractured memorization model opposes the creative, synthetic thinking required for new work and effective citizenship.
2. Schools are merging with prisons. As soon as students enter schools, they lose many of their fundamental rights, including the right to free speech. Students who do not wish to conform to prison-like, automaton production must develop individual creativity to survive… often at a price.
3. Inadequate teacher preparation, recruitment and retention. The U.S. public schools have always been lemmings, but are now failing to produce teachers who are savvy to the contemporary trends their students must learn and respond to in times of accelerating change. The other half of the picture is teacher-modeled creativity, something the public schools have never seriously attempted.
4. Insufficient adoption of technology. The squeeze is on from both ends: Student-purchased technology is usually derided, suppressed, and sometimes confiscated. These tools are part of the technology spectrum kids know they will have to master. On the other end, technology in the schools is dated, the Internet is firewalled, and there isn’t enough equipment to go around.
5. Focusing on information retention as opposed to new knowledge production. Disk-drive learning is for computers. Knowledge production and innovation are for humans. The first requires fast recall and low error rates from dumb systems; the second, driven by intelligent people, builds the economy and keeps America competitive.
6. Innovation is eschewed. Most U.S. teachers think innovation is something that requires them to suffer the discomforts and pains of adaptation. They don’t accept change as a necessary function of expanding national competitiveness. Many U.S. teachers might be more comfortable in industrial world economies and societies represented by China and South Korea, or 1950’s America.
7. Continuous reorganization of school leadership and priorities, particularly in urban schools. Serious questions can be raised whether schools are the organizations required to cope with semi-permanent underclasses, violent youth, incompetent, irresponsible parenting and negative adult role models. What institutional substitutions would you make for the schools?
8. National education priorities are built on an idealized past, not on emergent and designed futures. Blends of applied imagination, creativity, and innovation are required to visualize preferred futures, to render them proximal and grounded, and to forge them into empirical realities. On the other hand, it is quite possible that Secretary Spellings and other highly placed education “leaders” have never had an original thought in their entire lives.
9. Social class and cultural problems in schools and communities suggest that the schools live in a Norman Rockwell past. Bright kids capable of novel thought and new culture creation have never fit into the industrially modeled American schools, and lower-middle class teachers have little respect for working- and poverty-class art, music, and culture. It appears that the schools are populated by timid, unimaginative, lower-middle class professional placeholders who crave convention (spelling bees, car washes, exceptional sports performances) over invention.
10. Failing to invest resources in education, both financially and socially. Education is formal, informal, and non-formal in structure and function. It is possible that formal education will be recognized as the least powerful of this trio, in part because it is so dated, and in part because it occurs in such a small percentage of life compared with the other two types. Perhaps new funding algorithms and decisions must follow this ratio.