innovation
-
The problems with tech companies as infrastructure
None of what I am about to relay is new, but it’s enlightening when you have a small personal experience that momentarily lifts away the curtain to demonstrate the broader significance of a trend. So, on the one hand this story is “man had to wait slightly longer for a taxi, boohoo” and on the other it is “foretaste of troubling social trend.” You can decide. Last week I visited my daughter who is studying for a year abroad in North Carolina. Being ice hockey fans we went to see the Carolina Hurricanes (twice) in Raleigh. The PNC Arena where they play is a few miles out of town and…
-
Disruption’s legacy
Clayton Christensen passed away yesterday. I never met him and he was by many accounts a warm, generous individual. So this is not intended as a personal attack, and I apologise if it’s timing seems indelicate, but as so many pieces are being published about how influential Disruption Theory was, I would like to offer a counter narrative to its legacy. I think to give it fair credit, the initial idea of disruptive innovation was both powerful and useful. Coming as the digital revolution really began to impact upon every sector of our lives, people were looking for theories to explain the new logic of these businesses that seemed to…
-
Innovating Pedagogy 2020
Sorry I’m a bit late with this, I’ve been writing (more on that in the next post). The annual Innovating Pedagogy report is out. As ever this is written by my colleagues in IET, in collaboration with another institution. This time it was the super smart gang at the National Institute of Digital Learning at Dublin City University. The report continues with the aim of focusing on pedagogic developments that are related to technology, but crucially not focusing on the technology itself. This year’s innovations are: Artificial intelligence in education Posthumanist perspectives Learning through open data Engaging with ethics Social justice pedagogy Esports Learning from animations Multisensory learning Offline networked…
-
Innovating Pedagogy report 2013
Last year a few of us at the OU produced the Innovating Pedagogy report. This listed some topics in educational technology we thought were going to be significant. No-one warned me but it was an annual event, so here is the Innovating Pedagogy report 2013. My colleague Mike Sharples (of FutureLearn fame) does an excellent job of cajoling us into contributing and putting it all together. He operates a process similar to that used in the creation of the Horizon reports, so a bunch of us suggest topics, we vote on these, then get assigned to write a summary for the selected topics. These are then reviewed, and then we…
-
The role of respectable idiots
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/aussiegall/6846455366/> I gave a talk at the Higher Education Academy 'New Places to Learn' seminar yesterday about openness and the institution. I was proposing that in order to facilitate openness you need a combination of a top-down and bottom-up process. So for example, OER projects such as OpenLearn, combined with creating the space for academics to generate and share their own content (eg by recognising digital artefacts in promotion). One aspect I raised for creating the environment within which academics engage in openness of their own free will is the role of the 'respectable idiot'. This is a person who has a degree of respect within the institution as a…
-
The issue of scale
Michael Feldstein has an interesting post on the issue of scale, inspired by Jim Groom's Open Ed keynote. Michael's post is very reflective and thoughtful and he admits he'd always sort of dismissed Jim and the edupunk stuff as interesting, but it doesn't scale, and scale was what he was concerned with. He concludes he was wrong to do so, and maybe Jim's approach does scale, but not in the conventional sense: "But if we can create a world in which the average community college student asks her professors what their credentials are to teach their classes, then all else becomes possible in educational reform." In his comments on the…
-
Projects, innovation & the small price of a coffee
<Image coffee love http://www.flickr.com/photos/javaturtle/133316103/> Stephen Downes pointed at this piece from Tony Bates arguing that the choice facing higher education institutions is often phrased as one of 'innovate or die'. It prompted me to blog some half baked thoughts I'd had around innovation recently. In my presentation on Academic output as collateral damage I suggested that organisations like projects. They are set up to work with project structures, which have lines of responsibility, a set of deliverables, milestones, and fixed budgets. I understand this and for a lot of tasks it is the best way to work. But here are three statements I would like to put forward: 1) The small…
