Schools Of The Future Debrief Part 2: Innovation Management

I keep thinking about the concepts from Don Richardson's breakout session on "innovation management," in an attempt to transfer them to my K-12 school context. Richardson is Microsoft's Innovation Manager and is responsible for making the capturing of new ideas part of the work flow process at Microsoft. Their biggest fear is that good ideas walk out the door everyday just because somebody decided not to listen. He made the following claims before describing Microsoft's "idea grab" system.

-Research and development does not mean innovation. Innovation needs a shared framework.

-The best ideas come from inside organizations but have no process for being nurtured.

-The least amount of good ideas are generated externally.

-It's important to have a culture of innovation.

Microsoft's Process Looks Like:

Sounds a lot like the elements of critical thinking to me. So any employee can access this innovation process via portal/social network/collaborative workspace. And each idea gets entered, tracked, tagged, and peer reviewed as it moves its way through the process.

What if I had something like this interactive innovation database as part of my class curriculum? Students could enter ideas for learning opportunities and environments, and we could collaboratively work on them. The course would be collaboratively designed and amorphous.

In this spirit, today, I asked a student that I know is interested in architecture to think about and sketch his ideal classroom. We'll see what I get.

Or what if we had something like this as a network of teachers in a school (or across many schools). We'd build curriculum collaboratively. I could go back to ideas of teachers from 10 years ago and work with them with a fresh perspective. Maybe the school just wasn't ready for the idea, but now they are...

Don pointed to some examples in education:
Cosmic Blogs - for younger students
Lego Mindstorm
Both are examples of what Richard called "open innovation."

Other examples and ideas?

PGC In Australia

I'm not going to lie, Project Global Cooling in Hawaii was really stressing me out. I thought that maybe I had gotten myself into something I wouldn't be able to finish. But students have come to the rescue. We've got a club going. We're starting to gather sustainability projects and post them to the PGC site. Our concert planning continues to move forward. And best of all, PGC has led to new collaborations with schools around the world.

Yesterday's Skype with Jenny Luca's class in Melbourne, Australia came just in time. Lately, my days have been filled with meetings, leaving barely enough time for my own class, and next to no time for professional development 2.0. So thanks Jenny for inviting us to talk with your class about our school's sustainability initiative.

flickr photo credit: emptybelly

Technorati Tags: projectglobalcooling, collaboration

Curriculum Day With Alan November

Alan November was here to address our faculty and parents on Tuesday, and lead small workshops with various groups yesterday. For the edtech set, it was confirmation of the power of connective learning. What was interesting to me was the discussion of how to get more people engaged in web communication and collaboration technologies, especially in a K-12 school with a democratic leadership structure, 4000 students, and a high school faculty of 150+. Essentially, he laid out six things that should be happening in classrooms:

1. There should be a curriculum review team made up of four students, assigned jobs like: writer, mixer, editor. They produce a podcast each week reviewing the lessons and content.

2. There should be a tutorial design team that creates screencasts for further review. Alan suggested using Jing for screencasting. (I used to use screencast-o-matic, but Jing can do more, and screencasts are easy to embed in a Moodle page or blog or anything else.)

3. Student questions should not be answered by the teacher. Instead students should be charged with finding the answers and using social bookmarking tools to organize resources. In addition, students teachers and students should become expert web researchers and create their own custom search engines for class topics and questions.

4. Three to four students should be official scribes for the class, collaborating to write and share notes in Google Docs.

5. Each class should have a global communications team, leveraging tools like: ePals, Skype, Technorati.

6. Students should manage RSS feeds relevant to curriculum and communications.

Language Barriers?

Last week, I met with Alexander, head research consultant for the E-learning support project at the National Training Foundation for teachers in Moscow, Russia. He and Gregory, a vice principal he works with, were visiting our campus to learn more about the ways to get technology more integrated into their school culture. Today, I Bruce Schauble and I presented to a group of 26 visiting teachers from Beijing, China. In both cases, we gave a brief show-and-tell of the ways our school uses blogs, wikis, Moodle, and a few other software applications. And what's been most interesting to a few of the groups is the 1001 Flat World Tales Project.

What struck me today was that all of our schools, irregardless of our contexts, are asking the same questions about technology, and we all seem to be moving in the same direction. It's exciting to think about the network of schools that will soon be connected and collaborating. Here are the questions that keep coming up:

How can a school create an environment where technology enhances communication rather than creates a barrier, physical or otherwise?

How do we define responsible (mindful) consumption of media? How much time online is the right amount?

How does a school mandate integration of technology in classes without mandating it?

What does the support system look like for faculty and staff?

How are results measured?

How does a school manage their digital assets?

Notes On First Student-Teacher Course Design Collaboration

Lindsey, of student2.0 notoriety, and I met today for our first work session. Our goal is to design and propose a new kind of course at our school, described on Twitter by Clay Burell. The idea is that students will create their own learning networks and apprentice in an area of interest. So far, we're also thinking that designing, maintaining, and modeling for a student network would be part of the course, as well as aggregating all the sustainability-related work that happens across our campus and figuring out how to best manage and publish it. We plan to podcast our meetings, and I hope we can create and post materials too. Just an update.

Essential Functionality: Desktop Sharing

A couple weeks ago, I sat down with two other teachers to play with Yugma. Clay Burell realized the potential of desktop sharing a long time ago, but it's taken me awhile to figure out how to enhance existing curriculum with this particular functionality. Today, I set up my students on Yugma so they'd be able to collaborate and peer edit a multimedia essay they're publishing with iMovie. In the name of efficiency, I had one student start a sharing session early, invite me, then we projected on a screen for the rest of the class to see. Ten minutes later, everybody was signed in with a free account. The whole class was humming with excitement over the possibilities, and I overheard a lot of great ideas for how this tool could be used in my class and others. I can't wait to see the collaboration that happens over the weekend and the resulting products. Next week, I'll post student reflections and ideas.

Ways Communication Technologies Bring Us Together: Pangea Day

Probably, many people online know about Pangea Day. I didn't until a few minutes ago. Thanks Lisa. The idea of contributing and sharing powerful films globally is an adult version of collaborative student projects like 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling. These projects are the most powerful ways to learn in the 21st century.