Shift to the Future

A lot of people are writing and speaking about innovation these days.  I hesitated to join in but it’s been on my mind lately too so why not see if I can add to the conversation.  Wikipedia (Feb. 25, 2012) starts its article on this topic with “ Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products , processes , services , technologies , or ideas ”.  When I read about the enormous problems facing us today and into the future, I see a rising need for more innovative thinking.  The worlds problems seem overwhelming with automated work , fuel costs and scarcity, war, public and private debt loads, education systems in need of redesign, governments buried in red tape and complexity , and the list goes on.  Small thinking isn’t going to help us solve these problems but innovation can.  The environment for learning matters tremendously as the authors of A New Culture of Learning suggest “ when play happens within a medium for learning—much like a cult...

What does it really mean to call oneself a "professional"? For me, there's an implication that a professional is working in a field that is knowledge intensive and requires regular ongoing practice to become and remain highly accomplished and valuable to their clients. Wikipedia’s entry for Professional includes: Expert and specialized knowledge in field which one is practicing professionally Excellent manual/practical and literary skills in relation to profession In our rapidly changing world, professionals should expect to be regularly honing and upgrading their skills and knowledge so as to remain relevant and current in their chosen field.  Notice the reference to “practicing professionally”.  To practice involves the individual or professional in this context, taking some action on their part “to improve, to learn, to solve problems, to enhance or refine skills, to maintain skills”.  Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers claims that “researchers ha...

I committed to writing a weekly blog post back in December 2009 and haven’t missed one yet.  Some weeks, actually many, I get to the weekend and have no idea what to write about.  My wife Shelley and will kick blog titles around while drinking our morning coffees (she blogs weekly as well over here ) until something resonates.  She came up with the idea to write about motivation today and I scooped it (she’s a sharing person). mo·ti·va·tion /moh-tuh-vey-shuhn / noun 1. the act or an instance of motivating , or providing with a reason to act in a certain way. Synonyms: motive, inspiration, inducement, cause, impetus. 2. the state or condition of being motivated : We know that these students have strong motivation to learn. Blogging for me is an outlet for my ideas.  My blog posts do not attract a lot of comments but my blog averages around 350-400 visitors from around the world with 1000-1400 page views per week.  This audience or readership de...

I am increasingly aware of the complexity of “the system”.  Think about your place in the world and then consider the layers and walls around you that have been built up over time in “the system”.  Those of us that work for “the education system” would view things differently then say a plumber, electrician, or politician might.  Regardless, we all encounter complexity whether we choose to or not.  I’m primarily thinking about organizational complexity here.  Organizations tend to naturally become complex over time.  They become very difficult to work within, to accomplish things through, and become very expensive to operate. “Few things can doom a “system” faster than excessive complexity, which then collapses into chaos.”, Is America in Danger of Collapsing (Feb. 5, 2012) I probably read to broadly, too many obscure articles and books, but I see a pattern emerging: complexity is making our systems unsustainable.  Think of the costs of health...

I’ve been thinking a lot about what our response to technology driven change should be.  For instance, is it reasonable to just carry on with our traditions and practices while ignoring important changes brought on by new technologies?  I don’t read status quo in this  definition of practice.  I see ample room for practice to be a shifting phenomenon over time as the environment we live and work in is changed. prac·tice (noun): repeated performance or systematic exercise for the purpose of acquiring skill or proficiency: Practice makes perfect. Last week I wrote “[b]y adding technology to an environment and not changing current practices, we have the proverbial round peg in a square hole problem. To provide real benefit, technology in classrooms, used by students and teachers, must change practice ( eventually )”, Learning at the Speed of Change .  A teacher colleague of mine emailed me to share that a few teachers had taken exception to this and other...

I visited a grade 6 classroom this past week where every student had a personally owned laptop.  The students were learning about basic geometric shapes such as triangles, squares, and others with more sides which I forget the names for (I could Google them if I needed to).  The teacher ask them to create a program using Scratch to prompt for the number of sides, the length of a side, and to calculate the angle between any two sides, and finally to generate and display the shape.  While I was there, the kids were able to complete, to varying degrees, the pieces to prompt and calculate an angle (not necessarily correctly, but).  Some had a display “algorithm” programmed and were generating all sorts of spiral graph type shapes (not the shape intended mind you).  It was exciting to see their engagement, actually total being absorbed, in the learning activity.  For homework, they were to at least have a correctly running program that calculates and displays t...

There is a lot of talk about 21st century this and 21st century that and our education system is not immune to throwing new buzz words around for our century.  Certainly there are important conversations to have with respect to what we expect students to become and how they will contribute to their local community, country, and our world.  What is it that students should know?  What behaviours should they possess?  What skills should they acquire?  What is the purpose of an education?  How should educators prioritize what is to be known?  The pace of change is exponential so how can we continue to teach kids to memorize dates, names, and places that they will likely never remember or care about?  What value is there to memorizing easily findable facts and figures?  I believe we will be navigating some pretty storming days ahead while we sort these things out… In the February 2012 issue of FastCompany , I read an article about the Generation...