Here is the next installment of defining Innovation. We will explore creativity skills. Creativity is the process of imagining and generating new ideas that have value.
I have included a mind map for creativity. You will see the following skills:
* Imagination
To be creative, you need to have a good imagination.
* New Lens
To be creative, you need to be able to look at this in a different lens. This means you need to be able to look at things in a different way.
* Open Mindedness
To be creative, you need to have an open mind to new ideas and possibilities. We have a lot of people in this world that closes their mind to new ideas. They are so fixated on the past that they can not imagine the future.
* New Possibilities
To be creative, you need to able to generate new possibilities / ideas that have value. The key to this statement is “value”. You can have ideas but if they are not valuable then the ideas will never get traction.
* Risk Taking
To be creative, you need to not be afraid of failure. You need to be able to understand that not all possibilities and/or ideas will be of value which means they is a good chance you will fail with your ideas. We are so focused on the right answer in schools today that no one is willing to take a risk and fail. I find that failing are just as good learning experiences as successes. You learn alot. This takes someone who has the self confidence to fail and move on. This means that you need to be able to learn and unlearn very quickly.
* Flexible
To be creative, you need to be flexible. Change in a constant in today’s business world so you will be faced with opportunities and you need to be willing to be flexible. Just because you have a good idea does not mean you become arrogant over it and hold it close to the vest. It requires an openness and flexibility to go with the punches.
I have done a little brainstorming on innovation and created a top level mind map of my thinking around innovation. We will explore each area of the map in future blog entries. I call this the 6 Cs – collaboration, communication, community, creativity, curiosity, and culture. Innovation is a full holistic process and not just about technology. It is about people, processes, and technology. Each of the Cs brings innovation to being not just a personal process but also a collaborative one. It requires someone with good communication skills, someone to be creative, and someone with curiosity. Someone willing to ask questions and be curious. A big part of innovation is about asking the right questions. Innovation is also about community. You can have the greatest idea in the world but it will never be successful because the community does not adopt it. As part of community, you need to understand the culture of the targeted community. More about this in another post.
I have my own definition of innovation that has been informed by Phil McKinney of www.killerinnovations.com and Sir Ken Robinson, author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative.
in * no * va * tion [in-uh-vey-shuhn]
- noun
1. the process of taking an original idea that has value from conception to adoption.
Innovation is about ideas that have value. It is also about being able to take it from an idea to be used by the community at large. You can have a great idea but it does not mean you can bring it to the world who will adopt and embrace it. Remember, it can be a process and/or technology (either physical or virtual). Innovation is both social and technical. It requires both the right and left brain. It requires form and function.
Since we are now in a Creative Economy where creativity and innovation is king. What are some of the skills needed for innovators. The 21st century skills (www.21stcenturyskills.org) web site is where we will begin the exploration of skill sets in creativity and innovation. These lists are useful to begin a dialogue and not an end in itself. I say this because someone will want to take these skills and create a curriculum based on traditional teaching methods which will not work for these kinds of behavioral skills. You must learn from experience and not from listening to lectures and taking tests.
So, from Partnership for 21st Century Skills web site -
Creativity and Innovation
* Demonstrating originality and inventiveness in work
* Developing, implementing and communicating new ideas to others
* Being open and responsive to new and diverse perspectives
* Acting on creative ideas to make a tangible and useful contribution to the domain in which the innovation occurs
If you look at these points, you will see most of them being behavioral in nature. The key aspect of innovation is being able to take ideas from conception to production whether it is a physical product or a software product or a process. I believe that you can apply innovation to people, processes, and technology.
Invention is different from innovation. Just because you invent something does not make you an innovator. An example of this is the operating system. Bill Gates did not invent DOS but he was able to innovate to bring DOS to the masses. This is something to keep in the back of your mind.
Sorry, I have not posted in a while. I have been a big fan of Killer Innovations (www.killerinnovations.com).
I have been very concerned about the future of technological work. Part of my doctoral research I wanted to figure out where the future is going.
We have entered a creative economy that is very focused on ideas and innovation. I have suggested in the past that we are entering a new renaissance. Today, left and right brain thinkers is what is needed. Form and function is important. One is not important over another. A good example is the Apple iPhone and iPod.
What are the implications of this thinking? Traditional disciplines and educational models are quickly becoming commodities. The world is about how to generate ideas and bring them quickly to market. Innovation is the key to the future. To me, this means we need to educate and train new technological workers in a different way with creativity and innovation as important goals in education. This is not a focus in most programs.
Slowly but surely, the Hollywood model of creating movies is coming to the technological workforce. Everyone will be a consultant in the future. The Hollywood model is about bringing the talent together to create a movie and then the team is disbanded at the end. This is increasing happening in technology.
There are two kinds of companies…you have the big companies and the small companies. The employees in a big company has a corporate entity to be able to move between projects. Employees are somewhat isolated from the risk that small companies The small companies live on a project by project basis and may have multiple customers at one time.
Between the move to the Creative Economy and the change in the employment contract, technological professionals need to stay on their toes and stay current.
In Activity Theory language, a tool is considered a mediating artifact between a subject whom uses a tool that transforms some object that becomes an outcome for the subject. Lets look at an example of a farmer. A farmer uses tractors to transform the land to be able to plant, cultivate, and/or harvest crops. In this case the mediating artifact is the tractor.
All Web 2.0 tools are all mediating artifacts in the activity theory language. Subjects uses Web 2.0 tools to transform some object into an outcome. So, there are three questions we need to ask ourselves when we make statements that Web 2.0 will transform the world.
* What is the subject who will use the tool? Who are the person or persons who will use the tool?
* What is the object the subject will act upon or transform?
* What is the outcome of using the tool?
There needs to be some motivation for someone to use Web 2.0 tools and we need to make sure that we are meeting a true need. Web 2.0 tools just on the face of it looks very promising and will make the interactive Web a reality. I see Web 2.0 as enabling communities and people to collaborate, communicate, and share.
Typically, when using mediating artifacts over time allows an activity system to transform itself. What are Web 2.0 tools going to transform? I believe it is the user experience and also the Internet will become the computer if Web 2.0 lives up to its promises.
Last week I received an email about a community called learnhub (www.learnhub.com) where you can be both a teacher and a student in a community. You have the ability to teach to or also learn from other people. You can join communities, participate in discussions, sign up for classes, also teach classes. You can also learn from other people. I would like to take some time and outline my interest in LearnHub and the theoretical foundations that I use to measure LearnHub.
I am a communities of practice, activity theory, and social learning theorist believer. I look at the world through these lenses. I do this because the world right now is so focused on behaviorism which is based on stimulus – response and looking at the world through pieces and parts and not the holistic hole. I look at the world holistically through a systems approach. Communities of practice are groups of people who share a common interest and participate together to co-create a practice. A practice can be anything like family practice, systems engineering, and other professions.
CoPs have members at all levels of participation. A community can have a lurker who sits on the periphery of a community and occasionally participates. Then, you have the core members who are the leaders and are completely engaged in the practice of the community. They are the role models for the other members. In this model, there may be multiple people who are the teachers or what I like to call coaches. These people are responsible for transferring the knowledge of the community to the newer members. CoPs also transform through participation of its members. There is a distinct culture in a CoP. Also, you will find tools, technologies, social norms, division of labor, informal goals of the CoP. I envision LearnHub as constellations of communities of practice. In a CoP, members have identities and those identities are transformed through the members participation in the community. In one community, a member might be a novice member or in another community that same person could be a master/expert in the community.
I really like to see LearnHub use their authority measurement and create a peer authority. I am not sure what the actual measures under the peer authority would be but it would be related to the participation of the member and their status among the members. Other members should be able to rate other members of the community through their interactions with them. For example, if a master member responds to another member, the post could be rated as effectiveness or helpfulness to the member requesting information or help. So, if I visit a photography community I should know who are the levels of members in the community from novice, apprentice, journeyer, master. Depending upon their authority numbers, they would be in one of those categories. The authority number can be calculated through multiple ways like the others are done. This does require some thought though. This would get LearnHub closer to a CoP as the research presents and also provides newbies information about who the masters are.
So, to fulfill the ideals of social learning theory, CoPs, and activity theory, I would like LearnHub to use these ideals to transform itself into a powerful social learning network. I will explain more in upcoming posts.
There are a lot of Web 2.0 tools that exist in the marketplace. Web 2.0 does have a lot of possibilities including creating a better interactive multimedia and learning experience to the Web. But, we have got to remember that these are just technology tools and the tools themselves will not change the world.
There are three parts of any introduction to new technological innovations: people, process, and technology. You can not have one without the others. People will not use Web 2.0 tools unless it improves their personal and/work processes in how they do their job. I have tried to introduce new Web 2.0 tools and innovations in the workplace over many years. I have learned the hard way that it is not easy to integrate new tools or innovations into the workplace.
I think we need more research on how and what technological tools are being used by people in their day-to-day lives like an anthropological study. This may gleam some insights on what tools are being used, how they are being used, and why they are being used. Unless we ask the who, what, when, how and why questions then we will not really know the answers to these questions. I used activity theory in my dissertation research to try to learn how IT professionals solve problems. Activity theory may be a model that can be used to guide such research in Web 2.0. I need to do more research myself to see if any of this work is ongoing.
I have also learned a couple of things while introducing these tools. First of all, the technology must be a mandatory part of the day-to-day work processes to be used. Email needs to be used for updates and reminders and a link to get them to where they need to go quickly. Also, there must be a concerted effort on leaders to use the tools and model their usage to others.
Web 2.0 technologies possess the possibility of truly transforming the user experience. Designers need to figure out how to make these tools so easy that users want to use the tools and they are more productive in the process. Otherwise, people will stay with what they know – email, browsers, office, etc.
I would like to continue the dialogue on metaverses in education. In my previous post, I talked about the need to move beyond just replicating the real world classroom into metaverses even though it is going to happen. I am designing a Second Life island for a group in Springfield, MA to support their technological education mission and we will have these areas.
To fully move to the next level, imho, we need to look at metaverses as simulations of the real world and provide rich, immersive experiences that will actively engage learners in their development of who they are aiming to become. In my example in the previous post, I am actively working on designing programs and courses in the network and security technology areas. I would love to be able to provide learners with a rich immersive learning experience where they are “working” as network and/or security technologists that provides experiences to help them learn how to become these professionals. I would also want to design learning experiences where they practice a particular technical skill.
I believe that learning is best situated in context and in participation in a community of practice. Learning is social by nature. Metaverses has the potential to provide these rich immersive social learning experiences.
I have been doing quite a bit of work with metaverses lately especially in the areas of Second Life and Croquet. Metaverses are virtual 3d worlds that you immerse yourself in and participate in as a member. You are able to build and/or just be a user. Being active in these metaverses is about participation in the community surrounding the tool. In Second Life, for example, you can buy items using a currency called Lindens and use them to build your avatar or to build with. You can explore the world and participate in its activities. I am interested in these worlds for educational purposes. These worlds are pretty incredible and exciting to say the least.
BUT, we have to be careful with these virtual worlds in education. Like all other technologies, they are just tools. They are a means to an end not an end in itself. These virtual worlds are not going to solve any problems with education unless we think differently.
I am afraid that we are just going to replicate the traditional classroom in these worlds. Actually, I am seeing it happen already. Replicating what we already do is not necessarily all a bad thing it is just thinking too narrowly and in the box. I am not going to say any more about this because I want to start a conversation on the possibilities of metaverses in education NOT the failings of education. I could go down that route but it always ends up with people becoming defensive and combative. The failings are pretty well documented. It always what Zander and Zander in The Art of Possibility calls the downward spiral. I want to get us out of the downward spiral and get us into looking at the possibilities instead of the problems. It changes the dialogue from the negative to the positive. We have a habit to always look at the negative and pessimism sets in if we are not careful.
The possibilities of metaverses are endless. I would challenge everyone to think differently here. I believe in activity and that learning is through experience as Dewey once wrote. Metaverses provide the tools to allow us to create a new kind of learning experience. One that is immersive in nature and one that guide learners into becoming the practitioner they want to become whether the practice is music, video, technology, art, etc. Learning is about experience and doing. I believe that you must do to learn. In the way we design courses today, we focus a lot on content and not on activity and context. I would challenge us to think about how to design courses that are activity centered and in context.
For example, I am responsible for network technology at Capella University. I would love to be able use a metaverse to teach learners how to become network technologists from the architecture to the construction. This hypothetical metaverse would simulate a real world context such as wiring a building or installing a network for a client and the learners would have to plan and execute the plan. Why can’t we have a full immersive metaverse experience where learners are put into close to real situations as they can and let them work through them. With the virtualization becoming mainstream I could see a mashup between virtualization and metaverses. Why not be able to simulate a real problem in a metaverse that teams of learners collaborate together to solve? I believe this is the future that we need be envisioning.
I call this kind of experience, a practice field, which is a term the Senge uses in his work. A practice field is like a practice on a sports team. The athletes practice techniques, plays, and other things to prepare for the game. But, a practice field is not a game. The game is the only place where athletes earn their stats and their reputations. But, practice can be effective to help athletes become better. There is some research on deliberate practice that shows that practice does make a difference. But, practice is about activity. Part of activity is content do not get me wrong but athletes can study the play book (the content) but they will not learn the play until they practice it actively not through the passive activity of memorizing the play. I call a game a real field in my work. Real experience requires a real field but a practice field can provide learners a place to practice the principles and techniques to help them in the real experience. We know from the research that pilots can become better pilots through simulators and in some cases I have read that new pilots have learned to fly in a simulator and are able to transfer that experience to the real world.
To close out this blog posting, we need to be aware of the infinite possibilities that metaverses can provides to our learners and we should not just replicate the real world in the virtual world and expect it to help our learners in the long run. I believe that a combination of practice fields and real fields are needed for a program to be an effective program to help learner become the professionals they come to us to be. I have seen way too many instances that this does not happen very often today except for the top 10-15% of the learners that come to us. We must reach the rest of the learners because they are our future.
