I am including links to a couple of their models – but I do recommend visiting their site to see more…

• A model of the Creative Process
• How do you design?
• A model of play
• A model of innovation

What is cool is that they have created a whole series of posters that can be downloaded as pdfs.

I haven’t had the time to look at all their work in detail… I but I anticipate going back there multiple times in the future.

The cartoon is given above.

For instance see these posts:

• Thoughtless acts? Technology, creativity & teaching
• Thoughtless acts? Technology, creativity & teaching
• Jugaad, educational toys from Junk (TPACK at work)
• Jugaad, India-genous creativity

There are lots of cool examples in this article but the one that stood out was this one:

This underwear sign presents an example of innovative thinking about space. Finding a drain
opening in the path of his endeavors, the artist spontaneously incorporated a navel (and home for a mynah bird)

How wonderful is that!! Read the entire article for more…

RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

Click here to view the embedded video.

The three key factors that Pink describes as being inherently motivating are Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Now think about school… How much of these three do we present our students? Too often school is about doing things someone else as prescribed, not for mastery but rather just to get it done, with little sense of the broader purpose for doing so. Is it surprising that school is demotivating?

This is not an issue of whether or not (or how) we should be using technology – but rather a more fundamental issue of why we have school in the first place.

What can we do to bring in these three into the classroom?

Slate magazine is running an interesting series by Julia Turner on signs and their design. Two articles are now up

• The Secret Language of Signs: They’re the most useful thing you pay no attention to. Start paying attention.
• Lost in Penn Station: Why are the signs at the nation’s busiest train hub so confusing?

This is looking to be a fascinating series with four more articles forthcoming.

President Obama plans to name Howard A. Schmidt, a veteran cyber security warrior with experience at senior levels of government and industry, to fill a long-anticipated cyber coordinator position at the National Security Council, administration officials and outside consultants confirmed.

As far as one can see Mr. Schmidt is well qualified for this position, having served both in industry and in the government in the past. However, one fact about his background caught my attention and prompted this note. In describing his qualifications Ambinder wrote

Schmidt has credentials unique to the job: he received his masters in organizational management from the University of Phoenix, a (fully accredited and esteem) mostly online university.

Apart from the typo on esteem, what struck me was this positive mention of the University of Phoenix, something I often do not see or hear. Over where I live and breathe, the good old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar university, the University of Phoenix is not regarded as having much esteem. I have argued here and elsewhere that this will soon change. That most of us at the “traditional” university have underestimated just how powerful the forces of change are. Online learning (and for profit universities) are here to stay and maybe even take over universities as we know them.

Reading about Mr. Schmidt’s credentials just reminded me just how quickly this change is happening.

However, new technologies do not just replicate what we could do before – they insidiously and fundamentally change the nature of the tasks we perform. Think of the idea of hyperlinks! Regular texts go hypertextual through developments like the table of contents, indices etc. however, these are weak attempts at best. True hypertext emerges only through digitality.

I was reminded of this when reading a recent NYTimes article on video bingo and the controversies it is causing in Alabama. The article begins by describing traditional bingo:

Everybody knows what this is: dozens of people, mostly retirees, hunched over paper grids in a smoke-filled American Legion hall on a Sunday evening listening eagerly to a woman recite numbers.

Now we have a new player on the block, video bingo! which is described as follows:

But what about this: a dim warehouse of flashing, jingling video terminals with names like Boomtown Bonanza where, early on a weekday morning, people sit on stools pushing buttons and watching cherries and 7s reel by.

The question of whether what both these groups are doing essentially the same thing, or something totally different is at the heat of a serious legal battle in Alabama. One one side are those who argue that these new machines are nothing but illegal slot machines! They look like slot machines and with their cherries and 7′s rolling by.

On the other side are people who argue that for some critical and crucial reasons, these are very different from slot-machines. For instance, they argue,

First, there has to be more than one player. The machines are connected to a single server, which acts like a bingo caller; at the push of a button, the server calls a whole game of bingo at once, and the machine marks the virtual card for the player. If the server’s combination matches the pattern on a player’s card, the player wins.

The cherries and 7s are just eye candy. It all takes seconds, and the players do nothing more than push a button. But, supporters say, it is still bingo.

In instances where this has come up in courts of law, judges have tended to side against the video bingo crowd. Here is what one judge said,

The game is not ‘bingo’ because it eliminates the requirement that players manually daub their own cards or call out ‘bingo!’ when they have won.

What I find fascinating is that this whole controversy depends on how we define bingo. Is playing bingo the manual process of marking cards with a pencil and calling out bingo and does something fundamentally change when we automate the entire process? What is the essential nature of video bingo? is there a Platonic ideal version of bingo and does video bingo capture that or does it play havoc with it?

What a deep philosophical question?

Now these issues are not new. They have always been part of the discussion of new technologies and their impact on what we do. For instance, how is the bingo debate analogous (or different from) browsing for books in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore and picking up one to buy versus skimming them on Amazon.com and buying/downloading it onto your Kindle? How about the discussion on the nature of face to face v.s. online learning, or the whole debate about sharing music with your friends (through tape mixes v.s. mp3)?

We could go on providing examples and the point of this note is not to adjudicate between these competing narratives and argue for one interpretation versus the other but rather to raise the broader issue of how new technologies even while replicating existing practices can fundamentally change the nature of what we do. These consequences are often unintended or unanticipated but are real all the same.

Finally, as a side note, I could not but think about the way new technologies force us to come up with new names for things that have gone before. Think of video bingo. Till that idea came along, bingo was bingo. Now of course we have to distinguish between video bingo and regular bingo. This is a form or post-hoc name generation created to differentiate it from something new. Linguists have a term for it, they call such words “retronyms.” As the wikipedia article says:

A retronym is a new name for an object or concept to differentiate the original form or version of it from a more recent form or version. The original name is most often augmented with an adjective (rather than being completely displaced) to account for later developments of the object or concept itself.”

Not all retronyms are constructed due to advances in technology (World War I for instance was called the Great War till World War II came along) but most of them are. Good examples of retronyms created by advances in technology are snail mail (to contrast it to email), face to face teaching (to contrast it to online teaching), acoustic guitar (created after the advent of the electric guitar) and so on.

Anyway, here’s William Kamkwamba speaking at the TED conference.

What is both incongruous and amazing is that we live in a world where there can be a terrible famine that a 14 year old has to drop out of school. And this boy finds a book at a library funded by some Western agencies, and looking at the pictures (he couldn’t read English very well) builds a windmill. The story ends up in the newspaper, and then hits the blogosphere. The kid ends up presenting at the TED conference in Africa!… and here is is on the Daily Show! Incidentally, Jon Stewart has a delicate balancing act as he tries to get this story across even while cracking jokes that his guest may not even understand.

Just how far Kamkwamba has come is best revealed by watching the video till the end… Watch for the discussion about Google.

As he says, “Where was this Google, all this time?”

[T]he day is coming—sooner than many people think—when a great deal of money is going to abruptly melt out of the higher education system, just as it has in scores of other industries that traffic in information that is now far cheaper and more easily accessible than it has ever been before. Much of that money will end up in the pockets of students in the form of lower prices, a boon and a necessity in a time when higher education is the key to prosperity. Colleges will specialize where they have comparative advantage, rather than trying to be all things to all people. A lot of silly, too-expensive things—vainglorious building projects, money-sucking sports programs, tenured professors who contribute little in the way of teaching or research—will fade from memory, and won’t be missed.

But other parts of those institutions will be threatened too—vital parts that support local communities and legitimate scholarship, that make the world a more enlightened, richer place to live. Just as the world needs the foreign bureaus that newspapers are rapidly shutting down, it needs quirky small university presses, Mughal textile historians, and people who are paid to think deep, economically unproductive thoughts. Rather than hiding within the conglomerate, each unbundled part of the university will have to find new ways to stand alone. There is an unstable, treacherous future ahead for institutions that have been comfortable for a long time. Like it or not, that’s the higher education world to come.

His essential argument is that under the assault of new technologies, mainly the rise of online learning, the business model that sustained U.S. colleges can’t survive. [He restricts his comments to just private colleges and universities, but given the condition of state funding, I see the points he is making relevant to all universities and colleges, private and public.]

He paints a bleak picture of the future college/university, saying

When this happens—be it in 10 years or 20—we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now. It will mean fewer professors and worse pay; low-paid, untenured faculty will do much of the teaching. Online instructors are already joining freelance reporters in the underpaid, insecure, overeducated work force that works from home. The market will encourage this trend. The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabi and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.

Most of the points he makes are not not new – they have been made in the past by others (I have had a couple of posts about these issues as well). However, there is one new idea that I had not fully thought about, and that has to do with the idea of college aggregators. Making an analogy with news aggregators that are pushing traditional news organizations towards demise, he argues that the future will see the rise of college aggregators.

Taking the newspaper analogy one step further, I would venture that college aggregators will be the hub of the new school experience. In the world of news, the aggregators (Google News, Yahoo News, blogs) have taken over from the physical—and virtual—newspaper as the entry point for news consumption. Already, half of college graduates attend more than one school before graduation. Soon, you’ll see more Web sites that make it easy to take classes from a blend of different universities, mixing and matching parts of a degree and helping to navigate the different institutional requirements. Already you can go to Web sites like http://www.bachelorsdegreeonline.com or www.EducationDegreeSource.com to learn about possible online-only degrees. Or you can go to the University of North Carolina’s Web portal to find classes around the state, some online, some offline. These are crude beginnings—like the news listservs of 1996. Soon, aggregators will combine and repackage not just courses, but the modules inside courses. Hourlong sessions will be remixed for different classes: That one hour on the French Revolution is good for both French History and for the History of Revolutions class.

The age of the educational mashup is here!!

He ends with a plea, that I would strong endorse:

But unless we make a strong commitment to even greater funding of higher education, the institutions that have allowed for academic freedom, communal learning, unpressured research, and intellectual risk-taking are themselves at risk. If the mainstream of “college teaching” becomes a set of atomistic, underpaid adjuncts whose wares are sold by barkers in the subway, we’ll lose a precious academic tradition that is not easily replaced.

Tetlock, P.E. (2005). Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know? Princeton: Princeton University Press.

I recently came across a review written by him, titled Reading Tarot on K Street (in the September/October 2009 issue of The National Interest) and I thought it captured his work in this area quite nicely (and would be worth preserving).

When we score the accuracy of thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts across dozens of countries over twenty years, we find the best forecasters tend to be modest about their forecasting skills, eclectic in their ideological and theoretical tastes, and self-critical in their analytical styles.1 Borrowing from philosopher Isaiah Berlin, I call them foxes—experts who know many things and are not finicky about where they get good ideas. Paraphrasing Deng Xiaoping, they do not care if the cat is white or black, only that it catches mice.

Contrast this with what I call hedgehogs—experts who know one big thing from which likely future trends can be more or less directly deduced. The big thing might be any of a variety of theories: Marxist faith in the class struggle as the driver of history or libertarian faith in the self-correcting power of free markets, or a realist faith in balance-of-power politics or an institutionalist faith in the capacity of the international community to make world politics less ruthlessly anarchic, or an eco-doomster faith in the impending apocalypse or a techno-boomster faith in our ability to make cost-effective substitutes for pretty much anything we might run out of.

What experts think—where they fall along the Left-Right spectrum—is a weak predictor of accuracy. But how experts think is a surprisingly consistent predictor. Relative to foxes who are less encumbered by loyalties to an all-encompassing worldview, hedgehogs offer bolder forecasts and, although they hit occasional grand slams, they strike out a lot and wind up with decidedly poorer batting averages.

The implications for people who make projections about technology and schools and learning is quite obvious to me. It is the hedgehogs we need to be careful of, mainly because of the vehemence of their beliefs which can sometimes override our “foxy” nature. I say inherent because I think that educators, for the most part, are pragmatists, sensitive to the limits of arm-chair theorizing and big ideas. A hard nosed approach to reality, that recognizes its complexity, that demands multi-faceted problems solving approaches is what is needed, not being wedded to one, just one overarching idea.

Edupunk seems to be a reaction against the rise of course-managements systems, which offer cookie-cutter tools that can make every course Web site look the same.

As with any neologism, there are as many meanings as there are users… here are some links if you want to learn more. First the post that introduced Edupunk to the world, and a couple more that attempt to explain its intricacies, here and here. [Note, this is not a comprehensive or even most important set of links on this topic, just what a few minutes with Google revealed to me.]

Now, the idea behind EduPunk, as Mike Caulfield describes it, “with its implication of technical accessibility, a DIY ethic, quick and dirty over grand design, and a suspicion of corporate appropriation” appeals to me a lot. It is something that Matt and I have been arguing and implementing for a while now, though of course we didn’t call it EduPunk. We often said that our course websites worked through a strange combination of “Duct Tape and Magic”.

In fact many years ago I wrote an essay for First Monday, titled “On becoming a website.” In this I think I articulated a skepticism of corporate sites such as Blackboard and Angel. Speaking of how corporate uniformity cramped me as a teacher, I wrote:

The main bottleneck preventing me from being “present” in the online classroom was this thing called the course Web site. The orthodoxy of online course Web design did not have much place for the instructor. Influenced no doubt by corporate discourse about standardization was the idea that Web sites needed to be consistent in look and feel. What this meant is that all online courses offered at my university (or at other universities for that matter) had to look the same. It didn’t matter whether it was a course on criminal justice or biomechanics. Imagine having all the professors in a university being clones of each other. How bland and stultifying that would be. Contrast this to the variation we have in courses today. In today’s universities, one would be hard pressed to find two professors who take identical approaches to teaching the same content. There is a great value in this variation in how each of us approaches our subject matter and our pedagogy. It offers students (as well as us) some insight into the many approaches there are to scholarship and teaching and to developing a personal relationship with subject matter. Isn’t that what teaching was all about?

As I thought about these matters I realized that no two classes I have ever taught were identical, even if I was covering the same content. I was even different in successive class meetings over the same semester. At a superficial level, I was different because I wore different clothes, cracked different jokes, interacted with students differently. However, at a deeper level, I was different because I came to class with a growing understanding of the content, and the group. However, this variation and richness was anathema to the standard instructional design model in online settings, dominated as they are by corporate discourse about standards and uniformity of experience. This uniformity is further reflected in the fact that the front pages of most online courses often remained unchanged over the period of the semester. This page usually had some introductory text, describing the course and the instructor, and irrespective of whether you were visiting the site for the first time or the fiftieth, this content stayed the same. It was as if you were given the introductory spiel every time you went to a class meeting. Imagine beginning each and every class with “Welcome to CRS568: Learning Technology by Design. I look forward to an exciting semester as we play and learn together.” Imagine how horribly boring that would be, ignoring the shared experience we were building up together.

Last summer, Johnson Space Center senior management coordinated a center-wide, cross-generational effort to explore well thought out and researched recommendations on improvements that can be implemented to make the center more open minded, collaborative, inclusive and innovative…. This video, which was created by the Barrier Analysis team and posted by Wayne Hale, is the first artifact to make its way into public domain. It highlights many of the barriers an employee with an idea encounters within the organization, including management styles, institutional inertia, organizational silos, and complexity of processes. The Barrier Analysis team did an excellent job identifying the barriers and developing implementable solutions to overcome those barriers [Text from opennasa.com].

Watch the video:

How often have we seen similar things happen in institutions we work in?