Category Archives: #MustRead Shares – Weekly Reading

#MustRead Shares (weekly)

Posted on by
Reply

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

#MustRead Shares (weekly)

Posted on by
1

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

#MustRead Shares (weekly)

Posted on by
1

  • Nobody’s as Smart as Everybody—Unleashing Individual Brilliance and Aligning Collective Genius | Management Innovation eXchange

    “Rite-Solutions created a state-of-the-art “innovation engine” designed to provoke and align individual brilliance toward collective genius. The goal was to connect on an emotional level where all employees are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for their opinions, listened to, and rewarded for successful ideas. Our quest is for each employee to feel “more relevant” and turn that relevance into forward motion toward a future state that we all create.”

    tags: management innovation exchange Mutual Fun UnbouBrainFood #MustRead

    • Rite-Solutions created a state-of-the-art “innovation engine” designed to provoke and align individual brilliance toward collective genius. The goal was to connect on an emotional level where all employees are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for their opinions, listened to, and rewarded for successful ideas. Our quest is for each employee to feel “more relevant” and turn that relevance into forward motion toward a future state that we all create.

    • You start to get the message Day One. At 9am on your first day of work we throw you a birthday party—with wrapped presents, cake and all kinds of fun. That morning, your family gets the “welcome wagon”—flowers, gifts and a personal note from me and Joe, delivered at home.

      Why do we give people a party when they’re leaving a company?  That’s not the time to make them feel important! How do we make people feel important the moment they join a company? The idea behind the birthday party is that you’ve arrived at a new place where you belong, you were expected, and you are important.

      Even better, when  you go to your birthday party, everyone in the room has a lot of different reasons to relate to you. New recruits fill out a “birth certificate,” which details their hobbies, travel experiences, family, schooling, pets, military service, and surprising facts—like a hobby of growing giant pumpkins or playing a particular instrument..

      • Love this idea of throwing people a party when they START at a school, not when they leave!

  • Innovation Excellence | DNA of a 21st Century Educator

    tags: innovation dna 21st century educator educator Brainfood #MustRead

  • A Crash Course in Innovation | Edutopia

    tags: innovation design design thinking edutopia Boss #MustRead schools of the future

    • At capacity, SCS will serve 900 students in grades 6-12. Teens learn alongside college role models who are preparing for careers in creative professions.
      • Great synergy possible among 6-12 teens and college students studying for careers in creative professions. Interesting model of Ken Robinson’s “not grouping by date of manufacture.”
    • HFLI model emphasizes readiness for college and careers, “but we also want students to become active agents in community redevelopment,”

  • Can Innovation Skills Be Learned? | Edutopia

    tags: Innovation edutopia Wagner #MustRead Mindset

      • Curiosity, which is a habit of asking good questions and a desire to understand more deeply
      • Collaboration, which begins with listening to and learning from others who have perspectives and expertise that are very different from your own
      • Associative or integrative thinking
      • A bias toward action and experimentation
    • But as an educator and a parent, what I find most significant in this list is that it represents a set of skills and habits of mind that can be nurtured, taught and mentored!
    • “Innovative entrepreneurship is not a genetic predisposition, it is an active endeavor.
    • what you have learned to do is more essential
    • But by the time they are 6½ years old, they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.
    • “Creativity is a habit. The problem is that schools sometimes treat it as a bad habit . . . Like any habit, creativity can either be encouraged or discouraged.”

  • The Creative Personality

    tags: creativity #MustRead Psychology Csikszentmihalyi

    • Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.
    • Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.
    • the convergent and the divergent
      • I wonder…are schools pretty good at the convergent, but relatively negligent of the divergent? If so, could this mean we are scoring a “50” in terms of educating “whole people?”
    • People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying
      • Educational transformation in ways that enhance and amplify the blurring of lines between “school” and “life” seems to be an idea worth pursuing for a lifetime!
    • Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility
    • Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work: “Tell anybody you’re a sculptor and they’ll say, ‘Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.’ And I tend to say, ‘What’s so wonderful?’ It’s like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they don’t wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn’t fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture?”
      • This paragraph about sculpting and hard work reminds me of “Grit” from Jonah Lehrer’s talk on 99%. Great connection to Drive, Mindset, Talent Code, Element, etc.
    • Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality
    • Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted
    • Creative people are humble and proud at the same time
    • Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping
    • Creative people are both rebellious and conservative
    • In innovation, you have to play a less safe game
    • Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well
    • Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.
    • Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable

  • How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity – Harvard Business Review

    tags: pixar creativity leadership Collective creativity #MustRead

    • If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people! Contrary to what the studio head asserted at lunch that day, such people are not so easy to find.

  • The 11 Leadership Secrets You’ve Never Heard About – Forbes

    tags: leadership followers leading following Burk #MustRead

  • Cultural Change That Sticks – Harvard Business Review

    tags: change culture #MustRead

  • Experts & NewBIEs | Bloggers on Project Based Learning: The Common Core is the “what.” PBL is the “how.”

    tags: PBL commoncore CCSS #MustRead

  • Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums | Video on TED.com

    tags: innovation schools of the future TED&TEDx #MustRead

  • Between the By-Road and the Main Road: The Wide Space Between Personalized Learning and Personal Learning is Choice of Action

    tags: personalized personal learning choice action PBL schools of the future #MustRead

  • Common Core State Standards Initiative | Key Points In Mathematics

    tags: CCSS mathematics math PBL projects context #MustRead

    • standards stress not only procedural skill but also conceptual understanding, to make sure students are learning and absorbing the critical information they need to succeed at higher levels – rather than the current practices by which many students learn enough to get by on the next test, but forget it shortly thereafter, only to review again the following year.
    • high school standards call on students to practice applying mathematical ways of thinking to real world issues and challenges
    • develop a depth of understanding and ability to apply mathematics to novel situations
    • high school standards emphasize mathematical modeling, the use of mathematics and statistics to analyze empirical situations, understand them better, and improve decisions
    • “Modeling links classroom mathematics and statistics to everyday life, work, and decision-making. It is the process of choosing and using appropriate mathematics and statistics to analyze empirical situations, to understand them better, and to improve decisions. Quantities and their relationships in physical, economic, public policy, social and everyday situations can be modeled using mathematical and statistical methods. When making mathematical models, technology is valuable for varying assumptions, exploring consequences, and comparing predictions with data.”

  • Common Core State Standards Initiative | Key Points In English Language Arts

    tags: CCSS PBL Writing Projects English Language Arts #MustRead

    • range of subjects
    • Research—both short, focused projects (such as those commonly required in the workplace) and longer term in depth research —is emphasized throughout the standards but most prominently in the writing strand since a written analysis and presentation of findings is so often critical.
    • students gain, evaluate, and present increasingly complex information, ideas, and evidence through listening and speaking as well as through media.
    • Formal presentations are one important way such talk occurs, but so is the more informal discussion that takes place as students collaborate to answer questions, build understanding, and solve problems.
    • standards help prepare students for real life experience at college and in 21st century careers

  • What does it mean to be learned? | SmartBlogs SmartBlogs

    tags: learning DavidWarlick #MustRead schools of the future responsive assessment gaming

  • Colleges Awakening to the Opportunities of Data Mining – NYTimes.com

    tags: data data mining assessment predictive colleges #MustRead

  • Social and Emotional Curriculum: Sharing Your Gift | Edutopia

    tags: gift strengths brightspots happiness PBL #MustRead

    • “Happiness comes from giving, not getting . . . to get joy, we must give it, and to keep joy we must scatter it.”
      • This article on sharing your gift seems intimately connected to PBL and the future of schools to me. If classroom work was done more to share gifts, innovation, enhancements and less as just-a-completion-of-an-assignment-only-the-teacher-will-see, then the level of engagement would seem to rise dramatically. The possibility for solutions-oriented education would rise dramatically, too.
    • moving from “me” to “we.”
    • signposts that can mark the way
      • Could these also be some of the signposts for school transformation to a more 21C model?

  • 21 Things That Will Be Obsolete by 2020 | MindShift

    tags: future mindshift schools of the future obsolete #MustRead

  • 10 Things in School That Should Be Obsolete | MindShift

    tags: school design learningspaces schools of the future #MustRead

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

#MustRead Shares (weekly)

Posted on by
2

While I have been reading with the social bookmarking tool Diigo for a couple of years, I have just learned how to auto-post from Diigo to WordPress – thanks to @Philip_Cummings! This post is my first iterative prototype, and I made a few errors to tweak in my experiment. I like the idea that a portion of my weekly online reading (that portion marked with the “#MustRead” tag) will circulate to a weekly post uploaded to my blog on Sundays (once I get the time stamp correct).

  • First-level bullets mark the articles read and tagged with #MustRead in Diigo;
    tags appear unbulleted, below article, indented

    • Second-level bullets share my highlighting with the highlighter tool in Diigo
      • Third-level bullets share my annotations if I add a sticky note in Diigo

Thanks, Philip. I have a good starting place, thanks to you.

tags: innovation mistakes experiments learning #MustRead

  • (Power)Pointless or Purposeful? « Molehills out of Mountains

    tags: PBL schools of the future authentic #MustRead

  • Helping Students Become Active Citizens

    tags: citizens citizenship slacktivism PBL CBL #MustRead

    • The question becomes, how do we translate our students’ understanding of past actors into action by young people today? Whitney and I decided in March to chuck the traditional exam format and craft a project to help students make this connection.

      We wanted students to act on their growing knowledge and to connect with others beyond our school walls. With this objective in mind we focused the project on three components: student interest, sustained research, and engagement with peers in school and elsewhere who shared their interests or were leaders in one way or another.

      • This is a key way that I think Unboundary can interact with, influence, and enhance education. I think Unboundary is uniquely positioned to synergize its work with significance/CSR and educational transformation.

  • What’s the Best Way to Practice Project Based Learning? | MindShift

    tags: PBL Projectbasedlearning problem_based_learning continua spectrum #MustRead

  • Whole-School Project Builds Pride | Edutopia

    tags: PBL project based learning projectbasedlearning project_based_learning edutopia #MustRead

    • already a 1:1 laptop district that integrates technology effectively. Two years ago, teachers took part in professional development to learn more about PBL. Except for some isolated classroom projects, however, the shift away from more traditional instruction has been slow to happen.
      • Reinforces Aran Levasseur’s points in “Does our current education system support innovation?” in MindShift 7-18-12.
    • planned it as a team, we could all go down the road together, moving forward with our understanding of PBL,
    • teachers had two hours for collaborative professional development every other week to devote to planning.
      • For a school with aggressive approach to PLCs, there could be even more time – if school is serious about systemic change more quickly
    • Using flip cameras that the school provided or their own mobile devices, students captured still shots and video, which they uploaded to a Posterous site.
      • Like Synergy Observation Journals.
    • make it even better?
      • Brightspot challenge
    • mix of students from grades 9-12.
    • He wanted everything to be right.
      • When work is intended for “beyond the classroom,” students want to do their best work (and not just because of a grade!)
    • Mentors provided students with additional feedback, encouragement, and ideas from beyond their small community. “Our kids took to heart what their mentors had to say,” Parks adds, and students used technology in authentic ways to connect with them.
      • When schools are not scared of online policy, but instead embrace the educational possibilities, great coalitions of learning and doing form!

  • Does Our Current Education System Support Innovation? | MindShift

    tags: innovation #MustRead

  • Change or Die

    tags: change narrative #MustRead innovation Switch

    • pointed to the paramount importance of framing
      • Like a recent NPR Planet Money explained in relation to “Why People Do Bad Things.” Not so much character as frame of reference.
    • If we had the frame of the company as a family or a commune, people would know very different ways of working together.
      • I wonder what happens when we call ourselves “a family” but we run hierarchically? Seems confusing of purpose, process, etc.
    • the story must be simple, easy to identify with, emotionally resonant, and evocative of positive experiences.”
    • impact of reframing and telling a new narrative that’s simple, positive, and emotional
      • Change is narrative!
    • radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones.
      • Wow. This could really inform the ways schools orchestrate change.
    • tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease
      • So to justify radical, sweeping change in schools, we may have to show immediate, positive results. Those can come in many different forms.
    • “short-term wins”
      • So much of this article reminds me of Heath Bros SWITCH!
    • Xerox lagged in giving them the support they needed
      • Do schools “lag” in giving faculty, parents, students the support they need? Is this why change is so slow?
    • brain’s ability to change — its “plasticity” — is lifelong
    • drive lasting changes in the brain
      • Like the hot water on butter channels in Creative Thinkering on p. 12
    • Posit Science has a “fifth-day strategy,” meaning that everyone spends one day a week working in a different discipline.
      • “Play each others’ instruments.”
    • So ideally you deliberately construct new challenges.
    • Innovation comes about when people are enabled to use their full brains and intelligence instead of being put in boxes and controlled.”

  • Top Universities Test the Online Appeal of Free – NYTimes.com

    tags: universities online #MustRead

    • experts wonder whether some colleges will find it harder to attract students willing to pay $20,000, $40,000 or even $60,000 a year for the traditional on-campus experience.
      • Increasing power and ability of online to capture relational aspect will help determine where price points make difference.
    • Residential colleges already attract far less than half of the higher education market
      • I did not know that!
    • Most enrollment and nearly all growth in higher education is in less costly options that let students balance classes with work and family: commuter colleges, night schools, online universities.
    • standard class will be a hybrid of in-person and online elements
      • Hybrid makes a lot of sense. Combining parts of residential and in-person with virtual and anytime/anywhere. How many learn now! Just not integrated “officially” yet.

  • The Innovative Educator: 19 bold (not old) ideas for change

    tags: Innovation change richardson #MustRead

  • Will · Valuing the Immeasurable

    tags: edreform #MustRead

  • Will Richardson: My Kids are Illiterate. Most Likely, Yours Are Too

    tags: 21stCenturySkills literacy richardson #MustRead

  • Consortium of Colleges Takes Online Education to New Level – NYTimes.com

    tags: online education Coursera colleges university #MustRead

      • Flipping the classroom. Using precious f2f time for more interactive, engaging, problem solving.
    • In a field changing this fast, we need flexibility,
      • This is fascinating – outsourcing the grading work to students who calibrate well with co-assessing work with professor. Sample size seems small.

  • Let Go of the Wheel…. Teaching Without Driving | Beth Holland

    Great post from @brholland “You have to let go of the wheel.” #edchat #edtech http://t.co/fPoVa0EB

    tags: edchat edtech #MustRead

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.