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Stanford’s Most Popular Class Isn’t Computer Science–It’s Something Much More Important
HT Dr. Nathan Vigil
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5 Lessons On Innovation From Modern-Day Explorers And Adventurers
“One of the highest return investments any company can make is in an exploration practice.”
HT@MeghanCureton
Innovators and explorers…you may want a formula but it’s about a menu http://t.co/s9zQsURFQW @boadams1-
using exploration to fuel invention
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In studying more than 2,000 companies, the World Database of Innovation Initiative (WDI) has discovered that many of the highest-growth companies share one peculiarity: They invest in someone or something exploring the edge of human ability
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An explorer, on the other hand, envisions the endpoint, assumes it is possible, and then figures out how to get there.
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making a simple but profound shift from a “Can we do this?” to “How will we do this?”
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In fact, the only two things risky about investing in innovation are treating it like a pipeline–or not doing it at all.
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One of the highest return investments any company can make is in an exploration practice. While you may want a formula, the five approaches here are simply a menu.
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Student Engagement: What Do Students Want? | Learn as You Go
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Innovate By Learning To Fix First – Explore Create Repeat – by Format
HT @MeghanCureton
Innovation Diploma Consultivation
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used the Innovation Diploma Disney Cohort as consultants for learning and integrating design thinking into their Open Idea Lab in Atlanta, the doctors and administrators there coined a hashtag at the end (because the approach created great impact): #RentAStudent
Well, iDiploma Director Meghan Cureton (@MeghanCureton) seized on that insight and started an adVenture series that the Disney Cohort named “Consultivation.” In short, an outside person spends a 90-minute session with the Cohort to work through a rapid design lab to address a challenge or opportunity he or she faces in work or business.
Today, the iDiploma Disney Cohort hosted its third consultivation. The chief engineer for NAES (North American Energy Services) joined us to share a challenge his team is facing in communication. A photo gallery of the consultivation can be found below, and a Google doc of the facilitation flow is also provided.
If you are looking for creative and productive ways to blur lines between “school” and “real world,” you may want to consider something like our consultivation. Our student learners are not only amazing future resources, but they are incredible current resources – growing designers who want to and can contribute to real-world problem solving and solution seeking.
Our client left this morning saying that he was extremely excited to explore the solutions our iDiploma Disney Cohort created – hybrid systems that combine and integrate already-available tools which work together to address the needs that our user shared with us. He also indicated that he was leaving with a “standard” against which to measure future, potential solutions because of the needfinding and prototyping that was made visible this morning… in just 90 minutes.
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Views on iDiploma Consultivation from other Angles:
- “The Future of School,” post by Meghan Cureton about Consultivation
- “An Eventful Day,” post by Anya Smith about this Consultivation
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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HT @Romathio
Finnish schools dropping subjects. http://t.co/EHZzL2spCB cc: @jbrettjacobsen @boadams1 @EmilyBreite @kristaparker @HollyChesser #mvlearns
Schools in Finland will no longer teach ‘subjects’ http://t.co/ufIbBOGwN7 @boadams1 @cliffordshelley @chiphouston1976 @jbrettjacobsen-
“What we need now is a different kind of education to prepare people for working life.
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Subject-specific lessons – an hour of history in the morning, an hour of geography in the afternoon – are already being phased out for 16-year-olds in the city’s upper schools. They are being replaced by what the Finns call “phenomenon” teaching – or teaching by topic.
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More academic pupils would be taught cross-subject topics such as the European Union – which would merge elements of economics, history (of the countries involved), languages and geography.
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There are other changes too, not least to the traditional format that sees rows of pupils sitting passively in front of their teacher, listening to lessons or waiting to be questioned. Instead there will be a more collaborative approach, with pupils working in smaller groups to solve problems while improving their communication skills.
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“We really need a rethinking of education and a redesigning of our system, so it prepares our children for the future with the skills that are needed for today and tomorrow.
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Ms Kyllonen has been advocating a “co-teaching” approach to lesson planning, with input from more than one subject specialist.
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“Making nonhuman things intuitive to humans. Purpose provision. Opposability. Cross-class expertise.”
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As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too, and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged.
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For example, in today’s loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch afterward and follow up with four carefully tended friendships forevermore. Then they spend their lives connecting people across networks.
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Network sustainability.
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People with social courage are extroverted in issuing invitations but introverted in conversation — willing to listen 70 percent of the time. They build not just contacts but actual friendships by engaging people on multiple levels. If you’re interested in a new field, they can reel off the names of 10 people you should know. They develop large informal networks of contacts that transcend their organization and give them an independent power base. They are discriminating in their personal recommendations since character judgment is their primary currency.
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“The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.”
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#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Disney’s $1 Billion Bet on a Magical Wristband | WIRED
Incredible piece about the incredibly designed UX at Disney. What if “school” had more of this UX design and capability? Wow!
HT @TreyBoden
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In fact, it’s called the paradox of choice: You make people happier not by giving them more options but by stripping away as many as you can. The redesigned Disney World experience constrains choices by dispersing them, beginning long before the trip is under way. “There are missions in a vacation,” Staggs says. In other words, Disney knows that parents arrive to its parks thinking: We have to have tea with Cinderella, and where the hell is that Buzz Lightyear thing, anyway? In that way, the park isn’t a playground so much as a videogame, with bosses to be conquered at every level. The MagicBands let you simply set an agenda and let everything else flow around what you’ve selected. “It lets people’s vacations unfold naturally,” Staggs says. “The ability to plan and personalize has given way to spontaneity.” And that feeling of ease, and whatever flows from it, just might make you more apt to come back.
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Will the world at large ever become something akin to Disney World, loaded with sensors attuned to our every move, designed to free us? There are signs.
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Linda Hill: How to manage for collective creativity | Talk Video | TED.com
“Innovation is a journey. It’s a type of collaborative problem solving, usually among people who have different expertise and different points of view. Innovations rarely get created full-blown.”
“we found that innovative organizations are communities that have three capabilities: creative abrasion, creative agility and creative resolution.”
“Why is it that Pixar and Google are able to innovate time and again? It’s because they’ve mastered the capabilities required for that. They know how to do collaborative problem solving, they know how to do discovery-driven learning and they know how to do integrated decision making.”
“For sure, there are times when visionary leadership is exactly what is needed. But if we want to build organizations that can innovate time and again, we must recast our understanding of what leadership is about. Leading innovation is about creating the space where people are willing and able to do the hard work of innovative problem solving.”
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The 10 Faces of Innovation | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
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Innovation is all about people. It is about the roles people can play, the hats they can put on, the personas they can adopt. It is not just about the luminaries of innovation like Thomas Edison, or celebrity CEOs like Steve Jobs and
Jeff Immelt. It is about the unsung heroes who work on the front lines of entrepreneurship in action, the countless people and teams who make innovation happen day in and day out. -
At Ideo, we’ve developed 10 people-centric tools, talents, or personas for innovation. Although the list does not presume to be comprehensive, it does aspire to expand your repertoire. We’ve found that adopting one or more of these roles can help teams express a different point of view and create a broader range of innovative solutions.
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Weekly Wrap-up: Time to Tune Projects | GHS Innovation Lab
Teacher and facilitator collaboration is a MUST! GHS provides a nice, quick case study of why this mantra of collaboration is critical for modern education – if we truly mean to be innovative in our practice!
Jeff Immelt