1. Sir Ken Robinson on “Do schools kill creativity?”

2. Salman Khan on “Let’s use video to reinvent education”

3. Daniel Pink on “The Surprising Science of Motivation”

4. Steven Johnson on “Where good ideas come from” (not as entertaining as the others but a great demystification on the matter)

5. Steve Keil on “A Manifesto for Play, for Bulgaria and Beyond”

I’ve identified in my thesis that there are 3 components that enable learning by interaction: first is that situation matters; second is that trust matters; and third is that language matters. I’ll try to explain it here not going into many technical issues. In order to do so, I’ll use an example to back up the theory.

Let’s say you play video games and that you like one title in particular. It doesn’t really matter which one, the important thing is that you enjoy it and that you want to know more about that game. You can try to work alone at your home and go through trial and error or read the game manual. Without the help of other people you simply can’t do more than that, can you? But assuming that if you own a video game you probably also own a computer and you have internet connection. Your set of tools changed. You are now able to contact other people, surf the net for tips, reports, forums, blogs, ask friends on MSN, Skype or Gtalk and so on. This is a change in the situation. The introduction of tools and / or people as resources for learning enhances your possibilities of absorbing new knowledge.

So by surfing the net you learn that if you smash the left side of the console with a hammer (just above the power button) you’ll be able to get more points in the game. How do you know you can do it with no harm to your hammer? I know this is a lousy example but it shows how trust matters in the interactive learning process. If you don’t trust your counterparts, how can you put the knowledge they give you to test and use?

Finally, you decide that the knowledge you found on the Internet seems trustworthy enough – it’s the biggest gaming forum on the web! – but it seems you’ve skipped some classes in school because you can’t understand anything people say. Incomprehensible sentences keep coming up like “omg I h8 this part cuz there iz no lulz”, “gimme the cookies plx!”, and “how come you don’t know that the dmg meters only calculate a third of the poison dmg because the math on dot’s is messed up, you nub?”.

Video game language test.

This is where we clearly see why language matters. When coming into a new group people often have to adjust the words they use and learn the expressions and concepts that are characteristic for that group. This is as true for video games as it is for medicine, book clubs, or animal psychology. Until there is a shared language at work, members of that group will find hard to make sense of each others’ practice and experiences.

Therefore in order for people to be able to learn from one another, the group needs to establish tools that allow them to connect; trust each other as sources of knowledge; and create a shared language that enables them to understand the knowledge transferred in that interaction. Any group of people should take that into consideration when developing learning strategies that include interaction.

I first heard of it in 2009 in a meeting with some local suppliers here in Vitória, Espírito Santo state, Brazil. These are mostly medium-sized entrepreneurs that discuss their difficulties in supplying for large manufacturing companies that are located here. In that meeting, they turned the discussion to a request for providing “innovative ideas” to their contractors.

At first, it sounded to me like a great step, one that could bring lots of opportunities for them – to sell more services with embedded knowledge and higher value – and for the contractors to enhance their performance. However, I was taken by surprise when they all started to laugh. The request was somewhat considered ridiculous, even offensive to some businessmen present at that meeting. My first reaction was “why are they so defensive to change? There are lots of opportunities for them here!” but then I started remembering previous meetings of this sort. And it was indeed an insane request.

All large contractors in Espírito Santo are commodities producers and therefore their profit margin (or what they can do about it) is mostly about cost. Therefore their strategy for a long time was to pressure their suppliers to “do more for less”. It was common for the contractors to engage in joint meetings to search for unnecessary people and materials hired for the job to avoid waste of material, money and time in order to lower the price of the provided service. Even online auction to get new contracts were established: whoever do it for less gets the contract. Companies were getting clearly choked by a very visible hand.

And then, with no changes, with their margins near to zero, all of sudden the contractor asks: “hey! We need new ideas and innovation! And we need you to do it with us!”. Of course suppliers should laugh. Innovation is costly and uncertain, requires trials and errors, and it is time-consuming. The reward is high, of course, but also is the investment. And without balancing the relationship – which is clearly centered in achieving lower costs – suppliers will laugh at such requests.

What is needed is to hear what’s behind the laugh and find common ground where the collaboration can be fruitful for both sides. Contractors need to stop listening only to what they want to, and start paying attention to their partners’ voices. After all, in many industries, the suppliers are also the most important resource for innovative ideas. Loosen up the grip is very important to reestablish trust and initiative.

Even so, suppliers also need to take the leap and understand that, without innovative initiatives, they might also be trapped into an ever tighter pressure to “do more for less”. One that can only be broken with creative solutions to break from the competition that can be reduced to an online auction…

by now I guess everyone noticed (if anyone follows this blog) that I’ve been away for a while and it will probably still be like this for a little longer. I’m trying to finish my master thesis and time is running short to dedicate to this blog. I’ll be back when I’m done with this struggle.

Just want to leave here a few interesting links to give you some thoughts about creativity and innovation:

Digital Media and Learning: the power of participation – http://dmlcentral.net/

Creative Class – http://www.creativeclass.com/

And an interesting video to motivate you to get things going: http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/archives/2010/01/the_eight_irres.shtml

Hope you have a great, fresh start in 2010 and find what really matters. See you soon!

For example, video games have been blamed for the disaster of Columbine in 1999 and in Helsinki in 2007 [1]. They’ve also been blamed for kids that don’t want to go to school or bad school performance; childhood obesity, and the list keep growing. However, more and more research shows that video games have hardly anything to do with most of them. Kids that suffer from any of those have shown psychological backgrounds that explains better their problems than “video game addiction”[2].

In fact, I share the opinion that only troubled minds get addicted to video games. In our current society we only praise successful people, stories, and those who became rich and famous. I’m not a psychologist but I like to question the kind of pressure we put in people these days. Advertisement, movies, TV series, cartoons, and, more concerning, in magazines, newspapers, TV news reports everyone has some special powers that make them better than the average man or woman is. And hardly have we seen their failures. And not only kids are affected by that.

I heard once from a Human Resource consultant that “we are supposed to know to dance like Astaire, to choose wine like a professional sommelier, to sing like Sinatra, and to excel in every aspect of life but we are failures if we are learning how to do these things”. Have you ever considered that perspective? And how long does it take to learn all those things? Truth is that in virtual worlds offered by Video Games we accomplish a lot more in less time than in real life. And this reward, in troubled minds, can lead them to focus on virtual worlds rather than the real one. In a way, video game accomplishment offers an alternative to the mediocrity that daily life scrapes on our faces everyday – taking school exams that you have no idea what’s that course for, paying bills, paper work, fixing the door bell, or changing a flat tire. They offer us those special powers and allow us to dance like Astaire, or play guitar like a Guitar Hero (pun intended).

I don’t want to celebrate mediocrity. But I think we might as well value the process and the learning involved in trying – and not turn every mistake into failure. Because if we want to do something different (innovate) we are incurring into a great chance of making mistakes in the process. And if we do not take advantage of those and punish mistakes as we do today, how are we to ask for people to innovate? Video games instead, when you die you get new chances, and you can question what you are doing wrong, go to the internet to find out about it and so on. There is learning after dying – because there is purpose and a clear goal.

There’s a lot to be said about video games and some points are quite controversial. But this is just a first post of a series I’ll try to write discussing their use in many other fields that not only entertainment. Video games offer a far more interesting interface than regular software and some are aware of that power and willing to experiment with them. Here I just want to make the point that video games are not evil or responsible for the collapse of virtues and values in society. Those opinions are just facing a hard time in accepting the new as generations ago had as the following illustrates: “A pastime of illiterate, wretched creatures who are stupefied by their daily jobs, a machine of mindlessness and dissolution”. While this might illustrate the type of attacks that video games suffer today, it was actually said more than 70 years ago about the movies – which today are considered a form of art[3].

So instead of blaming them, perhaps we should look more carefully into them.

[2] and [3] Steven Poole (2004): Trigger Happy: Video games and the entertainment revolution. Arcade Publishing.

I’ve been reading John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information from 2000. And what I can say about it is that it has been a relief to find someone who studied and translated so well the conflicts between technology and practical work. For some time I’ve been thinking about this because there is a paradox between some of the promises from utopian technologists and the empirical evidence of technology use.

The first have a wide range of terms and predictions. According to them, the world is growing out of its borders to dissolve them. Through the information revolution, we will reach the information age where everyone will be knowledge workers and live in electronic cottages connected to the global village.

However, these predictions fail to set in the use people give to technology. Moreover, they overlook the social aspects of our lives. What we do in work, at home, or at school is often done by interacting with peers, and learning from them informally. These informal, lateral relations are not captured by most technology or management studies, which are focused at processes inputs, outputs, and the best organization of stages. However, as Brown and Duguid point out in their book, it is through lateral relationships that people adapt to changes and find meaning in what they do. It is within peer talk that the tacit part of knowledge is shared.

This goes in hand with Lundvall’s proposition that tacit knowledge is vital, but very hard to transfer through technology. To make a long story short, the difficulties raise from the fact that tacit knowledge is embodied in its owner, directly connected to his/her backbone, as Lundvall says. It follows that the tacit dimension of knowledge is what allows people to see when to apply the explicit knowledge they have acquired through education and training.

So it is hardly anytime soon that we will see people dispersing through the woods into their electronic cottages. Even with the growth of social media and the new euphoria that the internet 2.0 is creating, technology still is inserted in networks and communities. And they shape its use to better suit their way of exchanging information and knowledge.

REFERENCES:

Rob KLING; Reading “All About” Computerization: How Genre Conventions Shape Nonfiction Analysis in Philip E. Agre and Douglas Schuler (2001). Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community.

John Seely BROWN and Paul DUGUID (2000). The Social Life of Information. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts-US.

Bengt-Åke LUNDVALL (2006). Knowledge Management in the Learning Economy, DRUID Working Papers 06-06, DRUID, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy/Aalborg University, Department of Business Studies.

At first, I started following people who I already knew, part of my social circle. To be quite honest, it was plain boring. I don’t know if I was the strange one in the equation. But I don’t need to know all details of their lives, or their opinion about every little gossip on TV or YouTube. I felt like wasting my time. But I was looking at Twitter as another Facebook, or Orkut.

I dropped it for a few weeks but I kept hearing about it. How some people found interesting articles, news, and blogs by recommendation on Twitter and it compelled me to invest a little more. And the minute I stopped worrying about following people I knew and started following people with interesting posts, my impression of it changed completely.

Today my current view on Twitter is that it allows you to find and connect with communities of topics that you are interested in. Twitter allows you to hear what that group is talking about. Feels a bit like being in a party where you want to join a particular conversation but you don’t know anybody in the circle. You stay there, laughing of some jokes until you feel comfortable enough to say something – although I must admit people will still look at you and think “where on earth did this guy come from?”, and maybe still ignore your comments.

Nevertheless, some say being around giants makes you grow (I’m really bad when it comes to expressions and analogies). And just being able to find what some people have to say about topics you like, might give you incentive to think about it, and question it. And that exercise has been quite helpful in understanding the world around.

So my advice here is for you to join Twitter and try to find people who you admire. But don’t be afraid to unfollow those that fill your list with “Just had a nice tuna sandwich. Yam!”, unless you are interested in sandwiches. In that case, make sure you reply with a @ asking where from and what did it have.

(If you want know more about Twitter and how to use it, I found a blogpost from april 2008 with a long list of tips for using it. Might help your first steps.)

It reached me on Twitter a discussion by John Merrow about the role of technology in classrooms and how it is feared by many teachers and school principals. Here, I quote him:

“I think technology is a huge threat to a decent education precisely because it allows shortcuts like [the use of plot summaries on line that you can read in 30 seconds].  We know that students everywhere are downloading term papers written by others and submitting them as their own, and now they don’t even have to read the material.  We’re producing students with no deep understanding of our culture and a fundamental contempt for education”.

But what really gets me is that this is only a risk because the school model used in most countries is still based on instruction, rather than building the deep understanding he mentions! I agree that we are producing such students. But it is not the student’s fault or the technology’s fault. Can you tell me of anybody who will spend more time than needed in a task they don’t like? Will you tell me that you do not use the internet to search for needed knowledge to make your tasks easier? In the current educational setting, students are being punished for doing what we all do at our jobs! In fact, some authors argue that sorting out what you need from the numerous search results is a key competence is the Learning Economy.

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau

It is not my intention to criticize his entire post. In fact, I believe that he gives some insights on how to better use technology in the current setting. Also he offers some good perspectives on the risks schools are running while not investing in understanding technology. But he misses a greater discussion (and for me a more important one) that is about the school model.

What is needed is to review the school model that was built based on the late 19^th century understanding of how we learn. Its aim was to supply the industrial economy with its workers. Our current economy demands creative people with ability to research, solve problems, learn to use new technology, and innovate, which are crucial for people to live fulfilling lives in the new economy. And the learning sciences have already identified the principles that underlie building such abilities: customized learning; availability of diverse knowledge sources; collaborative group learning; and assessment for deeper understanding. From these, at least three can be broadly supported by technology[2].

What must be worked out fast is that the educational sector is one of the least innovatives[3] and that the adoption of technology is being made mostly for incremental change over the same foundation. It’s time to look for some radical new models. Put our minds together in exercises like Google’s initiative on Breakthrough Learning in the Digital Age to innovate education. Look for some examples already at work such as the Brazilian Instituto Lumiar who got also Microsoft’s attention as an innovative school.

If we are to discuss the use of technology in education, we might as well discuss how to educate for using technology. Knowledge is available. Perhaps we just need to teach how to find, sort, and make use of it, what makes learning skills more important than knowing. And if my logic makes any sense, it might turn out that I’m not THAT wrong.

[2] and [3] OECD (2008): Innovating to Learn, Learning to Innovate. Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. OECD.

EDIT: I remembered of a video that questions education as we have it that is related to school models and the discussion on this post. I decided to add it because it reinforces my point on the need for school model change.

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This time what caught my attention was the MPro projector. It’s a tiny thing with 12 x 6 x 2 cm large – a little bigger than a mobile phone. Its battery lasts for 240 minutes of non-stop projection of images up to 50”. I know it doesn’t sound much for most people but if you are constantly on the move like a salesperson or a consultant, it sure is helpful. Moreover, if you are a professor in a university where the infrastructure is not so good (let’s say… like a public Brazilian one?) it sure gives you the power to offer something more than board, chalk and spit – and you don’t need to worry about people stealing it as you can simply take it home. And all that for “only” US$ 490,00.

But why did it called my attention? Not only because it might be useful for me in the future, but also because it reminded me of 3M’s power of doing different things, in different areas, and with good results. It reminded me that when you know what you are good at, it doesn’t matter where you apply that knowledge, it will bring results. So find out what is your core competence, the resources your organization has that makes it provide unique solutions, and work hard on it – and start looking for ways of doing it better, or smarter ways of using it.

But please, stay away from the “our people is our most important resource” or other clichés. Look for those skills and experiences that has sustainably brought you results over the years. That’s where your competitive advantage is. And your job is to keep pushing it, just like 3M.

REFERENCES:

3M’s  website and 3M’s 2008 Annual Report

Douma and Schreuder (2002). Economic Approaches to Organizations. Ed. Prentice Hall, 3rd Edition

This statement illustrates social interaction as the driving force of innovation:“There’re some applications that never have occurred to me, to think about it, in the course of designing the network.” – Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist. The more people interact, the more the possibility of developing new possibilities, identifying new gaps between what there is and what could be. Interaction makes you aware of what have never occurred to you, and that might change the way you face your daily challenges.

Now, can you imagine the power we have to solve problems if all those unheard voices are given the chance to speak? How many questions would they raise from their experience? How many opportunities to question what is taken for granted? And not only question the established but also share knowledge and discuss possibilities, and develop roadmaps to changes.

It’s sad that some old mental models try to hold new developments and force them into their rusted frameworks. Perhaps if those would take the opportunity to question what they are doing, maybe they wouldn’t see their castles falling apart to some smart kid innovating the business model they have now.