It's About Learning

There has never been a better time…

Dwayne Harapnuik — December 1, 2014 — Leave a comment

I am not one to long for the “good ole days” because I believe that there has never been a better time to be a learner, to be an entrepreneur, or to be alive in general. You can fill in the “to be” section of that statement with so many things. Now, I need to qualify a few points. I am referring to living in the west and in particular Canada but despite the unconscionable social injustices we see throughout the world and in particular the third world there has never been a better time to be alive. Don’t take my word for this–just refer to Hans Rosling amazing Ted Talk The best stats you have ever seen.

The opportunities for a learner today have never been better. Virtually all the worlds information is available in the palm our hands on our mobile devices. We can learn all the time and everywhere. Social networking enables a learner to move out of isolation and to connect to so many others who are striving to learn about similar, related or dissimilar things. These learning communities are so crucial for the advancement of ideas. Steven Johnson in the RSA talk Where good ideas come from points to the European Coffee Houses in the Age of the Enlightenment and the Parisian Salons of Modernism as places were ideas “bumped” into each other and significant advances in society were born. Johnson also argues that these virtually connected communities will further advancement today because “chance favours the connected mind. ”

The connected world of the Internet has also put significant pressure on our traditional educational institutions. At all levels we are starting to see a shift toward more student centric form of education. We see many teachers experimenting with online, blended and technology enhanced learning because they have starting to recognize that the problem of the deliver of content has been solved by technology. It has never been a better time to be a teacher. Teachers now have the opportunity to focus on helping students to go much deeper and discern what can be done with all the information.

We truly live in an amazing time and it has never been a better time to be a learner. Are you embracing all the opportunities that the 21st Century has to offer?

In 21st century learning, Learning advancement, chance, Innovation, learner, teacher

People who like this stuff…like this stuff

Dwayne Harapnuik — September 16, 2014 — 2 Comments

https://seths.blog/2014/09/people-who-like-this-stuff/

One of the biggest reasons I have been and currently use a MacBook Air is that there is an elegance in the laptop’s simplicity and efficiency. It makes it very easy to get my work done, I don’t have to tweak anything and it seldom if ever fails me. Apple makes it very easy to like their stuff. I recently went away from the iPhone to the Google Nexus because I wanted to find out why more than 80% of smartphone users worldwide have chosen Android over the IOS. I have found that the greatest advantage of Android over the iPhone is that you can configure the Android to do anything you want. The biggest problem with the Android is that you HAVE to configure it to do everything you want. Granted, companies like Samsung, LG, HTC, and many more have created overlays to the Android OS to provide as close to an IOS experience as possible but these systems are nowhere near as simple and efficient to use as the iPhone. The Android world offers many more options and incorporates the latest greatest innovations but Apple makes it easy to keep on using their stuff despite the lack of innovation. Over the past 5 years, Apple’s market share for the iPhone has been sliding only slightly because “People who like this stuff…like this stuff”.

What does this have to do with learning? A great deal when you consider the role and opportunities that technology brings to the learning environment. In the blog post Back to School—Technology Is Changing Learning but Is It Changing Schooling? Marc Rosenberg laments:

“…that technology in our schools has come upon a significant barrier: the schools themselves.”

Rosenberg also points to the fact that regardless what opportunities technology offers the traditional schooling model won’t be undone quickly. He also warns that the fundamental change in our thinking is not coming quickly enough and

“traditional schooling may kill the promise of technology.”

Unfortunately, Rosenberg doesn’t offer any solutions to this problem but points to the blog post 5 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Innovate in Your School for those who are still willing to attempt to use technology to improve our traditional system.

Why is change in education so slow and so difficult? I think Seth Godin offers one of the most simple and elegant explanations…

“People who like this stuff…like this stuff”

Godin goes onto explain that:

“…for those that are already in it, you can’t push too far, because they like the genre. That’s why they’re here.”

Those who have walked away probably aren’t just waiting around for you to fix it. Those who have never been, don’t think the genre has a problem they need solved.”

If we apply this elegant thinking to the challenges we face in improving education, then most educators who like this stuff [traditional learning environments}… like this stuff. Most people who don’t, have walked away as we can see by homeschooling, unschooling, and uncollege movements. Perhaps more importantly, for those (students, parents, and politicians) who have never been behind the scenes of our traditional educational system, there is no problem. Or the problems that they can see are simply ones that appeal to emotions like class size or special needs. These issues become hot buttons for political sound bites and the 6:00 news but sound research by people like John Hattie reveals that student achievement is not impacted significantly by class size but by many other factors that just aren’t as newsworthy.

How then do we get people who like this stuff (traditional education) to like new stuff (digital learning environments)? While innovating the learning environment has been a significant challenge for the past century (John Dewey was calling for a change to progressive education almost 100 years ago) it is possible and involves the following four steps.

1 Start with Why – In his popular TED talk Simon Sinek makes the argument that “people won’t buy what you do they buy why you do it”, so rather than telling traditional educators what they should or need to be doing to improve learning you need to provide a reason why they would want to add to or improve the current system. This has to be an emotional appeal. Sinek provides a fully developed argument for starting with why and how to use the Golden Circle in his book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.

2. Identify and enlist key influencers – There are key social leaders within all organizations that have the influence to bring about the small activities that can start the behavioral change that leads to organizational change. Once you can identify one or two key activities and give these influencers the reason why they should be making these changes you can start the process of implementing digital learning to enhance the traditional learning environment. Once these influencers like the new stuff they will give others reason to like the new stuff as well. The book Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, Second Edition provides an exceptional explanation of how to start behavioral change.

3. Install an effective execution strategy – You can’t change everything within an organization at once. You still have the whirlwind of the day-to-day activities that will consume 80-90% of your efforts. However, the key activities that your influencers are willing to change can become the one or two wildly important goals (WIG) that make up the foundation of The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals (4DX) change process that has proven to be an effective strategy in executing organizational change. Once one or two aspects of the traditional environment are changed you can then move on to the next one or two activities and so on. The key is to have an effective strategy and to execute.

4. Enlist and empower self-differentiated leaders – Edwin Friedman in the book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix posits that having the conviction to keep on moving forward when everyone in your organization is screaming for the status quo is a key ability of the self-differentiated leader. These people do not need validation from the group but are able to see beyond the challenges to the broader goals of serving learners in new and productive ways. These people practice change by living it and have the ability to lead by example and can show people why they like the “new stuff” and why liking the new stuff is better for our learners and for our society as a whole.

This is not an easy process but we owe it to our children and to the young men and women who are going to our universities and colleges with dreams of building a better world.

In 21st century learning, Learning, Learning 2.0 Change, Godin, Innovation, leading change, organizational change, stuff

Why is Innovation so Hard?

Dwayne Harapnuik — August 12, 2014 — 3 Comments

Why Is Innovation So Hard? via kwout

Edward D. Hess, professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business provides the following research based arguments for why innovation can be so so hard:

…we are highly efficient, fast, reflexive thinkers who seek to confirm what we already know.

Laziness is built deep into our nature. As a result, we are cognitively blind to disconfirming data and challenging ideas.

Emotionally, we seek to affirm our self-image (our ego) and we use the 3Ds—deny, defend, and deflect—to ward off challenges to it and to our views of the world. Fear is one of the emotions that comes all too naturally to most of us—and makes it hard for us to engage in the messy work of innovation. Fear of failure, fear of looking bad, and fear of losing our job if we make mistakes all can lead to what Chris Argyris called “defensive reasoning”: the tendency to defend what we believe. This makes it hard to get outside of ourselves in order to “think out of the box.”

Our educational system and most work environments have taught us that good performance means avoiding failure, not making mistakes…most organizations exist to produce predictable, reliable, standardized results. In those environments, mistakes and failures are bad.

Despite all these odd against innovation it still happens all around us. What does it take to be innovative? Hess does provide some examples of exceptionally innovative companies and suggests that the best way to be innovative is to follow these companies lead I believe that he touches on but doesn’t fully explain the key solution to this challenge when he suggests that “innovative thinking requires the right kind of organizational environment.” Hess also suggest that because we are essentially confirmation machines, looking to affirm the status quo, we need to be taught how to take our normal thinking to a higher level or to think outside of the box.

This is where I think Hess misses a wonderful opportunity to point to the fact that instruction on how to be innovative will not work unless one conducts this instruction within a significant learning environment that promotes and supports innovative thinking. We are also learning from the past 25 years of research in neuroscience, psychology, behavioral economics, and education that fear is a powerful natural emotion that inhibits our ability to embrace the disorder that change or innovation bring about. That is why we need to structure our learning environments to be safe havens for the uncertainty and failure that are intrinsic to the innovation process.

In a previous blog post I have argued that we need to embrace uncertainty if we want to have innovation. I have also argued that you practice change by living it and this takes us back to importance of creating learning environments where people can catch the openness to change.

In a nutshell we have to be and live the change that we are hoping to see in our learning environments.

In Innovation Change, Innovation, significant learning environment

Art and Science and Making Things – Seth Godin

Dwayne Harapnuik — July 23, 2014 — Leave a comment

There has never ever been in the history of mankind a better moment to be someone who has something to say…The Internet was not design so you could way yet another Justin Beiber video…[the Internet] is capable of giving you a platform for a real sort of making for the making of connections, making things that matter and making a difference. I hope you will do that. 21:41-22:29

In Innovation, Video - Wednesday Watchlist connection, Innovation, maker, platform