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Creating Significant Learning Environments

Eight-Stage Process of Creating Change

Dwayne Harapnuik — February 25, 2010 — Leave a comment

In his book Leading Change, John Kotter provides the following diagram/list/rubric for creating change. He cautions that diagrams or lists tend to over simplify reality so reading the entire book is strongly recommended. Despite the caution the following list does provide a good overview of the process of creating change:

Establish A Sense of Urgency
1. Examining the market & competitive realities
2. Identifying and discussing crisis, potential crisis or major opportunities.
Creating the Guiding Coalition
1. Putting together a group with enough power to lead the change.
2. Getting the group to work together like a team.
Developing a Vision and Strategy
1. Creating a vision to help direct the change effort.
2. Developing a strategy for achieving that vision.
Communicating the Change Vision
1. Using every vehicle possible to constantly communicate the new vision and strategies.
2. Having the guiding coalition role model the behavior expected of employees.
Empowering Broad Based Action
1. Getting rid of obstacles.
2. Changing systems or structures that undermine the change vision.
3. Encouraging risk taking and nontraditional ideas, activities and actions.
Generating Short-Term Wins
1. Planning for visible improvements in performance, or “wins”.
2. Creating those wins.
3. Visibly recognizing and rewarding people who made the wins possible.
Consolidating Gains & Producing More Change
1. Using increased credibility to change all systems, structures, and policies that don’t fit together and don’t fit the transformation vision.
2. Hiring, promoting, and developing people who can implement the change vision.
3. Reinvigorating the process with new projects, themes, and change agents.
Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture
1. Creating better performance through customer and productivity-oriented behavior, more and better leadership, and more effective management.
2. Articulating the connections between new behaviors and organizational success.
3. Developing means to ensure leadership development and succession.

In Innovation Change, educational reform

Six Things That Innovative Universities Do Well

Dwayne Harapnuik — February 25, 2010 — Leave a comment

I consider myself a student of learning which means I MUST also be a student of innovation. I follow a Blog called Innovations and the archived post Six Things That Innovative Companies Do Well caught my eye. I have modified these six things to suite academia rather than business. Here is my take on the Six Things That Innovative Universities Do Well:

Question Everything – I agree with article’s author, that this is the most important factor in innovation and the most difficult to embrace. Like corporations, Institutions create big political and organizational impediments to change, making any challenge to the status quo a risky proposition. Innovative [institutions], on the other hand, reward challenges to conventional wisdom and take pains to position change as a positive part of the [institutional]/corporate culture.
Accept failure — Without the willingness to be wrong or to even fail innovation will never happen.
Don’t leave the innovation to the engineers/consultants – simplicity is often the best option for meeting the needs of learners. Engineers/consultants/specialists are great at designing elegant solutions to complex problems but these solutions often lack the elegance of simplicity. Faculty have the closest contact with the learner and will most ofen have the best solutions.
Learn constantly – If you don’t prepare people to do their work/teach/learn differently, they’ll never change. It’s human nature for people to avoid situations that may embarrass or humiliate them. Businesses [Institutions] that ask people to embrace change without preparing them to handle it set themselves up for failure at best, revolt at worst.
Try, try again – Institutions too often bail out of good ideas because they don’t succeed quickly.
Be wary of market research – Innovative institutions are in touch with their learners. Use research on the desires of the learner to validate your assumptions, but not to create your courses and services. The consumerist attitude of the learner should NOT drive the learning environment development but is should influence how we communicate with learners.

In Innovation academia, Change, education reform, Innovation, universities

The video Machine is Us captures the essense of what Web 2.0 is or is becomeing. Given the lack of standards as to what “Web 2.0” actually means, implies, or requires, the term can mean very different things to different people.

According wikipedia:

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004,refers to a perceived or proposed second generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

The following summary is derived from O’Reilly’s article: What is Web 2.0. Some may ask what summary? This is just a list of points and of links. To capture the true essence of what Web 2.0 is one need go to the web and explore.

Web as a platform
1. Netscape vs. Google
2. Doubleclick vs. AdSense
3. Akamai vs. BitTorrent (business with the tail not the head)
Harnessing Collective Intelligence – Global Brain – Social Networking
1. Wikipedia
2. YouTube
3. Del.icio.us
4. Flickr
5. Open Source (LAMP) – sourceforge
6. Blogging
7. Myspace (Dwayne’s Myspace)
8. Facebook
Data is the Next Intel Inside
End of Software Release Cycle
1. Operations as core competency – Google
2. Users as co-developers – Google vs Microsoft
Lightweight Programming Models
1. Mashups – Hackability & remixability
2. RSS
3. Ruby
Software above the level of a single device
1. iTunes
Rich User Experiences
1. Ajax – Google – Gmail

Core Competencies of Web 2.0 Organizations:

Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
Trusting users as co-developers Harnessing collective intelligence
Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
Software above the level of a single device Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

The five best business products at the Web 2.0 Expo

1. Vidoop – The Vidoop authentication engine replaces passwords with a visual image recognition system. It is the biggest innovation in authentication technology in a long time.

2. Egnyte – Sharing Microsoft Office documents usually happens in e-mail and results in tons of inefficiency and wasted disk space. Egnyte provides an effective portal for sharing doc files and spreadsheets. You can view them in a version tree, which allows you to access any of the iterations of the doc or spreadsheet. It’s a great innovation for file sharing and archiving, and there’s a free version for up to 1 GB of data.

3. Nokia Widgets — Nokia launched a standards-based widget system for its S60 smartphone platform (based on Symbian). This includes the usual widgets you’d expect (news and weather), but the main business benefit is that it could provide an excellent platform for business applications. What really makes it work is the S60 Web browser, which is the most sophisticated and useful browser that I’ve seen in any phone.

4. G.ho.st — As a Flash-based OS-in-a-browser, G.ho.st can provide businesses with a way to allow users to access their personal mail and data in a sandbox that is separated from their work computer.

5. AppLogic – If you are running an Internet company or a business that demands a farm of public Web servers, then you probably have a colo or a managed services environment. 3Tera’s AppLogic provides a virtual data center that is easier to manage than a colo and less expensive than managed services. My favorite aspects of AppLogic are 1.) it lets you build out your data center with a Web-based Visio-like tool, and 2.) you can build redundancy and fault tolerance without wasting hardware.

mLearning

According to Wikipedia — M-learning, or “mobile learning”, now commonly abreviated to “mLearning”, has different meanings for different communities. The term covers:

learning with portable technologies, where the focus is on the technology (which could be in a fixed location, such as a classroom);
learning across contexts, where the focus is on the mobility of the learner, interacting with portable or fixed technology;
learning in a mobile society, with a focus on how society and its institutions can accommodate and support the learning of an increasingly mobile population.

Technical challenges include:

Connectivity
Battery life
Interacting with small devices
Displaying useful content in small-screen devices

Social and educational challenges include:

The intrusion of formal education into daily life:
Protecting the privacy of young learners, from being continually monitored and assessed through their mobile devices.
How to assess learning outside the classroom
How to support learning across many contexts
Developing an appropriate theory of learning for the mobile age
Design of technology to support a lifetime of learning

Is Web 2.0 upside capped?

Web 2.0 Crowd a Small Minority

Laptop vs. Paper Pencil Competition

Dwayne Harapnuik — February 25, 2010 — Leave a comment

This was posted on the Abilene, Kansas High School Dialogue Buzz website (and was reposted by Rae Niles on her blog). It was an anonymous post, but VERY powerful. Feel free to share this with educators, parents and stakeholders about 1:1 and the power of the seamless use of technology. It seems to sum it all up!!

Let’s have a little competition at school and get ready for the future. I will use a laptop and you will use paper and pencil. Are you ready…?

I will access up-to-date information – you have a textbook that is 5 years old.
I will immediately know when I misspell a word – you have to wait until it’s graded.
I will learn how to care for technology by using it – you will read about it.
I will see math problems in 3D – you will do the odd problems.
I will create artwork and poetry and share it with the world – you will share yours with the class.
I will have 24/7 access – you have the entire class period.
I will access the most dynamic information – yours will be printed and photocopied.
I will communicate with leaders and experts using email – you will wait for Friday’s speaker.
I will select my learning style – you will use the teacher’s favorite learning style.
I will collaborate with my peers from around the world – you will collaborate with peers in your classroom.
I will take my learning as far as I want – you must wait for the rest of the class.

The cost of a laptop per year? – $250
The cost of teacher and student training? – Expensive
The cost of well educated US [Canadian] citizens and workforce? – Priceless

In 21st century learning laptop, paper, pencil

Myths in Online Teaching and Learning

Dwayne Harapnuik — February 25, 2010 — Leave a comment

Way back in 2002, professor of Educational Psychology as well as Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University, Curtis Bonk wrote Current Myths and Future Trends in Online Teaching and Learning which included the following list:

Web instruction is an either-or decision.
Pedagogical tools exist to teach online.
College instructors will flock to sophisticated technologies.
College instructors simply need a little more training to teach effectively on the Web
College instructors will not place their work on display for others to critique.
If we ignore this long enough, online learning will go away.
College instructors are loyal.
The institution will own the online course.
College instructors can teach the same way that they teach face-to-face.
Shhh…if you don’t say anything, college instructors will just do this for free.

I would argue that not much has changed since he first published this list and we can now expand online learning to include Mobile Learning. Have look at the full article that includes a full explanation of each myth but Ten More Myths.

Read the full article…

In Online Learning myths