Misplaced Innovation

I get a lot of good stuff from George Siemens eLernspace but there was something amiss about his posting the other day on How Knowledge Drives Innovation.

"Knowledge and imagination are the primary drivers of innovation in organizations."

Innovation is so important for education.

While many disciplines have re-invented themselves over the last several decades, education remains stagnant. Increasingly, as I dialogue with educators and leaders, the knowledge of needed change is evident.

Missing, however, is the imagination to conceive a richer view of learning that accounts for the needs of learners (and other stakeholders of education - society, governments, corporations, etc.) today.

Imagination (or as I've stated before, vision), not technology, funding, or knowledge is the limiting factor.

I tink he is pushing on a string.
There are a lot of things that are important for education, Innovation, per se, is not one of them.

• Innovation without purpose is purely waseteful and destructive and to pursue it for its own sake is stupid.
• All innovation is destructive and very rarely comes from within large organisations, let alone from within communities of practise, not least because the community is defined by the practise and if you change that practise you have to change the definition of what it is to belong to it. Bang, resistance right there.
• Regardless of the need, there is also a huge legacy investment, a sunk cost, built into the current edifice and we wont abandon that willingly, even less will be those who live inside it, especially when there is no guarantee that the new one will work, or have room for them in it.
• We are not here dealing with the survival or failure of a single entity, we are messing with our children's ability to survive in the world, the effects will be generational and we parents will always be highly conservative about that. Our education system may not be perfect, or even very good, but for some arbitrary value of "works", it works, for most kids, most of the time, to a reasonable level. For some arbitrary value of reasonable.

As my friend Carlos Braga is wont to say, we are going through a transition which is like a waterfall. Above it the river is smooth and calm, and below it the river is smooth and calm, but the transition is a bitch.

Our industrial education system is the legacy of an industrial society and, like that industrial society, it has created architecture and infrastructure that is no longer appropriate or necessary, but in which many people have vested interests. But more than that, we have been on a path of increasing complexity and professionalism where the eduction of children has been progressively taken ojut of th hands of the family and the community and, apparently, confined to specific times, places and people..

Now it was never true, we pick up our education everywhere, but because our economies have accepted the myth, the educationists have been able to obtain a rent from that (disclaimer: my wife is a lecturer so I get some of that rent) but beyodn that we now have a large industry which is itself dependent on industrial educational models (text book, whiteboard manufacturers, computing, educational software, the lot). And therein lies the problem. If innovation leads to ever bigger, more complex, more profitable opportunities, they would be here right now.

But they ain't because that's not where we are going. The people who have access to this technology are returning to more "natural" learning processes, specifically artisanal, apprenticeships.

The tough news is that our learning processes are encoded in the DNA, we learn by having our attention attracted, observing, imitating, iterating. We learn then from stories, from argument, from experience.

You can see it everywhere online. People gather around someone who is demostrating a particular skill or field of knowledge; they read, listen, watch, comment, debate, test their growing knowledge. Then they wander off and try it for themselves on a blog, YouTube, a podcast, Flickr, MySpace, PLoS. Where some of them gather their own acolytes and the process starts again.

Its irregular, peer reveiwed, casual, above all not systematised and, tah daaah, doesn't scale. When online communities reach a certain size they fragment, devolve, specialise or splinter; they can't be profitable enough for industrial pruposes any more than Stradivarius could have become a production line; they need touch.

And that is what stopped me with George's original post; the problem is that innovation is trapped between the rock of organic learning processes which are being liberated from industrial systems, and the hard place of institutional persistence and vested interest. So were, precisley, will it occur?

We aren't going to innovate our learning any more than we will innovate our breathing or walking or liver function, so the only target for the destruction of innovation is the hard place and good luck with that.

And by the time that game has played out fully, the only thing we can be pretty sure of is that the results will be irrelevant.

Comments

[Johnnie Moore]

Hi Earl, fascinating as ever. I started to experience discomfort in my gut at the third word of the article you reference: driving.

For my money, there's far too much driving-type metaphors in writing about change and as I understand it, you're apt to challenge that idea to. Real change in the real world seems to me to be emergent. Try to drive it and you're most likely to create what I'd call novelty - a superficially different repetition of the deeper pattern.

[newport driving schools]

Great stuff. The problem is that innovation is trapped between the rock of organic learning processes.Try to drive it and you're most likely to create what I'd call novelty - a superficially different repetition of the deeper pattern..Thanks for sharing.

[Earl Mardle]

Novelty, spot on newport.