Thinking about innovation

The Heroism of Innovation by Tony Salvador, Intel, at Web4Dev. He is an anthropologist and ethnographer, who spoke about following the Hero’s Journey as a tool to think through innovation. He touched on complex adaptive systems and about preparation around innovation.

Complex adaptive systems resist external influences — which cause change — to maintain homeostasis. Social structures manifest in this system. So, when we want to bring a new ICT or service to a group of people we need to ask: who will think that this new thing is a threat to the system? This helps us to manage the resistance to change, the push back against any new external input into the system.

Innovation/development is 1% ideation and 99% preparation. We should:

Plan strategically 5 or 10 years out; for each prediction have one or more end-state and estimate the probability of each.
Network systemically: vertically and horizontally.
Understand explicitly how local institutions manifest local social structures and power and what social power you and your partners actually have and don’t have. For me: do the unions hold the real power in SA in education: should I try to influence them?
Think about your “new development” as a threat.
Use pilots or case studies to test and push the social system, not the technology.

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Photos at Flickr.

Of golf balls and flirting: Web4Dev intro notes

Ann Venemon, Exec Dir of UNICEF and John Gage introduced the Web4Dev conference:

Both spoke very much about mobiles as the ICT for development. Also on biotech innovation as key to really moving the needle in reaching the MDGs.
It took 72 days for Christopher Columbus to reach the New World. Information can traverse the same distance at almost the speed of light — 280 million times faster than Columbus. This means that relatively speaking, the earth is now the size of a golf ball.
John Gage loves the Kindle and predicts that within 3 years ebook readers will cost $10.
A very powerful way to change behaviour is to show people what they’re doing and how much it costs them. For example, showing people how much carbon they emit and what they pay for that,will bring it home to them that they need to change.
Using the locative capabilities of mobile phones, providing services can become much more efficient. Efficiency is the most important thing in a downturn.
Someone asked how best to get people in the developing world to participate in ICT networks. John Gage responded that when it comes to engaging youth, the best way is through music, sport, gaming and flirting.
John Gage: leave traces of yourself on the web, what you’re doing, thinking about, etc. Buy every UN employee a basic camera to share their experiences. That’s how to spread information about innovation. (Clay Shirky articulates this very well in Here Comes Everybody.)

Web4Dev kicks off

Tonight the Web4Dev conference kicked off with a pre-conference reception. It felt pretty good to be at UN headquarters in New York, overlooking the East River and listening to Ann M. Veneman, the UNICEF chief. It doesn’t get more hifalutin than this.

Since the theme is Innovation for Access, let’s hope the conference includes great networking, sharing of ideas and showcasing innovative projects!

I’ll be blogging about the best of it over the next 3 days.

Yes, you can teach with copyrighted material

Copyright Confusion Conquered is a great post from MIT’s Project New Media Literacies about the use of copyrighted material for educational purposes.

For educators, venturing into this territory is usually a scary exercise, with the threat of a law suit always in the background. But read the post and be empowered. Yes, you can use that content even if it copyrighted. Woop!

Annotating the web

My esteemed colleague. Steve Song, has written a blog post about an Annotate-ipedia, a shared mechanism to annotate content on the web. It is only an idea at this stage, but a damn good one. We first discussed this concept last year when considering submitting a paper to Innovate journal’s forthcoming special edition on the Future of the Textbook.

Over the holidays I read Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. My copy has an introduction and notes by Richard Maxwell. While the book is brilliant, the notes really made reading it a richer, more enjoyable experience. They set the context, explained links to real people (the novel is historically factual), framed the theme within Dickens’ own personal struggles, etc.

But how much better if I could read notes from others? From school teachers, historians, Dickens’ fans and teens? How cool would it not be if I could ask a question about a particular historical point and have it answered right there, alongside the text? Then the book could become a resource for History students learning about the French Revolution as well as English language learners.

Bring on the Annotate-ipedia!

Note: The only thing that I’ve seen that is related to this is Trailfire, although it’s not exactly what is needed because it let’s users add notes to whole pages only, not to words or paragraphs within pages. (Still, it’s a nice way to create a web trail across different sites that you like, e.g. your 5 favourite blog postings about twitter.)

Brainstorming an ARG

Last week I held a brainstorm at the Shuttleworth Foundation to generate ideas for an educational alternate reality game (ARG) for youth in South Africa (SA).

In the world of learning games, as ARG is a good fit for SA because players don’t need sophisticated equipment, e.g. XBox or PlayStation, to play. Reading the newspaper or being able to receive and send an SMS can be enough to get involved.

As far as I know this will be the first educational ARG in Africa. Attendees included Vincent Maher (who heads up social media at Vodacom), Alixe Lowenherz (education, curriculum and e-learning expert), Danny Day and Marc Luck (game developers), Barry and Patrick Kayton (of Bright Sparks) and Graeme Comrie (advisor to Hip2b2).

While the ARG idea is top secret right now (:-) I can tell you that it’ll involve mobile phones (which cross-media experience in SA wouldn’t). Watch this space in the coming months!

The networked book

I’m exploring the expanded definition of literacy, which includes not only being able to read and write in print, but also read and write across different media. Living in a networked public — like many of us do — also affects how we think about literacy. This quote from the mission statement of the Institute for the Future of the Book is very interesting:

One major consequence of the shift to digital is the addition of graphical, audio, and video elements to the written word. More profound, however, is the book’s reinvention in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress.

A great read about techno-geek rebellion

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

My best read of 2008 was Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, sci-fi writer, co-editor of Boing Boing and general good guy.

San Francisco is hit by a major terrorist attack and the US Department of Homeland Security go bezerk. In the war on terror all basic human rights are hung out to dry and no-one is safe (sound familiar?). The story’s protagonist, seventeen year old Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is not going to take it lying down and unwittingly leads a techno-geek rebellion against this injustice. The novel is action-packed with teenage passion and righteous nerdism and, as Jane McGonical points out, holds “a bold argument: hackers and gamers might just be our country’s best hope for the future.” Alternate reality gaming — which is my “hot thing” for 2009 — is also covered, albeit obliquely, in the book.

The New York Times listed Little Brother as one of the eight notable children’s books of 2008, but don’t be fooled, it’s totally cool for adults too.

(Thank you Mark Surman for leaving a copy in the office, and Steve Song for recommending I read it 🙂

The educational value of fiction

In a recent paper, a research team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics (LSE) makes a bold and very interesting hypothesis: that fiction, such as the novels The Kite Runner and The White Tiger, is a legitimate way for people to understand global issues like poverty and migration. It is usually the domain of academic reports and policies to cover developmental concerns.

In a Telegraph article, Dr Dennis Rodgers from Manchester University’s Brooks World Poverty Institute explains that fiction “does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does.” He continues: “And fiction often reaches a much larger and diverse audience than academic work and may therefore be more influential in shaping public knowledge and understanding of development issues.”

The paper argues that Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner has “done more to educate Western readers about the realities of daily life in Afghanistan (under the Taliban and thereafter) than any government media campaign, advocacy organisation report, or social science research.”

The paper offers the obvious caveat: that fictional works should be read alongside (not instead of) formal research “as valid contributions to our understandings of development. In this way, literary accounts can be seen – alongside other forms – as an important, accessible and useful way of understanding values and ideas in society.”

Why is this particularly interesting? For educational purposes, the value of fictional representations is legitimised. I’m not thinking of books though, but rather digital and cross-media representations, such as video games or alternate reality games (ARG). We are constantly trying to engage young people in current affairs that affect their world — this is one way to do that.

For some time ARG designers have been trying to understand the educational value of the games (we already know they are highly engaging for some players, but what are they learning?) This paper gives credence to the belief that the game play, when embedded in real world situations and stories (at which ARGs excel), is a legitimate context for learning. I think that when the game play is then tied back to reflective discussions in formal contexts (such as in the classroom), the learning is even more powerful.