The following is an article that I started to write several years ago and just now rediscovered while working on something else. I guess I intended to write more about ‘big picture’ innovation in education but only got as far as some guiding questions that that section would address. Nevertheless, I think it’s an interesting article as is and may have some relevance in the rapid change environment that schools find themselves today as they adopt technologies such as mobiles/tablets, etc. I’m going to leave it as is with the questions at the end rather than writing the final section. Comments, especially ones that address the questions at the end, are very welcome.
I think most would agree that in times of increasingly rapid change, innovation is important for education. That then raises the question; how do we foster innovation in educational systems? There are a lot of general ideas about how innovation works and what needs to be done to promote it. Many of these ideas have been applied to education, primarily approaches that encourage small-scale innovation in the classroom, i.e. making the teacher the primary innovator. These approaches have given mixed results. They’ve produced a lot of interesting ideas but have seldom led to lasting change. Here, I want to consider what broader long-term views of innovation processes, what I’ll call “big picture” theories of innovation, can contribute to discourse on innovation in education. Continue reading
Imagine a country that has a highly developed culture: poetry, philosophy, science, mathematics, but nobody has yet learned to write; it just hadn’t occurred to them to have pencil and paper or even to write with sticks in the sand. One day somebody develops the idea of written language and the pencil and paper are invented. Very quickly this thing, which becomes known as information and communication technology, ICT for short, is picked up by scientists and by world traders. It has a big impact in those areas, and after awhile somebody wonders why we don’t introduce this into our schools. These being cautious people, they decide that it is too risky to give every child one of these new technologies so they put one pencil in every classroom. ‘If that produces good results’, they thought, ‘we’ll maybe produce two pencils in the classroom’, and so on.
