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Meghan Cureton

How Do You Teach to the Standards When Doing Project-Based Learning? - 4 views

  • People often debate about whether we should be process-driven or product-driven in project-based learning. But I think there’s a third option. We can be learning-driven. In other words, we should start with the question, “What do we want students to learn?” and let that drive the process and the product.
  • PBL is not a license to ditch the standards or take a break from real learning.
  • #1: Inquiry-DrivenInquiry-driven PBL begins with a state of curiosity and wonder. It might be as simple as the sentence stem “I wonder why _________” or “I wonder how _________.” Students then have the opportunity to research, ideate, and create.
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  • #4: Problem-DrivenProblem-driven PBL begins with a specific problem or challenge that students must solve. An example is our maker challenges that present a specific scenario that leads students into research, problem-solving, ideation, and a final product that solves the initial challenge.
  • #3: Product-DrivenPBL experts often say, “Students should focus on the process and not the product.” But there’s also a time and a place for projects that challenge students to focus on developing a quality product. In these projects, the product has tighter parameters but the process is more flexible.
  • #2: Interest-DrivenAnother approach is the interest-driven PBL process.
  • #5: Empathy-Driven (Design Thinking)Empathy-driven PBL can have elements of the previous four PBL approaches.
Bo Adams

The Myth Of The Innovation Lab - 0 views

  • "innovation theater."
  • happens when teams in innovation labs use lean startup tools without really understanding how they work. They take the canvases, sticky notes, whiteboards and bean bags, and they start thinking that they are all set for doing innovation. The teams then focus their attention on making cool products, without thinking about the business models that underlie those products.
  • problem of success
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  • causes the most frustration among people who work inside innovation labs. These are hard working diligent people who understand how to apply lean startup methods and tools the right way. They often succeed in creating great products with good business models. However, when they are ready to take these products to scale they face resistance from their parent company.
  • The lesson learned is to not let the creation of an innovation lab lull you to sleep. You are not in a safe space. The parent company does not love you as much as you think it does. There is still a lot of work to do to get buy-in and support from leaders and key stakeholders.
  • idea that the leaders who funded the lab understand its purpose and support innovation
  • opening of the innovation lab itself often represents innovation theater - played out at the leadership level within the company
  • first symptom of this is the lack of a clear innovation strategy
  •  
    HT TJ Edwards
Bo Adams

Purpose Based Learning (a #FailUp moment) | Planting T's - 0 views

  • So what is the big #failup moment? Well…perhaps product is more important than teachers tend to let on?
  • Reflecting back, I am more and more convinced that product and process are equally important. p[-[ I don’t mean to devalue the process by any means. That is where the learning happens. But the product – the thing – the solution – is why the learning happens
  • Last semester I had quite a different “engagement curve” with my T.E.D. class major project. In meeting Alex and 3D printing a prosthetic hand, my class and I made noticeable shift from working on a project to working for a purpose
Bo Adams

IBM's Got a Plan to Bring Design Thinking to Big Business | WIRED - 1 views

  • “We wanted to shift that culture towards a focus on users’ outcomes,” Hill says.
  • IBM today published its very own set of design thinking guidelines—a selection of best design practices the company hopes other big businesses will look to as they seek to remain relevant and profitable in a rapidly evolving corporate landscape.
  • corporate trend in design thinking
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  • even though design thinking champions nonlinear thought processes, big companies often find themselves mired in the methodology’s suggested phases (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test). Ultimately this defeats the purpose, which is partly to build agility into the product-creation process.
  • The company’s version of design thinking centers around something it calls “the loop.” Visualized, the loop is an infinity symbol punctuated with four dots—the yellow dot representing the user, the green dots representing the various actions of “observe,” “reflect,” and “make.” Explained simply, the loop represents the entire product-creation process, beginning with user-centered research all the way through prototyping (“everything is a prototype!” says Hill), to building and launching a product.
  • loop becomes a loop when you realize that the iterative process is never actually done; perhaps the loop’s most important requirement is reflecting on what’s been created and constantly improving it.
  •  
    HT Kat Mattimoe
kellybkelly

Supporting Children's Identities as Designers and Makers Through Inquiry - ICS Early Ye... - 2 views

  • Throughout these explorations, the children began to understand that the ‘classroom as a Design Studio’ was a place where ideas, creativity, technique and skills can be used to make beautiful, interesting and useful products.
  • The children’s idea that they should create their own museum in order to share their products affirms their strong identities as designers. As a learning community, the children have created interconnected systems full of makers with a range of products and knowledge about process which they are eager to share with others. The children are currently in the process of planning their own Kindergarten Design Museum.
  • We supported the desire of the children to have creative freedom to design in abundance and were also mindful of the ecological responsibility to use materials responsibly.
Jim Tiffin Jr

'Maker' movement inspires hands-on learning | The Seattle Times - 0 views

  • Tinkering is being promoted on college campuses from MIT to Santa Clara University, as well as in high schools and elementary schools.
  • The blending of technology and craft in tools like 3-D printers and laser cutters has made it possible for ordinary people to make extraordinary things. And many ordinary people, living as they do, more and more in their heads and online, are yearning to do something with their hands.
  • Constructionist Approach
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      This is the term that we are missing in our current MDE nomenclature!
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  • Yes, tinkering is now a pedagogy.
  • “You’re exploring creativity, you’re exploring design thinking, you’re developing a sense of persistence,” she says. Building something new requires planning, trying and, yes, failing, and then trying again. “These are incredibly important mind-set for today’s world,” she says.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Music to my ears!
  • talks excitedly about students who have designed child prostheses. “That’s what they’re going to remember their entire life,” she says. “They aren’t going to remember sitting in an electronics lecture.”
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      It is about creating experiences that help students see the world as a malleable place.
  • Alexandra Garey, who graduated from Rutgers last year, credits tinkering with changing the course of her studies, and life: “I went from somebody who was majoring in Italian and European studies to someone who was designing and prototyping products and realizing any product that came into my head.”
  • “U.S. schools are very good at finding the brain-smart people,” he says. “They are also very good at finding the best athletes.” But they are not so good at finding and nurturing people who, he said, describing himself, think with their fingers.
  •  
    A fabulous article full of stories about the impact of maker-centered learning experiences, and the growing number of places that provide them - elementary schools, high school, colleges, public. Perhaps most gratifying is the use of distinctly maker-centered AND educational terminology in the same article. A great sign of things to come!
Jim Tiffin Jr

7 Questions to End Your Week With | Hack Life - 1 views

  •  
    A simple and rich collection of prompts intended to facilitate regular and purposeful reflection. This blog post explains the questions themselves, and the intention behind them. Each question, or step, can be summarize as follows: 1) Observe 2) Reflect 3) Focus 4) Be Productive 5) Have Courage 6) Cleanse 7) Begin Anew HT to @boadams1 for sharing this with me as part of an experiment with MVPS leaders to encourage shared reflection practices.
Jim Tiffin Jr

Project-Based Learning Through a Maker's Lens | Edutopia - 5 views

  • A Maker is an individual who communicates, collaborates, tinkers, fixes, breaks, rebuilds, and constructs projects for the world around him or her.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      A nice list-style definition of a Maker.
  • A Maker, re-cast into a classroom, has a name that we all love: a learner.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      True, but (sadly) the converse is not always the case in some classrooms: A maker may always be a learner, but a learner is not always a maker.
  • A Maker, just like a true learner, values the process of making as much as the product.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Equality of these two ideas, process and product, is a value held by a Maker.
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  • Making, especially to educators and administrators unfamiliar with it, can seem to lack the academic rigor needed for a full-fledged place in an educational ecosystem.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Only in educational settings where content knowledge is deemed the most important indicator of learning.
  • With practice, the students can frame the questions themselves.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Essential when you are trying to develop agency in students.
  • Once completed, the project becomes less of a daily race to fulfill lesson plans and more of a quest to document your students' growing capabilities.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      This reflective documentation process should be something that both teacher AND student are doing. The student point-of-view should be written for the benefit of the student, not the teacher. The teacher should coach this process for the student so that the monitoring of growth is seen as a value for the student. The teacher documentation should also inform the student as to their growth, but the information can be used for more "teacherly" purposes as well, such preparing for future activities or intentional pairings of students in the early phases of the PBL unit.
  • model it yourself first
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Always let your students see you, the teacher, as a learner - first and foremost!
  •  
    The messy, hands-on Maker classroom is perfect for a PBL unit when the teacher is willing to collaborate, tinker, fix, break, and rebuild alongside students. Some fundamental elements to consider in the designing of a maker-centered project, but not as absolutes. It is important to realize that any project taken on in a maker-centered classroom is, by definition, a PBL experience.
  •  
    Fabulous piece about the myriad connection among PBL and Maker. And your commentary is so helpful and provocative. Thank you!
T.J. Edwards

Impatient With Colleges, Employers Design Their Own Courses | WIRED - 0 views

  • That’s the fastest the university has ever introduced a new degree program, a feat it achieved by adopting off-the-shelf course materials already developed by Microsoft that the company is distributing to help turn out more employees with data and computer-science skills.
  • The courses employers have been helping to create don’t just teach skills students need to work for Microsoft, Amazon or Google, like the highly specialized training classes that are longtime industry standards
  • Instead, the companies are working with edX and others to provide what they say are the educations that all of their employees require in common, including such abilities as critical thinking and collaboration.
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  • And companies including Accenture, Boeing and Microsoft have created the Internet of Learning Consortium to speed up the production of job-ready workers by using the internet to teach them what they need to know.
  • “We talk about the days long gone when companies trained employees from the ground up and now we’re talking about companies training employees again. These organizations are saying [to the universities], ‘We need people with X, Y and Z skills and you’re not providing that.’ ”
  • While 96 percent of chief academic officers at higher-education institutions say they’re effectively preparing students for work, only 11 percent of business leaders strongly agree
  • Faculty could react more nimbly to industry demands if their universities hired more of them and gave them the resources they need to update courses or offer them online
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      Hired more industry people? Career changers?
  • In addition to long waits for programs to be approved by faculty and accrediting agencies, for example, many schools can’t find enough people qualified to teach computer science. The increase in the number of tenure-track faculty in that and similar fields has been one-tenth as much as the increase in the number of students crowding into classes, the Computing Research Association reports.
  • The Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, for example, is in the market for five or six new faculty hires per year in data, business analytics and other fast-growing disciplines, said Ash Soni, executive associate dean of academic programs. It usually manages to fill just two or three of those positions, Soni said.
  • “The pace of change and product cycles and skills demands in the economy are moving more quickly than traditional university processes and program development can keep up,” said Northeastern’s Gallagher.That needs to change, for universities’ own self-preservation, said Gordon, of Eastern Washington
  • “We’ve got to be at the leading edge of today and tomorrow,” he said, “rather than the day before.”
Jim Tiffin Jr

Your Team Is Brainstorming All Wrong - 2 views

  • demonstrate that groups that use Osborn’s rules of brainstorming come up with fewer ideas (and fewer good ideas) than the individuals would have developed alone.
  • There are several reasons for this productivity loss, as academics call it. For one, when people work together, their ideas tend to converge. As soon as one person throws out an idea, it affects the memory of everyone in the group and makes them think a bit more similarly about the problem than they did before. In contrast, when people work alone, they tend to diverge in their thinking, because everyone takes a slightly different path to thinking about the problem.
  • Early in creative acts it’s important to diverge, that is, to think about what you are doing in as many ways as possible. Later, you want to converge on a small number of paths to follow in more detail.
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  • Many techniques use a structure like this. For example, in the 6-3-5 method, six people sit around a table and write down three ideas. They pass their stack of ideas to the person on their right, who builds on them. This passing is done five times, until everyone has had the chance to build on each of the ideas. Afterward, the group can get together to evaluate the ideas generated.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      The 6-3-5 technique summarized.
  • allow individual work during divergent phases of creativity and group work during convergent phases.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Here is the key to the most productive brainstorming techniques.
  • t is often important to spend time agreeing on the problem to be solved. A whole round of divergence and convergence on the problem statement can be done before giving people a chance to suggest solutions. 
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Wonder if there is a place for this in our HMW work?
  • It’s important that groups have time to explore enough ideas that they can consider more than just the first few possibilities that people generate.
  • Many brainstorming sessions involve people talking about solutions. That biases people toward solutions that are easy to talk about. It may also lead to solutions that are abstract and may never work in practice.
  • a combination of drawing and writing is ideal for generating creative solutions to problems
  • First, it’s hard for people to describe spatial relationships, so any solution that requires a spatial layout is better described with pictures than with words. Second, a large amount of the brain is devoted to visual processing, so sketching and interpreting drawings increases the involvement of those brain regions in idea generation. Third, it is often difficult to describe processes purely in words, so diagrams are helpful.
  • To develop stronger ideas, you need to manage the conversation so that the team doesn’t converge on a solution before everyone hears what others are thinking.
  •  
    "Early in creative acts it's important to diverge, that is to think about what you are doing in as many ways as possible. Later, you want to converge on a small number of paths to follow in more detail."
Bo Adams

Sustainable Sources of Competitive Advantage · Collaborative Fund - 0 views

  • The key to business and investing success isn’t finding an advantage. It’s having a sustainable advantage.
  • That leaves doing something others aren’t willing to do as the top source of sustainable competitive advantage. Here are five big ones.
  • “strong beliefs, weakly held,”
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  • “the curse of knowledge,”
  • Business success doesn’t necessarily go to those with the best product. It goes to whoever is the most persuasive.
  • Most business edges are found at the intersection of trust and simplicity.
  • Having no appetite for being wrong means you’ll only attempt things with high odds of working. And those things tend to be only slight variations on what you’re already doing, which themselves are things that, in a changing world, may soon be obsolete.
  • “If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.”
  •  
    HT Christian Talbot
Bo Adams

In 2017, a New Push to Find the Balance Between Work and Life - Independent Ideas Blog - 0 views

  • “Telepressure is a workplace problem, not a worker problem. We learn how to respond to email through our colleagues’ behavior, and it’s a consequence of the social dynamics within a work environment,”
  • In this world of stress and pressure, how do school leaders become enablers of work-life balance? Most research points to starting with how we as leaders model that balance.
  • “If we are to serve as stewards of productivity and engagement, we must pursue excellent performance as leaders in all four domains — work, home, community, and self — not trading off one for another but finding mutual value among them.”
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  • Be Real.
  • Be Whole.
  • Be Innovative.
Bo Adams

The Marriage of Formal & Informal Learning - 1 views

  • important that integration of formal and informal learning have champions
  • Web 2.0 technology is a key enabler for this marriage
  • Technological tools and leadership support alone will not be enough to make the marriage of informal and formal learning work. The shared values, beliefs, mental models, habits, and behaviors of the workforce in an organization – its culture is key.
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  • How do people feel about knowledge – is it power to be hoarded, or a gift to be shared?
  • The two key advantages of informal learning are that it happens at the point of need and what is learned is usually applied right away.
  • In the cooperative model, the learning and development group can shift from being the producer of content to being the guide, initiator, facilitator, and coach.
  • Based on alignment with agreed upon organizational and learning goals, the learner takes responsibility for his or her own learning – with the support and guidance of the organization.
  • People who are not used to working in a learning organization culture, where cooperative learning within communities of practice is the norm, need the knowhow and a new mindset regarding learning to cooperatively in the workplace.
  • The positive is that this incidental learning doesn’t take people away from the work. The disadvantage is that when they are so caught up in doing, people often miss an important ingredient for learning: reflection.
  • The combination of structured and incidental learning can give us intentional learning.
  • The key to solidifying this learning is reflection.
  • David Kolb, wrote about a model of experiential learning consisting of the following cycle: action, observation, reflection, concept formation, and back to action.
  • Morgan McCall and George Hollenbeck asked managers to stop once a week and answer just two simple questions, “What did you do last week?” and “What did you learn from it?” They found that this simple process of reflection enabled the managers learn from their experiences and to change the way they managed.
  • integration of formal and informal learning can create a virtuous cycle that leads not only to increased productivity but to the real innovation that is necessary for long term success in a dynamic marketplace.
Meghan Cureton

How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In the 1960s, Gay Talese, then a young reporter, declared that “New York is a city of things unnoticed” and delegated himself to be the one who noticed.
    • Bo Adams
       
      LOVE THIS! "delgated himself to be the one who noticed."
  • discoveries are products of the human mind.
  • As people dredge the unknown, they are engaging in a highly creative act.
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  • What an inventor “finds” is always an expression of him- or herself.
  • Some scientists even embrace a kind of “free jazz” method, he said, improvising as they go along: “I’ve heard of people getting good results after accidentally dropping their experimental preparations on the floor, picking them up, and working on them nonetheless,” he added.
  • an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process.
  • capable of seeing “patterns that others don’t see.”
  • That’s why we need to develop a new, interdisciplinary field — call it serendipity studies — that can help us create a taxonomy of discoveries
  • A number of pioneering scholars have already begun this work, but they seem to be doing so in their own silos and without much cross-talk.
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