Innovation--who is doing it? What if?

This Thursday's #isedchat Everyone's talking innovation. Who's doing it? and @dwillard's Schools don't innovate? Do they?comment got me thinking.

In the "no duh" category, I had a thought this morning doing what I call jogging while listening to 21st Century Learning podcasts. Derek Willard and Josie Holford (Schools are conservative entities) are right--schools don't innovate. However, people do, both individually and collaboratively. While it's tempting to point out the wildly disruptive innovations such as, well, iAnything, most innovations/inventions aren't in that category.

Instead, some schools are intentionally creating environments that foster teachers and students who innovate. They are places where questions beginning with "what if" are met with "tell me more" or "try it" instead of "no" And that, I think, makes all the difference.

Today I listened to two leaders (Brad Rathgeber, Director of the Online School for Girls and Michael Nachbar, Director of the Global Online Academy) in the world of independent online education share the stories of their schools. How did I listen? Via downloaded podcasts while doing the aforementioned "jog." Innovative? Well, the voice interview has been around for quite a while now. The medium that allowed me to listen, not quite as long.

In a similar vein, what I learned was that not everything about these schools was wildly innovative. But something about them was--in this case it was the delivery again. Do schools need to be completely redone? Nope. Is the saying "there's nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9) still true? Yep. Do these two statements mean that there's no such thing as innovation? No. It's just that it's hard to define. Innovation isn't a set thing--a new idea, uncharted territory. Instead, it is an esprit of "let's try" that can exist in even the most tradition-bound environments. If we let it.

Nonplussed--doesn't happen to me often (but it probably should)

Last week, I returned from the Lausanne Laptop Institute in Memphis. This is always one of my favorite conferences when I go--it's well organized, the sessions are long enough not to feel rushed, and the presenters are always prepared and are masters in their areas. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

While at the institute, I live-blogged many of the presentations I attended. One of my blogs caught the attention of the keynote, Jeff Utecht. This is a conference with a pretty lively back channel and I ran into some trouble with monitoring the twitter feed and keeping up with my liveblog. Thank goodness for Bill Campbell @billcamp who stepped in to manage the twitter feed.

I'm working on a post about the value of the backchannel (not yet finished) when I realized that I had more readers of my live blogs (either live or later) of the sessions I attended, including the keynote, than I did attendees at my presentations. I'm a bit nonplussed about this fact. Could it be that I have more to contribute as a reporter than as a presenter?

Jeff Utecht The Changing Nature of Communication

Session Summary: Being a leader in the 21st Century means going beyond e-mail and newsletters into the new digital world of communicating with parents and students. Understanding that society today wants information in short and more frequent bursts is the first step in utilizing tools that allow you to communicate using the new web. This presentation demonstrates and discusses the different ways schools and school leaders can harness the power of the Internet to communicate with their school communities

Elizabeth Hellfant at Laptop Institute

Elizabeth Helfant TPACK and SAMR as Evaluative, Unifying, and Goal-Setting Framework.

There's an App for That

Julene Reed, Dir. of Academic Tech., St. George's Indep. School was so good this morning, I thought I'd come back for more!

QR Codes, connecting the physical and digital worlds with Jeff Utecht

I decided this one was too good an opportunity to pass up.

E-Books

Session on EBooks