We have a dilemma. Education is desperate need of significant innovation. Yet the more radical the innovation, the more uncertainty is associated with it and the more difficult our institutions have coping with it. Big new ideas don't tend to emerge from the mainstream markets or the companies and organizations that serve them.
There are several people that have made their mark communicating this point. Clayton M. Christensen, author of the
Innovators Dilemma, and more recently,
Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, has made the case that new products emerge and take off where they are competing against .... nothing! In educational terms, innovative approaches to teaching can't take off and become more widespread when there is are existing alternatives. Dislodging the predominance of lecture, for example, is very difficult because:
- there are some lecturers who are captivating (though a small percentage)
- it is perhaps the most inexpensive large class delivery method that stills involves a live body
- it is for some very easy (those that don't really try to remain contemporary and see it as a necessary evil to get through to get back to their research)
- it is very familiar -- tradition --
Learning innovations to address alternatives to lecture will be unquestionably more expensive, at least during the transition/
start up phase, fraught with risk, not always successful or even appropriate. And they will likely not be well received (at least at first) by the very subjects for whom the innovation is intended to benefit -- students. Who is going to
countenance and endorse the proposal to take an efficient, well understood, reasonably accepted method of teaching large classes and embrace a
risky, potentially
disliked, and
more costly alternative on the promise that it '
might' get less expensive over time and the students
may come to love it, and
learning gains may see improvement? Don't bet on it.
Introducing Change: What are conditions that foster change?
- Catastrophe,
- marginality,
- perceived irrelevance,
- no compelling alternatives exist (not to the status quo - the status quo is itself powerful & compelling).
Those cases in business where innovations have been studied strongly argue that innovation tends to occur where there is no compelling market into which the new 'innovation' has to compete. In Christensen's work he cites examples of the introduction of the introduction 3 in disk drive. It was an innovation for which there was no market. The drive makers were building bigger, faster, denser 8 in. drives and their customers wanted more of them. 3 in. drives couldn't hold as much data, were slower, and didn't meet their customers expectations. They wanted incrementally better drives for their primary market requirements.
It just so happened that about the same time that these improvements in drive dimensions were being developed something else was going on. A personal computer was in the works - that, like 3 in. disk drives was slower than minicomputers, had less graphical capabilities, had next to no applications written for it, and was expensive on a price/performance basis. And we know where minicomputers are today... What happened? Both the 3 in. disk drive and the microcomputer created new markets, addressed capabilities and in the process needs that existing computer hardware manufacturers didn't see and their customers who were buying their products
didn't want.There is the argument that incremental change is better than no change at all. And that perhaps, with time, the accumulation of small steps will, looking back, cover an enormous distance. It's the chinese proverb about a long journey starting with a small step.
I have deeply mixed feelings about this. Good colleagues have made this approach a central tenant in their approach to technology and changing pedagogy.
A Low Threshold Application (LTA) is a teaching/learning application of information technology that is reliable, accessible, easy to learn, non-intimidating and (incrementally) inexpensive.
The admonition is to
not raise unrealistic expectations, don't add to the hype or the work, and
I understand this but I also find myself disturbed by it. Partly it's the sense of surrender - don't rock the boat too much you'll just get dumped. I may be more sensitive to this lately being in the land of the '
tall poppy syndrome'.
A more central concern is based around the idea that we live on a topology, a surface of possible maximas (local summits, if you will) but that the landscape of our learning environment is much broader than the hill on which we presently sit. In fact, if you strive to carefully work you're way to the top, you may get there. But as you peer out you're just as likely to find there is another hill, another higher summit, just over there. But the only way to get there is accept going down for a bit, slogging through a trough and struggling up the other side.
Or maybe not. Maybe one can jump to the slope on the next hill. Maybe you won't land as far up it as you'd like, but at least you avoid the "pit of despair"
(A Princess Bride supplies lots of wonderfully descriptive dialog at times).
And that's the part the worries me most, the bit about being unwilling to jump. Of course it could all be a matter of scale. The little step being a jump of heights for some. But I don't think so. Of course the discussion is obviously more nuanced than I'm treating it here. And there no doubt has to be a mixture of leapers and incremental climbers. Analogies abound but I won't go there now.
Perhaps the latest book by Daniel Pink,
Drive, will shed some insight into this one. It's scheduled for late December 09 release, but it's thesis is about what motivates us to learn or to succeed. In it he does the usual review of contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology to derive the following principles for what makes people strive to succeed:
*Autonomy- the desire to direct our own lives
*Mastery- the urge to get better and better at something that matters
*Purpose- the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
Sounds pretty much on the money to me.
--pdl--
