I've been thinking about how to better support innovation on campus, and realized that there is a strong bell curve describing the drive to innovate in teaching practices in a population of instructors (and, likely, students), something like:

The "mavericks" are the ones that will explore, experiment and push the boundaries no matter what the institution does. The "quiet majority" are where most instructors are - they work hard at what they do, but don't have the resources (time, funds, people, etc…) to try many new things. The "resisters" are the often-vocal ones who push back against change for various reasons.

Steven Soderbergh, lamenting the decline in cinema in lieu of movie-making by executives and accountants:

Now, of course, it's very subjective; there are going to be exceptions to everything I'm going to say, and I'm just saying that so no one thinks I'm talking about them. I want to be clear: The idea of cinema as I'm defining it is not on the radar in the studios. This is not a conversation anybody's having; it's not a word you would ever want to use in a meeting. Speaking of meetings, the meetings have gotten pretty weird. There are fewer and fewer executives who are in the business because they love movies. There are fewer and fewer executives that know movies. So it can become a very strange situation. I mean, I know how to drive a car, but I wouldn't presume to sit in a meeting with an engineer and tell him how to build one, and that's kind of what you feel like when you're in these meetings. You've got people who don't know movies and don't watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie you're going to be allowed to make. That's one reason studio movies aren't better than they are, and that's one reason that cinema, as I'm defining it, is shrinking.

Stephen Downes observed that the response from elite institutions to MOOCs has been essentially instantaneous - and unprecedented in both immediacy and scale of the response.

That entire post is great, as is the rest of his coverage of the EDUCAUSE MOOC conference¹.

The money shot, on response to MOOCs:

MOOCs were not designed to serve the missions of the elite colleges and universities. They were designed to undermine them, and make those missions obsolete.

Audrey Watters and Jim Groom were at the MIT Media Lab with Philipp Schmidt and others for a hackathon. Sounds like it was a pretty incredible couple of days.

The video below captures some of the discussion. So much goodness in it. We haven’t lost the open web. We can (continue to) choose to build it. Yes, there are silos and commodifcation and icky corporate stuff that would be easy to rail against, but what if we just let go of that and (continue to) build the web we want and need? Yeah. Let’s (continue to) do that… That’s what Boone’s Project Reclaim is all about. That’s what I do on a tiny, insignificant, human scale. That’s why I publish my own stuff here - I’ve built this site up exactly how I want it, to support my ability to be as open as I choose, without relying on others to enable (or decide not to) me.

David Weinberger shared his notes from Anil Dash's recent talk at Berkman about social media and the (d)evolution thereof. Some really important stuff in there.

on shared values and culture:

There was a time when it was meaningful thing to say that you're a blogger. It was distinctive. Now being introduced as a blogger "is a little bit like being introduced as an emailer." "No one's a Facebooker." The idea that there was a culture with shared values has been dismantled.

Mars Gigapixel Panorama - Curiosity rover: Martian solar days 136-149 in The World

I started off snowboarding. That didn't work out too well. Reverted to skis so I could keep up with Evan. What a fantastic day…

I’ve been uncomfortable about the MOOC hype. There are a few reasons, ranging from the neoliberal commodification and privatization of education, to the extension of largely passive didactic pedagogies.

Basically, it’s an emphasis on education-as-content, and an exercise in the controlled dissemination of that content¹. Students learn through receiving access to content in the context of a course.

Sounds familiar.

wait. we’re innovating. there are better graphics now.

I don't have funding for this (yet), but my boss suggested a road trip to see what the state of the art is at other institutions. I proposed a school to visit, and was gently nudged toward restricting things to just western canada for some strange reason...

so.

where would you visit in western canada, and why. I need to make the case to visit some institutions to see really cool/kickass/innovative stuff.

maybe not education, but more of “learning and collaborating”.

moocs get all of the press (this year). they’re massive. they’re online. they’re funded.

but, under the cover, they’re not really all that innovative. they still involve students taking courses from experts, almost always by watching (or maybe reading) lectures. occasionally, by making stuff. but that’s not necessary.

the biggest issues with moocs appear to involve how to integrate them into the existing structures - how do people get credit for them? who pays for them? who controls the content of the courses? what is the role of institutions? etc… blah blah blah. boring.

Disruptors are not concerned about your specific problem, they only have blanket solutions. They don't worry about making something useful, only about sounding revolutionary. Disruption is about ego. You see disruption appeals to people because it's revolutionary, elite, new, sexy. Just being useful or practical looks all dowdy besides glamorous disruption.

So, everything has to be disruptive, a game-changer, a revolution, an all-encompassing tsunami of change. It can't just be useful in a particular context. That educause piece judges OERs a failure precisely because they are not disruptive. That tells you more about the author than it does about OERs - in their world only disruption matters. Take the OER based TESSA project. Useful? Undoutedly. Disruptive? Probably not. So, who cares about it, right? We should aim higher than getting well paid speaking gigs for middle-aged men with goatees who skateboard to work.

yeah. it's going to be a fun year.