iMedia

Gladwell to discuss "Outliers" in Louisville

Transforming Lexington: Malcolm Gladwell will be in Louisville on January 22 discussing his new book, Outliers: The Story of Success.

Wayne

Don't think like a robot

Listed by the World Futurist Society as a future trend and amplified by Britannica blog, the ability to think anew will be especially important in an age where knowledge is doubling every couple of years. Britannica:

'As traditional jobs disappear, people will need to develop their nonautomatable skills to remain marketable and productive in the Hyper-Human Economy. In many cases, workers won’t go after existing jobs, but rather create them by identifying problems to be solved with their hyper-human skills, such as discovery, creativity, and influence.' The key to staying employed in the future according to [workplace expert Richard W.] Samson is to become an expert in something that can’t be automated. 'If you behave like a robot, you risk being replaced by one,' says Samson.

"Permission-based" innovation

Seth Godin famously came up with the phrase "permission-based marketing" to capture how the business dialog had become a two-way street. Businesses and organizations could no longer simply flood individuals with information and expect a significant return in an attention-challenged word.

Similarly, having successfully captured a significant share of the browser market from Microsoft, the open source organization Mozilla has an idea about how to make innovation a participatory process. In a "best of" McKinsey quarterly interview (free registration required) Mozilla Foundation chairman and former CEO Mitchell Baker had this to say about innovation:

The Quarterly: How do you think about your role in enabling innovation in the communities?

Mitchell Baker: Sometimes, just giving people permission does wonders. Consider our quality control process. We have a public process for finding, tracking, and correcting bugs in the code we’re developing, and thousands of people are involved. When several people within the community began to take leadership in that effort, someone who worked with me said, 'All we need to do is tell these people it’s OK.' So that’s what we did. We said to the leader, 'You’re awesome; keep doing what you’re doing.' And after that, he became our release driver. There are more people like that than you would expect.

Baker also describes how up to 40 percent of the code that makes its way into the browser comes from volunteer community.

Wayne

Business winners "explode the status quo"

News Corp. president and Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin says that publishers who thrive, and not just survive, in the coming coming, will "explode the status quo" by being creative.

The media and financial sectors are only the most glaring examples of industries in need of transformation. Virtually every company in every stage of development is bracing for whatever comes next.

Tomorrow's leaders will embrace the creative destruction of innovation and effectively weed out outdated and corrupt systems that inhibit growth within their organizations....

When nothing else works, the only real choice is to create something new. It's the American way

'Identifying creativity and exploiting it is perhaps our only commodity,' Chernin said.

Happy holidays!

Sometimes the most innovative thing one can do is take a break. iMedia Kentucky will be back next week. Happy holidays everyone!

Right brain business revolution

If there is to be a right brain revolution in business, the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, which emphasizes design and integrative thinking in its work, will likely be on the front lines. Also recommended: Rotman Magazine, which consistently highlights a creative approach to business. Check out the "thinking about thinking" issue. (PDF)

What's the Big Idea?

Just a reminder: "What's the Big Idea?" will be broadcast tonight at 8p on KET1. Recorded at the Visioning Kentucky's Future Conference in Covington November 20, the show featured host Bill Goodman interviewing a panel of entrepreneurs, authors and educators about moving Kentucky ahead. There were of course, a couple of ground rules. One, no one could say it wouldn't work in Kentucky. And two, no one could say it was too expensive. Tune it at 8p to see what the panelist said.

New "focus on" section of iMedia

For the next couple of weeks or more, the "focus on" section of iMedia Kentucky will display a running list of bookmarked news stories, research and blog posts related to the idea and practice of innovation.

Researching the Digital Literacies

To follow up on the last post, the MacArthur Foundation is funding an initiative to look into how pervasive media does - and ought to - change the classroom, and it's blog, Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning, is an excellent source of information written by people actively working these issues.

New digital literacy: It's the knowing between discplines that counts

[Cross-posted from the IdeaFestival] As it turns out, the best way to pass that biology course might be to take it alongside literature.

While describing how a technology-based collaborative approach - and not the textbook-and-teacher method so long favored inside the classroom - might make the best use of the technology that kids routinely use outside the classroom, the essay "At School, Technology Starts to Turn a Corner," makes a second valuable point - that the collaboration encouraged by today's technology will inevitably blur the neat divisions between subject matter. And that's good for any school system that aims to produce literate 21st century students.

The New Technology Foundation, a nonprofit organization... has developed a model for project-based teaching and is at the forefront of the drive for technology-enabled reform of education. Forty-two schools in nine states are trying the foundation’s model, and their numbers are growing rapidly.

Behind the efforts, of course, are concerns that K-12 public schools are falling short in preparing students for the twin challenges of globalization and technological change. Worries about the nation’s future competitiveness led to the creation in 2002 of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a coalition whose members include the Department of Education and technology companies like Apple, Cisco Systems, Dell and Microsoft.

The government-industry partnership identifies a set of skills that mirror those that the New Technology Foundation [hyperlink added] model is meant to nurture. Those skills include collaboration, systems thinking, self-direction and communication, both online and in person.

State officials in Indiana took a look at the foundation’s model and offered travel grants for local teachers and administrators to visit its schools in California. Sally Nichols, an English teacher, came away impressed and signed up for the new project-based teaching program at her school, Decatur Central High School in Indianapolis.

Last year, Ms. Nichols and another teacher taught a biology and literature class for freshmen. (Cross-disciplinary courses are common in the New Technology model.) Typically, half of freshmen fail biology, but under the project-based model the failure rate was cut in half (emphasis supplied).

Wayne