{"id":728,"date":"2009-04-11T09:00:15","date_gmt":"2009-04-11T15:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/?p=728"},"modified":"2009-04-11T09:00:15","modified_gmt":"2009-04-11T15:00:15","slug":"how-to-host-an-innovation-banquet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/how-to-host-an-innovation-banquet\/","title":{"rendered":"How to host an innovation banquet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Phil Long has just written a very thoughtful and challenging post at EdTechTrends<\/a>. As I typed manically through my comment and watched it grow, I thought that instead of breaking the Blogger comment box I’d record a few thoughts here and further the distributed conversation.<\/p>\n

Dear Phil,<\/p>\n

Wow. I must read this book right away (Innovation, the Missing Dimension<\/em>).<\/p>\n

The more I talk about Web 2.0, the more I’m convinced that the heuristic points to habits of mind and heart with two primary characteristics: they seek, welcome, create network effects, and they trust in–shoot, they expect<\/em>–emergent phenomena. “Play” is another name for these habits, but “play” sounds trivial–unless one reads Vygotsky (where he argues play is the gateway to facility with abstractions) or Huizinga (whose Homo Ludens<\/em> rocks my world). The quotation you cite from Rosalind Williams is an extremely useful corollary. The focus on creativity is just right, in my view. People may resist the idea of playfulness, but it’s hard to naysay the idea of creativity.<\/p>\n

Yet there are those who believe that creativity can be had without the mess of “odd connections, wanderings, and daydreaming” and without the investments of “time and space to graze.” There are those who will not tolerate the ambiguities and uncertainties out of which real innovation emerges. This kind of misguided “due diligence” has also shaped forced-march large-section courses that are little more than bucket brigades in which assessment becomes a crude pour-your-bucket-back-into-mine exercise in self-certification. This isn’t education and it isn’t working, but the human capacity for denial never fails to astonish me (in myself as well, I hasten to add). Oliver Sacks tells a dismal story in Awakenings<\/em> of showing his colleagues films of Parkinson’s patients restored to mobility by L-Dopa, only to have those colleagues storm out of the conference room denying that any such thing had happened. When I first read that story, I was incredulous. Now, not so much.<\/p>\n

I have long thought that we should assemble case studies of the education of innovators. Which teachers really helped? How did they help? What teachers furthered the thought of an Einstein, a Boulanger, a Curie, a Lennon? What was the secret sauce? I think we’d find some fascinating commonalities. And I think that what works for the high achievers will work for the less gifted as well. Find a version of “teach to the top” that isn’t merely “teach to the most capable” but “teach to the top of what each student is capable of.” A top that by definition cannot be clearly visible to either learner or teacher. A real learning summit–the place where learning and innovation join–is always just beyond the farthest resolvable detail. A spiral pedagogy to match Bruner’s spiral curriculum?<\/p>\n

I remember the article I read many years ago in the Columbia U. alumni magazine in which alumni reminisced about Mark Van Doren and other famous CU profs. What they recalled most vividly were the digressions….\u00a0<\/p>\n

Your post is a vivid reminder for me of why social media and online affordances are such powerful learning opportunities: structured well, they maximize serendipity (it’s built-in to the Web) and make the odd connections, wanderings, and daydreaming visible, persistent, and available for reflection and further serendipity. We can’t all have MIT’s endowment or prestige, but we all have access to the amazing affordances of the ‘Net. All it takes is imagination, innovation, a willingness to go beyond what’s given (again, quoting Bruner, on the nature of true learning). Faith in the power of “shared inquiry and transformative conversations,” to quote from the emerging mission statement of the Academy for Teaching and Learning<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” has been crucial for me in this regard, as a student and as a teacher. Every single English Composition class I’ve taught since 1990 has begun with this essay. Now my “intro to college teaching” workshops do as well. \u00a0I’ve long drawn on Percy’s vision of education for inspiration, guidance, disruption (it doesn’t resolve very neatly). At least one of my former students, now a colleague, is carrying on the tradition as well<\/a>. So I’ll give Percy the last word here, gladly: \u00a0a benediction, a valediction, a charge to the innovation banquet committee.<\/p>\n

In truth, the biography of scientists and poets is usually the story of the discovery of the indirect approach, the circumvention of the educator’s presentation-the young man who was sent to the Technikum and on his way fell into the habit of loitering in book stores and reading poetry; or the young man dutifully attending law school who on the way became curious about the comings and goings of ants. One remembers the scene in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter<\/em> where the girl hides in the bushes to hear the Capehart in the big house play Beethoven. Perhaps she was the lucky one after all. Think of the unhappy souls inside, who see the record, worry about scratches, and most of all worry about whether they are getting it, whether they are bona fide music lovers. What is the best way to hear Beethoven: sitting in a proper silence around the Capehart or eavesdropping from an azalea bush?<\/p>\n

However it may come about, we notice two traits of the second situation: (1) an openness of the thing before one-instead of being an exercise to be learned according to an approved mode, it is a garden of delights which beckons to one; (2) a sovereignty of the knower-instead of being a consumer of a prepared experience, I am a sovereign wayfarer, a wanderer in the neighborhood of being who stumbles into the garden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Phil Long has just written a very thoughtful and challenging post at EdTechTrends. As I typed manically through my comment and watched it grow, I thought that instead of breaking the Blogger comment box I’d record a few thoughts here … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4bHwM-bK","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}