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Removing barriers to innovation – the teaching and learning centre and third spaces
In my last 2 posts ( 7 Rules About Innovation ; First Steps in Creating a Culture of Innovation; I said I’d get to the topic of removing barriers to innovation in an institution. I’m a bit academic about this topic, since I feel like this stage requires some sort of framework that gives your actions some method to the madness. This is also one area where I think senior leadership would do well to be a bit more academic outside of standard leadership literature and practices. But I digress… Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory is probably the most well known and cited tome on innovation, and I’ve found that senior admin really…
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First steps in Creating a culture of innovation in higher education – Figuring out what innovation will mean
In my last post I outlined Tannis’ 7 rules on innovation. I said that the next post would be about removing barriers to innovation, but that’s actually jumping the gun a bit. If you’ve just landed a job with innovation in your job title, the first steps are figuring out what your institution means when they say they want innovation. Find out what people at your institution care about when they say they want innovation. This should be obvious, but chances are different stakeholders (the Deans, the President, the CIO, the faculty) all have different ideas as to what is innovation and what they want. Innovation is a relative construct, and within an…
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About those innovation jobs…7 Rules About Innovation
Today was the latest job posting with innovation in the title, and this one is at a VP level. This seems to be an emerging trend in higher education, suggesting both a desire of institutions to show their commitment to innovation first by including it in their strategic plans, and in addition to that, making sure at least one person in the institution has innovation in their job title. This isn’t a cranky, cynical post about this trend, but it does seem timely to share some observations about what some of institutional barriers to ed tech innovation are, and what can work in overcoming them. For credibility sake, I should mention…
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Applied research day, badging, faculty development and iPads: Week 8 in review
WordPress theme: I changed the theme for this blog, and it feels like a new pair of fabulous shoes. JIBC Applied Research Day: We seem to struggle to attract a big audience to our annual research day, but this year was one of the best IMO. Instead of a keynote, the day kicked off with a series of presentations by students on research they are doing as part of their Bachelors program capstone projects. This was quite impressive and a testament to how integrated applied research has become in our programs, albeit quietly it seems. The speed research presentations were also fun, and I continue to love this format. Missing…
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Week 5 in Review
I’ve missed a few weeks, but the scope of my activity is increasingly centred on our big University of Guadalajara faculty development project which is about to launch its development stage. Innovation: The big news of the week was this announcement of funding from Western Economic Diversification Canada for our simulation tool, Praxis (#jibcpraxis). Getting to this announcement has been a 2.5 year work in progress with many highs and lows for the JIBC team involved. Nonetheless, it was a big event of speeches and congratulations and included both the attendance and an earnest commentary from MP @MichelleRempel who flew in from @dlnorman– land (and who apparently used to work in Tech Transfer…
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Week 50 in review
Innovation:Pushed along by one of our always keen and innovative instructors, investigated use of drones for Fire and Safety and SARS (search and rescue) training. This alternately excites me and frightens me, but then again, my job isn’t really about staying in my comfort zone. Sat in on and learned a lot from Grant Gregson’s (Emily Carr U) TELL session and am ordering a WD cloud. I’m grateful there are people in the ETUG community that can talk and do the technical, almost IT part of ed tech but still keep it simple for the rest of us. Reading and Responding: Responded to Tony Bates’ excellent (and well-timed) post on experiential learning.…
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Mobile Learning at an Applied Institution
We’ve been asked on numerous occasions about our mobile strategy–how we got there and where we are going next. Oddly, we are rarely asked the why question, but for me that is really where it starts. The Context When I first came to JIBC 4 years ago, mobile was on my radar as the latest thing but I was already at that stage of ed tech dis-illusionism where everything sounded like a buzzword. But the more I learned about this peculiar institution– which boasts a relatively unusual range of course offerings, course formats, and professions and pathways–the more mobile became interesting. When a particularly savvy program area pitched the idea of an app, explaining…
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A Response to D’Arcy Norman on the LMS/Open Binary
D’Arcy Norman has a great post on his blog where he challenges what he feels is a binary between LMS hate and Open love. I was really excited by this post because a) I realized how thirsty I’ve been to read actual blog posts again and b) I found it nailed the state of LMS and Open ed tool thinking. I think where you sit on the continuum of Open to LMS has to do with the kind of institution and institutional resources available to you. I work at a small but highly productive institution that runs on about 40 million (yes, only one 0 there, folks) a year. D’Arcy makes the point that institutions…
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RIP Jean-Claude Bradley, Open Innovator
I learned haphazardly via Twitter the other day that Jean-Claude Bradley had passed away quite recently, am still reeling a bit from this news, despite never having met him in person. When Open Education Resources were becoming a thing, JC Bradley was one of the first people I had heard about actually innovating his teaching around an idea of open. I referenced him on numerous occasions on this blog, first in 2006 when I came across a presentation he had done on how he was changing his teaching around podcasting and blogging, where, by providing students with a lecture archive in advance, he was replacing his live lectures with hands-on workshop stuff. I’m not…
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Innovation in Higher Education
I spent the better part of last week at CNIE 2014 in Kamloops where I got to enjoy some good sunshine, great TRU hospitality, great music, and good presentations and conversations with old and new colleagues. It was probably the first time I’d been to a conference where I left with a feeling that there was a common angsty thread in many of the discussions around innovation, nicely kicked off by Audrey Watters and already captured on her blog Hack Education (how does she do that so fast??) and wrapped up by Brian Lamb (not yet posted but hopefully captured). The purpose of my presentation–slides here–was to talk about how an over-investment…
