The Concord Consortium | Realizing the Promise of Educational Technology Students Fighting Slavery: A Classroom Example I don’t own a cell phone, a microwave, or a TV. By opening my very first professional blog with this horrifying confession, I’ve probably caused you to think two things about me. This guy is a technophobe and a cheapskate. One of these assumptions is correct. One student asked Google to change their logo for a day as a way to raise awareness of modern slavery. Last spring, I taught Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl for the first time. I had compiled a few sites about modern slavery and dedicated one class period to researching these. Instead, we made public service announcement videos and wrote letters to various governments, businesses, and individuals, all the while making connections to Jacobs’ slave narrative. You can view all of the work at our class Wiki, and below I’ll explain how and why we used various technology: I began most classes, though, asking students to show what they learned the day before. Within twenty-four hours, their quick efforts bore fruit.
Napkin Labs Turns IDEO's Innovation Process Into Web Apps For All | Co. Design Somewhere in between the work we're paid to do and the work we want to do lies what Riley Gibson calls a "creative surplus." People have a need to explore, make, photograph, draw, and collaborate on ideas that are important to them, including the products and services they're passionate about. The key for a brand, he says, is to give those people better direction to end up with insight they can actually use. His startup Napkin Labs is a customizable crowdsourcing platform that takes conventional collaboration one step further. It will offer a set of apps that guide users through the "design thinking" process -- that is, the innovation process pioneered by IDEO and now used by design firms and companies the world over. Gibson and his business partner began their careers as consultants for creative agencies, working with teams to generate new product ideas and conduct market research. As a video demonstrates, a company can create a challenge and invite customers to contribute.
What Is an Essential Question? What is an essential question? An essential question is – well, essential: important, vital, at the heart of the matter – the essence of the issue. Think of questions in your life that fit this definition – but don’t just yet think about it like a teacher; consider the question as a thoughtful adult. What kinds of questions come to mind? In Understanding by Design we remind readers that “essential” has a few different connotations: One meaning of “essential” involves important questions that recur throughout one’s life. A question is essential when it: Here is a variety of subject-area examples of such questions: How well can fiction reveal truth? Why did that particular species/culture/person thrive and that other one barely survive or die? Note that an essential question is different from many of the questions teachers typically ask students in class. Such questions are clearly not “essential” in the sense discussed above. Is such a leading question bad?
Design Thinking To Star In Its Very Own Documentary | Co. Design As cinema goes, watching designers talk about their work is boring enough. But watching designers talk about how they think? Suffice it to say, it's no Die Hard. Nevertheless, a handful of filmmakers wants to mount a documentary on precisely that -- design thinking -- and they hope to raise $15,000 through Kickstarter to support their work. The film, by One Time Studio in San Francisco, will feature interviews with a smattering of design minds. Among them: laptop inventor and IDEO cofounder Bill Moggridge; Smart Design cofounder Dan Formosa; and AIGA CEO Richard Grefe. Which prompts the question: Why? Anti-DT sentiment is exactly why the time is ripe to give the topic a full cinematic treatment, says One Time Studio's Yang Yu Hsiu. Let's just hope the filmmakers can squeeze some explosions in there, too.
How to implement studio teaching? Philosophy Studio teaching is not just another kind of classroom activity. It is not a lab session, nor is it just a series of class projects. It is an approach to teaching and learning that gets students actively engaged in directing their own learning. The goal of studio teaching is to get students to be active learners -- to let them "invent" their own knowledge. Instructors serve as guides or mentors, helping when needed and avoiding whenever possible taking the lead role. Strategy A key to studio teaching is to develop a collection of exercises/projects that will provide the focus for learning throughout the semester. In studio classrooms, just as in all classrooms that emphasize active learning, the amount of material delivered by lecture is less than in a traditional lecture class. As much as possible, the goal is to distribute assignments and then stand aside while students do their learning. Group activities lead to individual learning/development
Community Network Blogs What is happening during a sunny Saturday on the SAP Labs Palo Alto campus and its vicinities? Only a flip chart sign in the lobby building 3 that says “Design Thinking workshop go to fourth floor”, some empty pizza boxes and about 15 heads full of ideas for future playground designs are left. What happened? Is there anything else left? Three women were on a mission, on a mission to spread the word of Design Thinking within SAP and beyond. Instead of waiting for any formal training or investing in books and other reading materials – they said lets “just do it”. The three of us plus 12 committed colleagues from SAP, all from many different SAP organizations, immersed for a day into Design Thinking. The group consisted of many different disciplines as well as different cultural backgrounds. Stakeholders? “Design Thinking is a methodology for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result.” So, what else is part of Design Thinking?
2010 Horizon Report Download the 2010 Horizon ReportPDF • ePub (also available in other languages) The 2010 Horizon Report is a collaboration betweenThe New Media Consortium and theEDUCAUSE Learning Initiative An EDUCAUSE Program © 2010, The New Media Consortium. Permission is granted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license to replicate and distribute this report freely for noncommercial purposes provided that it is distributed only in its entirety. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. Citation Johnson, L., Levine, A., Smith, R., & Stone, S. (2010).
"Design Thinking" Isn't a Miracle Cure, but Here's How It Helps | Co. Design [This is a follow-up to Helen's previous article on design thinking, The Seven Deadly Sins That Choke Out Innovation ? Ed.] Recently, Kevin McCullagh of British product strategy consultancy, Plan organized a two-day event for executives to wrap their heads around the concept of design thinking?and, in particular, to think about how they might go about implementing it within their own organization. Ladies and gentlemen, let me break this to you gently. Now before you throw down your coffee cups and storm out in disgust, let me explain that I? First, some context: Until July of 2010, I was the editor of innovation and design at Bloomberg BusinessWeek. I joined the magazine back in 2006, which was a time when design thinking was really beginning to take hold as a concept. Eager onlookers were left baffled about replicating this success. Still, in the years that have followed, something of a problem emerged. Designers often bristle when the term design thinking comes up in conversation.
WALC2011 The active learning model is currently utilized in many undergraduate programs throughout the United States and continues to expand at the university level. Research shows that implementation of the active learning model results in a significant increase in students’ knowledge retention and improvements in student performance. Particularly impressive gains have been documented among groups of students that traditionally have been under-represented in science. The 2011 Windward School Active Learning Colloquium aims to develop the skills and knowledge necessary for school leaders to guide reform of the learning, assessment, and teaching of science at the secondary school level. The colloquium is designed for science educators at the secondary level. See the Flickr feed for photos from the Colloquium! See the Mar Vista Patch feature article on the Colloquium: "Science Colloquia for Teachers Emphasizes Active Learning"
Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What's Next? | Co. Design The decade of Design Thinking is ending and I, for one, am moving on to another conceptual framework: Creative Intelligence, or CQ. I am writing a book about Creative Intelligence, due out from HarperCollins in fall 2012, and I hope to have a conversation with the Fast Company audience on this blog about how we should teach, measure, and use CQ. Why am I, who at Business Week was one of Design Thinking's major advocates, moving on to a new conceptual framework? Simple. Design consultancies hoped that a process trick would produce change. I would add that the construction and framing of Design Thinking itself has become a key issue. There were many successes, but far too many more failures in this endeavor. CEOs in particular, took to the process side of Design Thinking, implementing it like Six Sigma and other efficiency-based processes. The success rate for design thinking processes was very low. Everyone likes creativity because everyone believes they are, or were, or can be creative.
Skyline CPI A Complete How-To for Creating Curriculum Sites and Student Portfolios using Google's Tools! Note: at this time Google is currently switching from Google Docs to Google Drive. We will update this site as soon as the switch is complete. The WhatA methodology for creating and organizing online student portfolios and curriculum sharing sites throughout an entire school. Additionally, the new paradigm for technology is that it is not relevant unless it seamlessly integrates with many other forms of technology; Calendars need to automatically sync with computers, phones, websites; Televisions need to work with the Internet, Blue Ray players, Netflix, iTunes, AppleTV, Roku, and computers; Cameras need to automatically upload pictures to Flickr, Facebook, Picassa. To do so, Skyline High School utilizes a variety of the Google Tool set to plow the landscape and plant the necessary seeds for a garden bed of technology integration school-wide.
Innovation 101: Stanford's d.school Teaches Students to Be Creative