The new NESTA report just out (June 2007) Hidden Innovation – How Innovation happens in six ‘low innovation’ sectors is something that every senior politician and strategic manager in England must read.

In this piece I’ll be concerned with the education bit as that’s what I have done in depth for the last 4 years – look at innovation in education with practitioners using web 2.0 apps and blogging, pod and vodcasting about it – disseminating good practice wherever I can to anyone who would listen.

When I downloaded the report and clicked to page 56, my first reaction was – ‘at long last’ – because sentences like this jumped out in high relief:

The education sector is notable for the extent of school-level innovation that does not reach a larger scale. Combating this will require more ‘D&R’, that is, more development-led experimentation by teachers that might lead to formal research work, rather than the other way around. For this to occur, such work needs to be better funded and supported, and schools and teachers need to be given incentives to engage in it.

I’ll refrain from the ‘Well DOH!‘ reaction to that; but I have been saying almost exactly those words to any and everyone for over a decade to total bemusement on all sides…Well it’s good to see the research backing those gut feelings up.

But somehow I feel it is more than that – I feel we are on the lip of a sea-change in education in this country – it’s just that people, and especially the teaching workforce, don’t know it yet. What is about to hit is the ‘joined upness’ of everything that just wasn’t there before. The advent of VLEs, location aware and handheld devices – the sheer ubiquity of communications – the increasing bottom up pockets of innovation amongst wired up (indeed wireless) teacher communities will start to ‘do’ for education as we know it in the next 18 months. Don’t believe me? – watch it happen – slowly at first and then with increasing rapidity as communities join digital hands.

Suddenly Becta issues a call for Research 12: Web 2.0 technologies for learning at KS3 and KS4 without saying what Web 2.0 technologies are specifically in that document I notice? And now it’s flavour of the month to look at distributed learning. Distributed learning is peer to peer from the bottom up not top down initiatives. But let’s go back to that Nesta document shall we?

Strengthening of the intermediary ‘market’ in innovation would improve the generation and diffusion of new ideas. The Gilbert Review noted that the responsibility for innovation in learning and teaching is distributed widely among bodies with different terms of reference and remits; it is not clear who is ultimately responsible for co-ordinating, capturing and evaluating innovative practices.

That’s politesse for ‘dog’s dinner‘ if you ask me – in effect there is dead zone of inactivity inbetween the major educational players in this market who are doing sterling work but they just don’t have the money (as usual) to bankroll R&D – sorry D&R– well someone has to – it really is a case now of Innovate or Die to go back and chime a much older phrase.

So where’s the money coming from to do the investment? Well again, with the help of another smart lens – a nodal person – David Wilcox – I was recently co-opted to observe the amazing open source tender bid for the Government’s Third Sector Innovation Exchange which was played out over at the Open Innovation Exchange Drupal Site. Amazingly they invited their competitors to join them in forming the bid (none of them took up the offer – they came fourth).

But what has this got to do with the Nesta report then?

These were the recommendations from Nesta:

Offering more of the available budget for educational research to consortia of schools engaged in D&R with other partners could have a significant effect. Similarly, making a proportion of capital investment available to groups of schools that work with other partners and intermediaries, to spend on innovative projects and the subsequent scale up of their outcomes, could enhance levels of adoption and diffusion across the system.

The underlying concept behind the bid for Innovation Exchange’s was embodied in this short video:

I like that idea of codifying innovation with replicators down to delivery agents but I’d call them key or nodal people in the network with reference to schools.

Hmm seems to be a bit of Zeitgeist in the air there possibly?

Now meanwhile back at the Nesta report these words end the piece on schools:

Encouraging more innovation will require system-wide change that will only be achieved if reflected in adjustments to existing accountability and inspection systems. These would need to develop to reflect the collaborative nature of innovation and the importance of locally-generated innovations as well as the implementation of top-down initiatives.

You see classically, the received anecdotal opinion, has been that the innovative teacher is going nowhere because he or she is isolated in a pretty formal school environment and when they go all their innovation goes with them. And the ‘informed’ opinion was that these individuals were pretty touched and what they did was great but no-one really paid them much attention (apart from their class who had a direct benefit) if they weren’t senior management and there was strategic adoption of their methods, sustainability and extensibility. And I guess that was pretty much the case up until very recently.

However that ubiquity, that ‘joined upness’, where teachers are getting into affinity groups and using Web 2.0 social networking applications and informal learning groups like Ning, means that traditional structures are under threat from the new guard – teachers like this are talking to each other like never before and sharing and collaborating and radically changing the learning landscape; they know exactly what they want and they are using web 2.0 and collaborative networks to achieve it through innovative practice – what’s more – they are now getting into positions as lead practitioners and spreading the word.

Sure it’s disruptive, sure it’s radical but why are they doing it in increasing numbers? Because it works, because it engages their pupils that’s why and we should be listening and marking out what I call ‘nodal’ people to provide the models.

The Nesta report shows that this is the case in many sectors now. This video on Open Innovation by professor Hippel of MIT speaking at the Nesta connect launch recently, really does bring home the whole concept of how people are joining up to do things differently and more efficiently and how models of innovation are changing because of the internet. We just don’t have the scalable models in education yet, but do we?

Professor Hippel has been putting his smart lens onto this area for over 30 years – look at the vid and see his comments on the Lego Mindstorm users near the end – it’s well worth waiting for. Looking at that I was struck by how similar it was to the way children and teachers are working with blogs and wikis and forming networking groups that often consist of global connections.

OK let’s zoom across the pond to Canada where Stephen Downes talks about his ideas on web 2.0 and your own learning development – now I’d say things start to get interesting at this point.

Then travelling on down to the University of Florida I’m struck by how all this chimes with the blog piece around the concept of de-synchronization by Christopher D. Sessums last December on eduspaces.

Then jumping back over the pond again to Josie Fraser’s views on Personalisation, Adaptive, Cutomisation and Dynamic with reference to the institution interacting with the learner we have this – look familiar?

Recently I have been doing a spate of interviews with innovative teachers and thinkers and they all seem to pointing in the same direction like iron filings around a magnet – so it’s a phenomenon that is hard to ignore.

Talking with Mark Berthelemy about his wider strategic role and experience with CPD, Doug Belshaw about the NextGen Teachers Ning Group of lead practitioners like Alex Savage and Joe Dale and overseers like David Wilcox about scoping his insights into the very sectors Nesta homes in on, it is becoming clear that something is happening in the form of social change and it is to do with networks, community, identity and globalisation. Communities of practice are beginning to coalesce around interest areas fit for purpose that are emergent.

I could go on and on citing more and more people like Grahame Atwell with his observations on PLEs but I won’t, the field is just getting too big and this piece far too extended.

The virtual is coming more to the fore, the connectivity becoming ubiquitous and we may not be as solidly geographically location based any more for teaching and learning in the future, but the need for our community identity is stronger than ever as the plate tectonics of human interaction change once again. I would even have quoted Peter Twining’s Educational Change and ICT as well but the PDF has mysteriously disappeared off the Becta partnership website? **

The contours emerging from all this learning landscape “flux” if you like, are that we are sometimes needlessly running around in circles pursuing pretty low level objectives because that’s what the system says we must – not only are we locked in but we are also locked down in terms of being able to encourage vibrant informal learning systems fit for our school communities. There is no time built in for reflection and insight so that we can remodel the ways in which we learn and so it’s business as usual and a disaffected pupil and teaching workforce in some cases.

Sure the Telegraph may be proclaiming its usual equivalent of ‘to hell in a handcart’ about the curriculum and subject specialist areas, but in a world where the Canadian Police force are starting to recruit in Second Life and Knowsley Council’s Education Department are deconstructing Secondary Schools as we know them and remodelling them into Learning Centres I reckon there’s no turning back.

But whatever your views can you afford not to pay attention?

References :

*

** Update : I have, with Peter’s help, finally manged to track down a copy of Educational Change and ICT and wanted to reference previous research that the funding gap may also have traditionally arisen from what was pointed out as too diffuse a common vision of what we should be using ICT for! (page 44).

http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page

http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ.htm

http://www.amazon.com/Success-Open-Source-Steven-Weber/dp/0674018583

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 11:40 pm and is filed under education policy, general ramblings, government, internet, mobile, opensource, personalisation, politics, schools, teaching and innovation, video, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.