Open Visual Thinkery
I zoomed in to Catherine Cronin’s talk on “If open is the answer, what is the question?” at the recent OER16 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. This thought resonated with me, as it’s something I’ve learning in my journey with Visual Thinkery: our contibutions matter. With a sideways glance at school, I think there’s a massive difference between enforced participation and a culture of participation…
A business starts with a culture of one. Every person that joins adds to that culture. Their values, their humour, their work ethic. Every decision, communication, action sets a precedent. Culture can take years to build, but days to damage.
A organisation is it’s people – so which part do you play?
(Inspired by “The Open Organization” by Jim Whitehurst)
Yay! Top of the league!
What… for rote learning?
<heart sinks>
Here’s Jim Knight talking OECD: ‘England is bottom of the league when it comes to deep learning. And top for drill and practice. It’s no coincidence’
This looks all wrong, doesn’t it? The thing is, it’s not at all easy to change your current world view. In fact, we actively look for things that will confirm our existing world view. This, I now know, is called confirmation bias, which always reminds me of the Simon & Garfunkel line “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest, hmm hmm hmm…”. I find the world a much more complicated place to live in being open to different world views, for to be open to other ideas we must also be open to our position being a bit wrong too. Feelings of doubt, uncertainty, and not being clever enough…
However inconvenient, this humility surely forms an essential ingredient of learning?
Sandwich anyone? I do love a good sandwich. If potatoes are the king of carbs, then surely bread is its queen? As an Irishman, I am of course very biased. Anyway, I digress…
The Digital Skills Sandwich is an idea that’s been rumbling around in my head for a while now. It’s seed germinates from the fact that it can often take a number of years to craft a vocational qualification. Great. Now, when it comes to Digital Skills, this poses a massive problem as the digital domain is evolving much faster than the qualification can be created. Not great. However, by shifting our focus from long journeys (like qualifications) to small steps of achievement, we can think in terms of a fluid collection of small achievements that are mapped on to a fixed generic standard framework, which could be given a wrapper of “meaning” by a third party such as an Awarding body. The Open Badge standard makes this possible. It’s new endorsement feature would also allow the small steps to be created by anyone, and included as part of a dynamic Sandwich filling. Crazy? Maybe. Hungry? You bet…
I met John Webber from Sussex Downs College recently, and discovered a number of common interests, including Open Badges. He sent through this thinking on his understanding of studentship, which I’ve taken the liberty of attempting to bring life a little….
Oh, the need for a creative process in order to ideate and innovate! In my experience, people have different strengths when it comes to thinking, and without a recognition of this (and a process), one person’s sideways idea is discounted as silly, or even worse, seen as a threat. Tom Barrett’s blog entitled “The ebb and flow between divergent and convergent thinking” caught my eye, and before long I found myself pruning trees…
Blockchain, the underlying technology used by Bitcoin, is cool. At least, I think it is, if I could only get my head around it. A group of thinkers (including Serge Ravet) from the Open Badges Community got together to start thinking about how the Open Badge standard could be used inside the Blockchain. What would it gain, and more importantly to me, what would that look like?
At the Digital Leaders recent conference, I took part in a discussion about young people and Digital Skills. As you might expect, there was lots of talk about “the skills gap”, which is already here (check out programmers salaries in London) and predicted to result in many thousands of unfilled jobs. In my experience, the mini-journeys that people undertake have more do to with their confidence. In particular, I’m thinking of young people leaving school blind to the world of opportunity out there or their place in it, but clutching a grades slip which essentially reads “not good enough”. The biggest travesty of all is that most believe it…
The recent Digital Leaders conference was entitled “Building Digital DNA”. Jacqueline de Rojas (VP at Citrix) spoke about women in tech (or the lack thereof).
I was thoroughly impressed with some female students I met a few weeks ago whilst doing some visual thinkery for UCL Academy. They had no problem seeing themselves as future engineers. Sure enough, looking inside the school, I could feel the project-focused creative engineering vibe flowing through their learning spaces.
I believe this is a cultural problem, and we would do well to continue to revisit this question.