Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

If we all knew the idea we'd not be writing blog posts like this, reading them or doing workshops on the matter. We'd be busy pulling that limitless supply of creativity out of its hole to see the light of day and bring us riches, joy, learning and new friends.

However, given that we're not, over the next month or so (or however long it takes me to splurge out those thoughts) I'll be summarising on this here blog some of the best online and offline reading and viewing that has attempted to answer that question, throwing in my own unresearched but tried and tested notions (and a few that haven't even got that far). This post will change to reflect the updating posts that will take a peek at:

1. Why it's important to (want to) know Where Good Ideas Come From.
2. Stand There And Do Nothing: Designing beautiful solutions rather than solving ugly problems
3. Creative Genius. Man At Work: Arguments for not working as a team
4. Getting Creativity Done (GCD): How to get productive and clean down the mental decks
5. Nurturing creativity: Worrying about "Tanya's Bow" or the Dinosaurs: Some arguments for caring about the team, not pissing them off and really understanding what failure is
6. Finding your tribe
7. Creating visions, not missions

As they're posted, please leave comments, disagree, add your own links, videos and pictures. I hope that by the end of it we'll have a resource to which we might come back with the stories of how the works, thoughts and attitudes of others have changed the way we operate.

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Brill pic from Chris Metcalf

If the Army sees the potential in Facebook, why not schools?

When social networks were still finding their feet among their key demographic a few years ago, I was a keen advocate of formal learning institutions and their staff keeping out of those spaces, certainly not using them as social learning environments. danah's research backed this up and the concept of teachers creating "creepy treehouses" was enough to knock that desire of some on the head.

Seeing how the US Army has harnessed Facebook for a mix of both informal communication and leadership is opening up the question again in my mind, as the demographic using Facebook rises well into the 30s and Twitter's growth started with an older demographic and is only now appearing to edge southwards to early 20 year olds and teens (thanks to my wholly unscientific research - danah, if you're not busy this summer...).

It's particularly pertinent as Local Authorities charged with improving the prospects of their learners and staff in an increasingly technological age do not cease to become ever more Machiavellian in their desire to clamp down on any communication about the realities of being a teacher or learner in their patches.

On the Facebook blog this morning says Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Arata (link to his FB page):

Allowing our audience — including our soldiers — to connect and communicate through social networking is still considered risky business by some, and we do face unique challenges. The risks to operations security felt by some, or the fears that our soldiers will post "unbecoming" information, are outweighed by increased communication and sharing.

From an institution that in 2000 wouldn't allow unfettered access to email (and before that whose "Full Metal Jacket" reputation preceded it), one of the most traditional public institutions with the most apparently valid potential for killing communication to those back home has come a long way. And it also shows how far schools and teen learners working within them have to go before their life cycles start matching the real world.

What is it that Facebook brings the military? It allows family to keep in touch with minimal effort through a great deal of the deep ambient intimacy of the status update:

Facebook is also giving a platform for sharing of skills and advice between recruits:

It also allows senior members of staff in the military to, quickly and easily, without disrupting the flow of their day, update via cellphone or laptop on what (non-secret) operations they are undertaking. What exactly does an army Colonel do? Well, now you can 'follow' them and find out. It will almost certainly make a few more people aspire to doing something different or improving their act not just in seeing what superiors and, above all, seeing what peers are up to.

While intranets and VLEs provide a structured learning environment for teacher-defined groups of learners, they do not provide very well (or at all) for friends-of-a-friend (FOAF) communication, happenstance connections and temporary windows in on what FOAFs are up to. They are designed for preset activity with preset groups, despite the admirable efforts of talented creative individuals to shoehorn them into other more enticing uses. It's hard to argue that, in terms of how kids connect within the school environment with school-like material and contacts, things have really moved on since the likes of my students blogging and podcasting from their French trip in 2003 (the 2004, 2005 and Auschwitz blog remain). The fun serendipitous connections are happening very much outside the school boundaries, and the school institution itself remains largely blind to this. The knock-on effect is that school and what it should stand for - learning - are also blind to learners outside the schooling complex.

Now, at Channel 4 the Education department has worked with great skill over the past two years to create learning opportunities in the social networks and spaces where young people hang out (think Battlefront, YearDot, Routes.... There has been little attempt to make these interactions fit into schooling per se. At 4iP, where many of our products and services involve learning of some description, we continue this 'non-school' of thought.

I wonder: is there mileage for schools in looking at what the Army is achieving here and for what purposes, and seeing if there are unmet needs in the schooling environment which could be supported by social networking services and platforms which are increasingly better embedded in society? Or is this something in which only others outside the formal schooling environment are prepared to invest?

Pic: Full Metal Jacket

Why Glow isn't Bebo, and why it will probably succeed

It doesn't take much digging around to know that I have a passion for finding out what makes social networks, online communities and the people on them tick, and learning from this to help influence how communities and groups might be built around learning. It's become a core part of my work with Learning and Teaching Scotland, whether the project is small, medium or large scale, an unconference, an online blogging platform or a national intranet.

In my latest BBC Learning column I explore the huge growth of Bebo over the past couple of years, resulting in its impressive sale a couple of months ago, and what we might learn from it in making Glow a success in years to come. There are a few community-building challenges which have begun to be worked through by the Glow team and by the leading Local Authority lights in the Glow roll-out. I'd love to know what they have to say about this SNS angle on what is effectively a highly organised attempt at community building.

The last column on mobile learning got a fair few comments from around the world, which were fascinating in their different takes on such an emotive subject. This post might be a little closer to (my) home, but I hope that doesn't stop readers in Scotland and further afield having a good ol' debate about how Glow's going to see its success form. And while we're at it, what would success for Glow look like? Comments are open.

Does the word 'teacher' create a barrier these days?

School of Everything have been pondering how they get across the idea that some people will learn and others will teach through the service, when the word teacher is, apparently, so loaded with negative connotations:

We want to help professional teachers advertise their services, but it's pretty clear from the general feedback that the word "teacher" also puts off many people with skills and experience to share. We think everyone has something to teach - but how many of us would call ourselves teachers? And is calling some of our members "teachers" and others "learners" just reinforcing unhelpful divisions, or respecting teachers for their skills in passing on what they know?

The balance between respect for the role and enabling learning by reducing the perceived barriers is hard to achieve. As adults we rarely refer to those who teach us how to work better as 'teacher'. We've invented a plethora of other words to avoid this: coach, mentor, facilitator...

My guess is that it shows mutual respect to use these not-teacher words, so does this mean that we use the word 'teacher' in schools to reinforce some kind of 'them' and 'us' attitude? And, having read Don and John's convincing arguments, do we really want a 'them' and 'us' approach to teaching and learning? About time, perhaps, that the organisation I work for changes its name simply to Learning Scotland.

Update: David Warlick has a nice take on this, where the differentiation is important, but with the nuance that learners are sometimes teachers, and teachers are learners.

Pic: Free like a bird

Community-building - why bottom-up alone doesn't work

For the hard of understanding: this is not, as Stephen seems to think, a defense of some kind of 'web aristocracy', as very recent posts would make clear. It's expanding some metaphors in a bid to find out how even small 'bottom-up' communities thrive, and whether there is always a central 'core' who are pushing and directing things.

It's a myth to believe that purely bottom-up culture will lead to any form of truly successful community. Purely bottom-up communities are, ironically, difficult for newbies to infiltrate and, once in them, hard for anyone to have their voice heard.

Stuart, from the NCSL, left a really worthwhile and considered comment on my last post, where I was considering why people would want to join a state-administered community at all. He points out the vital role of the top-down working in harmony with bottom-up passions:

"Large, nationally-run initiatives are successful too if they influence the culture in a more ambient fashion, if they encourage people to learn from what can be found within them - creative tools and the opportunity to connect with like-minded people - and then they go off and build their own networks, spaces and connections online.

"There's a role for institutions modelling and supporting these tools and behaviours, giving teachers a kind of first class ticket into a network they don't have to build from scratch like lego. Isn't eduBuzz an example of just such an initiative to kick start a networking culture?"

Indeed, eduBuzz was built in both a bottom-up fashion by being invitational (you were invited to sign up and share, not ordered or expected to) and open door (our Board meetings were Open Meetings - anyone could come along, whether part of the Local Authority or not, teacher or parent...). But there was also a degree of top-down management of the community, which I catalogued in last summer's series of talks at BLC07. What kind of actions were top-down? Here are some:

• We provided a portal page, to let people know what the principle aims of the teaching and learning policy were.
• We provided one web address where people could go to learn why they might want to share online, find others doing so in their field or geographical area and start sharing themselves.
• We helped connect people who 'should' have known about each other, but maybe didn't, being teachers with busy schedules and not as much time to read the panoply of blogs, wikis and podcasts coming out of the local teacher population. (I guess this backs up Andrew Keen's point that innovation comes from individuals rather than the digital crowd.)
• The Head of Education (now Director of Children's Services and Education) had created his own blog: the messages from this are often top-down, managerial, decision-making related, but coupled with the bottom-up approach of seeking comment and accord.
• We provided training sessions on digital new media - podcasting, filming, photography, blogging, animation - and used these as a means to encourage people to share the results in the online community.

eduBuzz has experienced a level growth (5000% a lot per year) well above more organic completely bottom-up communities with the same aim (for the previous 18 months the area's online community had stagnated), and was strongly linked to the image, vibe and ethos of a geographical place: East Lothian. It certainly offers all the advantages of being an essentially bottom-up community but with the direction and purpose of top-down.

Stuart's comment makes me think of what Charlie Leadbetter was talking about on Monday night (after I had written my previous post) in his tête-à-tête with Andrew Keen. In a chapter of his new book, We-Think, that wasn't published, he talks about cities, both those designed on a bottom-up settler tribal ethos (e.g. Lagos) and those designed on a purely top-down state-controlled basis (e.g. Shanghai). Neither extreme works particularly well, with one a chaotic, crime-ridden, slow-developing sprawl and the other a successful burgeoning but not particularly human-friendly concrete jungle. You can hear more of Charlie about the role of users and consumers in his TED Talk from 2005.

I'm waiting on my review copy of We-Think to arrive in the post, but I think it may provide some leads on where our various 'state-controlled' online communities might stand in the future, and how much of that leash needs to be slackened to ensure both the unthreatening and helpful intervention from 'them up there', to help those at the bottom get the most out of them and the people in those communities.

And where does this leave my analogy of the bothy as the enviable bottom-up community that we might want to emulate? Well, I guess there is actually a strong element of top-down in bothy culture: historical expectations. The people who use bothies are coming with a particular cultural and historical contextual baggage, expectations of how that bothy is used, how we treat others within it, and how we leave that community when we leave it. Likewise, those who choose to blog and stick with it come having done a little homework (reading others' blogs) and bring a set of expectations from history and culture that, ultimately, are top-down, coming from those who've been 'mastering' the art of writing or speaking through the medium. Blogs, wikis and bothies all have this hidden (or not-so-hidden) aristocratic history woven through them.

It's no mistake that Jimmy Wales has called 'his' wiki's Editors the 'aristocracy' of Wikipedia, with him as the Monarch. But it works. For him. Bottom-up, it seems, always requires a bit of state, monarch or Parliament, to make it work in the long term.

Pic: Shanghai

eduBuzz - 176th most popular wiki in the world

The guys from Wikio got in touch today having seen eduBuzz.org/support, the training and support wiki we created for teachers and learners in East Lothian Council in 2006, become the 176th most popular 'business' wiki in the world.

The wiki sums up a lot of the ethos of eduBuzz and the East Lothian Teaching and Learning Policy: openness, collaboration and the inclusion of all in the decision-making process. One of its highlights was the co-creation of safe-use guidelines for social media in the classroom by teachers, parents, students and managers over a two week period back in 2006.

eduBuzz isn't just the wiki, but a collaborative online space of over 1300 well over 1400 blog users and countless readers (1.3m page views per month) based on WPMU (see David's comment below about the problems of knowing the real, higher number of participants). While the online project was greatly enhanced by LTS funding some time and effort in an initial year-long period, this is a just another sign that the project goes from strength to strength in a sustainable fashion. Real community-building built on realworld tools.

Naace08 Keynote: Our future, our lives, our technology, our learning

A vague title so that I could get away with pretty much anything that I wanted to at last night's killer slot, 8pm, after dinner and before the next time Naace delegates could get to the bar. They did pretty well to make it through to the end and have some energy to talk about the issues I ended up raising. John, Ian, David and the Naace livebloggers managed to capture elements of what I cobbled together.

I could have done something zingy around the whizzbang technology that really is engaging our kids (and offer delegates the chance to view that presentation in full now that they've done the serious thinking). In the end, I took the strands of thought that have been hurtling around my head this past week (community, participation, tipping point or not, and a bit of the "We're adopting" talk) and wove them together with one common message:

The people who will make the difference in the classroom will not be the national organisations, the regulators or the civil servants. It will not be the QCA, Becta or various exam boards in England (though I think the leaner Learning and Teaching Scotland has potential to offer an extension of expectations that our counterparts on the border have failed to yet deliver). It will be the teacher, the one actually working with the child, who will make the difference.

Tipping Point Toast for Communities?

There's new research from a Yahoo mathematician researcher which shows that Malcolm Gladwell's 'Tipping Point' theory, where small groups of influential people tip new objects or ideas into the mainstream, may be mere whimsy. In my experience, he may be right.

This provides some further thought not only about why people might (not) join online communities in the first place but who might join online communities. Duncan Watts is published in the latest Fast Company magazine showing how the notion of the Tipping Point, from its incarnation as the "opinion leaders" thesis of 1955 through to the notion of 'six degrees of separation' in 1967, can be proven less persuasive with some maths:

"In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. Sure enough, he found that Milgram was right: The average length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he examined these pathways, he found that "hubs"--highly connected people--weren't crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target."

I subscribe to many ideas from Gladwell's Blink and Tipping point books, mainly the notion that people thin slice (make up their minds on something the instant they see it) and that good ideas require a small targeted group of people to help it spread initially. Gladwell's example was a bunch of influential fashionable hippies who spread the wearing of Hush Puppies around Manhattan in the 90s. My example is of good teachers sharing new ideas about how we can do our jobs better.

It's not how influential you are...
However, I've never believed that the influentual-ness of those individuals is particularly  important. It's more been a case of finding people who believe in the notion, idea or service that I believe in and helping them spread the word on whatever it is to others. Influential people already come equipped with presumably equally influential contacts and that way of explaining things to others, but that doesn't preclude 'non-influentials' (yuck, horrible term) from becoming influential in their own right, simply by being passionate to their friends, colleagues and community. And here's the plus side: with influentials probably 'selling' stuff to other influentials there comes the risk that your idea simply remains in its echo chamber. Get some regular folk together and you have a chance that your idea hits the mainstream.

In the eduBuzz community, where rapid growth in the numbers of teachers sharing their work on blogs and other collaborative sites was initially linked to the Tipping Point notion, we quickly realised that, in fact, there was a chaotic blend of classroom teachers, parents, librarians, students and managers taking the lead - not necessarily our "Top 10% Influencers" that we may have identified beforehand; just good learners or teachers who found plausible the idea that sharing learning experiences was a good thing.

Ultimately, we would understand from the Fast Company story, it has little to do with the person trying to propagate the trend, and everything to do with the trend itself. If a community is ready to embrace a trend then anyone can help kick that trend off. If, however, the culture of a community prevents people from easily getting 'infected' with the new idea, then whether persuasive influencer or Average Joe, you stand little chance of getting that idea to spread.

Ed Keller, author of The Influentials, disagrees with this based on his own experiences, where top 10% influencers happen to be five times more likely to dispense advice, and they're early adopters, too, using mobiles and the net years before anyone else.

If being influential isn't important, wherefore professional organisations?
But he concedes an important point: "Duncan is making a straw-man argument. Because nobody, including myself, thinks that Influencers are the only group of consumers who matter."

This, again, puts a compelling question mark at the foot of communities. What is being part of a community? Tonight I speak at the annual Naace strategic conference, a professional organisation which prides itself on being influential, having that cachet as a group of innovators, the Hush-Puppy wearers of the Education ICT world. Does this stand up in an age where anyone with ideas that society can grasp can take on an influence of their own?

Gareth Davis of Naace already has some ideas on this, although in the light of this research it would be interesting to see them developed further. I think there may be a case of what Mark suggests, that we distort what actually happens in the light of retrospection.

Pic: Uncensored

Social media for open education - the video

The LIFTers have managed to put up video from this month's event in Geneva. My five minute open stage talk, voted for by the conference participants, was marred by a dodgy mic and some even more dodgy conversion of the fonts on my preso (must remember to remove older versions from memory pens before handing them to the techie guys). This is the reason, dear conference organisers, that I much prefer just plugging in my own Mac - worth sacrificing 30 seconds of speaking time for :-) Nice versions of many of the same slides are in a 20-minute version of the talk that I've slideshared.

Anyway, I hope that in 5 minutes (and 20 seconds) I manage to do justice to the sterling work of the team back in East Lothian and at LTS. It's certainly had positive feedback, both on the day and since then on some blogs. It is probably the last time that I use that pesky cupstacking video (thanks, Stephen), although I'll have trouble not talking about the continued importance of audience, of purpose, and of sharing what we do. Above all, I hope that some LIFTers take my challenge seriously and help their local learning communities to start sharing a heck of a lot more than they currently do.

3/5: eduBuzz: East Lothian online publishing increases 5000%

This is the third of five parts in a personal learning log review of 2007. It might be of  help to you, might not be. Bear with me, and normal service will be resumed...

I was employed from August 2006 to see how Learning and Teaching Scotland could help enhance a teacher-sharing project, Exc-el, in East Lothian Council. I joined a team that, throughout 2007 created such a passion for online publishing we netted a 5000% increase in sharing practice and ideas online, from 20 teachers sharing their expertise, to over 1000 teachers, managers, technicians, students and parents working together in a new service: eduBuzz.

January 9th, and after three months of research, training events and talking with the teachers of East Lothian, we were looking at changing most of the old Exc-el formula - eduBuzz was born. Six months later we had just over 1000 bloggers in East Lothian.

July 18th: I was able to share how we created this excitement and increased morale, in part down to the technologies team, at the Building Learning Communities 2007 conference in Boston. On October 12th I was invited to expand on this in a keynote the Building Learning Communities 2008 conference on the theme of how online teacher development can help change attitudes and culture, and on August 12 published the adoption strategy outline in time for a Scottish outing at the Learning Festival.

January 19th: The first structure for TeachMeet Roadshow training events was floated. This now forms a highly successful basis for training teachers in constantly moving technology in East Lothian and beyond, including those working in the Higher Education sector who turned up on July 1st to see how the form of their professional development could change for the better.

On January 21st, I set out why schools shouldn't have school websites, but have more messy networks of blogs. In December, we hear that Musselburgh Grammar School has, four years after and small group of students and I started to blog there, moved completely over to self-publishing for its school website.

February 15th: We sneaked through a change to take East Lothian education resources into Creative Commons.

June 14th was an opportunity to guage how we were doing with a visit from education and technology visionary Stephen Heppell. Far from focusing just on technology in East Lothian - something one just can't do since it's part and parcel of a fulsome education being delivered to students, from active playful learning and critical thinking approaches, to the use of students' own gaming consoles for learning and learning environments.

The latter had been of interest in particular since hearing about the Stovner school in Norway, on May 23rd about which I spoke, in an East Lothian context, to our Head Teachers on June 19th. Since then, the whole notion of why we come to school in the first place and how many students should 'attend' at once has been challenged by my visit on July 17th to the MET Schools in Providence.

I no longer work in East Lothian Council, after five-and-a-half years of teaching French and German, working with the ICT Team and then developing national projects from that work. I'm already missing my classroom, and know I'll miss working with such a great team at the Council HQ.

Related posts:
1/5: Hit or miss? Spotting innovation that's worth spotting
2/5: The changing ways of the public sector 
4/5: Building a business
5/5: Having a bash - social media gets social