Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Round 5: Reflection

Michael Kaufman
MK: What your experience with that last exercise?
  • We need to have ownership.
  • Change is more effective when it’s bottom-up
  • Change is more effective when there’s more money involved
Conversations are good but cautious. They’re fearful of risk. We’re not taking the chances we need to take. We’re still too focused on the right answer.

I’d like to find at least a unit of change. It doesn’t have to be a whole year even.

We all have a sphere of influence and we can all make a difference in that.

I’ve experienced frustration. We’ve gotten into so many different brands of schools. We have a lot of people who want to be a part of this who are not here.

MK: What’s the fundamental operating principle in education?
  • Everyone can learn and can be taught.
  • Learning is supposed to be fun.

MK: Think back about 100 years.
  • Teachers teach and students learn.
  • Small percentage will do well
  • We need to turn out productive people
  • Do it as cheaply as possible
  • Create contributing members to society
  • Cookie cutter engineering
MK: I’m referring to what I've seen in the educational system in terms of the fundamental operating principle that is at the basis of the way we contruct our learning environments: 'control and compliance'. From our vantage point now, we understand there is no way to control learners. But like most of our structures in society, which are shaped like pyramids, almost all of the time you need to have control and compliance in order for that system to work.

What happens to creativity in this environment?
  • It's discouraged
  • It works as long as it fits in “this” box
  • Don’t color outside the lines
  • People use their creativity to get around the system. That’s where most of our energy goes.
MK: Any personal interests or learning from the exercise?
  • A lot of good energy in the room
  • Personalization issue keeps rearing its head
It’s very difficult to personalize a system if there is an atmosphere of control and compliance.

MK: At some point, it was decided that the ideal was to have 19 people in a classroom. Why was that? Research had shown that that number was how many people you could control.

Bryan Coffman: The next exercise we’ll go into puts you into 10 teams. We want you to think about systems from a distributed point of view. We used to think that there was a queen in ant colonies but seeing it that way comes from a command and control kind of thinking. It turns out not to be true. They work by a network system.

How large is the largest school represented here? 4000
How small is the smallest school represented here? 36

There is no way that one solution is going to satisfy both of these schools. So we’re going to challenge the dominant design.

You take away something from the system that you think you can’t live without. In the process of taking it away, we come up with other ideas. It’s almost like a particle accelerator. A lot of unexpected things come out of thinking about this.

I have some examples of organization which use networks. Some of them will not be applicable to you because they come out of the business side.

In Eli Lilly, which is a pharmaceutical company. They have about 600 people in R&D. That’s not enough people to be competitive. When they come up with a molecule to synthesize, they used to pass it off to someone else. But they are too busy. So now they put it on a website and allow other people to solve their problems for them. They always get the answer.

Royal Dutch Shell needed new ideas and innovations. They invited all their engineers to submit ideas and created a database. Everyone gets to interact with the ideas and run them through an action lab in order to get to proof of concept. Then they turn the idea into a business.

Have any of you seen Wikipedia? It is the number one referenced source for the internet. Any of you can sign on to it and search or contribute.

posted by Diane Castiglioni at 5:07 PM  

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