Complexity introduces significant challenges for humans. One of the unexpected ones is that it’s been used to hide from difficult problems. Our understanding of complexity has come a long way, but like many things, a little knowledge can be a real problem. A few years back I was facilitating a public health event that was
The Complexity Cop-out Read More »
As long as there have been people, there’s been education. The goal of learning remains, while the methods are changing. The way education and training is delivered has changed dramatically in the past 20 years moving from mostly face-to-face, classroom-based models to ones that might include an online component or be digital altogether. Some new
A Changing Future for Education and Learning Read More »
Media communications is trending toward generating content in small forms. What does small ‘snackable’ content mean for learning big things? It’s back to school time in many parts of the world and with it a return to a different pace of life. Throughout history we’ve not had many models of structured, intentional learning. Until the
Learning: Bites, Snacks, and Meals Read More »
One of the central pillars of evaluation is assessing the quality of something, often described as its merit. Along with worth (value) and significance (importance), assessing the merit of a program, product or service is one of the principal areas that evaluators focus their energy. However, if you think that would be something that’s relatively
The Quality Conundrum in Evaluation Read More »
Adaptation, evolution, innovation, and growth all require that we gain new knowledge and apply it to our circumstances, or learn. While much focus in education is on how individuals attend, process and integrate information to create knowledge, it is the social part of learning that may best determine whether we simply add information to our
Complex problems and social learning Read More »
A recent study found looked into the experience of cyberbullying by university professors at the hands of their students. This disturbing phenomenon points to much larger issues beyond mental health promotion and calls into question many of the assumptions we have about the systems we’ve designed to foster education and what it means to be a
Bullying, the market for education and the damaged quest for learning Read More »
In a quest for getting more, faster we pursue strategies that aim to compress and challenge the physics of time. Education is one of these areas where the quest to learn more, faster and ‘better’ may actually be taking us away from knowledge and speeding us to folly. What would you say or do if your
The Myth of Fast-tracking Learning Read More »
Learning styles, technology-driven teaching, and self-direction are all concepts that anyone interested in education should be familiar with, yet the foundations for their adoption into the classroom, lab or boardroom are more suspect than you might think. Today we look at the three urban legends of learning and what that might mean for education, innovation
The urban legends of learning (and other inconvenient truths) Read More »
Beautiful answers require beautiful (and better) questions and Warren Berger’s new book looks at this very phenomenon of inquiry and asks: What does it mean to ask better questions and what does that mean for the answers we seek and receive?  Warren Berger recently published  A More Beautiful Question, a book looking at something we
Asking Better and More Beautiful Questions Read More »
If You Build it is documentary about a social innovation project aimed at cultivating design skills with youth to tackle education and social issues in a economically challenged community in North Carolina. The well-intentioned, well-developed story is not unfamiliar to those interested in social innovation, but while inspiring to some these stories mask bigger questions
“If You Build It..”: A Reflection on A Social Innovation Story Read More »
