Educause 2013 "Uncommon Thinking for the Common Good"

This is the first time that I have attended an Educause conference and I have to say it has exceeded my expectations. I felt as though I was on some kind of educational game show but I guess I can categorize this as a Mega conference!  I estimate that there were about 5500 people in attendance, easily over 100 venders at the expo. A large portion of the conference was focused on global or campus wide IT challenges and creative solution brainstorming.

The featured keynote speaker, Sir Ken Robinson, was excellent! You may have seen one or two of his Ted Talks. He focuses his message on innovation, creativity and education and the unique combination to solve big challenges that we face today and will face in the future. He has a couple of books you might want to check out: "Out of our Minds", "The Element", and "Finding your Element."

The keynote address at Educause was titled "Leading a Culture of Innovation." Sir Ken was both entertaining and thought provoking. He started with the ideas and perceptions of "culture." Sometimes when we hear about other cultures from other countries we find it hard to understand, but this is because with every culture bubble you have a context around it. We (humans) live within a framework of values and ideas. He also pointed out that most great ideas are not exactly planned. We oftentimes cannot even predict how something might impact the culture. When the television invention first came about most people didn't believe that TV would kill the radio. TV eventually did kill the radio and it changed the culture. Smartphones and devices are similarly changing the culture. We are at a point in time where we are witnessing a change in the culture of education.
Sir Ken said that imagination and creativity are quite different in that you can imagine all day long but creativity is actually acting on the imagination by "doing." With creativity we add value to ideas. So going back to the culture conversation and how we might struggle to understand culture it is because we are adding out values and context to it. In general, the question might become then, when thinking about an idea, which values or who's values to you apply to it?
Innovation is putting good ideas into practice.
It is always funny to project into the future. Will we be flying around with jetpacks, will education be completely free, will we have personal robots, or will we have nanochips in our brains that think for us? We might think that those ideas sound absurd right now but if you have said just 15 years ago that we'd all be carrying around these small computers in our pockets and making phone calls and accessing the wikipedia for answers on a whim, we would said you were koo-koo.
With education, getting degrees do not guarantee a job anymore. It is too expensive as well. Who are we serving? Who should we be serving?
Sir Ken's main take away is that we need to think creatively and radically on solving challenges that will impact the future generations.

I highly recommend that you view this 11 minute video from RSA Animate that Sir Ken Robinson narrated on the topic of Changing Education Paradigms http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

Nicole