^{Go directly to the original of the resource described below.}

Eran Ben-Joseph is a professor of urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of Rethinking A Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking. In this essay for The New York Times, he shares some of the book’s ideas and philosophy. (You can purchase the book at Amazon here and, without increasing your cost, the society will receive a small bit of revenue.)

This article, and TED Talk video, examine a phenomenon that Chris Anderson calls "an upward spiral of improvement," which is essentially improvement due to transparency, and he suggests that "the arrival of free online video may turn out to be just as significant a media development as the arrival of print." Specifically, he notes the LXD dancers at last year's Academy Awards. Several of the dancers were self-taught, and all engaged in a series of international "challenge videos" which improved their skills.

Then he notes that after TED began putting its various talks on line, the presenters started putting even more and more work and effort into their presentations. The quality spiraled upwards.

This is a must-read for planners. You may think differently about video, reading, and crowd-sourcing. Page two contains a chart emphasizing A History of Collaborative Circles, ranging from early trade routes (producers and traders), through the scientific revolution of the 1500s scientists), and eventually shared, online videos (everyone).

The way I see it, Crowd Accelerated Innovation requires three ingredients: a crowd, light, and desire. Let’s take each in turn.

A crowd. A crowd is simply a community, any group of people with a shared interest. It can be narrow (unicycling, Greek archaeology) or broad (science, world peace), small (my village) or large (humanity). The community needs to contain at least a few people capable of innovation. But not everyone in the community need be. There are plenty of other necessary roles:

• The trend-spotter, who finds a promising innovation early.

• The evangelist, who passionately makes the case for idea X or person Y.

• The superspreader, who broadcasts innovations to a larger group. The skeptic, who keeps the conversation honest.

• General participants, who show up, comment honestly, and learn.

A session here at the Council of Independent Colleges' conference for presidents opened with the sort of joke that goes over well in a room full of top administrators: "How many faculty members does it take to change a light bulb?"

The punchline: "Change?"

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Scott Carlson, writing from the presidents' conference of the Council of Independent Colleges, shares from a presentation that was focused on good relations with faculty, and the importance of getting faculty support, especially in tough times. Some of the presidential advice:

• Be brutally honest about the challenges, but don't paint a situation as hopeless—and never overpromise.
• Encourage faculty members to interact with the business-affairs staff and decision makers on the board of trustees—not just at board meetings, but also in informal situations.
• When sacrifices pay off with new or renewed resources, be sure to share those resources with those who gave up something for the organization. "Conspiracy theorists will say, You're just using the crisis to pull things from us that you felt you couldn't do" in good times, he said. ...

The key lessons, Mr. Anderson said, were that crisis can drive change on a campus, but it can also present two risks: "The first is that we can get into a food fight over process, and we lose our focus on the real issue of how we are going to make reductions and reallocations," he said. The policy document from the 1970s helped with that problem in this case.

"The second thing is, How do you preserve the fabric of the community and avoid the board taking charge or the administration taking charge?" he said. That threat can alter the very spirit of the higher-education enterprise, he said.

Does tenure evaluation "undermine" teaching? Is it the administration's fault? Is it because it is truly difficult to evaluate innovative teaching? This is a brief "back and forth" between Michael Brown and Mary Churchill in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Mike: Education departments have been denigrated for a long time, often based on the claim that they make a fetish of process and do not adequately take substance into account. But there is a different reason for the defensiveness that often accompanies that judgment: It is primarily in education departments and rarely in other disciplines that faculty are most likely to discuss the relationship between teaching and learning.

Mary: This is related to the fact that so many academic departments seem to devalue teaching. We actively recruit and hire junior faculty members who are able to teach in innovative ways: utilizing global outreach, service learning, and new technologies. But we fail miserably at promoting and retaining these faculty members. We hire them for the “differences” they bring (significantly, many of these new hires are women and/or racial/ethnic minorities), but then we can’t deal with their innovations — particularly when it comes to evaluation.

And so forth.

 Did you know that your mind is "wandering" about 30 percent of the time you are awake? No wonder things get dangerous when you add driving and cell phone into the mix! And there really is a scientific term: "zoning out." Read more.

You’d be stuck contemplating the mass of idling cars, a mental exercise that is much less pleasant than dreaming about a beach and much less useful than mulling what to do once you get off the road. There’s an evolutionary advantage to the brain’s system of mind wandering, says Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota and one of the pioneers of the field.

“While a person is occupied with one task, this system keeps the individual’s larger agenda fresher in mind,” Dr. Klinger writes in the “Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation”. “It thus serves as a kind of reminder mechanism, thereby increasing the likelihood that the other goal pursuits will remain intact and not get lost in the shuffle of pursuing many goals.”

Of course, it’s often hard to know which agenda is most evolutionarily adaptive at any moment. 

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to "A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy'"

Salman Khan is a 33-year-old who makes lecture videos in his hole studio/closet. His lecture on "Cancer" is embedded in this post, below.

Mr. Khan calls his collection of videos "Khan Academy," and he lists himself as founder and faculty. That means he teaches every subject, and he has produced 1,400 lectures since he started in 2006. Now he records one to five lectures per day.

The lo-fi videos seem to work for students, many of whom have written glowing testimonials or even donated a few bucks via a PayPal link. The free videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of views, making them more popular than the lectures by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, famous for making course materials free, or any other traditional institution online, according to the leaders of YouTube's education section.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to "Higher Ed: Innovative or Devoted to Mimicry?"

A number of top higher education policy thinkers met June 3 at the American Enterprise Institute to talk about "Reinventing the American University: The Promise of Innovation in Higher Education." David Glenn reports out on the discussions for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Some sample comments:

The structural incentives within higher education "seem to push against innovation," said Dominic J. Brewer, an associate dean and professor of urban leadership and education at the University of Southern California. "They seem to push toward mimicry."

That theme ran through the conference's first two panels: The structure of higher education makes it difficult to improve the quality of teaching. But the speakers did not always agree about which structural factors are to blame for the purported institutional sclerosis. Some pointed fingers at faculty-governance systems, which they said slowed down the pace of change. Others blamed regional accreditors for being too inflexible about, for example, standard models of credit hours.

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Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a professor of economics at Cornell University and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, offered a rather gloomy analysis of changes in the faculty profession . . . Outside of elite research universities and liberal-arts colleges, Mr. Ehrenberg said, most institutions of higher education are likely to see a "de-skilling" of faculty jobs in the coming years, as fewer instructors will have Ph.D.'s.

***

Two speakers dissented, in part, from the basic premise that there is too little innovation in higher education. Jack H. Schuster, a professor emeritus of education and public policy at Claremont Graduate University, said there is plenty of experimentation at American colleges; he expects higher education to be substantially transformed within the next decade.

And Candace Thille, director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, said the problem is not a lack of innovation but a failure to carefully study the experiments that do take place. Thousands of college instructors make good-faith efforts to improve their teaching, she said, but there are usually no resources for evaluating or replicating those innovations.

 

[P]eople hate change. It causes the status quo to become unsettled and the familiar starts to go away, replaced with uncertainty. Our comfort zone is demolished and we have to try to resettle into uncharted territory.

If we've learned a routine and it seems to work, there is absolutely no reason to have to do it differently. After all, the experts will agree that there is nothing new under the sun. So-called innovations are only the status quo in a rehashed, repackaged format that looks new. Honestly, who believes that just because a proposal will generate a slick exterior that the same functional beast doesn't lurk within?

Unfortunately, there are always those who just don't get it. You know-those who think organizations need to adapt to remain competitive, that change is good and results in greater efficiencies, that failure to adapt to "modernalities" is evil and counterproductive. Since they usually mean well and truly believe they are trying to improve our situation, we don't want to cull them from the herd (besides, who wants the hassle of trying to break in the newbie?). It usually suffices to discourage these people to the point that they fall in line and stop agitating. How do we get them to stop? How do we encourage the status quo without driving them to leave?