‘ [Web 2.0 tools offer] a new user-centric information infrastructure that emphasizes participation [ ] over presentation, that encourages focused conversation [ ] rather than traditional publication, and that facilitates innovative explorations, experimentations, and purposeful tinkerings that often form the basis of a situated understanding emerging from action, not passivity.’ John Seely Brown
In this post I begin to unpack what innovation means to me in the context of learning; I need to develop a personal working definition of innovation for my Online Education course. I have spent a lifetime teaching people about the creative process and looking at innovation as the output of the psychology of creativity. From a traditional academic perspective I could write and have written a great deal about creativity and innovation. The theories, the practice and application have accompanied me throughout my career. This latest assignment is asking for a working definition that will enable me to evaluate if a particular technological achievement can be called an innovation. It asks less for a theoretical endeavour and more for an exploration situated in my context of operation.
‘Productive inquiry [is] that aspect of any activity where we are deliberately seeking what we need in order to do what we want to do (Dewey, 1922 and Cook and Brown, 1999). In the net age we now have at our disposal tools and resources for engaging in productive inquiry – and learning – that we never had before.’ John Seely Brown
Productive Inquiry is what we do when we leverage the net, Seely Brown tells us.
I think productive inquiry is also what we do when we say ‘ There must be an app for that?’. I am not writing this post to explore the challenges presented by this confirmatory non-evidence based approach to learning, but to look at innovation in online learning as a kind of productive inquiry. In preparation for writing, I have been tinkering with various innovations and in the process formulating a view of what counts as innovation which will be the subject of my next post. I have been ‘learning to be’ innovative on the web as I ‘learn about’ innovation in the context of education. This is an example of what Seely Brown calls using the web for ‘purposeful tinkering’ or productive Inquiry. I was curious (and may be a bit doubtful) about how successful I could be at bringing up to date a given innovation using the web. Seely Brown’s paper was written in 2008, there was so much in it I could pursue. Once again blogging for the sake of learning, my assignment this time was to blog about just one innovation, having researched it to bring it up to 2013.
You gotta slow down (slow down) sweet talking woman (slow down)
You got me running (run, run)
You got me searching
(Sweet talking woman by ELO)
Head buzzing, body tired. So many implications to a simple assignment. I am really getting value for money on this course. The assignment this time is to blog about (why not just write?) researching on the web for academic purposes.
‘For most academics, blogs are irrelevant because they don’ t count as publications’ (Lovink 2008)
‘ [Blogs are] the unverified and unverifiable statements of individuals, discussions on listservs … questionable advertisements for questionable products and services, and political and religious screeds in all languages.’ (Borgman 2007)
Where does somebody who has held on to unexamined views so eloquently expressed in the quotes above go when asked to write her own blog? And write her first post on the use of blogging as a research tool? I went into a cognitive spin and then, as a born researcher, I got on with researching my topic.
doublemirror 
