Jen Millea @ education.au

A lot of web time and meeting time goes into trying to be innovative. How can we come up with that new idea that will satisfy a need - be the need that of a student, teacher or education system? How will we come up with an idea that solves a problem in a new, more efficient, or better way? How do we come up with an idea that creates a thing (like the web!) that people don’t know they need yet.

Organisations of any kind, if they have the desire, can create an environment where maverick thinking, flaky weirdos and innovation have a valued role in challenging existing thinking, leading the way and enabling new solutions to old problems.

An interesting article in the Financial Times reviewing a new book, ‘Mavericks at Work’ by William Taylor and Polly LaBarre, argues that organisations need more ‘flaky weirdos’.

There’s definitely a role for flaky weirdos in thinking about the web and emerging technologies. New uses for a technology don’t necessarily grow out of existing ones. New technologies don’t necessarily immediately lend themselves to use in an education or training environment. Often it needs the flaky off-the-wall thinking to really hit the nail on the head - to murder a few metaphors.

There’s often a fear that a technology, or a technology device, is a fad and will fade as fads often do. The challenge for the education sector is to distinguish the fads from the technologies that will be the foundations of the future.

And it’s not the flaky weirdos you rely on for this - by this stage their job is already done. They’ve gone to work for Apple, or fought the bureaucracy in their organisation, or set up their start-up in their mum’s garage and been bought out by Rupert Murdoch for $500 million. They’ve challenged the CEO, made some people nervous and uncomfortable, and made some think ‘hmmm, there might be something in that’…

By this stage we need to look at the young people we’re teaching. What are they doing? At home? With their friends? In internet cafes? On their phone? The 5-year-olds, the 15-year-olds, the 25-year-olds? What are they using and HOW are they using it? What is working well for them?

Anyone who looked at what was happening a year or two ago would note that they were using their mobile phones, preferring texting over talking, and listening to music via MP3 files.

What is the lesson for us in education?

Last year education.au undertook a survey of emerging technologies on behalf of the ACT Department of Education and Training about how ermeging technologies were being used in education.

The need to establish strategies to appropriate the technologies students use in their day-to-day lives for teaching purposes and outcomes remains.

So what are our young people doing now? They’re at YouTube sharing videos, myspace making friends, and chatting to each other in real time. They’re still texting and listening to MP3 files. They’re subscribing to services, they’re personalising them, and they’re sharing. They’re creating social networks with others.

Services like YouTube and myspace have hundreds of millions of users - they have connected with young people and the way they want to interact with the world.

How can we learn from these services and apply what this tells us to delivering better education to our students?

We need to encourage the flaky weirdos and the maverick thinkers in our organisations and systems to come up with new ways of doing what we do that connect with those we teach.

We need to be looking at where the future of technology is going and how we can position our education environments to take advantage of it.

In other words, we all need to put on our own flaky weirdo hat at least once a day.