THE ROLES OF EMERGING INNOVATIVE EDUCATORS Brainstorm Associates Leadership in Community Development project 2014 is the first emerging issues of technology-related innovation in education from a business perspective. The field of education is undergoing a dramatic increase in technological innovation and corresponding commercial organization activity with startups, venture investment, government support, and customer sales. The innovations range from products for administrative and reporting requirements, to learning tools, to data and analytics platforms. The extant education technology journals focus on the relationships of learning tools to traditional classroom practice, but leave largely unaddressed the growing commercial dimensions, and how these different products are impacting the ways that schooling and education can be organized using blended learning models and other technology-mediated pedagogy. Therefore, in today’s creative, knowledge-based and knowledge-driven societies and economies, learning, innovation and education are core enablers of progress and development sustained, as well as disrupted, by technology. The projects of Brainstorm Leadership Academy, Nigeria has aims to study, dissect and profile the nature and dynamics of pedagogy, technological change and the phenomenon of innovation as they interact with each other, and in so doing catalyze learning at multiple levels with theoretical, policy and practical implications, challenges and opportunities. Our role of leadership most, the arts in particular as a trigger, catalyst and accelerator of creative learning and beyond-the-box envisioning and enacting of innovation is a central theme and tenet of the mission and vision of Technology, Innovation and Education. Over the past four years, I have been told a number of times that the work that we are do at Brainstorm Leadership Academy, Nigeria is innovative, outside the box, and exciting. Sometimes the word ‘bold’ even creeps into the equation. Certainly the experience-based learning environment is highly engaging and plays to students’ passions, but In this regard, our research reports proves Technology, Innovation and Education serves a mutually complementary and reinforcing role with the other projects in which I am involved, such as the Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management says Mr. Sunday Reuben Jnr. CEO/Principal Consultant of Brainstorm Leadership Academy, Nigeria as Brainstorm Graduates Centre is combining an open access and our expertise in delivering high-quality and rapid publications, from online submission systems and in-depth peer review to an efficient, author-friendly production process…. In addition, he said I have to be clear here, I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of advancement in our understanding of innovation. Today we have a real challenge, all of us, in boosting our capacity for innovation. We need to achieve this ‘boost’ as the outcomes we will gain are both economic and social in their potential value. We need to move beyond the existing and tackle the blockages to the preferred, when it comes to innovation achievements. We face many challenges within a highly competitive world as we seek out fresh opportunities, locally and globally, we are becoming increasingly challenged. The world is highly competitive. The key driver to meet these ‘twin’ challenges is innovation, not just for the short-term results businesses are so obsessed about, but the critically important need to find the pathway to sustainable development through re-occurring innovation activities. Much of management within organizations is mortgaging the future for today’s immediate gains. Sadly today we still marginalize innovation. We rely on incremental activities to pull us through the short-term and just keep putting off the long-term projects. Much of management within organizations is mortgaging the future for today’s immediate gains. I loved this thought, although it may not contain much original thinking but it does offer what I felt reflects on this point: “we are simply kicking the innovation can down the road.” This desperately needs to change for the increasing economic and social reasons looming down the same road. Innovation needs to be better understood – in what it constitutes and all the different ways it can be applied. We do need to understand it better for its significant contribution potential to solve social and economic problems. The role of people within innovation can never be overstated. They make it happen, everything else is their enablers. We do need to understand what makes innovation truly work through increasing the comprehension of “combining” its many myriad parts. Innovation skills need an innovation friendly environment and we need to reform much of our existing approaches to innovation as practiced today. We need to speed up our reforms and achieve a clear consensus of better frameworks and activities. Therefore, Teacher educators and mentors should utilize what they have gained from their professional experience to offer comments on pre-service teachers’ instructional design, such as the design of lesson plans. In conventional teacher education programs, this is a way of enhancing pre-service teachers’ cognition apprenticeship. Pre-service teachers’ competence with regard to teaching practice is also nurtured in this way, but ideal cognition apprenticeship is not easy to accomplish in a traditional classroom setting, even in a university. The number of pre-service teachers is far larger than the number of teacher educators. In our aged, It is increasingly recognized that we all need to follow the lifelong learning track, as organizations increasingly insist on increasing human performance yet are constantly reducing the ‘bodies’ to assist in this. We need to keep relevant or we get caught up in this marginalization and have poorer potential in our future. Henceforth Information Technology can’t stand alone; since organizations today are mistaking the promise of technology alone and this will not work; it needs people, their knowledge and experiences to apply the technology. Far too often we are not finding the time as increasing complexity is layered onto dwindling human resources. We are adding more pressure into the system by taking out the very solution we need to keep in place and utilize far more, that is our people. We are pushed to keep up and to stay relevant; we often have to bury our personal grievances because if we surface them, we might get singled out in the next round of often mindless people cuts. We do need to reverse this board room mentality and stop cutting out the diversity of opinion that should be valued, not thrown away. We need to make our performance potential stretch even more, encouraging and sustaining these different opinions. We must find ways to break into this ‘boom or bust’ mentality in board rooms by reducing the very friction that stimulates greater innovation thinking. Mr. Nelson Morgan, Social Media Consultant with Sunstar e-vision Project Development Centre prove to participants as one of the guest speaker in the conference today that, Building real education into an innovation road-map, one place to start is to design a more comprehensive road-map of innovation made up of its integral parts. The more innovation is seen and the people who enact it are recognized, not buried in plain sight, the more it will be valued. The more we see ‘it’ and what it contributes the more people become essential to their place within this mutual value proposition needed between the organization and its employees. The overarching plank of offering education on innovation is the real ‘glue’ as this is where the value of knowledge is central, in my view, to the way forward. Knowledge, innovation knowledge, is made up of an awful lot of different things and this is where the real education comes in, front and center in developing new practices, in training, in educating, in translating this knowledge into lasting value. The more people are valued, the more they become ‘sticky’ and the more they use their knowledge, then it becomes mutually re-enforcing as their organizations grow to appreciate their worth. We need a new social contract between organizations and the people they employ and that should be on mutual appreciation of the ability to translate knowledge into new value-generating outcomes together. The more we identify the educational parts, the more we appreciate innovation’s complexity, but we also see the rich potential in the rewards that become achievable in taking this new route. Education leads, it provides the appropriate focus and this we can derive the training and knowledge to be applied, so we can improve results and innovation outcomes. These processes are described as “legitimate peripheral participation” in a community aimed at learning. A learner can achieve the goal of learning when his or her participation status successfully shifts from the peripheral to the core of the community. That is to say, inexperienced learners can eventually possess expertise with effective participation in a community of mutual practices. As the pre-service teachers engage in teacher education program, the community comprised by these trainees, experienced school teachers, and teacher educators naturally attempt to provide potentially sufficient opportunities to make the procedures of participation explicit. However, this does not guarantee pre-service teachers’ efficient participation with their limited course hours in the conventional learning environment. Further, they can also consult with teacher educators to discuss why these teaching models can contribute to their teaching competence. Second, the design and implementation of online courses provide a vision for pre-service teachers to deliberate the possibilities of carrying out teaching using Web-based technologies. As the online course is under way, the pre-service teachers will have a teacher identity that they can use to conduct the learning activities in the course and to recruit students to participate in the course through the student interface. Compared to conventional microteaching, online courses will increase the pre-service teachers’ experience in conducting teaching with ICT and reduce the time loading of their peers (other pre-service teachers) and teacher educators. Being online, the virtual “students” might not be restricted only to their peers, so that pre-service teachers can, thus, get more useful comments from a broader audience. Third, an online review system is built into Brainstorm Associates Research Professional Council Project for teacher educators to provide comments and suggestions directly on the Web page-based artifacts of pre-service teachers. Conventionally, in paper-based lesson plans or course design, it is not easy to evaluate the suitability of the multi-media resources that are involved. Instead, the online review system provides a more precise manner of reviewing function, especially when the pre-service teachers conduct instruction design for teaching with ICT media. This function is also believed to strengthen the role of tutor played by teacher educators and contribute to cognitive apprenticeship in the community with teacher education more tightly since they meet in the classroom only once a week or depending on the design framework for the delivery of the courses. Obviously, as some drawbacks that can occur when the ideas are applied in conventional teacher education are also suggested in this conference. These assertions illuminate the possible directions that might be followed in innovating within current teacher education programs using a Web-based environment that encompasses situated cognition in teacher education, enhancing peripheral participation, strengthening cognitive apprenticeships, and forming special interest groups online were proposed as a means of confronting the challenges that teacher educators encounter in the modern educational milieu. In the future, researchers can employ the principles and implications proposed in this paper to engage in constructing a teaching guidance platform through the Internet and to manifest the value of situated cognition in teacher education. In addition, this study suggests that a larger population of pre-service teachers outside the field of information science and system Technology application shall be invited in future research. Also, further tracking of pre-service teachers is suggested when they become teacher interns and in-service teachers. These approaches will accentuate a deeper understanding of pre-service teachers’ perceptions of a Web-based environment within a teacher education program and provide a profitable direction for revision in preparing teacher prospects. As I simply enjoy researching innovation, applying this to provide novel solutions and advice, coaching and consulting to individuals, teams and organizations through my business, Agility Innovation Specialists. As an advisory business/Academic Director, Brainstorm Graduate Centre aim to stimulate and deliver sound innovation practice, researching topics that relate to innovation for the future, as well as align innovation specifically to organizations core capabilities. I write and contribute different views on innovation and its management through Brainstorm Associates Research Professional Council and contribute into the different and leading providers of innovation knowledge most importantly as we host this Emerging Innovative Leader’s Alliance Conference. Dr. John Franklin Conference Director Brainstorm Graduate Centre
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 12:56:27 +0000