Cecilia Weckström

Sounds wonderfully futuristic – but apparently entirely possible if you can call up brainwaves on demand. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8020904.stm

I have to share this with you – a hilarious prank call of a minifigure calling a construction company!

Remember that scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise is manipulating tons of data by just waving at a projection and using gestures to do what we spends hours clicking with a mouse to do. Think that is hi-tech? What about all those hours spent modeling things in 3d, using Computer Aided Design (CAD)? Somehow the real 3d world is looked at and manipulated on a 2d screen and oftentimes its far from intuitive to master. Less like sculpture and more like numbercrunching, many argue that thanks to CAD many objects have lost a certain poetic nature in the translation from computer to realworld. Could this all be about to change though? Have a look at the film clip below – this is unreal, but imagine if you could manipulate objects with your hands and change them – your blue tooth headset that fits so well, but suddenly doesn’t when you put your sunglasses on? What if you could reshape it? Perhaps in the future that will no longer be impossible -

This wonderful quote sums it up beautifully:

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his candle at mine, receives light without darkening me.”                     Thomas Jefferson 1813

[Alex Tabarrok: How ideas trump economic crises -- a surprising lesson from 1929 - see it here http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/525 ]

Ideas are not precious, it’s what you do with them that matters. Companies win or fail based on how good they are at running with ideas and bringing them to market. Great ideas are everywhere, but oftentimes they are killed before anything useful come of them. That experience discourages many of us from having more ideas, and it shouldn’t.

Half the challenge of a creative is to find the fertile ground where ideas can take root and grow. Not all soil is fertile, and not always is the right time of the year to sow seeds and even if you get both right, you might have to wait a while before you can harvest the crop. That and more is part of the fun of being a creative, but never ever should we start skimping on ideas. Having them allows us to have many more ideas, which in turn lead to even more ideas. At some point one has to choose what to run with, because the pleasure of seeing an idea maturing to the finished article is what gives us sustenance to continue. But it all starts with how we think about ideas.

A lot of talk about this at the moment – the MIT Media Lab is buzzing with interesting takes on sensor networks and neurally connected cities, The Institute for the Future’s Ten Year Forecast retreat was alive with discussions about this too – so here’s something to inspire your thinking of what might when physical and virtual realities merge into one.

The second day of the Institute for the Future’s Ten Year Forecast retreat is now drawing to a close and I have an opportunity to sit back and reflect over the last 2 days, the people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, the information I have been inspired by and all the ideas batted around in the meetings, breaks, lunches, receptions and dinners we’ve had. A highly intense experience, only now I’m coming up for air so to speak.

So what are my key takeaways from this session? I believe some of it I am yet to articulate, but I have had a distinct sense of a hive mind phenomenon, the notion that much of the topics being talked about here I have seen signals and expressions of elsewhere and we have looked at it without completely being able to explain what it is. I had a very strong sense of this when listening to the excellent talk by Bob Johansen on Leaders Make the Future, his forthcoming book on the kinds of leadership behaviours that will shape the future as we know it. What was so interesting about Bob’s talk was how he identified many of the qualities and behaviours oftentimes exclusively in the domain of creative people, yet when we talk about leadership in organisations we invariably forget to look at the new forms of leadership coming from this segment of individuals. Creatives are, through their multiple literacies, their creative, expressive and persuasive abilities, able to capitalise on their creativity to enable a new kind of leadership, required for dealing open source and massive scale collaborations.

Bob Johansen highlights the 10 behaviours as follows:

1. Maker Instinct – Ability to exploit your inner drive to build and grow things, as well as connect with others in the making.
2. Clarity – Ability to see through messes and contradictions to a future others cannot yet see. Leaders are very clear about what they are making, but very flexible about how it gets made.
3. Dilemma Flipping – Ability to turn dilemmas – which, unlike problems, cannot be solved – into advantages and opportunities.
4. Immersive Learning Ability – Ability to immerse yourself in unfamiliar environments, to learn from them in a first person way.
5. Bio-Empathy – Ability to see things from nature’s point of view; to understand, respect, and learn from nature’s patterns.
6. Constructive Depolarising – Ability to calm tense situations where differences dominate and communication has broken down – and bring people from divergent cultures toward constructive engagement.
7. Quiet Transparency – Ability to be open and authentic about what matters to you – without advertising yourself. If you advertise yourself, you become a big target.
8. Rapid Prototyping – Ability to create quick early versions of innovations, with the expectation that later success will require early failures. Leaders will need a learn-as-you-go style of leadership that know how to learn from early setbacks and fail in interesting ways.
9. Smart Mob Organising – Ability to create, engage with, and nurture purposeful business or social change networks through intelligent use of electronic and other media.
10. Commons Creating – Ability to seed, nurture and grow shared assets that can benefit other players – and sometimes allow competition at a higher level. Commons creating is the ultimate future leadership skill and it benefits from all the others

A great book. Got a copy already so will start reading it as soon as I finish A Guide to the Good Life – the ancient art of stoic joy by William B. Irvine – a beautifully written book investigating stoic philosophy and going back to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and other notable Stoic philosophers, truly a brain elixir!]

Sat here in the MIT Media Lab auditorium listening to a talk by Prof. Mitchel Resnick, heading up the Lifelong Kindergarten project. His group explores learning networks, how people of all ages learn and what ways we can assist learning to happen all over the world. His presentation aptly highlights how many of us still thinks about learning: someone at the front of the class imparts information “I tell you what I think you should know”.

Collaborative learning is something very different. It recognises that when people contribute something of themselves they learn. When people are in the presence of others who contribute something of themselves – learning also happens. Learning happens individually and collectively, at the same time. It is richer, because you have invested yourself in contructing the knowledge. You are also able to understand better how it fits with everything else you know, because you created your own understanding.  A central premise for this thinking is about harnessing creativity into the process of learning. Creativity requires a medium, or a system for ideas to be channeled through – whether the objective is to create new, surprising and valuable ideas and artifacts (being creative) or indeed learning (being a self-directed learner).

And collaboration is what super-charges the whole process, provides energy and a continuous flow of inspiration. Many relatively simple things help foster this – from simply changing the room layout to encouraging hands-on activity, supporting one another and working together – and sharing in on each others’ success stories. Learning and culture are intrinsically linked – a positive learning culture promotes exponential learning, collectively. Moreover learning happens everywhere, not just at school so when talking about learning networks, we also need to think about the transition spaces between different learning environments – rather than the walls of the school holding learning in – opening out the walls to include learning from everywhere.

Changes in how we participate impacts how we learn, where we learn, how we learn and with whom we learn and thinking about this in a networked way means we need to somehow connect all the spaces where learning occurs and equally figure out what is the rationale for connecting these spaces. Gaming may help us find some of the answers. We need to bridge across to the new realms of learning, yet also preserve and build on the traditional pedagogies. Use digital media to enrich the learning environment to assist embodied learning. Katie Salen, from Parsons New School of Design talks about her work to establish a school around game-based learning. There curriculums have been replaced by mission based learning – games that create a scaffolding for information flow and make it very clear that you cannot more to the next level before completing the previous level. She highlights some hilarious examples of kids learning spanish by interacting with space aliens via skype and notes how kidsthese days become entrepreneurial at earlier ages and at her school can take on internships from the age of 8, both virtually and physically.

More on Katie Salen and her work here:

http://www.gamersmob.com/ 

Institute of Play 

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2009/03/two_white_papers_gaming_in_sch_1.html

http://alturl.com/kboq

For many more beautiful LEGO ads – look here.

Further to my earlier post about the annual LEGO Idea Conference, I have the pleasure to share with you David’s great talk on Making is Connecting – explaining in beautifully simple terms the dynamics behind why all of us love making things, and why sharing is such an important element of all this – the fuel for the fun so to speak. Also – don’t forget to check out Bernie’s great introduction to our beloved CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstorp – not only a very accomplished leader of the business, but even more so, a leader of the people, both inside the Company and outside. A profound privilege to work with him I must say.