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I like to go to Educause because the keynote sessions are interesting, stimulating and often evocative. Alan Amory of Saide provides a reflection of this year’s Educause conference.
Daniel Pink, who delivered the first keynote entitled “The Cascade Effect: How Small Wins Can Transform Your Organization”, is the author of a number of provocative books including “To Sell is Human”. He is interested in business, work and behaviour. When I read that the talk was about behaviour, I thought Pavlov! But his take-home message was much more interesting - get rid of performance management! His argument is built on research that shows that higher pay does not always led to better performance. Incentives improved performance for simple technical, or algorithmic, tasks, but often degraded performance for complex tasks that require time and cognitive insights to complete. Apart from the obvious motivator - money - the principle of fairness is more important. What appears to be more essential for 21st century work is autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Allow people to manage their own work, support through feedback and support, and have fewer conversation about “how” and many more about “why”. Productive people work better doing it together in a socially collaborative environment
Andrew McAfee, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, spoke about the second machine age. Core to the presentation was Moore’s law that the modern digital revolution is driven by an exponential increase in computing power and a concomitant decrease in relative cost. For example, due to this increased power, artificial scientists no longer use a rules-based system but a network solution. This approach allows computers to solve problems in new ways. Another example is the self-driving car. But, what was great, was the juxtaposition of geeks (those who solve problems through computation) and HiPPOs (the highest-paid person’s opinion who mostly uses intuition to drive business decisions). Robert Parker Jr, the biggest HiPPO in the wine industry would predict the future success of newly created wines,until Ashtonfelter developed a formula that, over time, out-performed any wine taster’s predictions. Geeks always win over HiPPOs! However, for me an important message from this presentation was that technological advances not only support human creativity, but also drive systems in reductionist ways - support the first but challenge the latter.
Emily Pilloton, an architect, and Founder and Executive Director of Project H Design, working with school children to design, plan and build spaces for communities, illustrated four important concepts:
- experience matters more than content,
- seeking and asking questions is more important than knowing,
- we is greater than I, and
- curiosity is more important than passion.
The projects discussed showed how children working together developed solutions to real problems in their communities, learnt news skills and the application of knowledge. More importantly, they built artefacts important to their own lives and their communities, for example transforming a farmers’ market to a mobile space for homeless people.
Each of the presentations confirmed what I hold dear:
- we produce our best work when we collaborate,
- technology mediates knowledge construction but can support fundamentalist reductionism, and
- learning should be about undertaking authentic tasks with our community.
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