Rick West

Here’s a presentation I gave recently to the librarians at BYU, who wanted me to teach them about how technology can improve instruction (since they are also involved as teachers in many regards). The video needs to be edited to take out some stuff at the beginning before the real presentation begins, but at least it’s online now!

Library Presentation from McKay School of Education on Vimeo.

Link to part 2

Also available on my presentation page. 

Some students and I recently presented our current findings from three studies into group creativity, in the context of the BYU Innovation Boot Camp. Here’s a recording of the presentation.

Now if we could just get these articles out and under review!

Dr. Rick West – IP&T Seminar 11/17/2010 from McKay School of Education on Vimeo.

Here’s a file of an interview that we can practice coding as part of our workshop on technologies for qualitative research.

Interesting research came out recently supporting Dr. Suzuki’s approach to music education. Specifically, a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience explains that while listening to relevant stimuli is not enough, practicing some, and then listening to the stimuli was as effective in improving future performance as if the participants had practiced twice as long (instead of listening to the stimuli).

Interesting. I wonder whether this effect can be seen in other areas of expertise outside of music? Perhaps instead of listening to Suzuki CDs, can an employee spend some of his time simply observing correct activity and be as expert as if he had been engaged in the activity himself? This lends itself to the “stolen knowledge” theory perhaps, as proposed by Brown and Duguid, implying that some knowledge is best stolen by observing others in situated, authentic activity?

I love this quote from Paul Saffo, Silicon Valley forecaster (what does THAT mean, BTW? How do I get that job?). Here’s the full quote, in reference to Facebook’s creation and whether we can really call any technology ideas original or plagiarized because these ideas are nearly always developed in collaboration with others. I would argue the same is true outside of the technological realm as well:

“Being first is heavily overrated in the technology space because all really good ideas end up being collaborative,” says Saffo, of the San Francisco analysis firm Discern. “Ideas are cheap. It’s the execution that matters. And if you look at where Facebook is now compared to where it started, it’s a very difficult comparison. … I wouldn’t give a whole lot of credence to people who are showing up and claiming credit.”

Playing off of the Google Rule (which has been used for years by other innovative companies like Gore and 3M), Dan Pink recommends that companies give their employees mini genius grants of time and flexibility to work on their own creative projects. I like this—it describes this unstructured time as what it is: a grant gifted to the employee to allow their inner genius to emerge.

I’m excited to have a new article out in the recent edition of TechTrends. It’s an article written to students, about how they can build an effective learning community from the inside out. I have found that there are a lot of articles written to help instructors know how to build learning communities, but very precious little written to the students in language that they will actually read. I hoped with this article to fill this void. It’s not the most rigorous piece of scholarship in the world, but you know, I like it. I’m excited to see it published and hear what folks think about it.

Link to the article

I was fortunate this last year to attend TEDxNYED which was focused on great ideas for improving education. My colleague David Wiley gave a great talk there about how teaching (and learning) is really about sharing, and that we need to create policies and practices that increase our ability to share content and ideas with others. Awesome!

YouTube – TEDxNYED – David Wiley – 03/06/10.

I was asked by my college to write an article for our college alumni magazine on how to improve online civility. Here is the draft of what I have so far: onlinecivility_070710

I would be interested in any feedback or suggestions! A few notes:

• The article has to be 1,000 words about
• It’s written to a nonacademic audience
• My school is sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is why quoting scripture or church leaders is appropriate.

Thanks!

The New York Times had an interesting guest column written by a former designer for Microsoft. In the piece, Dick Brass remarks that “Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator.” The problem, according to Brass, is a lot of infighting within the bowels of Microsoft, where departments would sabotage and compete against other departments within the company, killing innovative ideas before they could flourish.

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

I find stories such as this fascinating. What is it that creates a climate of interdependence, trust, and collaboration within some companies and envy and competition within other companies?