💭 This week I am thinking about the innovation that isn’t. The innovation that doesn’t happen. I don’t mean innovation that fails. I mean innovation that simply doesn’t occur. The innovation that isn’t. Now I’ve learned to spot it, I see it everywhere.
It is cliché to cite Steve Jobs, and everyone has heard Jobs’ quote about how ‘[p]eople don’t know what they want until you show it to them.’ Teresa Torres, in her brilliant book Continuous Discovery Habits, notes that Jobs followed up by saying: ‘Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.’
I hadn’t heard this one before, and it made me pause. When there is no one to read things that are not yet on the page, we have a space where innovation is not. We have a space where the current state asserts itself as natural and inevitable, where convention and complacency suffocate all thought of reinvention. Until, that is, someone or some people read things that are not yet on the page.
The space where innovation isn’t is vast. Just look around you. In the UK, the systems and workings of our politics, education, transport, built environment, healthcare and most employment, while they may have gone through some kind of ‘digital transformation’, are substantially unchanged from where they were as long as 50 years ago. Of course, there has been incremental, even modular innovation, and improvements to the steady state. But the overall architecture remains the same.
In a world faced with climate change and reactionary nationalism, accepting that the current state is natural and inevitable is damaging, even irresponsible. The rate of progress needs to be greater than the appeal to traditionalism. So who will we count on to read things that are not yet on the page?
📘 This week I returned to Michael Bhaskar’s 2021 book, Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking. In it, Bhaskar examines the ‘Great Stagnation’ debate among economists such as Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon, and scientists including Lee Smolin, who hold that there is a slowdown in the generation of big, breakthrough ideas. Bhaskar sets out to examine the truth of the claims, and what lies behind them. He argues that the slowdown in the generation of big ideas is a measure of how much harder, more complex, and more interdependent are our problems in the 21st century compared to those solved in the 19th and 20th centuries: ‘In some areas there is a ceiling to new big ideas and we are inescapably closer to that ceiling than ever before.’
Bhaskar also observes how society is less accepting and more hostile to radical innovation. Collectively, we are more risk-averse, short-termist, cautious, unimaginative, and unable to pursue collective action. ‘Entrenched interests, a supercharged financialism, swollen bureaucracies, resurgent populisms; all inhibit the most daring forms of new thinking.’
This is a thorough, balanced, scholarly and ultimately optimistic book. Much of the second half of the book is devoted to advanced technologies which hold the promise of compensating for our collective mediocrity, by opening up new forms of knowledge and perception, and reading things that are not yet on the page. For Bhaskar, AI is a ‘cognitive technology’ which provides a much-needed extension to human imagination. ‘[O]ur capacity to develop big ideas’, Bhaskar predicts, ‘will rest on the development of our tools more than any other factor.’
The banality of many current applications of AI/ML notwithstanding, I hope Bhaskar is right.
💻 This ‘AI and the future of online learning’ piece in EdSurge is yet another reminder of how little breakthrough innovation there has been in online learning and educational technology in the decade since ‘the year of the MOOC‘. And of how little we really know about how to design effective learning experiences for adults.
Shorter courses (not full semester programmes).
More self-paced.
Badges.
Microcredentials.
Smaller, safer tweaks.
However, the article makes clear the powerful effect of the learner’s social relationships, with peers, study buddies, mentors and fellow professionals. This is significant. The learner’s community is not in the class or on the course. The learner’s community is where they are, and in the different spaces and roles they frequent. Often we try to manufacture proxies for communities, and to hold the learner within these (‘we can’t link out of the platform in case people don’t come back’). What if ‘the future of online learning’ is learners learning in and with and through their communities? What are we doing now to enable this? And what are we doing to prevent it?
And what if this kind of learning were to drive collective action against the stagnation of ideas and its consequences, against climate change and neofascism? What would our roles, and our institutions, need to look like? When do we start?
[Picture shows a colour photograph of an urban skyline, in which two high rise office buildings point up into the cloudy sky from behind a long, windowless brick wall.]
Matthew Moran 