Recently, Ronald van den Hoff and I organized a 'roundtable' discussion about innovation in education. As a result of this meeting, I've created the Society 3.0 Education Plaza. This website serves as a platform to discuss and connect initiatives in relation to educational innovation. Here we will inform you about these initiatives and any events related to Society 3.0 education. If you would like to be kept informed, join the discussions, or contribute in any other way, please feel free to join!

Sandra Reeb-Gruber was one of the participants to this brainstorm session, below, you will find her blog explaining what we talked about and what we want to do next!

A year ago, a friend of mine tried to explain a complicated theory (or the complicated part was that he did it in French…) to me he had read about in ‘La Source Noire’ by Patrice van Eersel (1986) saying that thoughts manifest in waves, much like radio waves, that are picked up by different people in different parts of the world simultaneously. This explains why some ideas and concepts are developed by different people at the same time, without these people having been in contact with each other. Basically these waves are the universe’s way of practicing risk management: if one person that ‘receives’ the idea doesn’t do anything with it, the idea doesn’t die because other people have it too. On a conceptual level (even though I didn’t get the physics part) this theory made sense to me, but on Friday November 11th 2011 I experienced this theory in real life. That day I attended a round table discussion about education initiated by Society3.0 at Meeting Plaza in Utrecht.

A group of eleven people, amongst whom John Moravec (Education Futures, Knowmads, Invisible Learning), responded to Society3.0’s invitation to come and talk about educational innovation. A very diverse group of people (teachers, educational designers, researchers, mothers, entrepreneurs) with one thing in common: a passion for education and an incredible drive to improve education (and through it, change society), to make it more about the learner, his/her passion, interests and talents. I already knew there were a lot of people with a passion for education and with ideas to improve it (I’ve been to seminars with Sir Ken Robinson and Richard Gerver), but I didn’t know there were so many people with pretty much the exact same vision on what education should be. And I also didn’t know there were so many interesting projects well underway of implementing that vision!

Some of the projects and initiatives I heard (more) about during the round table meeting: Kaos Pilots, Sudbury Valley School, The Learning Lab, Knowmads Society, Education Futures, Shibuya University Network, Laterna Magica, Research to Improve and De School in Zandvoort (and by Googling these initiatives I found even more!). After a general introduction round, the discussion soon turned to what we can do to really innovate education. Even though there are so many great initiatives worldwide, all of them are relatively small and isolated. And many of them, at least in The Netherlands, have to put a lot of effort into convincing ‘the powers that be’ (government, inspection and the like) that they are worthy of existing. Efforts and energy that would be so much better spent working on refining their innovative educational concepts. Inevitably the discussion spiraled down a bit at this point, thinking of how hard and tiring it is to convince others of our ideas over and over again. Ronald van den Hoff, being the no-nonsense entrepreneur that he is, directed us back into the positive energy by asking what we could do organize ourselves, to expand ‘the movement’. Marcel van Marrewijk triggered what would become our plan of action by talking about his work (involving appreciative inquiry); researching why educational innovations work. Most initiatives being so small, they don’t focus on the why it works, but on the what and how. And if you don’t really know why something works, it’s very difficult to convince others, let alone replicate elements of what you’re doing somewhere else.

The participants of the round table meeting decided that the ‘why’ is where we can contribute to up-scaling Education3.0. We agreed to form groups (also including people not present during the meeting) to 1) make an inventory of (isolated) innovative education initiatives; 2) contact the people running these initiatives to 3) collect their stories (what & how) and put these together in a publication (book, YouTube, website, …) and 4) conduct research into what these initiatives have in common on an abstract level (conceptualize) and into why they are working. In doing this we will build a community (by bringing all these initiatives together) and empower the people who are now trying really hard to improve education in their isolated contexts.

Everyone present got so excited about these ideas and plans that we immediately set a date for our next meeting, 12 January 2012, where we’ll share what we found during our individual inventories and ideas we have regarding the research we want to conduct. I can’t wait! Good thing that January 12th is only seven weeks away!!

Sandra Reeb-Gruber