Running with Scissors

Something I read today about innovation by Peter Merholz made me think about the topic differently:

As we’re realizing, “innovation” now doesn’t mean the niftiest new technology. Innovation is about identifying unmet needs and satisfying those.

I guess I’ve know this for some time, but after reading this, something shifted in my internal understanding – a recalibration occurred:

Innovation has nothing to do with technology. It has everything to do with ideas.

Maybe this is no revelation to others, but innovation and technology have been joined in my mind for some time.

I’ve got a strong interest in the topic of innovation. I love new ideas, different ways of getting at problems, and finding solutions. I also like the idea that innovation never ends – that there is always another way, a better way, lurking out there, just beyond the horizon. Innovation is ideas, but the devil has always been in the details of implementing those ideas – this is where technology comes in. It is the implementor. It can be the hammer, the saw, the lumber of innovation.

I’ve got a lot more to think about here.

Got to this via a Tweet by Laura Blankenship about this post by Brian Oberkirch quoting Peter Merholz. Don’t you love the distributed network of ideas? Seems pretty innovative to me.

Photo Attribution: ‘Men @ Work‘ by atomicjeep at Flickr

Many folks have written some very eloquent posts about this year’s Faculty Academy. I won’t try to go there, but I do have one observation.

We saw more faculty attending this year than ever before. We saw many new faces – not just sitting in the crowd, but presenting as well. What’s going on here?

Two things are going on here. One, is Jim Groom – the guy is on fire! (get the 2007 tour shirt here) :)

But the other has to do with technology coming to the users. What I mean by that is that is it is easy now. A few years ago, creating a web page and getting it on the web was a complicated process for the average faculty member. But with many of the new Web 2.0 services like WordPress.com, Flickr, del.icio.us, and now Twitter, the technology vanishes behind the tasks faculty are trying to accomplish. Conversations center around content first, technology second, or third.

We are in a great position to now talk about what makes great teaching. It’s not the technology – it is what our faculty are now able to do with it.

The time has come – well, almost.

Faculty Academy 2007 – Wednesday and Thursday, May 16 & 17 at UMW’s College for Graduate and Professional Studies.

More info here: http://facultyacademy.org

I love cool podcasting tools – and this one looks really cool. The new Belkin TuneStudio allows you to jack in your 5th generation video iPod and use it to record from 4 simultaneous inputs – it even has phantom power for those pro mics you want to use, 3 band equilization to tweak the inputs, and a compression setting to keep you from overloading/distorting the audio into the iPod.

It records right to the iPod hard drive, then you can move the files to a PC or Mac for further editing.

It’s due out this summer for $249 dollars.