Wednesday morning the Arizona Technology Council hosted Innovation Through Intersections - Solving Today's Technology Challenges on campus so I decided to take advantage of the convenience of attending a lecture that sounded pretty interesting. The speaker was Mary Contini Gordon who worked for 20 years for Hughes/Raytheon. Over the past seven years she's been in Tucson leading an innovation center staff and working with "technology and business development leads to create and apply approaches to solve tough problems."
Dr. Contini Gordon recommended two books during her talk - I ordered one and bought the other Wednesday afternoon. The first is Franz Johanssen's The Medici Effect and the second is Clayton Christensen's Disruptive Education. Christensen wrote The Innovator's Dilemma which I read several years ago and found extremely interesting.
If you ask me what is one thing I brought back from her lecture I'd say it is the idea of Wicked Problems. Wikipedia explains wicked problem as "a phrase used in social planning to describe a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems." The simpler way to see it is through its relationship of having both societal and technological pieces. Often we see the technological solution without considering the impact it has on people. then it is that impact on people that becomes the overriding concern and often counters the intended benefit that the technology brings.
The Webinar I attended was hosted by Higheredhero and Higheredhero announced and sold it as "Advanced Podcasting on Campus: Special Considerations for Coursecasts." The presenter, though, titled it " "Podcasting on Campus: Special Considerations for Coursecasts." Since it turned out not to be advanced I didn't get much out of it. There's some info that I'll pass along to Ron Landis in the event he needs to look at recording lectures in more classrooms without developing the sophisticated set-up that was placed in Centennial Hall.
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