Key Lessons from the Field of Cultural Innovation

The primary purpose of this knowledge synthesis is to provide the Rockefeller Foundation staff with a broader context for considering the findings of an independent evaluation of the Foundation's Cultural Innovation Fund (CIF). The synthesis has been designed to help key audiences understand the state of play, common concepts, challenges, questions, and key lessons from arts organizations who are already engaging innovative strategies and practices

Learning from Asia’s Success Beyond Simplistic ‘Lesson-Making’

Many international organizations, governments and academics concerned with economic development look to Asia’s success, recommending that other poor countries follow similar models and paths of development. This study argues that such Asian ‘lesson-making’ is a grave mistake in policy-thinking—and in the historical understanding of the nature and process of development. In identifying what we can and cannot learn from the Asian experience, this study examines the various paths of successful growth in East and South East Asia and asks: what can other developing countries learn from Asia’s success, if anything? The study also examines the arguments of some of the great development thinkers of the past to ascertain what can be learned. Because technological and market circumstances facing today’s developing nations have changed it is a mistake to base any strategy on the achievements of past …Asia, innovation, lessons, economic development

Crafting A Human Resource Strategy To Foster Organizational Agility: A Case Study

A decade ago, the CEO of Albert Einstein Healthcare Network (AEHN), anticipating a tumultuous and largely unpredictable period in its industry, undertook to convert this organization from one that was basically stable and complacent to one that was agile, “nimble, and change-hardy”. This case study briefly addresses AEHN’s approaches to business strategy and organization design, but focuses primarily on the human resource strategy that emerged over time to foster the successful attainment of organizational agility. Although exploratory, the study suggests a number of lessons for those who are, or will be, studying or trying to create and sustain this promising new organizational paradigm

The un-designability of the virtual. Design from problem-solving to problem-finding.

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze (1991) this chapter investigates the virtual as what problematizes the possible by inserting contingency in the process of emergence of the new. The tension between the virtual as what is uniquely placed to engender true innovation, and its aleatory and unforeseeable nature mirrors the tension existing in design between form-making and the need to acknowledge contingency. In embracing the un-designability of the virtual, design is called to take contingency and material variability as forces impinging on the process of emergence of the new. The chapter puts forward a new model for design research that shifts from problem-solving to problem-finding and is predicated on the undesigned at the core of design itself. This points to a further shift: the role of designer from creator to facilitator, teasing form out of the formless, engaged with the manifold forces expressed through material variation

Bringing the World to School: Integrating News and Media Literacy in Elementary Classrooms

For three years, the Powerful Voices for Kids program, a university-school partnership program of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island, developed a multifaceted approach to integrate news and current events into in-school and after-school instruction in K-6 schools. Three case studies detailing the program’s impact on an undergraduate novice instructor, an in-school technology mentor, and an experienced classroom teacher illustrate the ways in which different stakeholders at the school approached news integration. Though approaches, interests, and values of each teacher vary considerably, all teachers share a commitment to the following classroom principles: (1) the use of inquiry to guide lesson development, (2) the role of ambiguity and uncertainty in otherwise structured learning environments, (3) the use of scaffolding and planning to limit and shape students’ experiences with a variety of unpredictable media texts in the classroom, and (4) written reflection on how individual teacher values and motivations contribute to the unique classroom culture. Implications for future professional development in K-6 news literacy are explored

An Evaluation of Computer Aided Learning (BRAC-CAL) in Secondary Schools in Bangladesh.

BRAC initiated Computer Aided Learning (CAL) programme, the first ever in Bangladesh, to introduce ICT based materials in teaching-learning in 2004 Along with digital contents of Science, English and mathematics of secondary level, this programme provided basic ICT and content delivery training to the teachers of programme schools. A qualitative evaluation following the Realist Evaluation framework was designed to evaluate the programme mechanism, context and outcome. Data were collected from six secondary schools selected purposively. Findings showed that both teachers and students enjoyed the CAL materials and also believed that those materials had changed classroom scenario by improving learners’ attention and participation in classroom activities. However, significant difference was not observed between CAL and non-CAL classrooms. Teachers struggled to organise collaborative learning tasks such as group and pair works. Students also had limited participation in teaching-learning process. Irregular electricity supply sometimes hampered use of CAL materials. Furthermore, students had limited access to these materials. Bearing this context the recommendations were to focus more on teachers’ pedagogic improvement and to create more scopes for students’ self use of these materials

Towards a comprehensive pedagogical theory to inform lesson study: an editorial review

Purpose: This editorial review takes its agenda from issues about the meaning and use of variation theory in the context of Lesson Study, which have already been raised in previous issues of the journal. Its main purpose is to suggest a way of resolving such issues by locating variation theory in a broader framework of pedagogical theory. Runesson’s editorial commentary on articles in the special issue on the uses of pedagogical and learning theories in the context of Lesson Study suggest that they challenge the presumption that variation theory can be used as a basis for pre-specifying learning objectives in advance of teaching. This raises the issue of which approach to teaching the theory can be matched with; namely, teaching viewed as a technology or teaching viewed as an interactive process with students in which ends cannot be specified independently of the process. Also Hogan’s review of two recent books about Lesson and Learning Study in Issue 4.2 raises the issue about the extent to which the examples supplied abstract the experience of learning from questions about students’ motivation and attitudes in classrooms. Hogan suggests that the widespread use of learning theories, such as variation theory tends to distort the concept of learning employed in Learning Study by emphasizing its cognitive rather than emotional/attitudinal aspects. Approach: Elliott’s approach to the above issue is to pick up on Posch’s comments in the current issue, which suggest that variation theory has implications for student motivation that need to be made more conceptually explicit in the context of Lesson and Learning Study. He argues that this can be done by integrating it into Alexanders dialogic model of teaching and Stenhouse’s process model of curriculum development, and linking it with two related pedagogical theories that underpin these models; namely, ‘democratic pedagogy’ (Dewey) and ‘accelerated learning’ (Vygotsky). Research Implications: Such a conceptual integration of variation theory within a dialogic model of teaching throws light, Elliott argues, on Learning Study viewed as a form of educational action research. Practical Implications: This review article goes on to examine how the Lesson Studies depicted in issue 4.4 can be located in the light of the pedagogical framework and perspectives proposed

Institutions as Knowledge Capital: Ludwig M. Lachmann’s Interpretative Institutionalism

The paper revisits the socioeconomic theory of the Austrian School economist Ludwig M. Lachmann. By showing that the common claim that Lachmann’s idiosyncratic (read: eclectic and multidisciplinary) approach to economics entails nihilism is unfounded, it reaches the following conclusions. (1) Lachmann held a sophisticated institutional position to economics that anticipated developments in contemporary new institutional economics. (2) Lachmann’s sociological and economic reading of institutions offers insights for the problem of coordination. (3) Lachmann extends contemporary new institutional theory without simultaneously denying the policy approach of comparative institutional analysis

Global economics governance in the post-crisis world

The Great Crisis has made it clear once again that avoiding the derailment of globalization of trade and finance and the protecting the globe from fragmentation call for enhanced global cooperation and an efficient, flexible and coherent system of global governance. Three interconnected levels (national, regional, and global) comprise the system of global governance. This paper is dealing with some of the main issues of global economic governance in the post-crisis world. It reveals that the turbulence and the distress of the world of the early 21st century have deeper roots and broader sources than the crisis. Global governance therefore has to respond much broader set of challenges in comprehensive framework and long term perspective