Creating Innovation Systems through Virtual Communities

The current rationale is that geographic regions provide the best context for innovation systems to emerge and thrive because of localized learning processes and the need to transfer “sticky” knowledge through social interaction. The core idea is that innovative activity relies upon an entire system composed of a variety of institutions and infrastructures interacting to create a learning-conducive environment that is geographically bound. The benefits associated with establishing regional innovation systems is that physical proximity facilitates the necessary underlying social capital essential for the creation of new intellectual capital. However, this concept of promoting innovation by restricting researcher and private firm mobility to specific geographic regions has real limitations, for instance, there may not be enough developed land, housing or amenities to attract the top scientists and organizations to a specific region. This begs the question, can regional innovation systems designed in a virtual world generate the same dynamics? In this paper, we consider whether the term “regional” in the sense of innovation systems is limited to geographic proximity in the real world, or whether or not this concept extends to geographic proximity in a virtual world. The purpose of this paper is to present our design ideas about how to create a virtual regional innovation system in the virtual world Second Life. We base our community design on the theoretical foundation underlying the primary and support activities of innovation systems. We then present our ideas about how these activities may be translated to a virtual community. We end with a discussion of why this research is relevant in terms of both practice and research

Creating Innovation Systems through Virtual Communities

The current rationale is that geographic regions provide the best context for innovation systems to emerge and thrive because of localized learning processes and the need to transfer “sticky” knowledge through social interaction. The core idea is that innovative activity relies upon an entire system composed of a variety of institutions and infrastructures interacting to create a learning-conducive environment that is geographically bound. The benefits associated with establishing regional innovation systems is that physical proximity facilitates the necessary underlying social capital essential for the creation of new intellectual capital. However, this concept of promoting innovation by restricting researcher and private firm mobility to specific geographic regions has real limitations, for instance, there may not be enough developed land, housing or amenities to attract the top scientists and organizations to a specific region. This begs the question, can regional innovation systems designed in a virtual world generate the same dynamics? In this paper, we consider whether the term “regional” in the sense of innovation systems is limited to geographic proximity in the real world, or whether or not this concept extends to geographic proximity in a virtual world. The purpose of this paper is to present our design ideas about how to create a virtual regional innovation system in the virtual world Second Life. We base our community design on the theoretical foundation underlying the primary and support activities of innovation systems. We then present our ideas about how these activities may be translated to a virtual community. We end with a discussion of why this research is relevant in terms of both practice and research

Can knowledge management save regional development?

Australia needs to create innovative regions to sustain economic prosperity and regional development. In order to do this, regions will need to systematically address their knowledge needs and identify tools that are appropriate in maximising their effectiveness. Many initiatives have focused on information and communication technology (ICT) to enable knowledge exchange and stimulate knowledge generation, but active knowledge management (KM) strategies are required if ICTs are to be used effectively. These strategies must respond to the regional economic and social environments which incorporate small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This paper outlines the importance of KM for supporting regional cluster development and the key ways in which communities of practice (CoPs), a KM technique, have been used to add value in similar contexts. How CoPs and their online counterpart, virtual communities of practice (VCoPs), can be used and developed in regional areas of Australia is considered along with a program for further research.<br /

It's Not a Matter of Time: Highlights From the 2011 Competency-Based Learning Summit

Outlines discussions about the potential and challenges of competency-based learning in transforming the current time-based system, including issues of accountability, equity, personalization, and aligning policy and practice. Includes case summaries

Education Unleashed: Participatory Culture, Education, and Innovation in Second Life

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and LearningWhile virtual worlds share common technologies and audiences with games, they possess many unique characteristics. Particularly when compared to massively multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual worlds create very different learning and teaching opportunities through markets, creation, and connections to the real world, and lack of overt game goals. This chapter aims to expose a wide audience to the breadth and depth of learning occurring within Second Life (SL). From in-world classes in the scripting language to mixed-reality conferences about the future of broadcasting, a tremendous variety of both amateurs and experts are leveraging SL as a platform for education. In one sense, this isn't new since every technology is co-opted by communities for communication, but SL is different because every aspect of it was designed to encourage this co-opting, this remixing of the virtual and the real

Designing for innovation around OER

This paper argues that designing collections of 'closed' educational resources (content and technologies) for use by specific student cohorts and collections of open educational resources for use by any 'learner' require different design approaches. Learning design for formal courses has been a research topic for over 10 years as the ever growing range of digital content and technologies has potentially offered new opportunities for constructing effective learning experiences, primarily through greater sharing and re-use of such content and technologies. While progress in adopting learning design by teaching practitioners has appeared slow so far the advent of open educational resources (OER) has provided a substantive boost to such sharing activity and a subsequent need for employing learning design in practice. Nevertheless there appears to be a paradox in that learning design assumes a reasonably well known and well defined student audience with presumed learning needs and mediating technologies while OER are exposed to a multitude of potential learners, both formal and informal, with unknown learning needs and using diverse technologies. It can be argued that innovative designs for formal courses involve creating structured pathways through a mixture of existing and new content and activities using a mixture of media and technologies in the process. This type of 'configurational' design that blends together given items to meet a particular need, rather than designing something fully de novo is typical in many areas of work and not just teaching. Such designs work very well when there is a small set of users of the innovation or their use of the innovation is narrow. However many innovations in information, communication and computing technologies often have multiple types of users and many more layers of complexity. In these cases, rather than heavily pre-define an innovative solution just to meet certain user requirements, it is necessary to design for greater flexibility so as to allow the users to adapt their use of the innovative solution for their own requirements once it has been deployed. The use of such an 'innofusion' approach for OER is highlighted using the case study of OpenLearn (www.open.ac.uk/openlearn)

Cracking the Code: Synchronizing Policy and Practice for Performance-Based Learning

Proposes a policy framework for integrating performance-based learning into the education system, synchronizing policy and practice, and ensuring collaborative state leadership and flexible federal leadership. Lists state policy issues and exemplars