Posts Tagged ‘ course ’

Reflections on Innovation – How I Did

Well, we’ve given our final presentation, and we’re ready to turn in our final products.  The mod is just about over, and it’s time to say goodbye to the innovation class posts in this blog.  Of course, there will still be posts about other things, especially my upcoming trip to Rwanda.

How did I do?  Professor Bloom’s asked us to write a quick review of how we felt we did in the course, according to a letter we wrote in the first week of the class.  I remember writing about being open-minded, especially to the different perspectives that I faced.  I wanted to always break free from my perceived set of standards, and trying to come up with ideas that would expand the projects, and not get married to any one idea.  Also, I set a goal for myself to learn about the innovation process and try to understand how to properly work within the chaos that good ideas are formed from.

Overall, I think I did pretty well in what I set out to do.  It was a good idea for me to remind myself to be open-minded.  I know that it’s easy to get entrenched in one’s ideas, especially when trying to create good solutions, so I spent a lot of effort making sure that I was always thinking about how to be a better teammate and listen to other ideas for their merits, not their differences from my own thoughts.  By actively ‘climbing out of my box’, as Professor Bloom would call it, I definitely experienced the discomfort and uncertainty associated with real experiential learning a couple times.  But it was also a trial at times.  I’ve talked about the frustrations of working with such tight deadlines, and the different personalities within the group clashing.

I’d say that I’ve accomplished my goals in this course.  Certainly, it was a completely different experience from what I had expected of the course.  But, it was different in a way where I really learned a lot.  I benefited, even though I felt uncomfortable at times.  And that just means I didn’t just expand my knowledge from my boundaries.  It means I grew past boundaries I hadn’t even acknowledged before.

2011
03/03
CATEGORY
Innovation and Design
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visualizing

Today in class, Professor Bloom talked about different ways to visualize the different pieces of research that we’d done for the project.  He mentioned the different ways that we can use to visualize the various keywords and recurring phrases that occur in peoples’ reactions.  There are a few things that this sparked, though.  Since we have so many things that are going to be input in order to improve the course registration, it’d be really really helpful to see what people are saying in a quick, visual way.

By being able to provide students with a quick look at maybe a Wordle (like Professor Bloom mentioned), it could easily give a 1-second overview of a course or professor without making people sift through layers and layers of information.

Thankfully, most of these tools are already in use.  Hopefully there is something that we could pull in easily, without having to come up with a second innovation just to support our first innovation. 🙂

2011
02/03
CATEGORY
Innovation and Design
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teamwork

I’m a little frustrated with the way my team is handling things.  We have a great team to form ideas and synthesizing them, but it feels difficult to keep in control. Additionally, there is a member of our group who insists on doing things in an extremely strict manner.  I think this is constructive when the group is veering extremely off-topic, but even when things are going well, he seems to intentionally try to keep things in the specific box Professor Bloom is teaching.  It’s quite frustrating.

Professor Bloom is constantly saying how innovation is the art of controlling the chaos that is caused by being creative.  It’s really tough being in the group with so many people, so there are many conversations going on at the same time.  This person continues to demand that we work in a single-processing kind of manner.  Especially with our project, which requires the team to deal with many different ideas at the same time.

Hopefully there would be a way to help groups along with this next year.  As much as Professor Bloom tries to help, there might be more troubles than he can deal with at the same time.

2011
02/02
CATEGORY
Innovation and Design
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