Maybe you know… I've been interested in innovation in engineering education for the past year or so. I've been reading quite a bit about innovation, creativity, and such as it pertains to engineering education but education in general as well. I should indicate here that I'm not really talking about teaching innovations (new and great ways of teaching). I want to help students become more innovative or hone the skills that aid in innovation. Teaching innovations are important and fun to think about as well. But that's for another blog post later.
While I've been reading about this for some time, I thought I'd ask the question Is it possible to teach innovation to college students? on twitter. Now, I'm relatively new to Twitter. I've had an account for some time, but never really got into it. Its time to change that. In any event, Chris Sundberg initially responded via Twitter that it is not possible to teach innovation. He later went on to write a great blog post about teaching innovation. Essentially, he broke innovation down into some components/traits/skills: creativity, being a polymath, execution, and risk. Over my time researching innovation, I've seen and thought about each of these. However, Chris' blog post got me to thinking about the fact that we should be nurturing each of these traits, not just one, to lead students to be more innovative.
Chris also links to some interesting books. You should check out his blog posts.
You may be interested in following Mark Guzdial's blog (http://computinged.wordpress.com) — he does groundbreaking quantitative research in computer science education, but blogs frequently about educational research in general.
Thanks Greg. I’ve been a big fan of Mark’s for some time. His work is great! I want to be like him when I grow up! hahah
Thanks for your kind words. I'm glad you enjoyed my thoughts.