worst practices

Opening Keynote, Dr. Myk Garn, gave a nice little talk, with powerful images (he was a photography instructor), about learning from our worst practices. Learning best from my mistakes has certainly been true in my life and in teaching. He enhanced his presentation with mistake testimonials from the attendants. Good fun, and certainly good lessons learned.

When I started at Kirkwood, I often suggested that faculty incorporate discussion into their classes -- at least for those who did not use it already. Most told me about how terrible their experience had been in the past and so were not interested in discussing discussion. This always left me feeling strange, because while they learned a lesson from their failure, their solution was simply to avoid that behavior altogether. It seemed they had learned the wrong lesson.

Dr. Garn has a website: worstpractices.org. I haven't looked much, but it could grow into something interesting. He certainly has some insights... "Learning to fail in an organized manner" -- I like that.

He recommended The Innovator's Dilemma and talked some about sustaining vs disruptive innovations. He did not mention, to my recollection the next volume, The Innovator's Solution, and I probably shouldn't read into that too much, so draw your own conclusion. In any case, it's interesting to think about how we handle innovation. Careful planning? Or more of a "Fire - Ready - Aim" approach? Part of it, I think, is personality. But if we temper our personality to suit the type of innovation perhaps more successful failures will occur.

He didn't mention one of my favorite books, "The Logic of Failure", but I think it relates, so I did. Hey, it's my blog.