Warning: liveblogging. Typos, errors and grammatical insanities likely. This post will change repeatedly over a period of time. Refresh for the latest updates. You are warned.
Ian Fordham - Rewriting our Education
The Education Foundation is six weeks away from launching. How can the Like Minds community help rewrite education? How can we create a non-politically motivated organisation, that doesn't go looking for problems?
Education is a £100bn industry - we need to connect the disparte parts of it together. 30K+ educational establishments of various sorts. In the developed world, we have the largest gap between the top and the bottom of the education system.
Their ket thesis is about change: from top down to bottom up, from conflict to consensus-driven education. Atomised institutions replaced with connected institutions. There's a calendar of media coverage of eductaion: summer is GSCEs, autumn is health and safety and conkers. How can you connect the worlds of business and education?
The first schools in 598 were debating wether we should teach Latin and the arts. Some debates have been going on just too long...
"Big" school makeovers - something from the job Ian is leaving at the British Council for School Environments - changing the way it looks and operates in five days to prove what can be done with a little money. They revamp staff rooms, dining areas (a 40% uplift in school meals take-up), art areas and so on.
Where would a think tank normally base itself? Westminster. But they've done a deal with startups to work in a 12,000 sq ft incubator space - a catalyst for bring people together, conversation and collaboration - with room for an innovation greenhouse...
Andy Middleton - the Art of Being Unreasonable
Do we want to live in a world of compliance and targets, where even if we get a 10/10 and a gold star, we're still screwed? is there an alternative?
We consider is reasonable to buy more to save more. We consider it reasonable to shift products around the country to use for a few minutes. We consider £9.99 wetsuits (unfit for purpose) reasonable. We build carpet to live in landfill for 10,000 years...
It's time to be more unreasonable.
What's the opposite of play? Work? No. Depression. How do we get into that playful space of fearlessness? How do we create an unreasonable approach to food, that gives our children and grandchildren a legacy?
Do Lectures - not-for-profit serious of conversations. No name badges, to encourage conversation. They come together in a tend. The screen moves with the wind, you hear the rain. They do a lot with fire, and the conversations around an open fire at 3am are quite something. They use blackboards. They aim for an inter-generational space. Dancing. Singing.
An applied improvisation speaker helped people; you need to notice more so you know what the world's telling you. Nature is smart at noticing - it's called evolution. Nature is really good about using everything, and so does Do, using everything around them as a learning experience.
They've had 6m downloads of talks - how do they get that to 60m? How do they get those talks in schools, workplaces...?
You're not going to do that on an incremental change with a compliance-based model basis...
Find ways to create prototyping spaces to focus on what you actually want to do.
How can you work with the networks you're involved with to do things of greater significance? To change things for the better?
Looking over a cliff is scary. But if you know there's water at the bottom, you can make that jump. And Do helps throw people over cliffs.