The Importance of Risk-taking in Teaching & Learning

by Noah Geisel

Earlier this week, the following headline popped up on my daily stat app: "Twice the R&D Budget Doesn’t Get You Twice the Innovations"

The study of around 100 semiconductor and related companies revealed that when companies double down on Research & Development, the effort “leads to just a 22.5% increase in new-product announcements.”

The language in the interpretation of this study (“leads to just...”) implies this is not an acceptable return on investment. One person I can think who might beg to differ is baseball player Ken Griffey, Jr. Had The Kid been able to reap a 22.5% benefit from putting twice as much into R&D on his home run swing, he would have retired with 771 career home runs, 9 more than all-time leader Barry Bonds (Hmmm...). One man's interpretation of diminishing returns is another's immortal legacy.

How does this relate to teaching and learning?

Research & Development are closely tied to risk-taking. As an educator, I am constantly challenging my students to push themselves in the 21st Century Skill of risk-taking, a key force behind invention, innovation and, I believe, general success in 2011 and beyond. Risk-taking is the lone subjective component found in every rubric students receive in my class - to the tune of at least 20% of the total grade. Risk-taking is also the only way a student may earn extra credit on any given assignment. It is one way of showing the students the floor and not the ceiling: show students the ceiling of expectations and some heads may bump the fan; show students only the floor and some will touch the clouds.

Stat(s) of the Day

Stat of the Day: According to analysis of global Internet statistics by Miniwatts Marketing, the number of folks in Africa using the Internet grew from 4.5 million to about 66 million between the years 2000 and 2009.

That's a 1360% growth rate.

And yet that only touches less than 7% of the population of the continent.

What would the Net look like if we were able to reach those other 92% of the pop?

***

Oh, and another thought...

There are now more users of Facebook than there were users of the entire Internet worldwide nine years ago.

Shift.

KMLFactbook: a presentation from NECC that will change the way you think about using stats and maps in the classroom

Watching an NECC session from Elluminate Live as a virtual participant.

The subject is KMLFactbook, which as far as I can tell could make all of those demographic and statistical charts in your old history textbooks completely obsolete.

The trick?

KMLFactbook merges the online CIA World Factbook with Google Earth.

What does this mean for you?

You and your students will be able to project data directly into Google Earth; create new map layers; and then export the data to online spreadsheets and other web-based presentation apps.

Here's an example: You want to know the relative GDP for all of the countries in Western Europe. Just click 'Western Europe' and 'GDP' in the CIA World Factbook and the data will immediately manifest as a layer in Google Earth.

You can even take your own data and slap it right onto Google Earth via KMLFactbook. Or try out applications bringing in data from Wolf/Alpha.

I'm immediately going to make a layer of world soccer stats.