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B822 : Book 3 : Activity 1.1

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 21 Feb 2014, 16:41

Though some 16 days behind with the next block (or book) I feel on familiar ground having done H807: Innovations in e-learning; indeed the more I read, the more that B822 (Book 3) and H807 (Innovations in e-learning) appear extraordinarily complementary.

As so many are currently blogging about H807 (as required) I look forward to tracking the course from their notes, as well as mine from 2010.

I often said I would have liked to have done H807 again, in this way I can.

Repeating a theme I developed in H800 too of personal development planning (PDP) I see this NOT as repetition but rather as akin to a glider rising on a thermal, so although I am going over old ground, I am doing so at a greater height.

(Maybe I am now seeing too how a Masters Degree advances on the undergraduate degree and the PhD on the Masters).

According to Michael Kirton's Adaptor-Innovator

Theory 'Innovators do things differently' while 'Adaptors do things better'. Kirton (2003)

  • Boeing 737 as an example of adaptation (continuous change)  over innnovation (discontinuous chsnge) which understandably risk averse managers would avert.

B822 Book 2 Activity 1.1

Can you think of examples from your experience to illustrate each of the following cells?

Radical innovation :

Product (including services): iPod, Dyson (as presented to the public), QWERTY keyboard, Sony Walkman, Xylaphone, distance learning utilising TV and Radio (the OU), lynk digital phoning through the computer vs analogue phones.

Process: women doing men's work during the First World War, a country switching from driving on the left to the right (Sweden?),

Incremental improvement

Product (including services): Dyson (as developed), tyres, road surfaces, car phones to mobile phones, less sugar and salt in processed foods, the M25, eBooks,  Virtual Learning Environments.

Process: Kaizan, Women in the Army, Navy and Airforce, Going Green, the rise of facism (retrospectively incremental demise), sorting recyclables and landfill, 
31 entries here containing QWERTY fail to find this, which is my blogged late grandfather's memoir:

'One day J.G. had my father carry this ‘Blick’ up from the car; it was a German typewriter. J.G. tried to show me how to use this Blickenfurentstater. It was a portable affair with a wooden case. The top row of letters began ZXKGB so it came in before QWEERTY when they had to slow the action down on account of the metal keys getting jammed if you typed too fast. I did all the typing after that, up until the First War. We started out by doing the letters with carbon copies. During the war they got girls in for the first time doing that job'.

Wherein I'd say lie two innovations as responses to the problem of keys jamming and of, ironically, lack of manpower.

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