Transcript

Benefits of a Radical Learning Community | Sarah Gardial | TEDxIowaCity

Jack Welch said that if the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside then the end is near ominous words but it's one of my favorite quotes and I have to say that as dean of this College I have had the privilege of meeting business leaders as I like to say river to river in Iowa coast to coast in the country and around the world and be inside all kinds of industries corporation's headquarters facilities and I don't think there's anyone out there in for-profit or nonprofit business that is exempt from this I also don't think in her education that we are exempt from it either I think that we should be staying up at night worrying about this and and where we're going to be because our world is is changing very quickly as well now it's not that we haven't changed at all right leave the classrooms that you see and if you come over into the Tippie College of Business the space looks fantastic and we've got a lot of Technology and in fact the classroom isn't always the classroom the classroom now can be you in your jammies at home and a MOOC so it's not that things aren't changing but some of the things that need to change aren't changing and that is that even as we've changed the look the field the place of the classroom we're still locked into a mode of one-to-many get the faculty member at the front of the class or maybe on screen teaching to the many out there this one to many model this is not a model that I see at all in working environments where there is innovation and learning going on I see things that look like this I see environments that look chaotic organic flexible malleable I see groups of people working together I see problems that aren't clearly defined I see poor incomplete data and I see diverse perspectives being thrown together to try to work through muddled through a problem that's a very different kind of learning environment I think that is a radical learning environment what we are doing across the street across Clinton doesn't look a lot like this and so I'm really worried I'm wondering about that disconnect there so let's think about the University of Iowa and what it would take for us to move toward that environment and something I'm gonna call the radical learning community I feel so fortunate to be here we're in a great city but we're also in the midst of a great institution academically we know and we have the names of the great innovators the legendary people who have gone before us and Van Allen and Link Weston Grant Wood in a very compact Geographic space not too far from here there's a lot of brain power there are faculty that have amazing depth of knowledge skills and experience and there are facilities there are resources there are labs and studios and equipment and computing power and all kinds of things that make up that learning community and oh yeah there's these guys - we have boatloads of students and they come to us literally by the thousands and bring their energy their curiosity their passions their need for and they're looking for ways and direction to point all of that so I've got a lot of great things coming together and what do we do with all of that when it comes together on the campus all the facilities the people the reputation the students we do something that looks like this I know this is a very Iowan image but it is not the one I think that we want for a radical learning community we have incredible knowledge that is narrow and deep but we have knowledge that doesn't work across we have people that don't communicate with each other we have no way of sharing or bringing together what's going on on that campus for what I think are problems in the world that get more complicated more thorny more hairy more multidisciplinary every day that I don't think is the solution and by the way there are exceptions to this and someone's going to call me on this and I'm gonna say yes indeed you are not siloed but the vast majority of our campus and all campuses are so let's think about the campus and think about how we might work differently I have a lot of interest around the problem of water quality and not just for us here in the state but it just really bothers me that there's a dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River called little Iowa and we're creating problems for the rest of the world so what if we as a campus decided we really wanted to strap on better wallet water crawl water quality for the world so turns out that there's a place called the Stanley hydraulics lab you probably drive by it on Riverside Drive and the ìiî HR is there and that is a place where they study the engineering of hydraulics they do a lot of really great science and engineering around water and they are attacking very much some of the pieces of water quality but submit that if we really want to attack the issue of water quality we don't just need engineering or even more specific we don't just need the hydrology people in engineering we need the law folks there we need public policy there we need the College of Business there we need education there what it's gonna take to change the world is more than just the science behind it and this is where we get crippled as a campus with all the good work that's going on in the ihr we are just really stymied in terms of how to bring all the pieces together in what an environment that's chaotic and that is virtual and organic and that has flow and messiness to it we don't do that very well here's another problem that we have on campus and that is that chasm that exists between theory and practice we are really really good on the side of delivering toolkits to people skill sets I call it your - but your tool belt that's what we're doing for the students but we have to make the leap from that - how do you apply it what do you do with it and the best way to do that is to do it in a context that mirrors how that's going to happen in the real world and I just told you that what we have is the campus over there that doesn't really mirror the kinds of environments that really exist today where people are innovating and solving problems so what I'll call the little C the campus part of the community certainly needs to do better connecting among ourselves and we have to start there first but then we really need the Big C the community around the campus to be a part of this solution I think there are two important points here and one takes us back to what Jack Welch said which was that if we're not connected to the external environment to what happens off of our campus we're gonna miss all that change and we're not going to be plugged into where things are going and how fast it's moving and what are the new problems that are coming along the second piece of it this equally important is we need that space out there we need those companies those partners to help our students find a place to apply what they're learning to have real live situations that are Purpose Driven for those students to get them to get out there and have those hands-on experiences that aren't just about learning but they're about doing that piece is very important we've got to rebalance that on campus we're really good on the learning part but we've got to up our game on the doing part and I would just submit that we can't do it unless we have a wider field out there to work with and the good news about all this is if we bring the the small C campus together with the big C community we really complete each other what companies tell us that they need more of is bandwidth they're constrained by their resources and what did I say we've got boatloads of student bandwidth out there we've got students that are begging for opportunities to have problems they can dive into and we can throw those students in that direction but what those companies have that we don't have are the problems and the real understanding of where things are headed and how complex it is and so we can benefit from that in so many ways as a campus so all those pieces can come together in radical learning community that is much much bigger than a classroom or a department or a college that really takes in a community and by the way the community can be Iowa City it can be the quarter can be the state because of Technology the community is the world so if we took our water quality scenario and then we added in the Big C community around it all of a sudden we have the ability not just to connect these different parts of the campus but to reach out to the Burr Oak Land Trust a Conservancy group here in town and work with them and have some folks in town working at merge on some of the innovations or the Iowa City Planning Commission or maybe the hygienic slab out in Coralville there are lots of folks right here in our community that have their hands in the issue of water quality and all of us together can find a way to bring our resources together in a way that's a richer ecosystem where everyone benefits I don't think it's really that hard to do in all deference to James Van Alen I don't think this is rocket science what would it take for us to get from that siloed campus and that that chasm that is Clinton Avenue out there that divides us all into something that looks more like a radical learning community I think there are three things one is I think we need to start thinking about boundaries in a more porous way because if we really are going to have those organic and malleable and bottom-up and diverse messy environments we've got to expand our thinking about the divides that we create between curricular and co-curricular between town and gown between theory and practice they're false divides and they keep us from not engaging all of that in the name of solving the problems that we need to be working on the second thing obviously is more networking and this is about communication it's about relationships imagine if you're an individual here in town and you've got a particular problem that you're working for and you want to connect with people on campus where do you even start I live on campus and I will tell you that there are times I don't know who to pick up the phone and call and so part of this is about relationship building part of it's about communication and probably some infrastructure as well the third thing that I think we need is to focus a little bit more on Purpose Driven problems because that's the glue that's the magic energy that draws people together that gets people excited about working across those boundaries and working in cluttered messy innovative environments and so when we pull those three things together into a radical rat achill learning community the porous boundaries the the networking and the really the purpose driven problems I think that those three things alone are going to get us a large way toward what we want to accomplish in this community what we could accomplish in this community I think we can create a radical learning community in Iowa City and I would like to invite you all to be a part of that process thank you [Applause]