My most powerful lessons from AIEC 2014

Saskia Loer Hansen is the Director, International Partnerships and Development at RMIT and has responsibility for International Relations, TNE, prospecting and 'offshore presence' developments. Prior to working at RMIT, Saskia worked in Higher Education in Scotland and Denmark and was the Secretary to the European Consortium of Innovative Universities from 2001-2008. 

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In our busy social media crazy world, we often forget the importance of being in a live face-to-face setting with others from the higher education / VE community. Conferences are an amazing way of learning and developing together. For those of us who had the chance to attend AIEC 2014 in early October in Brisbane, there was plenty of food for thought. Here are some of my brief highlights from the conference. 

He who is afraid of asking is ashamed of learning - Danish Proverb

BOLD THINKING

Ms Holly Sargent is the Founding Director of the Women's Leadership Board at the Harvard Kennedy School - a very inspiring woman.  As our first speaker of the day, she was quick to remind us about the importance of 'bold thinking'; to be more compassionate and focused on the changes and initiatives we can make as individuals.

She made explicit references on the need to 'tear down walls', challenging us to forget about the typical organisation silos and to think differently about changing our local world, and the world at large.

She shared with us a personal project - a pilot program at Harvard where staff and students can pilot new innovative learning and teaching ideas. In a large bureaucracy like Harvard, it is easy to get lost in the numerous labyrinths in the organisation - something I can very well relate to! And at times, we forget about the bigger, wider problems we are trying to solve.

Her program was a reflection of 'bold thinking'; the emphasis was on pilots as opposed to new mega projects - test, try, fail, learn. This program allowed students and staff to think beyond their silo-ed shells to test fast, fail fast and learn fast.

My biggest takeaway from her story is to instill a responsibility for change - as an individual, as a team and as an organisation. Change is often risky but necessary, and waits for no one. For me, change does not necessarily require huge amounts of resources. Often we are surprised by how small and simple initiatives can make a large impact.

STORYTELLING: MEGA TRENDS

The second keynote speaker, Dr Stefan Hajikowics from CSIRO spoke about 'Our Future World'. Given our recent discussion at RMIT about 'megatrends', it was interesting to hear Stefan's take on key trends crucial to our future planning.

Stefan had a way with storytelling: More from less, Great expectations, Virtually here, Going,going...gone? The silk highway, forever young... These weren't headers to a romantic comedy. This was his unique way of talking about the ageing population, the economic shift in power, the digital advances, and the changing business models across education.

As I don't think the talk was recorded, I strongly recommend you to read about the megatrends here.

GAMIFICATION

Humans are by nature social animals. Gabe Zichermann spoke about a concept I thought was quite different to broader organisation developments or the global challenges we are facing: gamification. I was wrong. Gave spoke about how concepts and ideas from games can be applied as a solution to many of our problems today and quite neatly put gamification in context as something that can help shape how we re-imagine problems.

For example, the very simple concept of 'intrinsic reinforcement' used in game development. In a game, you get rewarded through positive feedback when you've succeeded in a level - You succeed, you get rewarded and you move on to the next level. A similar approach can be taken to solve problems and challenges.

Gabe shared with us an example from Delta. At Delta, employees have to undertake training on basic geography (so that they know which destinations are in which part of the world). The training program 'Ready, Set, Jet' was designed using basic game principles and incentives. This provided employees with a smarter approach to learning, reducing the completion time from 4 years to less than a year (and with most of the training actually being done in staffs' spare time outside of work hours).

My biggest takeaway form Gabe's talk wasn't about turning everything into a game - but understand the positive reinforcement in game principles - and utilise this actively in designing approaches to solving problems.