One of the most interesting examples of grassroots innovation that I’ve heard about so far was in Joi Ito’s TED presentation about creating a distributed, bottom-up, collaborative radiation measurement data project (TED, 2014). This project came about after “Japan was hit by a 9 magnitude earthquake that triggered a tsunami with waves up to 128 feet high that killed 16,000 people and flooded the Fukushima nuclear power plant, causing a catastrophic nuclear disaster—the worst since Chernobyl” (Delkic, 2017).

What made Ito’s project different than most others was that he took it upon himself to assemble a team of experts to collaborate via the Internet to build and deploy Geiger counters, collect radiation data, and distribute the information publicly to the world. Ito stated, “it was a new way of doing things that was enabled by the Internet” (TED, 2014). While this particular example isn’t specifically related to education, the same principles can be applied to education. Rather than waiting around for the government or some authoritative body to take action in a situation, through the connectivity of the Internet, educators around the globe can work together to share knowledge and innovate in their classrooms. Educators should be allowed pull resources as they are needed rather than having some central authority control them.

This concept, however, is hard to imagine in my organization. Almost all our IT resources are centralized and access to them is controlled by the university. Budgets are often set a year in advance, and faculty typically must jump through IT security hoops in order to try something new and different with technology than the centralized resources provided to them. With this type of intense control and centralized planning, it is difficult for our faculty to be a “now-ist” (TED, 2014).

When Monique Markoff asks us, “are you flexible?” (TEDx Talks, 2014) in our organization, that answer is somewhat mixed. Faculty are encouraged to use technology, and many are using technology to flip their classrooms or engage in other forms of blended learning. Faculty are also encouraged to develop creative assignments, authentic projects, and experiential labs. However, faculty also must contend with financial constraints, IT security concerns, and FERPA restrictions related to using third-party tools and resources for class assignments. I hope that our institution can become more flexible and committed to providing opportunities for faculty to engage with students in other ways by promoting blended learning options.

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