Innovation ACT Pitch Night

Greetings from the pitch night of Innovation ACT, where teams of university students are competing for prizes by presenting their business ideas. The event is being held in the Inspire Center at University of Canberra. This was an excellent event (even though the team I was mentoring did not make it to this round). In August I dropped in on Philippe Kruchten at UBC  in Vancouver to hear about his "New Venture Design" course, where students are encouraged to enter a innovation competition as part of their studies. I am designing a similar course to be run alongside Innovation ACT.

The pitches:

1. The first team "Vacant Space" are promoting an advanced version of the "Renew Leichhardt" initiative in Sydney, which provides vacant shops to artists and artisans.

2. Team "KRIGE Tech" are offering a smart power system using switches controlled by a smart-home app. This is claimed to reduce energy use. However, I am skeptical that such remote controls save any energy, whereas simpler automation in individual devices does.

3. Siege Sloth Games are producing more non-violent computer games. This seemed the most mature of the pitches. The graphics were good (which they should be for a computer game project).

4. Bio-Mine: This initiative is for electronic certificates, similar to the Digitary service (based in Ireland). While ANU already uses Digitary (I was issued with a digital Grad Cert in Higher Education). However, I found Digitary's system clumsy to use and it has not had a high take-up. There is therefore room for a better product.  One interesting aspect is that Bio-Mine proposes to charge the graduate an annual fee and pay the university a commission. Also they plan to link this to the Intellidox product which ANU already has a relationship with. This sounds very promising.

5. BehavioMatrix: This team is producing a diagnostic aid for depression. This would use sensors rather than a questionnaire or practitioner's opinion. I am not qualified to asses the clinical validity of the technique, but if it works this could be a good business.

6. OzGuild: This team scans trading cards so that collectors can search for cards to complete their collection. While pitched for the "Magic: The Gathering" card game, but could be applied to other collectible cards.

7. Ingiv: This team organizes volunteers for non-profit organizations online. While pitched for non-profit organizations this may also be attractive for for-profit organizations who encourage staff to volunteer to work on projects. In many cases the companies have difficulty keeping track of what their staff have volunteered for.

8. CanBAR: This team has the best logo of the night (a stylized cocktail glass with a Google style map pin as the cocktail stick). Their product provides demographics of patrons for cocktail bar owners, via an App.One technique the team might try at their next pitch is to hand out cocktails. I was part of a team pitching a line of boutique spirits at one such event and we handed out drinks to the judges, which put them in a good mood. ;-)

9. Meeting Cost and Timer: This App is billed as "The Taxi Meter for Meetings". It estimates the cost of a meeting, in terms of staff and other resources used. This might be fun to have on a large screen during a meeting. Of course the solution is not to have meetings. I am not so sure about having his in the Microsoft Office Apps store. what I would like is an application for preparing for meetings, which would prompt for all the necessary materials for a good meeting and prompt those involved to try to complete tasks before the meeting, thus eliminating the need for a meeting. I noticed there are some simple Meeting Meters already, such as "Meeting Cost Meter".

10. Young Money: Comparing insurance policies for young people is the topic of this product. It was not clear how this would differ from the many insurance comparison websites already available.

Based on the presentations, my ranking of the teams from highest to lowest would be:

1. Siege Sloth Games
2. Bio-Mine
3. OzGuild
4. Ingiv 
5. CanBAR
6. KRIGE Tech
7. BehavioMatrix
8. Vacant Space 
9. Meeting Cost and Timer
10.  Young Money

ps: The Canberra Innovation Network (CBRIN) will launch on 7 November 2014. An open innovation event will be held on 29 November.

Join GovCamp Across Australia

Greetings from the opening of GovCamp 2014 at the Inspire Centre, University of Canberra. The event is also being held in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney (as well as online). This is an un-conference with presentations from whoever wants to talk, about how to make government work better.

Jane Treadwell Goes Naked at GovCamp

Greetings from GovCamp at the Inspire Centre in Canberra. The first speaker is  Jane Treadwell, CEO, DesignGov, who said she was "going naked", meaning speaking without any Powerpoint slides.

DesignGov is the Australian Centre for Excellence in Public Sector Design. It was established in mid 2012 to apply strategic co-design processes in the Australian Public Service.The initiative has parallels in the ANU Unravelling Complexity course, which I help teach.

Coming up before morning tea are: Steve Baty, Meld Studios;  Senator Kate Lundy, Minister Assisting for Industry and Innovation;  Pia Waugh, GovHack MC and Cassandra Bisset, Objective Corporation.

Cronulla Street Exhibition in Canberra

I dropped into the University of Canberra’s Inspire Centre today and had a tour of the "Cronulla Street Exhibition" by James Steele. The work is a series of photographs showing changes in the Sydney suburb of Cronulla, as documented by photographs by the same photographer, at the same places, forty years apart. The work is on display until 28 September 2012. Also on display on the the large screen in the Inspire main space is a multimedia work, in collaboration with centre staff.

Global Innovation & Entrepreneurship

A free Global Innovation & Entrepreneurship Forum will be held at the University of Canberra, 4 August 2012. This is part of the Innovation ACT 2012 completion for ANU, University of Canberra, ADFA and CIT students, but anyone can RSVP to attend. This worth attending just to see the advanced facilities of the Inspire Centre, where the event is being held.

This open to the public half-day forum will bring international influential entrepreneurs from different disciplines to discuss entrepreneurship and innovation within for-profit and non-profit scopes. This event will provide learning and networking opportunities. Participants will be encouraged to participate and interact with panel of speakers.

TEAL Teaching Room at University of Canberra

Last Friday to Saturday I attended Recent Changes Camp 2012, with Wikipedians, in the new TEAL Teaching Room of the "INSPIRE Centre" of the University of Canberra. TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning) is a room set up for a combination of short presentations and student group work.

The room has a flat floor with tables for up to nine students each (total capacity around 100). Normally the presenter stands in the middle of a TEAL room, cabaret style, with the students all around at the tables (the UoC room had the lectern in one corner of the room, but I assume it can be moved to the middle). There are projection screens on all four walls and the walls are entirely converted in white-board paint.

The UoC room is more flexible than than other TEAL rooms, in that there is no fixed furniture: all the tables are on wheels and fold up so they can be packed away. There are no computers provided. There are only a few power points around the walls and ion the center, where computers could be plugged in (people with laptops, rather than tablet computers tended to congregate at the power points).

This flexible room arrangement has the advantage that the room can be filled with rows of chairs for a traditional lecture. This looks a much better idea than the stepped floor approach with fixed furniture which some universities seem to be adopting for new buildings. The rooms with stepped floors and fixed furniture will be very inflexible. It will be very difficult to move furniture up onto the stepped parts of the room and a constant risk of it falling off the edge and injuring someone.

For the event I attended we reconfigured the room several times a day, with chairs in a circle for the morning and afternoon single group sessions, then bringing out the tables for small group work. The vast expanse of whiteboard wall proved very useful, allowing all notes from the three day event to be kept: we started in one corner on day one and worked our way all around the room, filling the last section during the closing session. This provided a very useful group memory.

What also proved useful was to use the projectors on different walls. For the single group sessions all projectors showed the same content. But for other sessions, each screen could show a different presentation for each of four groups.

Furniture in the Inspire Centre

The "INSPIRE Centre" at the University of Canberra has an interesting collection of new furniture designs for schools and other educational buildings. Interestingly, many of the items of furniture which would usually be be built in a library or school are freestanding units in the Inspire centre, providing for more flexible arrangement.

Swivel Chairs

There are Steelcase Node Chairs, with a circular six caster base, these chairs are very stable, but movable. The base doubles as a place to put a schoolbag and there is a large worksurface on an arm. The only real problem I found with the chair was that they were so stable that they will encourage the student to race them around the room. It would be useful if a friction brake could be incorporated in the casters, so that they could not move at more than a walking pace.

Carrels

There are single seat Carrels: these are freestanding three sided single seat booths, as usually used in libraries. The Inspire centre units are interesting as they are about two meters high and covered in gray felt, providing sound deadening. There is a desktop large enough for a laptop computer and paperwork, with a reading light.

There are two carrels arranged back to back. In terms of sound absorbtion, they would be better facing each other, with the two people setting back to back. Each unit would then shelid sound from the other.

Lockers

There is a column of freestanding storage lockers. Unlike the usual wall of lockers, this looks far less institutional. However, while the unit itself does not take up much space the area needed for access is large.


Podcast Room

There is a "podcast" room, which is essenitally a small soundproof audio recording studio. This is needed for recording high quality podcasts. Otherwise stray sounds, which are not evident to someone in the room can be distracting on recordings.

Emeco 111 Navy Chair

The " 111 Navy Chair" from Emeco is made from more than 100 plastic soft drink bottles. The chairs look like traditional wooden kitchen chairs in bright red. They feel very robust, but are uncomfortably heavy to move.

Tipsy chair/barstool
The Tipsy, designed by Tim Collins is a plastic barstool which can be inverted to be an armchair. The Inspire center uses these three on each side of a high bench, with a wall mounted screen at one end. The idea seems to be similar to the common "diner booth" arrangement I have seen in many learning commons. A small group of students sits facing each other and are able to share the large screen at one end. But in this case it is not clear what is added by having the table so high.

The stools are stable (despite their name "Tipsy"), but are more difficult to get in and out of than chairs. They are heavy and difficult to move, particularly on the non-slip rubber floor. The action of tipping the stools over to make chairs would be difficult for the average student and they might not want to sit in a chair where the arms have been rubbing around in the dirt, on the floor.

A standard desk height work surface, with either standard chairs (as used at ANU Hancock Building) or bench seating (as used in the Eora Exchange Student Lounge at UNSW), would seem to be preferable.

Recent Changes Camp 2012 Canberra Day One

Greetings from the closing session of the first day of Recent Changes Camp 2012 in Canberra. This is being held in the TEAL Teaching Room at the "INSPIRE Centre" of the University of Canberra. I learned that there is more to Wikipedia than just a collection of articles. There is an organization behind the Wikipedia, looking after the existing content and expanding its use, for the public good. There is funding to educate people on how to create new Wikipedia content and work with organizations. There is are also resources to help with educating on how to create wiki content and how to use Wikipedia in education.

The Wikimedia Strategy

The Wikimedia Movement Strategic Plan (to 2015 ) calls for "Women and other under represented groups will need to be invited/recruited, and the culture of WMF projects will need to be adjusted to accommodate them ..." (User:FloNight).

Wikipedia Outreach

The Wikipedia organizing has been successful at working with the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). I suggest that the Wikipedia organization could extend this to other knowledge workers, through their professional associations (such as IT professionals, film makers, scriptwriters and media).

Wikimedia and Education

Wikipedians would like to encourage teachers and students to create more content. At RCC2012 we discussed how this could be done. Wikipedia is seen as a problem in schools and universities with students being told not to use it. This is because Wikipedia is not a primary source, is of variable quality, is not something teachers grew up with and plagiarism by students. The way to address this, I suggest, is to provide teaching materials for teachers to incorporate responsible use of Wikipedia in their courses. A byproduct of this will be the creation of additional Wikipedia content by students and teachers.

The Wikipedia of Things

Someone else had already put up "Wikipedia Education" on the list of topics, so lacking a topic to suggest I wrote up "The Wikipedia of Things". The idea would be to use the "Internet of things" (intelligent devices connected to the Internet) to automatically update the Wikipedia, rather than having to wait for someone to enter the information.

The Inspire Centre Building

It was also to see the Inspire teaching spaces in operation. The centre is new and is still being fitted out. There is one standard size TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning) room where most sessions were held. All four walls of the room are painted with white-board paint. Three walls have projectors projecting directly onto the walls and one with a projection screen. The room is equipped with round tables accommodating nine people each. For increased flexibility the tables are made of two semicircular halves on wheels, with flip up tops. There is a computer equipped lectern on wheels in one corner of the room (this can be plugged into a socket in the floor in the middle of the room for "Cabaret" style presentations).

The TEAL room looks to the casual observer low tech (just a big square room with white walls), compared to other computer equipped rooms, with screens for each student bolted to the desk, stepped floors and all sorts of gizmos. But the TEAL room design has years of research behind it, on what actually improves education. Also with a flat floor and furniture which is not bolted to the floor (or tethered by cables) the room can be used very flexibly (think of it like the holodeck on the Star Ship Enterprise, which is about the same size).

Outside the TEAL room is a large common space, with a rubber floor, kitchenette and an assortment of informal group furniture. The centre is intended to introduce teachers to the use of technology in learning, so there is a slightly eclectic assortment of furniture. Most popular was a small circular pod which seats about four people. The walls are covered with cloth, providing a relatively private small group environment. There are some benches with LCD screens at the end and three stools on each side. There are bright red chairs which look like they are wooden, but are actually made from recycled plastic Coke bottles (these looked very durable but were very heavy). There are some chairs on circular wheeled bases with built in desks (these proved popular for pushing each other around on).

Recent Changes Camp 2012 Canberra This Week

Recent Changes Camp 2012 starts in Canberra on Friday (preceded by a dinner Thursday night). This is a free informal conference (an un-conference) on what Wikis can be used for (I will be discussing research and education on-line). It is being held at the University of Canberra's new high-tech teaching "INSPIRE Centre". The event runs until Sunday 22 January 2012: participants can attend any, or all, days.

INSPIRE Centre for ICT Pedagogy, Practice and Research

The University of Canberra has released the web site for their new Inspire Centre for ICT Pedagogy, Practice and Research. A building for the centre is due to be opened by the end of the year. The slide show about the centre shows a cabret style teaching room with ten nine seater circular tables each table with its own wall screen.

In partnership with the the ACT Department of Education and Training, the University of Canberra’s INSPIRE Centre seeks to lead ICT pedagogy and practice to advance a practical vision for educating with technology in the 21st Century. This vision will be informed by research and development on the innovative application of ICT to improve learning [...]