The Conference Idea

Idea avoidance: reflections on a conference and its language

Purpose – This paper aims to offer a personal reflection on the 2012 joint conference of the American Society for Cybernetics and the Bateson Idea Group, “An Ecology of Ideas”. The intent is to raise awareness, through examples, of ideas – and their associated ways of thinking – that the author tends to take for granted in the work as systems theorists as well as in everyday life, yet ideas tha...

Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea

I a wide variety of settings, organizations generate a number of possible solutions to a problem—ideas—and then select a few for further development. We examine the effectiveness of two group structures for such tasks—the team structure, in which the group works together in time and space, and the hybrid structure, in which individuals first work independently and then work together. We define ...

The Idea in Brief The Idea in Practice

Success and survival conference: a novel idea to resonate an underutilized concept in medical education

Since the publication of the Flexner Report on medical education and the creation of the Hospital Standardization Program by the American College of Surgeons in the early 1900s, morbidity and mortality (M&M) conference started to evolve gradually into medical education. Nowadays, it is a well-recognized educational activity which is usually taught periodically to improve medical education in bo...

What's the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power

A key to understanding why School is what it is lies in recognizing a systematic tendency to deform ideas in specific ways in order to make them fit into a pedagogical framework. One of these deformations is described here as " disempowering ideas. " The insight leads to a new direction for innovation in education: re-empowering the disempowered ideas. Doing so is not easy: it needs a new epist...