NSF Awards I-CHASS $97,991 Grant for Radical Innovation Summit

October 15, 2012 – Urbana, IL

The National Science Foundation has award the Institute for Computing in
Humanities Arts and Social Science (I-CHASS) $97,991.00 for the proposal
“Radical Innovation Summit.” The meeting will convene leading
practitioners and scholars of innovation to collectively consider how
education might be reconfigured. Summit participants will identify and
articulate strategies for creating and sustaining learning environments that
promote the development of innovative thinking skills, behaviors,
dispositions and that reward students, faculty and administrators for
practicing and tuning these skills. The Summit will leverage current ideas
around innovation as a foundation for thinking about how to operationalize
these ideas and practices in education, across the pre-K to college
spectrum. Hosted in Spring 2013 by I-CHASS at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Washington DC Access Center, the two-day
Summit will bring together leaders in innovation from across a wide variety
of disciplines. Invited participants will include disruptive education
innovators from academia, industry, and government to bring a broader view
of innovation to the gathering.

An immediate anticipated outcome is that the Summit will explicitly identify
and articulate strategies for implementing innovative education into pre-K
– college curricula. The Summit will be organized to create an open
environment for creative thinking and collaborative strategizing, with the
ultimate goal of producing ideas that help incorporate “design thinking”
into pedagogical approaches. By design thinking, the Summit means to
designate a process that begins with formulating new ideas, leads to new
creations, and ends in a transformed ecology of ideas, resources, models and
tools. A wiki or other private online space will be created where
participants will be encouraged to continue discussions or comment further
on ideas generated over the course of the two days. Mapping social networks
of and among participants will provide insights into how innovative
practices are shared and spread across relationships and networks. The
organizers will also make aspects of the Summit available to educators, by
making areas of the wiki available to educators and researchers.

Intended broader impacts of the Summit are (1) to be able to offer educators
and policy makers concrete suggestions for “next steps” in
operationalizing innovation in educational settings, (2) participants will
take away ideas to implement in their own teaching practices and become
innovation evangelists in sharing new strategies with colleagues, and (3)
participants will become models or mentors to an extended network of
educators as they prepare students to become innovative contributors in
their courses, future employment, and as US and global citizens. Evaluation
of the Summit will include a mapping of social networks that form among
participants, which will provide insights into the “reach” of the Summit
and the connections participants pursue with other radical innovators.
Organizers expect to be able to get a sense of how ideas about innovation
spread beyond the Summit and the degree to which the Summit fosters new
connections among innovators.

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ABOUT I-CHASS

The Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science (I-CHASS)
charts new ground in high-performance computing and the human sciences.
Founded at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and located at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications, I-CHASS creates learning
environments and spaces for digital exploration and discovery; presenting
leading-edge research, computational resources, collaborative tools, and
educational programming to showcase the future of the humanities, arts, and
social science.

For more information on I-CHASS, please visit: