"Lets mix my jelly with your eggs" metaphors

[Zoidberg is trying to attract a mate]
Dr. Zoidberg: [screeching] Craw.
Female: Keep your jelly away from my eggs.
Dr. Zoidberg: [screeching] Craw.
Female:  I'm SO not interested.
Dr. Zoidberg: [screeching] Craw?
Female: I've heard THAT line before.

I don’t know about you but recently I find myself dusted with metaphorical male gametes several times each day  – the dusting comes in emails, phone conversations, and when attending workshops and meetings. 

Seems there is a new metaphor let loose in the educational landscapes of the wobbly isles.  And as befits Gladwell’s  “tipping point” its distribution has reached that point where everyone I nudged up against this week introduced it into the conversation.

The ab/use of the metaphor for normal sexual connection in the plant kingdom has reached a critical mass in educational conversation – so much so that that the next person who invites me to a  “cross pollination meeting” will be told in normal invertebrate sex talk to “Keep your jelly away from my eggs”

Tom Kelley, author of "Ten Faces of Innovation" talks of the cross-pollinator, who "can create something new and better through an unexpected juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts".

It seems that the cross-pollinate metaphor  is intended to capture a sense of Koestler’s (1970) argument that creative activity, be it in humour, discovery or art is the result of a bisociative act. These are acts that juxtapose two ideas that normally do not get thought of together.  Bisociation demands flexibility and establishes an unstable equilibrium that leads to creative originality. 

But I don’t think the "cross pollination metaphor" works well with respect to Koestler’s thinking.

The botanist in me rejects the notion that an unstable equilibrium and innovation could result from a metaphor for a biological system that is so cleverly designed to go together.

Pollination – the transfer of male gametes onto the sticky stigma of the female carpel is all about sexual connection.  Pollination occurs within the same flower (self pollination - pollen dusting onto the stigma of the same flower ) and between different flowers of the same species (cross pollination – pollen dusted onto the stigma of a different flower of the same species).  Cross pollination within the same species is common within the plant kingdom and does not conjure up images of two things that do not normally get together. 

“Lets hybridise” might be a better catch phrase – but even hybridization (pollination between flowers of different species of the same genus) does not occur between two widely different species. 

My argument is that cross pollination does not capture the extraordinary connection – the association of two things that do not normally get thought of together.  The metaphor lacks that sense of dislocation that creative originality requires. It is like an invitation to mix my jelly with your eggs.

Rather than an opportunity to bring ideas from widely different fields together cross pollination makes me think of the reverse situation – an invitation to “cross pollinate” is an invitation to bring a whole load of similar thinkers together so we can reinforce each others beliefs, maintain the status quo. 

We’ve got another cross pollination event coming up at next week’s Home Group Meeting – the focus on "New ways of Assessing for New Learning Environments".  I have offered to run a session on “A provocative look at the MoE ms response documents as tools for assessing new learning.” But have yet to hear whether it will be accepted.

Thinking about these Home Group Meetings is why I enjoyed Teemu’s post on No one ever got fired for buying LMS this week. Teemu looked at the research around group thinking and how although groups might make good decisions about already created solutions in a bewildered herd like way they are rubbish at finding problems or creating solutions

This interested me because there has been a great wave of Kanagawa like surge in education related online learning communities in New Zealand.  Everyone has their own online group/learning community space. Yet if you check out how many people actually belong to these groups, look at the discussion threads or even the edit history they don’t really qualify as participatory - there is little sense of a group or even community in the usual sense of the word.  More individual than communal.

Even more disappointing is the evidence of thoughtful discussion when these online groups meet face to face. In face to face meetings group members seem to be looking for ideas to assimilate rather than ideas they might have to accommodate.   Teemu’s “Because, everybody is having Learning Management Systems, we must have one, too” conversations are rife. The exchanges awash with self approbation and the flotsam and jetsam of  constructivist learner centred rhetoric about authentic tasks mixed with Prentskyisms about engage me or enrage me and digital natives. They are in truth face to face conversations about the importance of change that inhibit change, reinforce the status quo and seek reassurance rather than challenge.

I enjoyed Teemu’s analysis of this effect whereby “People seem to end-up to some same decisions because everybody else is taking the same decision.”

Back to the topic: Now we know that crowds are not good at setting problems. How could we teach, guide or help people to learn to ask good questions? When there are good questions it is much easier to come-up with good solutions.
To work with real problems and solutions you need close peer-groups. You must feel free and comfortable to ask naïve and hard questions So, from whom to do you ask these questions? With whom do you come up with possible solutions to the problems?

(1) From your mother and father, from your best teachers, your close friends; or

(2) from the feeds in your PLE and the blogosphere?

To put it in the fashionable terms of “networks” you basically ask (good) questions from and with the people with whom you have strong links. In his theory of social ties, Granovetters (1973) gives the following factors for strength of a tie: amount of time spent, emotional intensity, intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal service associated with the tie.

Teemu’s post makes me realize that invitations to cross pollinate in home group meetings are probably completely appropriate for the expected thinking outcomes of groups who have not spent much time together, groups who lack an emotional intensity, an intimacy and the reciprocal service associated with the tie.

“Lets mix my jelly with your eggs” metaphors - inappropriate for innovation but completely OK for group think.