Innovation at HIT – The Good, The Bad, The Difficult

“Innovation differs from improvement in that innovation refers to the notion of doing something differently rather than doing the same thing better.”

-from Wikipedia

At HIT, we now have a center for innovation. We try to do things differently. Like inviting students for a free lunch (but they have to attend a lecture by Rachel Mendelovitz on table manners while they are eating). Right in the middle of the cafeteria. 

That event was very successful. Students will do almost anything for a free meal. And yes, they were very polite. 

We manage to bring many events into the college. TEDx, Ramon Breakthrough, BirdBrain unconference, and more. Hopefully, more and more students from HIT will attend.

Perhaps we need to consider giving them academic credits for attending education- and technology- related conferences. 

We have started a special exhibit enabling students to showcase their work at the college.

We bring successful entrepreneurs and luminaries to the college to share their stories and life experiences with the students. A recent luminary was Lior Manor, who was so fired up that he almost set the studio ablaze. Have a look. 

We had a pirate day, as part of our course on creative thinking. It was the students’ idea. They converted the cafeteria deck into a ship’s deck, hoisted the pirates’ flag, pillaged and plundered, and created other minor havoc. 

To top off pirate day, we asked legal expert Eyal Brook to volunteer to give a lecture on internet pirating and intellectual property. His talk was so intriguing that several students who happened to be passing by joined the class.

I love when students attend lectures just because they are curious to learn!

Another project is our weekly jam sessions, where staff and students perform together, playing songs that are part of our academic course on music of the sixties. In this manner, courses are able to flow out of the classroom and reach out.  

We recently inaugurated “The Place”, a new home on campus for creative activities (it used to be a tv studio many years ago) We are making it available for all kinds of events related to education. We recently hosted an edu-hackathon. Barefoot innovators from all walks of education wandered around campus!

We want to encourage our students towards interdisciplinary thought. We recently created a permanent exhibition consisting of four poems of Shlomit Cohen-Assif, illustrated by Daniella Koffler. The poems traverse the physical and the meta-physical worlds. 

I hope that students will realize that art and science have a lot to do with one another. 

We want our students to be curious and observant. Dov Peleg, our CEO, had a dream of a ‘science park’ where students and locals could learn science while having fun at the same time. To that end we have made a series of stimulating scientific exhibits and spread them around the campus to ignite curiosity. One of these is the ‘harmonic swing’. The two swing work in harmony with one another, based on physical principles. 

The folks responsible for many of these science-related projects at HIT are volunteers: Didi Vardi, Hagai Cohen and Dr. Alon Amit. It’s great that HIT can count on their loyalty and generosity. 

Other exhibits include the electricity-generating wind pipe, and the chaos machine. More are on the way. 

The most colorful and flamboyant exhibit of the science park is the giant magnetic graffiti wall. We tell the students it’s the largest magnetic graffiti wall in the academic worldw (and haven’t been contradicted yet). Our student Nofar Barkow makes amazing pixelated artwork which morphs continuously. 

We brought a bunch of google glass “freaks” to the college. They created quite a spectacle. Our President tried out a pair. 

A bunch of students are interested in developping apps. We had better get a glass or two!

At HIT, we want education to flow into and out of the college. We are preparing a series of short interviews on scientific topics for the general public. Here’s one. 

We want faculty and students to embrace new ideas, to challenge and question dogmas, to actively suggest alternative approaches, to be proactively disruptive, and to encourage interdisciplinary thinking. We want them to consider new teaching paradigms, such as flipped classroom and online courses. As with any innovative process, it’s a slow burn.

But it is happening!