Ten Inspired Ideas for 2013 (In Case You Missed Them)

If you took a holiday from The Tyee over the holidays we salute you. Great sense of priorities! However that could mean you missed a series of articles we called Ten Inspiring Ideas for 2013.

It just wouldn't be fair to send you into the new year without those seeds of inspiration. So we've collected all 10 stories here with excerpts to give you a taste of each.

Idea #1: 'MOOC': Saviour of Higher Ed?

'Massive online open courses' may just quell the next student debt revolt.

Justin Ritchie predicts, "Future models of higher education will need to reduce costs, increase access and undergo a fundamental re-think of basic assumptions to achieve sustainability. One model for the future of the university could involve a hybrid of online and physical courses." Stanford, MIT and others are already doing that to teach tech. But what about agriculture and sustainability, two areas Ritchie says are going to be hot fields? That's a prime opportunity for UBC to combine computer course with learning, literally, in the field. Read more here.

Idea #2: Turn Complex Problems into Games

Have fun and save the world: It worked for one conundrum that boggled scientists for years.

"Well-designed games can be used to identify our most pressing situations, to educate the masses about them, to engage people in important issues that are not yet alarming them, to find solutions to the problems, and to communicate the findings. And, there's another reward: the process of playing the game itself," writes Nick Smith, who has a personal stake. He's a teacher.

"As an educator, my mind shoots straight to an issue I face daily -- getting the most at-risk students to persevere through high school despite their complicated lives.... A gamified environment just might draw them in." Read more here.

Idea #3: Want to Defeat Harper? Force Co-operation

Start by signing up to vote in the open Liberal leadership race.

Kai Nagata tweaked the twittersphere with his reason why some people who don't love the Liberals should join the party anyway and cast their votes for leader. "I say the person we elect as Liberal leader needs to be the person who most strongly commits to co-operating with other parties: first, to turf Harper, and second, to get everyone's input in crafting a new electoral system that's fair to all Canadians.

"We can force that discussion to happen, because we vastly outnumber the registered Liberal Party members who will be voting. We can offer a very tempting carrot -- and a sharp stick -- to any candidate willing to look beyond the Liberal rank-and-file and speak more broadly to Canadians. We can persuade them to make promises they'll have a hard time breaking. But first, we have to sign up in droves." Read more here.

Idea #4: Teach Teachers How to Be Advocates

Done delicately, it's critical for students' needs, says UBC's dean of education.

Katie Hyslop interviewed UBC Faculty of Education dean Bly Frank and others to assess the power of teachers to speak on behalf of those who can't vote: kids. Hyslop reported that elementary school teacher Donna Beegle feels she and her peers "are in the prime position to advocate for children in need. Beegle, who comes from generational poverty, is an anti-poverty advocate working with organizations to help them 'fight poverty, not the people who live in it.' "

"She's given workshops to BC Teachers' Federation (BCTF) locals in Prince George, Surrey and Vancouver, and is often quoted by educators advocating against poverty in B.C. 'If I see injustice in any area -- poverty, or if a child with autism isn't getting their needs met -- I should be speaking up. That's what creates democracy,' said Beegle." Okay, but are there limits? Read more here.

Idea #5: 'You Are Not a Loan'

Occupy spin-off buys debt for pennies on the dollar, forgives debtors, shames predator bankers.

Sarah Berman's piece ran on the slowest day for news, Christmas, yet received the most traffic of any of the Ten Inspiring Ideas. "In November, Aleksandra Perisic and members of Strike Debt launched the Rolling Jubilee, an initiative that buys up debt only to erase it. Described as a bailout for the people, the project uses online donations to purchase debt in secondary markets (where collectors pay pennies on the dollar for loans already charged off by the banks). Instead of employing aggressive bounty-hunting tactics, Occupiers forgive the debt.

"It's a symbolic gesture, allowing a few Americans struggling with out-of-control medical, credit card and student debt to start fresh." Read more here.

Idea #6: Assess the Public Health Impact of New Laws

How many Canadian lives are sacrificed with every policy decision?

Crawford Kilian wondered why, given environmental assessments, we don't require a similar public health assessment when crafting new laws and regulations. "Political decisions don't have to involve wars to affect public health. Seven people died in Walkerton in 2000, and 2,500 fell ill, because Ontario's Harris government didn't want to spend money on maintaining water-quality standards.

"Or consider the public health impact when a municipality approves a new suburban development. The residents who commute to work will burn more gasoline than they would if they lived in the city. The resulting air pollution will have a harmful effect on both those residents and those living near their routes -- especially those who are already in poor health or with chronic conditions." Read more.

Idea #7: Make 'Affordable' the New 'Livable'

How creative, green or great is a city if no one can afford to live there?

Christine McLaren, whose beat is sustainable cities, wants urban design brainiacs to put more thought into affordability. She noticed recently "to my horror that the majority of so-called 'livability indexes' like those of Mercers or EIU don't include affordability in their criteria, which goes a long way in explaining how Vancouver has managed to continuously crown such lists.

"This is a big deal for more than one reason. Affordability is an equity issue, of course. But there is an even less philosophical, and more pragmatic aspect to it, especially in North America. That is, the reason we are putting so much effort into our cities today is not just because good, livable cities are fun -- though they are. It is because they are necessary to attract the critical density needed to achieve our environmental and social goals."

Idea #8: Time for a CBC Right to Food Day

Public broadcaster should launch it instead of pushing the failed food bank charity model.

UBC emeritus professor of social work Graham Riches argues, "Since the mid 1980s, the CBC along with the private media, the food, finance and transportation industries, professional sports, ... rock musicians and schools have slowly succeeded in socially constructing the issue of hunger as a matter for charity. It is now the norm with the CBC's annual food bank drives playing a crucial role in shaping this public attitude.

"Why not spend a day making the case for the right to food?" Graham challenges CBC execs. "Reliance on food charity undermines and prevents our understanding of hunger as a political question and access to food as a fundamental human right, the ... responsibility of elected government." Read more here.

Idea #9: Smartphones: The New Automobile

Cars made cities sprawling and impersonal, but that handheld gadget will change them again.

Nigel Dembicki, Genta Ishimura and Ian Lowrie say the car "resulted in sprawling cities and big-box stores. Smartphone users, too, enjoy unparalleled freedom and connectivity. But they demand much less physical infrastructure. Quite the opposite: the rise of the smartphone is making cities more dense and accessible." They go on to cite examples ranging from food trucks and car co-ops to virtual supermarkets, all thriving because of social media via hand-held mobile devices are creating virtual neighbourhoods. Read more here.

Idea #10: The Reinvention of Nearly Everything.

How open ideas, venture collectivism and the hacker ethic are changing the world.

We gave last word on the first day of 2013 to Phillip Smith, who is The Tyee's lead web designer. On New Year's he described a fast emerging "positive feedback loop" that empowers citizens rather than gatekeepers by allowing "rapid innovation in core technologies -- smaller, faster, components -- which then fuel new innovations in other areas (Steven Johnson, in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, called these 'adjacent possibles'). Those innovations in turn contribute to new ways of thinking about pre-existing problems. Those ideas iterate rapidly over the Internet. Sites like TED.com work to curate and promote those ideas; sites like Kickstarter use video to improve the ideas and build a community around them, and sites like Instructables work to disseminate them back out to a growing global community of DIY enthusiasts and hackers, who then feed the results back again via the Internet. All in the blink of an eye.

"The result is potentially world-changing technological outcomes." Read more here.

There. Aren't you glad we pulled these ideas out of the box before putting them away with all of last year's Tyee stories?

You can also find the entire Inspired Ideas for 2013 series here. Send it around!

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Wishing you an extremely inspired 2013!