Cultivating Creativity

Currently, dramatic changes take place in terms of rapidly emerging modes of communication, technologies, increased cultural diversity, evolving workplaces cultures, new challenges for equitable education and the varying and changing identities of students everywhere. Bearing this in mind, this article draws on a design-based research study to argue of the need for museums to respond to global trends and fulfill their social and educational imperatives by investigating the potential of a particular pedagogical framework that is grounded in culturally inclusive pedagogical practices and characteristics of ubiquitous learning.

Via Andreas Christodoulou

The contemporary business world lauds those who are seen as creative. Innovators such as Elon Musk and Jony Ive have become household names. Yet, for many of us, despite our best efforts to be recognized as creative thinkers, our suggestions in meetings are ignored and our pitches to bosses get rebuffed.

If your colleagues have already formed an opinion of you as technically competent but a little staid, it’s going to take a lot to change their minds and get them to listen — a situation that’s especially true for women, who, research suggests, are often unfairly viewed as less creative than men.

Via The Learning Factor, Jim Lerman

The contemporary business world lauds those who are seen as creative. Innovators such as Elon Musk and Jony Ive have become household names. Yet, for many of us, despite our best efforts to be recognized as creative thinkers, our suggestions in meetings are ignored and our pitches to bosses get rebuffed.

If your colleagues have already formed an opinion of you as technically competent but a little staid, it’s going to take a lot to change their minds and get them to listen — a situation that’s especially true for women, who, research suggests, are often unfairly viewed as less creative than men.

Via The Learning Factor, Karen E Smith

You stare at a blank screen for what seems like hours, waiting for your brain to come up with a brilliant idea, and it never comes. There has to be a better way to brainstorm, right?

 

There is--and it might be as simple as doing the laundry.

 

In the new book The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking, Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack--former faculty members of Stanford's Start X incubator program--explain how breakthrough insights come about. The two describe these insights as "that feeling of sudden clarity when you feel the answer staring you in the face."

 

"The biggest misconception about breakthroughs is that they're accidental or that they're spontaneous," says Fox Cabane. "But in reality that aha! moment is just the tip of the iceberg. It is the single conscious moment you have at the end of a very long, complex, unconscious process."

 

To understand how to prime the human brain for creative breakthroughs, one must first understand what parts of the brain help power them. As Fox Cabane and Pollack explain, the brain has two networks: the executive network, which is the "goal-oriented" part of your brain that you access to complete an action; and the default network, the part of your brain that's home to what the authors call the "genius lounge," or the place where creative insights lie. But, to access the genius lounge, your brain needs to tune out the executive network.

Via The Learning Factor