Cultivating Creativity

The wonderful Web is full of free design resources for every creative mind. In amongst the stuff out there that isn’t very usable, many kind souls have put time and effort into developing quality resources with open-source access for all. Check out this short list below of 5 of the best sites with free design resources for all of your highly creative learners.

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.

“When we have a rich meta-strategic base for our thinking, that helps us to be more independent learners,” said Project Zero senior research associate Ron Ritchhart at a Learning and the Brain conference. “If we don’t have those strategies, if we aren’t aware of them, then we’re waiting for someone else to direct our thinking.”

Helping students to “learn how to learn” or in Ritchhart’s terminology, become “meta-strategic thinkers” is crucial for understanding and becoming a life-long learner. To discover how aware students are of their thinking at different ages, Ritchhart has been working with schools to build “cultures of thinking.” His theory is that if educators can make thinking more visible, and help students develop routines around thinking, then their thinking about everything will deepen.

His research shows that when fourth graders are asked to develop a concept map about thinking, most of their brainstorming centers around what they think and where they think it. “When students don’t have strategies about thinking, that’s how they respond – what they think and where they think,” Richhart said. Many fifth graders start to include broad categories of thinking on their concept maps like “problem solving” or “understanding.” Those things are associated with thinking, but fifth graders often haven’t quite hit on the process of thinking.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/learning-path-for-professional-21st-century-learning-by-ict-practice/

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/design-the-learning-of-your-learners-students-ideas/

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.

So how do you visualize your ideas?

Your old standby bar graphs and pie charts are just the tip of the iceberg — it’s not uncommon now to see executives and professionals of all stripes working on visuals instead of hunkering down at the keyboard for a long session of pecking away in Word.

The people over at Funders & Founders shared this interesting infographic recently, with 33 different ways to visualize your ideas. Unleash your inner creative and challenge yourself to try one of these visual formats the next time you need to pitch your idea to a colleague or client....