Steven Johnson has spent twenty years immersed in creative industries, was active at the dawn of the internet and has a unique perspective that draws on his fluency in fields ranging from neurobiology to new media. Why have cities historically been such hubs of innovation? What do the printing press and Apple have in common? And what does this have to do with the creation and evolution of life itself?
By recognizing where and how patterns of creativity occur – whether within a school, a software platform or a social movement – he shows how we can make more of our ideas good ones.
"The recent international OECD-CCE-Singapore workshop gave 30 education decision-makers from 12 countries the opportunity to share the lessons from Asian educational initiatives aiming to foster pupils’ creativity and critical thinking. While most of these initiatives build on project-based, research-based, and other active pedagogies, some start to use design thinking methods to scaffold the learning of innovation skills.
"Singapore and Korea are two good examples of countries emphasising creativity, critical thinking and character building in their curricula. Since 2009, Korea expects its schools to foster creativity as part of quality subject-based learning – but also to devote almost 10% of overall school time to projects and other transversal activities that foster creativity. As for Singapore, their “Desired Outcomes of Education” include critical and inventive thinking as well as social and emotional competences. At the end of secondary school, among other things students are expected to be “resilient in the face of adversity”, “innovative and enterprising” as well as “able to think critically and communicate persuasively”.
"If Peter’s Laws shed light on how creative geniuses approach game-changing creativity, then I should be able to turn them into questions ANYONE can use to push their own extreme creativity.
"A sampling of extreme creativity questions you can use to take a big swing at game-changing results:
-What would be bigger & bolder than anything you have ever done and potentially impossible for you to pull off successfully?
-What BIG, new & radical things are the smartest people & organizations (regardless of industry) doing that you need to do too?
-What even more outlandish things would you do if there were no rules?
--If someone tells you “no,” what are you going to do to go around or above them and keep going?
-What would you be doing if you could never hear any objections people might raise?
-What can you do to dramatically speed up every element of the big projects you are working on right now?
-What can you do that is completely opposite of anything typical or expected?-What would you do if your goal were to be 100x bigger or more impressive than you are today
-What will create impossible-to-ignore buzz daily about what you’re doing and accomplishing?
"Pointing these questions at your strategic objective will yield multiple game-changing possibilities to pursue."
"Excellent collection of scholarly papers on the topics of knowledge, creativity, and communication, especially in relation to children, schools and families."
Excellent collection of scholarly papers on the topics of knowledge, creativity, and communication, especially in relation to children, schools and families.
There’s an ongoing argument in the technology world about whether tablets and smartphones are more focused on consumption than creativity. As time has gone on, though, the number of apps helping us do more than passively read, watch and listen has grown. Many also fall into a longer heritage of technology that democratises activities like film-making, photography and music-making. Video and photography apps now contain editing features based on those used in professional software, but made accessible enough for anyone to use in a couple of taps, and music-making apps are reducing the barrier to making listenable sounds. In all cases, this isn’t about you suddenly becoming a professional just because an app is holding your hand – instead, it’s about opening up the experience of artistic creation to a wider audience.
Just what you're looking for "Heard about an exciting new Google program? Want to learn everything about your favorite tool? We've collected help, training lessons, and educator-created materials for all our products."
" The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) embarked on a research programme, sponsored by Google, to examine to what extent the skills taught in education systems around the world are changing. For example, are so-called 21st-century skills, such as leadership, digital literacy, problem solving and communication, complementing traditional skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic? And do they meet the needs of employers and society more widely?"
Math teacher Laura Kretschmar gave students a rubric with specific goals around collaboration, communication and instructions to use various functions in the program, but not a lot else. She’s intentionally giving them a lot of freedom to play with the program, create cool designs and figure out what the functions do.
“I think “y” means, like, going up,” says Juritzy Maldonado. “So to pull it up, I’m going to try to change the number.” She punches in 200 for “y” and watches the image she’s creating shift upward. Another group discovers that if they hit “repeat” multiple times, they can create a parachute-like design that they’ve figured out how to color in various ways. That wasn’t their original plan, but they’re running with it now.
Director Robert Rodriguez has had plenty of experience with seeing his creative projects come to life, and his advice for people looking to get something off...
Creativity as a stream in life without boxes. We think of it as a separate function and get blocked. Listen to Rodriquez tell how he does it. Very insightful
Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.
There's an undeniable link between wellbeing and creativity in the office. Learn how it can boost employee engagement, relationship building and trust.
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow." TED talk from 2008.
It's not until we encounter an unexpected hurdle that the chains of cognition are loosened, and we experience newfound access to creativity. Frontal Cortex blogger Jonah Lehrer explains why.
"What is Creativity made of? Where do ideas come from, and how can you get more of them? How can you make them better? What happens when there is no box to think outside of? Jason Theodor, a long-standing Creative Director in the digital advertising world, has asked himself these questions for years. These are his observations from the field, and his tools for ideation.
This presentation breaks down the creative method and explores the fundamental elements of creativity. It describes multiple systems for idea generation, problem solving, and originality. It emphasizes the importance of routines, explains appropriate brainstorming techniques, and much more: all with unexpected examples and takeaways.
If you want to live a more creative life, or give yourself an edge in the Age of Ideas, this presentation is a must see."
"It is our contention that schools need to develop creativity in students just as much as they need to produce literate and numerate learners. Yet across the educational world there is no widely used definition of what creativity is, no agreed framework for assessing its development in schools and few assessment tools specifically designed to track learners’ progress.
"If creativity is to be taken more seriously by educators and educational policy-makers then we need to be clearer about what it is. We also need to develop an approach to assessing it which is both rigorous enough to ensure credibility and user-friendly enough to be used by busy teachers. "
Liberty Elementary, in Riverside, California, is bringing this idea inside and outside of the classroom, by building multi-themed learning stations for students to explore interests and produce “passion projects.”
Without having to leave the school campus, the LRNG Innovation Challenge grant-winning team created several student-centered, hands-on learning spaces. In a district that is working toward a personalized learning model, which emphasizes the importance of a student-centric approach over a teacher-driven one, teachers at Liberty Elementary interviewed students to identify interest areas and learning styles, ensuring that the project would keep students excited and strengthen skill sets. With full support from other instructors and school administration, a resource teacher and the team leading literacy coach, Norma Rodriguez, crafted and oversaw the project plan. As they gathered the information on student interests, Rodriguez also worked with teachers to match their personal interests and areas of expertise with the student activities.
Many academics and businesses have made inroads into this field. Management guru Peter Drucker identified the role of knowledge workers and, long before the dot-com era, warned of the perils of trying to “bribe” them with stock options and other crude financial incentives. This view is supported by the research of Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile and Yale University’s Robert Sternberg, which shows that creative people are motivated from within and respond much better to intrinsic rewards than to extrinsic ones. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at Claremont Graduate University in California has documented the factors that generate creativity and its positive effects on organizations, advancing the concept of “flow”—the feeling people get when their activities require focus and concentration but are also incredibly enjoyable and rewarding.
"While most students of the creative process have focused on what makes individuals creative, a growing number of thinkers such as Andrew Hargadon at the University of California, Davis, and John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox, are unlocking the social and management contexts in which creativity is most effectively nurtured, harnessed, and mobilized. Eric von Hippel of MIT and Henry Chesbrough of the University of California, Berkeley, have called attention to the critical role played by users and customers in the creative process and to a new model of “open innovation.” Duke University’s Wesley Cohen has shown that corporate creativity depends upon a firm’s “absorptive capacity”—the ability of its research and development units not just to create innovations but to absorb them from outside sources. Business history is replete with examples of companies—from General Electric and Toyota to the design-intensive Electronic Arts, Pixar, and IDEO—that have tapped into the creativity of workers from a wide range of disciplines, as well as the creativity of users and customers, to become more innovative, more efficient, or both."
According to a powerful report from the World Innovation Summit for Education, education is failing to respond to changing economies thus leaving students unprepared to thrive in the modern workplace. Fortunately, sparks of hope are being lit around the world as teachers learn ways to turn their classrooms into engaging creative communities that empower students for success in school, life, and employment.
Partners for Youth Empowerment (PYE), founded by Ashoka Fellow Charlie Murphy and Peggy Taylor MEd is part of a growing global movement to transform education through an emphasis on fostering creativity and social/emotional skills. Through its Creative Classroom Training series, PYE enables educators to engage their students using a framework called the Creative Community Model. Refined over 20 years of practice, the model employs a powerful blend of creative facilitation, experiential learning, and arts empowerment techniques. The model is based on the idea that we are all creative and that teachers do not have to be professional artists to infuse arts-based practices into their curriculum.
VIDEO OF 45 MINUTE CONFERENCE PRESENTATION IN MAY 2015
"Interactive widgets, rich resources and engaging learning experiences are great goals to have but how do you do it? You don’t have to be a great designer to design great learning. Re‑thinking learning can actually help us develop materials and supports that are innovative and can inspire learners. This session will explore a process for getting started, examine some real products and engage participants in the process. Let’s Think – Make – Do."
A documentary video project by RCA Production. It is a group assignment of Digital Media Technologies course. Sincere thanks to talent Leandro Marcelino. Cam...
In many cases, compromise can stifle creativity. In her talk, Mende Smith describes how her artistic life developed over the years and shares her "7 rules" t...
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