World-Shaker

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Introduction to Creativity - FREE PDFs

It’s all free here on iTunes (and you can subscribe to the podcasts too!). 

"Young people today have lots of experience… interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating [or] expressing themselves with new technologies. It’s almost as if they can read but not write."

—

MIT Media Labs’ Mitch Resnick | Everyone Should Code  (via courtenaybird)

I’m a huge supporter of encouraging students to use technology to create things, and then to share them in some way with the world around them. Aside from encouraging them to be global citizens, I think it has the positive side effect of giving them ownership of content, and the experience of actively wanting other people to share their work with proper attribution (which helps reinforce the importance of not plagiarizing others).

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MindMeister is an online mind mapping software that works like an extension of your brain. Think of it as a digital catch basin for your team’s best ideas — team members can contribute to business plans within the tool. Creative minds can piece together the big plan section by section. After the initial steps are laid out, they can be tweaked and assigned. But the app has uses cases far beyond business. If you’re planning a vacation, creating a budget or even studying for an exam, MindMeister can help you organize and visualize your big thoughts and little details in a coherent way.

Conduct Your Most Epic Brainstorm Sessions on MindMeister

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Life and learning.

(Source: smbc-comics.com)

"

In solving a problem, you often have to make connections between two things that aren’t usually connected. You know, E.M. Forster, the novelist, was asked, “What are your words of wisdom for future generations?” He said, “Only connect.”

An inventor might search for the two substances to put together. In the case of the poet, it’s the two words or three words. With a musician, it’s the notes or the rhythms. Whatever it is, your brain often suppresses such idle connections because you’re busy with the business of the day. You’re doing whatever you’re supposed to do. But there come times when you’re no longer doing what you’re supposed to do and you’re just kind of rambling, making strange connections…

"

— In discussing the art of songwriting, Pete Seeger speaks to the power of combinatorial creativity, which Steve Jobs referred to when he famously said that “creativity is just connecting things” and which some of history’s greatest scientific minds attested to. (via explore-blog)

Why Learning Should Be Messy →

A must-read, and probably the best article I’ve seen in a few months.

Why hasn’t project-based learning picked up yet? There are a few reasons. First, the model of education says principal Chris Lehmann where kids sit in rows, read textbooks, and hear lectures has lasted so long, because it never goes that wrong. “It’s boring as hell, but most principals don’t yell at their teachers if they walk by their classroom and all they see is a quiet classroom with kids reading the textbook. No one gets in trouble.”

“If you go into a classroom,” says Lehmann, “where there isn’t that structure, kids aren’t exactly on pace, projects look messy, and it’s loud, teachers have gotten in trouble for that.”

Second, the way students attempt to learn via projects does not work. Tulley says, “It amounts to kit-based experiences in 45 minute periods. ‘We’re going to do a biology kit.’ We already know that those recipe like exercises do not stimulate creativity.”

I also spoke with Harvard Professor Eric Mazur on this issue as well. He says, “You can have students do laboratories and hands-on activities and learn nothing, because they are following the cookbook and going through the motions without having their brains on. The word ‘hands-on’ is overused and abused.”

The role of the teacher in project-based learning as Laufenberg likes to say is an “architect of opportunity. Through a scaffolding strategy, they help us make sense of what we have learned. Still, teachers must understand that learning is uncomfortable, messy, and complicated.”

explore-blog:

Unprecedented look at the creative process of infographic storyteller Nicholas Felton of Feltron Report fame, from this year’s EyeO Festival.

"Creativity is, in a nutshell, a bit crazy - and most crazy people are too disorganized to do much. But geniuses require to be a bit crazy, yet also do prolonged focused work - and this is a reason why there are so few of them.

So - high intelligence is very rare (and some societies have too low an average intelligence to generate more than a tiny proportion of very intelligent people).

Within this tiny group of highly intelligent people, on top of all this, to get the coincidence of a creative way of thinking with a sufficiently persevering personality type is very rare.

And among this small percentage of a small percentage, there are the workings of sheer luck, there is the higher than normal risk of (self) sabotage by mental illness and addiction, there are the problems of a higher than usual probability of an abrasive or antisocial personality - and (as Murray identifies) the likelihood that for a person to aim very high requires a belief in transcendental values (the beautiful, the truth, virtue) - and that some societies (such as our own) lack this belief.

Put all these together and it is clear why in all societies genius is rare; and why genius is completely absent from most societies."

—

- Bruce Charlton, Why Genius Is So Rare

(h/t wildcat2030)

(Source: nextbigfuture.com)

"So how can we improve the situation? The first thing we should do is broaden our definition of effective classroom thinking. Although we often discourage daydreaming in students - we see the wandering mind as a wasted mind - studies show that people who daydream more score higher on tests of creativity. The same lesson also applies to students who are easily distracted. According to the latest research, these kids are significantly more likely to be eminent creative achievers in the real world. (So are students with attention deficit disorders, provided they’ve got moderately high IQ scores.) The point is that our current pedagogy is mostly designed to encourage focused cognition, teaching pupils to stare straight ahead at the blackboard and absorb information. Creativity, however, often requires a very different kind of thought process. Students need to learn how to pay attention, of course. But they also need to learn how to productively daydream. And this is why arts education is so important. Like most skills, creativity is best learned by doing. Kids don’t learn how to be creative by sitting in lectures about the creative process, or getting history lessons on American innovation. Rather, they learn how to be creative by creating things, by flexing their own imagination."

—

I don’t have the energy to decry the repeated slashed funding of the arts right now, but this quote really put things in context. There’s more to it if you click through.

Response: Several Ways We Can Help Students Develop Their Creativity

A 5-Step Technique for Producing Ideas circa 1939 →

Young proposes two key principles for creating — that an idea is a new combination and that the ability to generate new combinations depends on the ability to see relationships between different elements.

The first [principle is] that an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.

[…]

The second important principle involved is that the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships. Here, I suspect, is where minds differ to the greatest degree when it comes to the production of ideas. To some minds each fact is a separate bit of knowledge. To others it is a link in a chain of knowledge. It has relationships and similarities. It is not so much a fact as it is an illustration of a general law applying to a whole series of facts.

A very interesting read.

bestnatesmithever:

The State of Creativity

I think this is important. A research firm named StrategyOne did a global study of the state of creativity in the world.

You can see the whole thing HERE.

quantumaniac:

The Candle Problem

Given a book of matches, a box of thumbtacks, and a candle, how can you fix the candle to the wall so that its wax won’t drip onto the table below?

See Answer Below

Pin the box to the wall, put the candle in the box, and light it.

In experiments, Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker found that most subjects instead tried to pin the candle directly to the wall or to use melted wax to affix it there (neither worked). Duncker called this “functional fixedness” — a “mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem.” In this case, subjects had “fixated” on the box’s function as a container, which prevented them from considering it as a platform. If the box was empty at the start of the experiment, they were more likely to find the correct solution.

In a 2000 study, psychologists Tim German and Margaret Defeyter found the 6- and 7-year-olds show signs of functional fixedness, but 5-year-olds appear immune to it: “Rather than taking into account only the properfunction of an object, they adopt and agents-goals view of function in which any intentional use of an object can be its function.”

Read more

Fascinating.

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waltzingmatildablog:

Such a fantastic quote.

Seconded.

"Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?"

— John Keats, describing one of the most overlooked necessities of creativity: Grit.

curiositycounts:

Fascinating TEDed talk by Mythbuster’s Adam Savage on some of history’s biggest breakthroughs and how they came to be from simple ideas. How these people “were just a little bit more curious…and they changed the world.”

(via)