Creativity

by Ed Latham

I was talking to some students last week during some of the "down time" that often pops up towards the end of many classroom experiences. The talk was very casual, I was an outsider, and this was the first time I had met these students. I simply asked "What are you good at?" and sat back and listened. You may want to try that with a group of kids you know, it can be fascinating to watch what happens and the discussion that comes out.

The short story is that many students, even the academically successful students, did not feel they were good at much other than getting in trouble or irritating adults or peers. After a few minutes of listening, I asked those that did not feel much worth why they felt that way. Every single one of them was able to share a quick story of adults and peers that have judged the student's value to be unsatisfactory, of poor quality, or just wrong. School is a place many come to learn about themselves and how they fit in. Unfortunately, a good sized chunk of the population find out more about what they are not good at rather than the positive.

Sir Ken Robinson has a 20 min talk at TED concerning these issues. His talk is more of an awareness that the problem exists. I did not come away from the video with a "Here is what we can do as a system to help address this valid concern." Instead, I saw the video as a challenge to each individual out there working with kids to at least keep these thoughts in the back of their mind as they go through the daily chaos we call our school day.

Our schools were designed to get young students from point A to B and over time we have had many adaptations in the systems to try to allow for changes that are required. When you take something that works and keep adding on and adding on and modifying it over a hundred years, does it necessarily get better? Will it even accomplish it's original function as efficiently as it did "back in the day"?

With the pressures, tests, learning results and all of the other demons we face in our school lives, how are teachers finding opportunities to help students explore their creativity to find out what they are really good at. Trust me, when a student finds something he or she is good at, they will not need to hear it from you or even from a peer to know "I love this! I really like doing this!" Can people please share different ways Teachers/Schools/People are opening doors, rather than shutting out so many possibilities. Many adults and students can point to a time when he or she felt really good doing something only to be totally deflated by a simple careless or insensitive statement from a peer, a respected person or loved one. How are we helping people find those desires and helping to kindle those often tenuous fires that can one day burn so bright on their own, but for now, need nurturing to reach their potential?

Shining Eyes

Essential Question: What creates excitement in learning?


Photo Credit

Got Creativity?

Walnut Wiki - Got Creativity Workshop

Creative Process

ASCD - A New Compact to Educate the Whole Child

Wikipedia: Creativity

Creativity Models

The Creative Process

Earlier Posts on the Arts

Essential Question: How can use of the creative process be encouraged in our schools?

Daniel Pink Interviews Thomas Friedman

Essential Question: What is the function of parents and schools in the 21st Century?

Excellent article in February 2008 issue of the School Administrator combining the ideas of Daniel Pink and Thomas Friedman.

"Pink: Does this call into question the concept of the “school” as we typically think of it? In a world where information was scarce, schools operated as kind of a repository of that precious resource. But now information is abundant. A school doesn’t have to harvest and distribute this scarce resource. It has to serve some other kind of function.

Friedman: Right. When information is really abundant, when we can literally pluck it out of the air, you need people to sift it, sort it and connect it.

Pink: Sifters, sorters, connectors, “yes but-ers.” That’s a nice way to describe a teacher’s role today. Now let me ask you a question that’s tinged a little bit with politics. Neither one of us are educators. But we’ve both had the good fortune to talk to lots of teachers, principals and superintendents over the last year. I suspect that being a sifter, a sorter and a yes but-er in a world of No Child Left Behind is pretty difficult." More . . .

Related:

Steve Jobs Speech
Parenting

Creativity, Learning & Jobs

Daniel Pink, author of Free Agent Nation and A Whole New Mind - Moving from the information Age to the Conceptual Age, gives us this advice in a McNews interview:

MCNews: One last question: if you were going to give somebody just one piece of advice about how to be successful in this new age, what would it be?

Pink: The best career move is to find what you love to do, what you’re great at, and pursue that. I think you will be more valuable in the workforce. If you love accounting and you’re great at it, you’re going to be okay.

I worry about the folks who pursue careers because their parents, teachers, or spouses give them outdated advice and they’re dutifully marching into careers they don’t really care about because they think it’s the way to make money. Not only is that bad for their individual self-actualization but I think it’s a bad career move, too.

Steve Jobs gives this advice at his 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech:



Sir Ken Robinson at TED tells us this:



Do these views have anything in common?

From Noob to Leet

by Kern Kelley

For those follow the Learning 2.0 conference, a new Web 2.0 toy that's making the rounds is called Animoto. Basically it's a template driven video producer, you provide images and select music, then click finalize. It does this rest. The following video took me about 3 minutes from creating an account to completion. Here's a quick look.





When showing this to one of my Video Production students, he commented:

"It makes a Noob look like a Leet."

My Immigrant to Native language dictionary tells me this roughly translates to,

"A inexperienced user, (a Newbie) can quickly and easily

produce something that looks like a power user (an Elite) made it."

Some edu-bloggers like David Warlick and Wes Fyer are pretty excited about it, while others like Gary Stager lament on his blog: "Animoto lets you create meaningless PowerPoint-like slideshows without all of that pesky, editing, creativity or thinking. I won't even mention the discipline, knowledge and sense of history required of artistic expression. "

I have to agree with Gary's description, EXCEPT that it does have educational value. It raises the bar.

To recreate the effects that effortlessly appear in one of these productions in any flavor of video editor you'd like would take a substantial amount of time, but because they are so easy to create, it makes those production values into vanilla. It's like the first time you play with GarageBand. You create a song, that really sounded like a song you'd actually want to listen to in a few minutes - wow. There was magic there. Then you play it for others and they start nodding their heads and tapping feet. More magic. But soon, the more you listened to what other made, using the program, all those loop diven tracks start sounding the same. To the point where, it's cliche, and boring.

What this has done, for students is that they have to produce better stuff. Don't get me wrong, I think that GarageBand is a fantastic tool and fun way to create quick songs, but if everyone's sounds the same - it begs you to be different.

As students create content and productions like Animoto become the baseline. It makes the quality of work of those trying to stand out have to be that much better. Our expectations increase, and educationally that's not a bad thing.