Almost two years ago, we here at MSU’s Office of Arts & Cultural Programming, along with our partners at the Research Academy for University Learning, brought together an interdisciplinary working group of faculty members to create an unprecedented new course. Since then, we’ve worked with a long list of guest artists and thinkers to create CREATIVE THINKING - and the pilot version of the course will be offered this May!
As we’ve said over and over again on this blog,
Creativity happens in all disciplines, and this class works to dispel the myth that it “strikes”—like a bolt of lightning or a stroke of genius. Instead, it is possible to develop tools and approaches to foster innovative thinking. A team of professors from a variety of departments will lead the class in participatory activities designed to help you, the student, develop your own creative process and create a personal toolkit to unlock your creative instincts. Over the course of this four-week intensive, through in-class exercises and independent projects, students will build a portfolio of creative work in a variety of forms. The skills learned in this class will serve you throughout the rest of your college career and beyond.
For Montclair students, registration has already begun (and slots are going quickly!). The general public can register starting Wednesday, April 18. For more info, check out the course website, here. Have questions? Post ‘em to us here or on twitter!
Love this podcast from Soundcheck with David Byrne and James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem). Murphy’s plans for NYC subway turnstiles sound brilliant!
All the subway turnstiles in New York City…make a beep. It’s a really unpleasant sound and the one that’s right next to it is slightly out of key with it. So, it’s like “ehhh….aehhh…uehhh” Unless you get it wrong and it’s like, “No!” Then it’s the sound of your bruised hip as you hit the thing…
So I thought, I love New York and I love its aggression, and I love that it doesn’t make it easier for you to be a member of the city…But, I wanted to change the sound of going through the turnstile to a series of notes - I could do a little program. I could be like, well, the dominant note is the root, this is the fifth, this is the third, have a couple of sevenths, throw a few sixths in there just to be crazy. And during rush hour it would make arpeggiated music. And each subway station could have its own key or tonal set. For me, for a new person going to work, I think it would just be nice. It would be hard not to like that more than “shut up, idiot, you’re walking so slow!”
It would be an interesting way to have people relate to the city and I didn’t think it would be that expensive…if anybody knows anybody?
Creativity can seem like magic. We look at people like Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan, and we conclude that they must possess supernatural powers denied to mere mortals like us, gifts that allow them to imagine what has never existed before. They’re “creative types.” We’re not.
But creativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourselves and our work.
Love this! The Wimbledon High School near London held a “Failure Week” in February to show “that it is better to try new things and fail at them than play it safe and try to sidestep situations where failure is possible.”
The headmistress, Heather Hanbury, said she wanted to show “it is completely acceptable and completely normal not to succeed at times in life.”…
There will be workshops, assemblies, and activities for the girls, with parents and tutors joining in with tales of their own failures.
There will be YouTube clips of famous and successful people who have failed along the way and moved on.
The emphasis will be discussions on the merits of failure and on the negative side of trying too hard not to fail.
Failure Week ran from February 6-10, and here are some of the findings from it.
Leonardo da Vinci’s to-do list, illustrated
da Vinci wasn’t limited by anything so mundane as “discipline”…
In a recent New York Times article, The Rise of the New Groupthink, author Susan Cain argued that solitude has been given a bad name in the vogue for brainstorming and group work. Citing Apple’s Steve Wozniak as an example, she writes,
If you look at how Mr. Wozniak got the work done — the sheer hard work of creating something from nothing — he did it alone. Late at night, all by himself.
Intentionally so. In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors:
“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”
Keith Sawyer, author of Group Genius and Explaining Creativity, wrote in response that research has disproved her claims that “creative people are more likely to be introverts; that students learn better when alone; and that solitary computer programmers write better code.”:
Decades of scientific research have revealed that great creativity is almost always based in collaboration, conversation and social networks — just the opposite of our mythical image of the isolated genius. And educational research has found that deeper learning results when students participate in thoughtful argumentation and discuss reasons and concepts.
Read Sawyer’s full rebuttal on his blog, where he writes, “The science of creativity shows that exceptional, successful creativity depends on groups, networks, and conversation. If you hole up alone at home, I guarantee you will be less creative.”
On the website for his book on creativity, Sawyer links to other sites and tools to measure and enhance creativity. (Probably worth their own post!)
Over at quora, someone asked the question, “What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?” The responses are deep and wide-ranging, with some surprising analogies to other kinds of highly skilled creative brain-work.
One commenter writes,You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying.
Not so different from the other kinds of creative thinking we’re looking at.
Read the whole thing (with many rich responses!) here:
http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-have-an-understanding-of-very-advanced-mathematics
