Group items tagged

"This is a book about the ten mental locks that prevent you from being more innovative and what you can do to open them. Many of the ideas presented here come from the author's experiences as a creative thinking consultant in industry. During the past five years he had the opportunity to work with many innovative and/or interesting companies. He worked with people in marketing, engineering, data processing, finance, research and development, television, and retail. This book contains stories, anecdotes, insights, and ideas that came out of the workshops he conducted as well as many of his own thoughts about what can make you more creative."

"The Artist's Way is the seminal book on the subject of creativity. An international bestseller, millions of readers have found it to be an invaluable guide to living the artist's life. Still as vital today-or perhaps even more so-than it was when it was first published one decade ago, it is a powerfully provocative and inspiring work. In a new introduction to the book, Julia Cameron reflects upon the impact of The Artist's Way and describes the work she has done during the last decade and the new insights into the creative process that she has gained. Updated and expanded, this anniversary edition reframes The Artist's Way for a new century."

"Established companies are "held captive by their customers," in Christensen's phrase, and so routinely ignore emerging markets of buyers who are not their customers. Dominant companies prosper by making a good product and keeping their customer base by using sustaining technologies to continue improving it. The products get ever better-but at some point their quality overshoots the level of performance that even the high end of the market needs. Typically, this is when a disruptive innovation lands in the marketplace at a lower price and relatively poor level of performance-but it's a level adequate for what the lower end of the market seeks. The disruptive technology starts to attract customers, and is on its way to staggering the industry's giants. "Sustaining innovation makes good products better-but then you don't buy the old product. They're replacements. They do not create growth." To bring these powerful ideas into the real world, Christensen in 2001 founded the consulting firm Innosight (www.innosight.com) with Mark Johnson, M.B.A. '96. Now employing about 100, the company works mostly with Fortune 100 companies that are seeking to defend their core businesses and adapt to disruptive environments. It also coaches them on how to disrupt markets proactively, harnessing disruption's engine of growth for themselves. "It's hard to do both," says David Duncan, a senior partner at Innosight who earned a Harvard Ph.D. in physics in 2000. "As successful companies get bigger, their growth trajectories flatten out, and they need to find new ways to expand. But that will look different from what they did in the past. Most are so focused on maintaining their core business that when push comes to shove, the core will almost always kill off the disruptive innovation-the new thing. "The two goals conflict for resources," he continues. "CEOs are accountable to shareholders and feel Wall Street pressure to meet earnings targe

"It's a moment of peril as well as one of opportunity. I keep thinking of a phrase from Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": reception in a state of distraction. Benjamin associated this phrase with the loss of the possibility for a contemplative response to works of art. He connected that loss to the evaporation of "aura," the trace of art's religious origins that he claimed is destroyed by the reproduction of unique and stationary objects as ubiquitous, portable photographs. Distracted reception strikes me as an unavoidable consequence of the conditions under which today's poetry is produced and consumed-the general conditions of our wired lives as well as specific conditions of publication, distribution and so forth. It doesn't bode well for my commitment to poetry as a contemplative genre that I've actually been thinking of the Showcase as a chance to get up to speed with current poetry."

Caveat: written by Jonah Lehrer, whose star has fallen since it was shown that he recycled his own previous writing without noting it and he quoted people who other people, not him, had interviewed. Messages: K. Sawyer -- "Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups [who were told not to criticize anything proposed] think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas." Research by Nemeth -- Groups told that "most studies suggest that you should debate and even criticize each other's ideas" produced more ideas together and then subsequently on their own. Research by Uzzi -- (Lehrer's words) "The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy." Lehrer's take-home message -- "The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right-enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways-the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up."

""Play will be to the 21st century what work was to the Industrial Age - our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value""

The Toolkit is organized around the same four elements of the Certification Criteria for Linked Learning Pathways: Pathway Design: Quality pathways are designed with a structure, governance, and program of study that provides all students with opportunities for both postsecondary and career success. Engaged Learning: In supportive learning communities, students meet technical and academic standards and college entrance requirements through real-world applications, integrated project-/problem-based instruction, authentic assessments, and work-based learning. System Support: District policies and practices provide leadership, support, and resources to establish and sustain quality pathways. Evaluation and Accountability: A systemic evaluation process documents the pathway's impact on high school achievement and postsecondary success and drives the pathway's continuous improvement plans.

"Positive lead- ership rejects traditional deficit-based models of change management with their relentless drive to fix problems. Tombaugh (2005) advised managers that the challenge of maintaining a committed and motivated workforce is too difficult when the daily focus is on what is not working...."

* supporting learning through design experiences * helping youth build on their own interests * creating an emergent learning community, and * working always in a climate of trust and respect.

"Hack, play, learn A hack is a tiny, often throwaway, rapid prototype. It's a way of demonstrating the very first part of an idea in a short space of time. I build each one to test how I think something could or should work... Always done at speed, always done with passion, always to scratch an itch and always best if there's some humour or novelty involved."

what makes moth stories work

A study (pdf) done for the Innocenti Research Center, a research arm of Unicef, found that cutting had only 3 percent support in 2008 - down from 97 percent in 1999. This is a remarkable achievement. There is nothing more difficult than persuading people to give up long-held cultural practices, especially those bound up in taboo subjects like sex. The change happened because of an organization that Gebre and her sister Fikrte started called Kembatti Mentti Gezzima-Toppe, which means "women of Kembata working together." It is now known simply as KMG-Ethiopia.

"We still need more tool-building but there is much benefit in putting the remarkable tools we now have to work. So we will have a better understanding of both animal model brains, but to me very importantly, the human brain that makes discoveries relevant to disease actionable. And also advances basic neuroscience. We've been focusing on brain disease but in the end basic science is the well from which everything comes, and we should not forget it. But that said, understanding all the different cells, understanding how they're wired together, understanding the language of neurons - that is, when they fire, what are they saying to each other? Understanding how this information integrates. Understanding how activity spreads in the brain and how it's decoded is much more than a 10-year project. But I think a focused push like this could lead to a platform of ideas, of tools, of testable hypotheses, of new observations, that could power both basic neuroscience and translational neuroscience interested in disease and therapeutics."

""And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life - achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one's life as well, when one can feel that one's work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.""

The goals of engagement and insight are well worth students keeping in mind. Linking them to grades, however, sends the very traditional message of the educational system, which works against students developing the kind of self-directed, avid learning that the instructor wants. My advice is to de-emphasize grades even if they have to be given at the end of the course.