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Also as a follow-up to our conversation on Monday. Although more women are in STEM careers, there is still a lag in those considered "hard sciences." Most people look at mathematics as the core difference, these authors look at creativity. "For instance, three factors that are widely accepted as being positively correlated with creativity are playfulness, curiosity, and willingness to take risks. Studies have found that boys and men are generally more playful than girls and women, and are more curious and more willing to take risks, which could help explain why men are more creatively productive than women in general, and in particular, in the hard sciences."

How to build your creative confidence

Lecture on engagement and motivation of creative professionals

Zittrain on Apple's war against creativity

If computers can score writing, of course the first use will be for assessment. No surprise there. But how might we use this more creatively?

I tried to bring an scoring software program into my school. Nobody liked it except for myself. I thought the objective measure would be more motivating to students. But the other teachers thought that the students should have more practice with rubrics themselves. My school focused heavily on peer editing and scoring. Also, when teachers see such a large number of average scores they tend to disbelieve the results. For example, when I score the essays, there may be a lot of 'B's but I've sees the difference in between Betty's 'B' and Joe's 'B'. The grade is more of a reminder of my experience scoring Betty's writing. When the software scores it, I haven't necessarily seen the essay therefore the score doesn't mean as much. Of course the scoring makes much more sense for official assessments. Open Ended Responses are a much better measure of a student's understanding than multiple choice, if the software is able to distinguish the nuance of language. Some programs are scoring grammatical patterns, sentence length, and paragraph length; therefore, a student can be totally off topic and get a high score. I'm curious if this latest software corrected for this.

A must see. DIY = kids + creativity + kids online community. This blog post explains a little about history and goals... "We're a community of kids who make."

When I think of engagement and flow I always thought of being focused but need to reconsider how all those stimuli from WOW were really adding to the engagement factor.

Two ways to read about Wharton professor Jonah Berger's take on how game mechanics can be engineered to promote social currency. Do you agree with Berger's perspective? Here's the link to the academic paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1836457

This article provides a great overview of the new technologies profiled at SXSW and makes the case that it's now cheaper than ever before to bring prototypes to market. The author notes, "The dropping costs of designing and building inventive new hardware products has prompted a wave of creativity and innovation that echoes the software boom a decade or two ago in Silicon Valley." Makes me wonder... what's next?

This is such a well-designed learning platform! 

How's your Spanish/Italian going? Do you think this site is good for fostering creativity as well as memorization?

A conference devoted to play (relevant to creative professionals in industries targeted at children). The key note speaker is Jesse Schell of Schell games. There's a link to a set of cards titled " The art of game design" that you can find using the search term "Schell"

A video game that uses biofeedback to help players practice and better control their reactions to stress. It's an interesting combination of entertainment and serious biofeedback training, presenting a very creative approach to designing engaging conditions for learning that allow for relevant skill transfer.

Scroll down on this page to download the final report and case studies from a study that "examined the use of social software in the UK further and higher education sectors to collect evidence of the effective use of social software in enhancing student learning and engagement" (p. 9 of final report). For anyone considering boosting engagement through social media, this is a gold mine.

Hi Stephanie - Thanks for this! I just wrote in my mid-semester assignment that I need to find research about engagement through crowd-sourcing and social media in education! I've downloaded the report and can tell that with sentences like, "The results highlight the different pedagogical roles of social software: communication, nurturing creativity and innovation, and collaborative learning," you've definitely found great resources. ~ Leslie

Special section of Education Week focusing on virtual schooling

This article brings us back to an old unanswered question...how will we assess students to truly capture what they are learning? Online platforms tend to rely heavily on multiple choice. Online course developers will need to be more creative than plain old multiple choice in order to prove the rigor of the online environment.

A look at the commercial kids game space. The article indicates the development of kids games is moving to tablets because of the gesture format, low cost of titles and ability to play short games. Disadvantage with tablets highlighted is the lack co-play features (unlike consoles where it's easy for several people to play simultaneously). Games cited in article: Once Upon a Monster, Where's My Water, Niko, Habbo Hotel.

With bluetooth and WiFi features available, I wonder why there is not much thought about incorporating co-play in mobile games? I think using the gyroscopic features in iPhones and iPads can lead to creative multi-player games.

Students at the Center Project Explores How Students Learn Best--Reports on Enhancing Literacy and on Math Instruction for Minorities also Released New educational technologies offer exciting ways to help teachers adapt classrooms to the interests, needs, and strengths of individual students, but they cannot replace the crucial creative and emotional work of teachers, according to a new research paper from the ambitious interdisciplinary project, Students at the Center: Teaching and Learning in the Era of the Common Core.

Clark Aldrich's "The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games" is a good complement to Prensky's books on the subject. We require both in our "eLearning Games" course at UB. The instructor of that course directed my to these two resources.

Our schools and system are mostly designed for extroverts and for their need of lots of stimulations. The ideal students in schools are believed to be extroverts although researches show that introverted students tend to be more knowledgable. Instead of emphasizing too much on group work which benefit both extroverts and introverts, schools should also teach students how to work on their own. That's because solitude is critical for creativity and where deep thoughts are formed.