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Katie Day

In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...19Industry-t.html

cognitive_science creativity ideas thinking

shared by Katie Day on 20 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Jump’s work has elements of management consulting and a bit of design-firm draftsmanship, but its specialty is conceiving new businesses, and what it sells is really the art of innovation. The company is built on the premise that creative thinking is a kind of expertise. Like P.&G. and Mars, you can hire Jump to think on your behalf, for somewhere between $200,000 to $500,000 a month, depending on the complexity and ambiguity of the question you need answered. Or you can ask Jump to teach your corporation how to generate better ideas on its own; Jump imparts that expertise in one- and five-day how-to-brainstorm training sessions that can cost $200,000 for a one-day session for 25 employees.
  • What’s clear is that in recent years, much of corporate America has gone meta — it has started thinking about thinking. And all that thinking has led many executives to the same conclusion: We need help thinking. A few idea entrepreneurs, like Jump, Ideo and Kotter International, are companies with offices and payrolls. But many are solo practitioners, brains for hire who lecture at corporations or consult with them regularly. Each has a catechism and a theory about why good ideas can be so hard to come by and what can be done to remedy the situation.
  • “We’re not only blind to certain things, but we’re blind to the fact that we’re blind to them.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • You often hear this from idea entrepreneurs: Don’t ask us for the answers. Let us help you frame the questions, so you can answer them yourself.
  • At Jump, they prefer to brainstorm with a variation of a technique pioneered in improv theater. A comic offers the first sentence of a story, which lurches into a (hopefully funny) tale, when someone else says, “Yes, and?” then adds another sentence, which leads to another “Yes, and?”— and back and forth it goes. In the context of brainstorming, what was once a contest is transformed into a group exercise in storytelling. It has turned into a collaboration.
  • Why now? Why did innovation-mania take hold in the last decade or so? One school of thought holds that corporations both rise and die faster than ever today, placing a premium on the speedy generation of ideas.
  • Other ideas entrepreneurs offer a “great man” theory, pointing to the enormous influence of Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and an author of books including “The Innovator’s Dilemma”and “Innovation and the General Manager.”
  • Dev Patnaik of Jump has his own answer to the why-now question. He contends that advances in technology over the past three decades have gradually forced management to reconceive its role in the corporation, shifting its focus from processing data to something more esoteric.
  • “Suddenly it’s about something else. Suddenly it’s about leadership, creativity, vision. Those are the differentiating things, right?” Patnaik draws an analogy to painting, which for centuries was all about rendering reality as accurately as possible, until a new technology — photography — showed up, throwing all those brush-wielding artists into crisis.
  • Most idea entrepreneurs offer what could be described as Osborn deluxe. Govindarajan, the Dartmouth professor, presents companies with what he calls the three-box framework. In Box 1, he puts everything a company now does to manage and improve performance. Box 2 is labeled “selectively forgetting the past,” his way of urging clients to avoid fighting competitors and following trends that are no longer relevant. Box 3 is strategic thinking about the future. “Companies spend all of their time in Box 1, and think they are doing strategy,” he says. “But strategy is really about Box 2 and 3 — the challenge to create the future that will exist in 2020.” He recommends to clients what he calls the 30-30 rule: 30 percent of the people who make strategic decisions should be 30 years old or younger.
  • Katie Day on 20 Dec 10
     
    long article on creativity, innovation, and people who are dedicated to the process of coming up with ideas....
Keri-Lee Beasley

Connie Yowell on Digital Media and Learning, Then and Now | Spotlight on Digital Media ... - 0 views

spotlight.macfound.org/...connie-yowell

professional_development technology digital_media digital_literacy creativity games

shared by Keri-Lee Beasley on 30 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The Holy Grail in learning and education is context. The problem is that education is focused on generic outcomes. And as soon as you shift to that conversation, you forget about context of the learner. You forget that learning is social, and about identity, and fundamentally connected to what the learner cares about.
  • I saw a video of you talking recently. You said starting with outcomes and working backward was a big mistake. You said we should start thinking about the student and then design forward. What does that actually mean, and is that related to what you’re saying about context? In education, we traditionally think about content. We think about content as the outcomes we’re striving for. Does a kid know X? That’s what all our tests measure, and that’s how we lose the kid.  We lose the kid to our focus on content—we talk more about STEM than we do about kids. 
  • People talk about kids learning content and then testing them on that content. People like Katie and Will are thinking about designing the context for participation. That’s the Holy Grail.  Its through participation that learning happens. 
  • Keri-Lee Beasley on 30 Jan 15
     
    Interesting interview regarding the potential future of Digital Media Literacy
Sean McHugh

Screen Time? How about Creativity Time? - Mitchel Resnick - Medium - 1 views

medium.com/...ut-creativity-time-928528c0214

screen time time kindergarten early childhood screen creativity

shared by Sean McHugh on 22 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Too often, designers of educational materials and activities simply add a thin layer of technology and gaming over antiquated curriculum and pedagogy
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 22 Jan 18
       
      I think because the designers of these apps are not educators and are therefore assuming that they often traditional education they experienced is the norm or at the very least is still a desirable outcome for the kids that they are designing their Apps for.
  • But I’m also sure that some students found it very discouraging and disempowering. And the activity put an emphasis on questions that can be answered quickly with right and wrong answers — certainly not the type of questions that I would prioritize in a classroom.
  • In many cases, the skeptics apply very different standards to new technologies than to “old” technologies. They worry about the antisocial impact of a child spending hours working on a computer, while they don’t have any concerns about a child spending the same time reading a book. They worry that children interacting with computers don’t spend enough time outside, but they don’t voice similar concerns about children playing musical instruments. I’m not suggesting that there are no reasons for concern. I’m just asking for more consistency.
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  • For kids growing up today, laptops and mobile phones aren’t high-tech tools — they’re everyday tools, just like crayons and watercolors.
  • Of course there’s a problem if children spend all their time interacting with screens — just as there would be a problem if they spent all their time playing the violin or reading books or playing sports. Spending all your time on any one thing is problematic. But the most important issue with screen time is not quantity but quality. There are many ways of interacting with screens; it doesn’t make sense to treat them all the same
  • Rather than trying to minimize screen time, I think parents and teachers should try to maximize creative time. The focus shouldn’t be on which technologies children are using, but rather what children are doing with them
Sean McHugh

How Stephen King Teaches Writing - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...379870

grammar spelling literacy writing

shared by Sean McHugh on 16 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • One either absorbs the grammatical principles of one’s native language in conversation and in reading or one does not
  • Reading is the key, though. A kid who grows up hearing “It don’t matter to me” can only learn doesn’t if he/she reads it over and over again
  • You need to take out the stuff that’s just sitting there and doing nothing
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  • Ask yourself what they need to get on in life, the bare minimum (like filling in a job application), and concentrate on that.
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 16 Sep 17
       
      Surely this is true of reading as well? Maybe some students need to just focus on being 'functional' readers, like reading the instructions on a job application.
  • telling the truth is the most important thing, much more important than the grammar
  • I would often ask them to describe operations that they take for granted. Ask a girl to write a paragraph on how she braids her sister’s hair. Ask a boy to explain a sports rule. These are just basic starting points, where students learn to write on paper what they might tell a friend. It keeps it concrete. If you ask a kid to write on “My Favorite Movie,” you’re opening the door to subjectivity, and hence to a flood of clichés
  • See, then say
  • A good reader digging into a good book is wonderful. Musical
  • Reading good fiction is like making the jump from masturbation to sex
  • Good teachers can be trained, if they really want to learn (some are pretty lazy). Great teachers, like Socrates, are born
  • What about teaching? Craft, or art?King: It’s both. The best teachers are artists
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