Set your focus: define the problem or area you will be looking at. It can be as narrow as a specific annoyance you face in your life, and as broad as a whole industry, but you can’t just have a vague brainstorm with no predefined focus.Gather new material: give yourself—and the team if it’s a group brainstorm—time to familiarise yourself with the area of focus. This means reading articles, watching videos, etc. If it’s a group brainstorm, this step should ideally happen before the session to give time to your brain to incubate these ideas, but if not you can block a bit of time at the beginning of the session.Generate ideas: remember, quantity over quality. Use the three creative modes presented earlier. Combinational to mix old ideas together, exploratory to investigate new potential ideas within the rules of a given space, transformational to break the rules and come up with radical ideas.Test your ideas: this is where most brainstorming sessions fail to take the one extra but necessary step. Instead of selecting your ideas on the spot, you need to test them in the real world. Select the few most promising candidates, and see how your audience reacts. For a book, write a blog post. For an app, build a landing page or a quick MVP.Select and refine your ideas: use the feedback your receive to adapt or drop your ideas. If a particular problem or area keeps on coming back in the feedback… Go back to step 1.

Remember the principles laid out earlier: quantity versus quality, building a creative routine, and using all three creative modes to ensure you don’t leave any ideas off the table.

Transformational creativity: this method takes things even further. Instead of exploring a space and questioning its rules, transformational creativity is about ignoring fundamental rules to come up with potentially impossible but highly creative ideas.

Exploratory creativity: in academia, exploratory creativity is defined as “the process of searching an area of conceptual space governed by certain rules.” This means that you try to generate new ideas within a given space, taking into account its specific rules

Combinational creativity: we are often seeking original ideas, when in reality most creative concepts are a combination of old ideas. First, collect as many old ideas as possible. This can be done by reading science fiction or just taking notes every time you hear a commonplace idea in a conversation. Then, let these old ideas incubate for a while. Yes, there’s no second step. Let your brain do the work.

Whether your goal is to write a book, become a better illustrator, or build an app, don’t leave creativity to random bursts of inspiration. Block some time every day or every week to generate new ideas and new work. I personally use mindframing to ensure my daily creative output aligns with my bigger goals, but as long as you flex your creative muscle consistently, you will be on your way to do your best creative work.

It may sound counterintuitive, but science shows that quantity yields quality when it comes to creativity. In simpler terms, this means that the more ideas and work you produce, the more creative they will be.

“Boredom serves a function,” she says now. “It’s boring, obviously, and we don’t like that, but, when you have no input coming in, you generate output. That’s how you become resourceful. But now you constantly have access to information, entertainment, distraction – all of this stuff coming in, coming in and coming in. And it doesn’t allow you the empty space to create something, or to just process something.

sometimes you de- yelop a whole passage, not with the intention of completing it, but because it comes of itself and because inspiration is like grace, which passes by and does not come back.

71,660,160

All four of these extraneural resources — technology, the body, physical space, social interaction — can be understood as mental extensions that allow the brain to accomplish far more than it could on its own.

A series of studies conducted by Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau, a professor of psychology at Kingston University in Britain; Gaëlle Vallée-Tourangeau, a professor of behavioral science at Kingston; and their colleagues, has explored the benefits of such interactivity. In these studies, experimenters pose a problem; one group of problem solvers is permitted to interact physically with the properties of the problem, while a second group must only think through the problem. Interactivity “inevitably benefits performance,” they report.

First, if you can’t build and distribute the new thing to lots of people, the circle of innovation can’t complete.

Making the best decisions often requires looking at them through different lenses so that you don't overlook an important aspect.

Great writers become great by closely studying and copying other great writers. This is how cultural knowledge works. We learn the foundational skills from each other first, and then get all weird and experimental later on once the normal rules become boring.

The point of Zettelkasten is to digest each thing you read well so you don’t need to go back to look at it again.

The baroque goofiness of Blackbird Spyplane’s house style can be something of a test for readers of the newsletter (the “sletter,” in Blackbird Spyplane parlance). “X out of ten people are going to show up and read that and just be like, This is impenetrable, I’m out,” Weiner told one interviewer. “But for the people who stick around, I think that it adds to a sense of, Oh, this is like an in-joke that I’m in on.” And better (at least to this reader) that clubbiness take a niche form — it is less claustrophobia-inducing than the many newsletters that seem to insist we are all wearily following the same disputes on Twitter, all inevitably watching the same shows on Netflix. Such newsletters wind up feeling like crowded rooms with too few windows on the world beyond.

Feature Idea: Chaos Monkey for PKM

As I studied Edwards’ writings and insights, I realized that I might be sitting at the feet of not only Edwards’ intellectual genius but his organizational genius, too. 

And essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden.  One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life.  And that life isn't necessarily exactly what you'd envisaged for them.  It's characteristic of the kind of work that I do that I'm really not aware of how the final result is going to look or sound.  So in fact, I'm deliberately constructing systems that will put me in the same position as any other member of the audience.  I want to be surprised by it as well.  And indeed, I often am. What this means, really, is a rethinking of one's own position as a creator.  You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together.  Gardener included.  So there's something in the notes to this thing that says something about the difference between order and disorder.  It's in the preface to the little catalog we have.  Which I take issue with, actually, because I think it isn't the difference between order and disorder, it's the difference between one understanding of order and how it comes into being, and a newer understanding of how order comes into being.

Though it is often assumedthat mnemonics were used to memorize speeches, the importance of memory to theinventionofspeech was readily apparent to ancient orators—thus the famous praise of memory as athesauruminventorum(Herennium3.16.28). As Cicero writes inDe Oratore, the orator must commit tomemory“the whole past with its storehouse of examples and precedents,”as well as a knowledgeof all laws general and civil, for without such memories, the orator is left speechless (1.17–18).Expanding on Cicero’s point, Quintilian claims that“it is the power of memory alone that bringsbefore us all the store of precedents, laws, rulings, sayings, and facts which the orator must possessin abundance . . . and hold ready for immediate use”(Institutio11.2.1). The art of memory was thusto be used to recollect not only pre-written orations but also knowledge from a variety of sources tobe called upon when constructing new texts, speakingex tempore, or responding to an interlocutor’sarguments.

but is about writerly choices

That’s how blogging is complimentary to other forms of more serious work: when you’ve done enough of it, you can get entire essays, speeches, stories, novels, spontaneously appearing in a state of near-completeness, ready to be written.

That’s how blogging is complimentary to other forms of more serious work: when you’ve done enough of it, you can get entire essays, speeches, stories, novels, spontaneously appearing in a state of near-completeness, ready to be written.

But I'm not at all confident I would have made the initial connection without the help of the software. The idea was a true collaboration, two very different kinds of intelligence playing off each other, one carbon-based, the other silicon.

Why did a figure such as Leibniz fail to use his own tools? Perhaps messiness was the source of his creativity. This is a fact of intellectual originality with which Google must still grapple—libraries, after all, allow for the type of manageable disorder which is often the spark of creativity.

Lichtenberg’s quips: “Oh how many ideas aren’t hovering dispersed in my head! Quite a few pairs among those could provoke the greatest discovery if only they came together. But isolated from one another they lie, just like the sulphur from the city of Goslar lies isolated from East Indian nitre and from Oaksfield coal dust when jointly they could produce gunpowder!”

The four C’s of 21st Century skills are: Critical thinking Creativity Collaboration Communication

Unlike naming children, coding involves naming things on a daily basis. When you write code, naming things isn’t just hard, it’s a relentless demand for creativity. Fortunately, programmers are creative people.

as the generation of numerous original ideas, we recognize that creative thought involves the selection of appropriate ideas to move forward

Human brains seem to be best for generating new ideas. I want to learn more, think faster, distract less, interact and visualize, effortlessly remember everything; not memorize and do routine information processing, which computers seem better at.

Usually while writing a Notion, I show the graph of how it connects to other Notions/Notes alongside it. I set the graph to show not only the 1st level links, as that only shows the links already apparent from the text I have in front of me. I set it to show 3 steps out at the start, and reduce to two steps when there are more links.

Received this from a friend, and has been dwelling on every sentence of this, among many other things.

No one ever really starts from scratch. Anything they come up with has to come from prior experience, research, or other understanding. But because they haven’t acted on this fact, they can’t track ideas back to their origins. They have neither supporting material nor accurate sources. Since they haven’t been taking notes from the start, they either have to start with something completely new (which is risky) or retrace their steps (which is boring). It’s no wonder that nearly every guide to writing begins with “brainstorming.” If you don’t have notes, you have no other option. But this is a bit like a financial advisor telling a 65-year-old to start saving for retirement – too little, too late.

Om Malik writes about a renewed focus on his own blog: My first decree was to eschew any and all analytics. I don’t want to be driven by “views,” or what Google deems worthy of rank. I write what pleases me, not some algorithm. Walking away from quantification of my creativity was an act of taking back control.

The complementary principle to dividing isgathering and collecting. Eachnew composition can also be conceived as a place into which culled and rec-ollected matters are gathered. The very concept of reading in Latin is basedonthenotionof‘‘gathering,’’Latinlegere, ‘‘to read’’ having as its root mean-ing ‘‘to collect up, to gather by picking, plucking, and the like.’’ The Greekverblegōhad a similar range of meaning, from ‘‘to lay’’ something down or‘‘to lay asleep’’ to ‘‘to lay [things] in order,’’ hence ‘‘to gather, pick up,’’ ‘‘torelate,’’ ‘‘to speak purposefully.’’ The name of one venerable and essential typeof ancient and medieval encyclopedia puns on these closely allied verbs: theflorilegium, ‘‘flower-culling’’ (with a pun on ‘‘flower-reading’’), a collection ofsayings, maxims, and stories collected from past works, sometimes quotedexactly (though in mnemonically brief segments), but often just summarized.The best known of these through much of the Middle Ages was ValeriusMaximus’sDicta et facta memorabilia(early first century..), but there aremany other examples. Indeed, the premodern encyclopedia itself is a sort ofmemory-book, the flowers of (one’s extensive) reading gathered up in someorderly arrangement for the purpose of quick, secure recollection in connec-tion with making a new composition. After all, this is one essential purposeof encyclopedias even today.

Gardens were also popular, the medieval sort of garden,with orderly beds of medicinal plants and fruit trees separated by grass andsurrounded by a wall. Undoubtedly, gardens became popular with monasticand later writers because of the Song of Songs, a preeminent text for mysticalmeditation. Various other Biblical structures were often used too: the Taber-nacle described in Exodus; the Temple described in  Kings; the Jerusalemcitadel envisioned by Ezekiel and often conflated with the Heavenly City ofthe Apocalypse. We now would never think to organize an encyclopedia ofknowledge on the plan of Noah’s Ark, but for a clerical audience to whomthis text was as familiar as the order of the alphabet is to us—why not? It is asimple (if large), clearly arranged (if imaginary) composition site, containingmany useful compartments with a straightforward route among them, a sortof foundational map to use in arranging your materials (orresin Latin) as yougather them into the location of your new composition from the networksof your experiences, including of course all your experiences of books, music,and other arts. Thus, in the course of an ideal medieval education, in addi-tion to acquiring a great many segments of scriptural and classical texts, onealso would acquire an extensive repertoire of image-schemes in which to putthem, both ‘‘to lay them away’’ and ‘‘to collect them’’ in new arrangementson later occasions.

Thus, as an art, memory was most importantly associated in the MiddleAges with composition, not simply with retention.

What if the best tools for thought have already been discovered? In other words, perhaps the 1960s and 1970s were an unrepeatable golden age, and all we can expect in the future is gradual incremental improvement, and perhaps the occasional major breakthrough, at a decreasing frequency?

Is it possible to create a medium which blends the best qualities of both video and text?

I want creativity!

When I received Chris’s comment, my first response was that I should delete my post or at least the incorrect part of it. It’s embarrassing to have your incorrect understandings available for public view. But I decided to leave the post as is but put in a disclaimer so that others would not be misled by my misunderstandings. This experience reminded me that learning makes us vulnerable. Admitting that you don’t know something is hard and being corrected is even harder. Chris was incredibly gentle in his correction. It makes me think about how I respond to my students’ work. Am I as gentle with their work as Chris was to mine? Could I be more gentle? How often have I graded my students’ work and only focused on what they did wrong? Or forgotten that feeling of vulnerability when you don’t know something, when you put your work out for others to judge? This experience has also reminded me that it’s important that we as teachers regularly put ourselves into situations in which we authentically grapple with not knowing something. We should regularly share our less than fully formed understandings with others for feedback. It helps us remember that even confident learners can struggle with being vulnerable. And we need to keep in mind that many of our students are not confident learners.

Poems are the perfect way to tell someone you love them.

Lessig (2005) claims that at a very general level all of culture can be understood in terms of remix, where someone creates a cultural product by mixing meaningful elements together (e.g., ideas from different people with ideas of one’s own), and then someone else comes along and remixes this cultural artefact with others to create yet another artefact

associated with activism contesting copyright and intellectual property legislation

This argument is reinforced by the fact that, at the individual level, we meet many brilliant people who are fascinated by (and often working on) tools for thought, but who nonetheless seem to be making slow progress.

Note that we are not making the common argument that making new tools can lead to new subject matter insights for the toolmaker, and vice versa. This is correct, but is much weaker than what we are saying. Rather: making new tools can lead to new subject matter insights for humanity as a whole (i.e., significant original research insights), and vice versa, and this would ideally be a rapidly-turning loop to develop the most transformative tools.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. —Steve Jobs (via lifehacker and Zettel no. 201308301352)

Dez Dickerson: [laughing] One of the things he also told me one time was – this was back before Pro Tools and all stuff, obviously. And every once in a while, you'd get a take, and the energy and the feel of the take was good enough – was so good that even though there might've been a mistake technically, you wanted to use the take. So he said, "You know what, when there's something in the track that you want to keep but there's something in the track that you don't want in there, just put an explosion over it." [Dez laughs] That was it. So now you know studio secrets with Prince. Put an explosion over the mistakes. There you go.

link things together that shouldn’t be linked, with more thinking out of the box for future academic and social life

Seriousness is bad. It does not allow to go beyond what is accepted now , so there is a risk of being stuck in a local maximum. At first, the new formats seem ridiculous and incomprehensible (see, for example, a twitter feed from a decade ago ), but only in this way do we find something truly working.

The problem with thinking big is that it produces a laundry list of actions that are too heroic for you to actually take on.

This is spot on. An idea on its own does nothing. Execution and actually doing the hard work are the most important thing in any creative endeavour.

Today, Third-Generation individuals whose professional lives have been shaped by their grandparent’s ordeals are found in the creative arts, in helping professions, human rights work and in Jewish studies and communal work. The Third-Generation members are no different from those in the Second-Generation, who gravitated towards the creative arts in order to remember the barbarity committed against the Jews living in German-occupied countries and , the Jewish life that was destroyed, and to raise consciousness about present-day racism, human-rights violations, and genocides.

Yeahitreallyis,andIoftenthinkabouttherelationshipIhavewithmystudentswhoareinaoneyearprogramandtherelationshipIhavewithcorporatestudentsthatImightcomeinandtrainforaweekorsomethinglikethat,youknowinthefirstcoupledaysofalltrainingsessionsIhavenoabilitytocritiquebecauseIdon'thavetheirtrust.So,ifIcomeinthefirstdayofclassandsaytheirworksucksandhere'swhatyoushoulddotoimprove,andthiswillneverwork,it'smetwithresistanceandit'salmostlikeadefensemechanismagainstitandsothat'satotallyinappropriatewayformetobehave.Butifyoulookfurtherintothecurriculum,let'ssaysixteenweeksintomyoneyearprogramoraWednesdayoraThursdayinaoneweektrainingprogram,hopefullyifI'vedonemyjobwellI'vebuiltupenoughrapportwithpeopletheytrustthatIknowwhatI'mtalkingabout,thatmyfeedbackiscomingfromaplaceofloveandcareandsothey'rewillingtohearthingslike,thatisn'tverygoodandthosearewordsthatcomeoutofmymouthduringacritique.It'ssomethingthatyou'renotmaybeusedtohearingifyou'renotpartofthiscreativeculturebutthatisn'tverygoodandhere'swhy,isactuallyareally,reallyimportantthingtohelpadvancethequalityofwork.Andthenthenextsentencewouldbeandhere'showIwouldimproveitbutagainthathastocomefromaplaceofrespectandthat'searnedovertimeandsoyouknowyouhearalotaboutI'veheardalotaboutanywayandyouknowthenewbosscomesinandit'sahotshotcreativedirectoranditblowsthingsupandrunsaroundgoingintoameetingandshittingoneverythingtherewasanoldjokeatoneofmycompaniesisthatthechiefcreativeofficerwouldcomeinandswoopandpoopwherehe'dcomeintoaconference,roomtelleverybodywhathethinksuckedandleaveandnoneofthatworksbecausehedidn'thavethetrustofthepeoplethatwerehavingtheirworkshitonandsothathastocomefromaplaceoftrustagainandthatyouknowthere'snoshortcutfortimeIsupposeinthatrespect.Andspeakingofrespectoftheotherflavortherearetheotheringredientismutualrespect.It'ssayingthingslike,lookyouwerehiredbecauseItrustyoubecauseyou'regoodatyourcraft,youhavepotentialandexpertise,nowlet'stalkaboutwhatyou'redoingwrongandhowtoimproveit.

Individuals are most creative when provided space to follow their interests without sanction, when support and guidance are readily available, and when social community is fostered.

Think Creatively

The least important question you can ask about Engelbart is, "What did he build?" By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to admire him, to stand in awe of his achievements, to worship him as a hero. But worship isn't useful to anyone. Not you, not him. The most important question you can ask about Engelbart is, "What world was he trying to create?" By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to create that world yourself.

performance curves beginning to level off – because of our inability to automate the design work needed to support further hardware improvements. Wed end up with some very powerful hardware, but without the ability to push it further

And the fourth concerns the idea of the adjacent possible. It just may be the case that biospheres on average keep expanding into the adjacent possible. By doing so they increase the diversity of what can happen next. It may be that biospheres, as a secular trend, maximize the rate of exploration of the adjacent possible.

Research and background

That’s really what licensing is all about. Creativity.

It partly relates to the psychology of social conformity that generally increases with age and enhanced social awareness

“Think of all the things that could interfere with graduating from college.” Then he instructs them to pick one of those items and to come up with as many solutions for that problem as possible. This is a classic divergent-convergent creativity challenge. A subset of respondents, like the proverbial Murphy, quickly list every imaginable way things can go wrong. But they demonstrate a complete lack of flexibility in finding creative solutions. It’s this inability to conceive of alternative approaches that leads to despair. Runco’s two questions predict suicide ideation—even when controlling for preexisting levels of depression and anxiety.In Runco’s subsequent research, those who do better in both problem-finding and problem-solving have better relationships. They are more able to handle stress and overcome the bumps life throws in their way. A similar study of 1,500 middle schoolers found that those high in creative self-efficacy had more confidence about their future and ability to succeed. They were sure that their ability to come up with alternatives would aid them, no matter what problems would arise.

In early childhood, distinct types of free play are associated with high creativity. Preschoolers who spend more time in role-play (acting out characters) have higher measures of creativity: voicing someone else’s point of view helps develop their ability to analyze situations from different perspectives. When playing alone, highly creative first graders may act out strong negative emotions: they’ll be angry, hostile, anguished. The hypothesis is that play is a safe harbor to work through forbidden thoughts and emotions.In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms—fantasies of entire alternative worlds. Kids revisit their paracosms repeatedly, sometimes for months, and even create languages spoken there. This type of play peaks at age 9 or 10, and it’s a very strong sign of future creativity. A Michigan State University study of MacArthur “genius award” winners found a remarkably high rate of paracosm creation in their childhoods.From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions. But this transition isn’t easy. As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates.They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.

It’s also true that highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.

Parents encouraged uniqueness, yet provided stability. They were highly responsive to kids’ needs, yet challenged kids to develop skills. This resulted in a sort of adaptability: in times of anxiousness, clear rules could reduce chaos—yet when kids were bored, they could seek change, too. In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished.

The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer. When UGA’s Runco was driving through California one day with his family, his son asked why Sacramento was the state’s capital—why not San Francisco or Los Angeles? Runco turned the question back on him, encouraging him to come up with as many explanations as he could think of.Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.

the school’s teachers came up with a project for the fifth graders: figure out how to reduce the noise in the library. Its windows faced a public space and, even when closed, let through too much noise. The students had four weeks to design proposals.

During improvisation, the highly trained music majors used their brains in a way the nonmusicians could not: they deactivated their right-temporoparietal junction. Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli, sorting the stream for relevance. By turning that off, the musicians blocked out all distraction. They hit an extra gear of concentration, allowing them to work with the notes and create music spontaneously.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.

Is this learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.

To understand exactly what should be done requires first understanding the new story emerging from neuroscience. The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach.When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

a collective, a community of similarly minded people who helped Sam learn and meet the very particular set of needs that he had

Creativity and Intelligence. We treat them as separate cognitive processes, and although a correlation between the two has yet to be proven,

“One way to look at it is he’s just wasting time,” says Leslie. “But for him, there are no instructions. You figure out how to do it yourself. It’s ‘how do I make my guy take over an Imperial Ship?’ It teaches logic and tenacity, and how to solve your own problems.”

When school is seen as a test, rather than an adventure in ideas,” teachers may persuade themselves they’re being fair “if they specify, in listlike fashion, exactly what must be learned to gain a satisfactory grade…[but] such schooling is unfair in the wider sense that it prepares students to pass other people’s tests without strengthening their capacity to set their own assignments in collaboration with their fellows”

Once you figure out you can’t break anything on the Internet, getting your hands dirty by experimenting can present incredible stretches of that “flow” that comes with intense immersion in a task.

It was of interest that all attribute categories of un- creative characteristic~ and almost all attribute catego- ries of creative traits (39 of 42) were suggested by both male and female teachers

The respondents also de- scribed a creative person as one who has a collectivistic orientation, such as one who "inspires people," "has contribution to the progress of society" and "is appreciated by others." These descriptions, found in this sample of Chinese people, did not occur in U.S. investigations (Rudowicz et al., 1995

onventional, " "timid, " "lack of conjidence. "and "conforming. "

imaginative, " "always ques- tioning, " "quick in responding. " "active, " and "high intellectual ability, "

Implicit Theories of Creativity: Teachers' Perception of Student Characteristics in Hong Kong

"self-directed," "curious," "original," "artistic," "intel- ligent," "interested in many things," "exploratory," "unique," "innovative," "flexible," "imaginative," "al- ways questioning," "nonconforming," "challenging," "uninhibited," "independent," "sensitive," "expres- sive," "inventive," and "good at designing."

We are naturally creative and curious. We just have to build systems that nurture our inherent abilities. Schools do not do that.

De Rond, M., & Miller, A. N. (2005). Publish or perish—Bane or boon of academic life?Journal ofManagement Inquiry, 14(4), 321–329. doi:

gender neutrality, creativity, imagination and tinker time are the basis for learning

After administering the marijuana, the research team gauged each participant’s ability to complete cognitive tasks that included two types of creative thinking. The first task: "Think of as many uses as you can for a pen"

Al-Ghazali launched a philosophical critique against Neoplatonic-influenced early Islamic philosophers such as Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. In response to the philosophers' claim that the created order is governed by secondary efficient causes (God being, as it were, the Primary and Final Cause in an ontological and logical sense), Ghazali argues that what we observe as regularity in nature based presumably upon some natural law is actually a kind of constant and continual regularity. There is no independent necessitation of change and becoming, other than what God has ordained.

Now, it is important for you to understand that everything which is manifest, or appears, has its basis in the creative flow of Mind. You are not the creator in the sense that you, as a point in the universe, have a creative thought and put it forward into manifestation. Rather, you are the Totality, you are the One that constitutes the Many. And, it is on the basis of this Totality that this creativity is expressed. Every creative action by which Being unfolds Itself is in total harmony with the whole of Its Self. Therefore, it becomes clear that the creative process is the harmonious unfolding of the Totality of Being which brings forth Its individual, creative ideas—and not of a single point in that Totality. This means that creativity does not occur from the standpoint of a three-dimensional consciousness called a “person” or “personality.” This means that your experience of being Creative will not feel the same. The experience of being it will be different from the experience of having it, which you had from a three-dimensional frame of reference. You could say that Creativity is a Universal Action which is experienced specifically. It is not a specific action which is experienced universally.

there will be more experimentation around content

Creativity has to be visionary, subversive, disturbing. It must be innovative. It must drive ideas and concepts. It has to question stereotypes and old models.

On one hand, there are infinite ideas, and so the taking of one idea as private property clearly leaves “enough,” and debatably “as good” for others (Locke, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: POLICY FOR INNOVATION 8   1690, Chap. V, Sect. 27).

Following my original question, I wanted to add two quotes. First, an excellent quote on originality by the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, : ‘It’s not where you take things from. It’s where you take them to.’ Second, Jim Jarmusch who was quoting Godard. “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations. Architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable. Originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said, ‘It’s not where you take things from. It’s where you take them to.’” Both are similar to, but much better than the worn Picasso quote : “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

I n B u r r o w - G i l e s , t h e C o u r t d i s t i l l e d t h e s a m e r e q u i r e m e n t f r o m t h e C o n s t i t u t i o n ' s u s e o f t h e w o r d " a u t h o r s . " T h e C o u r t d e f i n e d " a u t h o r , " i n a c o n s t i t u t i o n a l s e n s e , t o m e a n " h e t o w h o m a n y t h i n g o w e s i t s o r i g i n ; o r i g i n a t o r ; m a k e r . " 1 1 1 U . S . , a t 5 8 ( i n t e r n a l q u o t a t i o n m a r k s o m i t t e d ) . A s i n T h e T r a d e - M a r k C a s e s , t h e C o u r t e m p h a s i z e d t h e c r e a t i v e c o m p o n e n t o f o r i g i n a l i t y . I t d e s c r i b e d c o p y r i g h t a s b e i n g l i m i t e d t o " o r i g i n a l i n t e l l e c t u a l c o n c e p t i o n s o f t h e a u t h o r , " 1 1 1 U . S . , a t 5 8 , a n d s t r e s s e d t h e i m p o r t a n c e o f r e q u i r i n g a n a u t h o r w h o a c c u s e s a n o t h e r o f i n f r i n g e m e n t t o p r o v e " t h e e x i s t e n c e o f t h o s e f a c t s o f o r i g i n a l i t y , o f i n t e l l e c t u a l p r o d u c t i o n , o f t h o u g h t , a n d c o n c e p t i o n . " I d . , a t 5 9 - 6 0 .

I n T h e T r a d e - M a r k C a s e s , t h e C o u r t a d d r e s s e d t h e c o n s t i t u t i o n a l s c o p e o f " w r i t i n g s . " F o r a p a r t i c u l a r w o r k t o b e c l a s s i f i e d " u n d e r t h e h e a d o f w r i t i n g s o f a u t h o r s , " t h e C o u r t d e t e r m i n e d , " o r i g i n a l i t y i s r e q u i r e d . " 1 0 0 U . S . , a t 9 4 . T h e C o u r t e x p l a i n e d t h a t o r i g i n a l i t y r e q u i r e s i n d e p e n d e n t c r e a t i o n p l u s a m o d i c u m o f c r e a t i v i t y : " [ W ] h i l e t h e w o r d w r i t i n g s m a y b e l i b e r a l l y c o n s t r u e d , a s i t h a s b e e n , t o i n c l u d e o r i g i n a l d e s i g n s f o r e n g r a v i n g , p r i n t s , & c . , i t i s o n l y s u c h a s a r e o r i g i n a l , a n d a r e f o u n d e d i n t h e c r e a t i v e p o w e r s o f t h e m i n d . T h e w r i t i n g s w h i c h a r e t o b e p r o t e c t e d a r e t h e f r u i t s o f i n t e l l e c t u a l l a b o r , e m b o d i e d i n t h e f o r m o f b o o k s , p r i n t s , e n g r a v i n g s , a n d t h e l i k e . " I b i d . ( e m p h a s i s i n o r i g i n a l ) .