scott klepesch's List: Design and creativity

• We were looking for the newest developments in curriculum design, situating what we found in a wider context of social, communications and curriculum theory, and just put out a report.
• He suggests that the structuring patterns of the Internet as it is developing in the era of social and participatory media is leading to a massive transformation of cultural, commercial and political life. Consequently, we are witnessing a “death of the centre” in contrast to the centralized structures that patterned the past:
• we are witnessing the death of the centre and the rise of a new centrifugal trend that disperses power to individuals [and is] empowering audiences...

  • The idea that scholarship is a shared responsibility. The collective approach to building knowledge is a the foundation of any academic setting.
• So in the era of the social and participative Web, the idea of centres of organization has been replaced by the imagery of network structures, centrifugality and decentralization. These ideas and images are now influencing the way the curriculum of the future is imagined. 
• He argues that this decentralized network structure can now be found across the media, business, finance, and political landscape.
• “Switchers” can be found building strategic alliances between the media and financial markets, or between scientific and military networks, religious and political systems.

  • Similar to Brown's Power of Pull. Those agents that make connections and build creative spaces.
• But alternative curricula are now being developed and designed by a much more diverse range of organizations and agencies. Many foundations and trusts, charitable and  philanthropic organizations, think-tanks, non-profits and corporations alike are involved in different curriculum experiments. Many of these are directly in response to youth media cultures. And increasingly, these experiments are being networked together to form greater strategic alliances and joint actions. 
• In short, there is a shift being proposed from centralized knowledge management to decentralized knowledge production.
• The switchers in this case are experimental curriculum designers and their ideas and projects, but the idea increasingly seems to be that students should be empowered to do this kind of network switching for themselves

  • Developing curriculum is a shared endeavor- services such as Google Docs or a wiki space to formulate a course.
• These shifts represent an approach to curriculum design that sees curriculum as dynamic and always-in-the-making. This is a vision of curriculum-as-wiki, or “wikirriculum.”

• They transform our ideas about authorship and editorial control with, increasingly, anyone enabled as an author or an editor of content.

   

  • Multiple editors and discussion forums built around the document.
• So, a “wikirriculum” entails teachers and learners taking on greater editorial responsibilities. This is perhaps an ideal-type form of curriculum design for an edit-based network age. It represents a move away from seeing curriculum in terms of a core or central body of knowledge and content to seeing curriculum instead as hyperlinked with participatory media cultures and networked publics.

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• Bebbington writes on The Guardian’s Teacher Network blog that far from taking an extended recess the students "worked solidly for six hours, cross-pollinating across different projects, ages and abilities."
• One student responded that he had discovered a preference for "longer time periods of project-based learning because it means you can spend longer planning it, thinking about it and concentrating on it so you can produce a better piece of work at the end of it all."

• In school, Sudran says, science had held no interest for him at all. But out in the real world, it turned out to be the thing he'd been missing all along.

  "My life is immeasurably better since I got into science," Sudran says.
• So Sudran got a college to donate some space and equipment. Pretty soon, a small nonprofit called the Community Science Workshop Network was born.
• There's no curriculum. Nothing to memorize. Just tools to play and experiment with. And a lot of noise.

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• What if we articulated the idea that if parents really want their kids prepared for anything, they need to be in classrooms where we’re focused on solving real and important problems, creating provocative and meaningful work, connecting to other teachers and students from around the world, and doing stuff that can only happen when a vibrant, engaged community of learners gets together to do real work?

• John Maxwell in his book Thinking for a Change, creativity is not a single skill or attribute, but a mindset that embraces a broad array of different things including Ambiguity, Learning, Possibility, Connecting, Ideas, Options, Exploring Gaps and Inconsistencies, the Offbeat, and Failure.
• We must foster intuition to anticipate changes before they occur; empathy to understand that which cannot clearly be expressed; wisdom to see the connection between apparently unrelated events; and creativity to discover new ways of defining problems, new rules that will make it possible to adapt to the unexpected.”
• but it takes a creative mind to spot wrong questions.”
• The University of Michigan “Criticial and Creative Thinking” Page at umich.edu sees criticial thinking as “the process we use to reflect on, assess and judge the assumption underlying our own and others ideas and efforts” and creative thinking as “the process we use to develop ideas that are unique, useful and worthy of further elaboration.” 

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• If it's at times of megafailure that human organization needs radical ideas and thinkers, then to become one, seek the deeper roots of crisis. Humdrum collapses and workaday crashes can be solved by pruning the shoots — but historic crises, Great Resets, in Richard Florida's terms, require paradigm shifts: sets of ideas that challenge yesterday's cherished assumptions and beliefs. Like, for example, that the apex of human prosperity is churning out more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now.
• My favourite example, though, is punk: a musical form that ear-splittingly shattered the leisure-suited conventions of the spread-collared bourgeoisie — that gave voice to the marginalized, powerless, and their dissatisfaction.
• For an idea to be radical in human terms, it's got to seed a system, nurture a thriving jungle of human interaction —

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