10 Awesome Videos On Idea Execution & The Creative Process At 99U, we try to demystify the creative process. To show you the real inner-workings of how ideas are made to happen by sharing the thought processes and creative practices of great achievers. Here, with the help of our readers, we’ve rounded up some of the best videos on idea execution from artists, writers, designers, storytellers, researchers, and chocolatiers. 1. It’s always been in between the things I thought I was doing that the real work has happened. 2. The most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. 3. Sometimes we over-value our own experience. I know that being right is a pretty deadly thing. 4. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all. 5. Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius. 6. Procrastination is finding the most difficult way of doing something, is jumping from one idea to another to another, is checking your emails. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Learning Technology Learning Are We Wringing the Creativity Out of Kids? Do you think you’re creative?” Ask this question of a group of second-graders, and about 95 percent of them will answer “Yes.” Three years later, when the kids are in fifth grade, that proportion will drop to 50 percent—and by the time they’re seniors in high school, it’s down to 5 percent. Author Jonah Lehrer recently discussed the implications of these sobering statistics for education in his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. Lehrer began by quoting Picasso: “Every child is born an artist. “Right now we are grooming our kids to think in a very particular way, which assumes that the right way to be thinking is to be attentive, to stare straight ahead.” One such intervention: “We have to expand our notion of what productivity means,” said Lehrer. People with such conditions are actually more likely to become “eminent creative achievers” once they’re out in the real world, Lehrer noted. Parents’ and teachers’ task, he said, is to help kids learn how to “productively daydream.”
8 shocking things we learned from Stephen Hawking's book From the idea that our universe is one among many, to the revelation that mathematician Pythagoras didn't actually invent the Pythagorean theorem, here are eight shocking things we learned from reading physicist Stephen Hawking's new book, "The Grand Design," written with fellow physicist Leonard Mlodinow of Caltech. The book, covering major questions about the nature and origin of the universe, was released Sept. 7 by its publisher, Bantam. 1. The past is possibility According to Hawking and Mlodinow, one consequence of the theory of quantum mechanics is that events in the past that were not directly observed did not happen in a definite way. For example, if all we know is that a particle traveled from point A to point B, then it is not true that the particle took a definite path and we just don't know what it is. Yeah, we're still trying to wrap our brains around this. 2. This fun fact: A 1-watt night-light emits a billion billion photons each second. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Improvisation May Be the Key to Successfully Managing Change, Says MIT Improvisation May Be the Key to Successfully Managing Change, Says MIT January 10 2012 by ChiefExecutive.net Agility , flexibility, improvisation – a company’s ability to quickly change is crucial to its long-term success. MIT’s Leadership Center published an article by professor Wanda J. Orlikowski that equates a successful company to an orchestra. Sometimes, however, the conductor needs to let go and let its skilled and creative musicians lead. Orlikowski says, “Organizations that stay flexible take advantage of new opportunities, explore new ways of working, and resolveunanticipated consequences.” Read: Jazz-Inspired: Manage Change by Improvising
Using Diigo in the Classroom - Student Learning with Diigo Diigo is a powerful information capturing, storing, recalling and sharing tool. Here are just a few of the possibilities with Diigo: Save important websites and access them on any computer.Categorize websites by titles, notes, keyword tags, lists and groups.Search through bookmarks to quickly find desired information.Save a screenshot of a website and see how it has changed over time.Annotate websites with highlighting or virtual "sticky notes."View any annotations made by others on any website visited.Share websites with groups or the entire Diigo social network.Comment on the bookmarks of others or solicit comments to your shared bookmarks. To learn more about how Diigo can be used as as information management tool, visit these pages: Diigo has clear advantages to the individual that needs to store and recall important information. Below are just a few options for using Diigo in the classroom. Personal Student Bookmarks Bookmark Lists Extended Learning Professional Development Research
Annie Murphy Paul: Your Morning Routine Is Making You Dull Brrriiinnng. The alarm clock buzzes in another hectic weekday morning. You leap out of bed, rush into the shower, into your clothes and out the door with barely a moment to think. A stressful commute gets your blood pressure climbing. Good luck with that. (MORE: Paul: The Myth of ‘Practice Makes Perfect’) As several recent studies highlight, the way most of us spend our mornings is exactly counter to the conditions that neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists tell us promote flexible, open-minded thinking. Your commute filled with honking cars or sharp-elbowed fellow passengers doesn’t help, either. (MORE: Paul: The Bigger Ball Drops Faster — and Other Myths of Physics) The only thing most of us do right in the morning, in fact, is drink coffee. So what would our mornings look like if we re-engineered them in the interest of maximizing our creative-problem-solving capacities? (MORE: What If Introverts Ruled the World?)
10 places where anyone can learn to code Teens, tweens and kids are often referred to as “digital natives.” Having grown up with the Internet, smartphones and tablets, they’re often extraordinarily adept at interacting with digital technology. But Mitch Resnick, who spoke at TEDxBeaconStreet, is skeptical of this descriptor. Sure, young people can text and chat and play games, he says, “but that doesn’t really make you fluent.” Mitch Resnick: Let's teach kids to code Fluency, Resnick proposes in this TED Talk, comes not through interacting with new technologies, but through creating them. The point isn’t to create a generation of programmers, Resnick argues. In his talk, Resnick describes Scratch, the programming software that he and a research group at MIT Media Lab developed to allow people to easily create and share their own interactive games and animations. At Codecademy, you can take lessons on writing simple commands in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, Python and Ruby. While we’re at it: bonus!
Make Something 365 & Get Unstuck How Creativity Works in Cities - Arts & Lifestyle The human imagination is a bewildering process. How the brain comes up with great ideas is mysteriously complex. Jonah Lehrer's ambitious new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, takes a fascinating dive into the world of creativity and how it all works, not to mention devoting a chapter entirely to cities. Lehrer recently took some time to chat with Atlantic Cities and expand on his ideas concerning the nexus of creativity and cities. You title your chapter on cities "Urban Friction"and you go on to talk about the pioneering work of Geoffrey West, Luis Bettencourt, and their colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute on "urban metabolism." I think the basic logic was outlined long ago by one of our mutual heroes, Jane Jacobs. These sidewalk conversations came with real benefits. What’s interesting is that the sheer disorder of the metropolis maximizes the amount of spillover. I see it as resulting from the same basic phenomenon, which is that blending of knowledge into new forms. Absolutely.