Skip to main content

SXSWedu and NAIS

To friends and attendees at the 2012 SXSWedu and NAIS conferences,

As a follow up to the outpouring of support following these two recent presentations, I've begun this blog as an accessible place to collect and share work in the areas of creativity, education, philosophy, and cognitive psychology.  

Here, I aim to expand upon and share ideas from the talk in posts that include both slides and a written explanation.  So far, you can find the core ideas--the Taxonomy of Creative Design and the Three Regions for Creativity--and several additional posts.  In coming weeks and months I'll explore other examples and ideas from the presentation (guidelines for good creative work, examples from the presentation, and more), and other work around the intersection of creativity, education, philosophy, and cognitive psychology.

If you have interest in particular ideas from the presentation, or if you have specific questions, please let me know in a comment below or in an email, and I'll aim to post and explore those ideas sooner.

If this conversation is appealing to you, please consider following this blog via email by entering your address in the field to the top and right.  And please share posts you like on Facebook, Twitter, and Google, using the buttons at the top of each post.

Many thanks, again, for the support!

Cheers,
Pete

PS. The images on this blog are higher quality than the ones from the presentation.  If, however, you'd like to download a selection of the original slides, they're posted here on SlideShare.
blogger analytics

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Four Ways to Measure Creativity

Assessing creative work has been a bugaboo for a good long time.  In schools it's the constant refrain: “How can you grade creative writing?”  or “It’s a poem: however it comes out is right.”  In businesses and elsewhere, people demand innovation--and are stymied with understanding how to measure it. But this is not the bugaboo we think it is--in the classroom, or in the broader world of creative work.  Here are four different ways to assess creativity, each designed for different settings: 1. Measuring How Creative a Person Is - The Guilford Model 2. Measuring How Creative a Work Is - The Taxonomy of Creative Design 3. Measuring Creative Work Against a Program - The Requirements Model 4. Measuring the Social Value of Creative Work - Csikszentmihalyi’s Model Notably, in each of these cases, what we mean by "creative" changes a little.  Sometimes "creativity" refers to divergent production (how much one produces, or how varied it is).  Sometimes "c...
11 comments
Read more

Taxonomy of Creative Design

Strategies to improve creativity are many, but they are also diffuse.  Little ties them together in a way that offers a coherent vision for how creativity can be understood or developed incrementally.  The Taxonomy of Creative Design, a work in progress, offers a new theory for doing so. Since creative work can be measured along spectrums of both and form and content, the Taxonomy of Creative Design offers a progression from imitation to original creation measured in terms of form and content.  In doing so, it organizes creative works into an inclusive, unifying landscape that serves not only as an analytical lens through which one might evaluate creative work, but also as a methodical approach to developing creative skills. Here is a closer look: Imitation Imitation is the replication of a previous work.  It is the painter with an easel at the museum, painting her own Mona Lisa; it is the jazz musician performing the solo of the great...
13 comments
Read more

On Artificial Intelligence, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and the Risks of Playing With Magic

  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  - Arthur C. Clarke, in Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (1962) When I uploaded to ChatGPT a picture of my family taken at a screening of Taylor Swift’s “Eras” Tour, and asked ChatGPT simply to “write a poem about the attached picture,” and when it returned to me a sonnet accurately describing my wife and children wearing “Swiftie” shirts in front of a poster of the singer herself, capturing the mix of love, fandom, and family, I couldn’t help but pause to appreciate what an incredible time we are living in.  Today’s technology might as well be magic. I’ve been thinking recently about another magical moment, too: Disney’s 1940 release of Fantasia , which includes the nine-minute, short film “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”  The animated film recently celebrated its 80th anniversary, but the story is actually much, much older.  And in its age, it serves as a ti...
7 comments
Read more