I get sent a lot of ideas for web services that will "appeal to a niche" and, thanks to that book, we're all expected to bow at the Alter of The Long Tail and drink the nectar of the microbrand. I've never been so sure. If you ask me to make the call between a half-empty macrobiotic boutique restaurant and a packed, noisy French bistrot with music that's just a tad too loud, you know which one I'd go for. For ideas to come into existence you only need two. To thrive and survive towards a sustainable future it needs more than village.
The size of the communities around us does matter. That's why more and more of us head to the city, for sure. The more people, the more opportunity to interact, the more opportunity to make good things happen. Or so we'd like to hope, anyway.
I like this WSJ colour piece by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who features in the video above, as he describes what makes the perfect city. His opinion on size is revealing in the physical world, and sends a reminder to those designing communities in the virtual one: size does matter:
A city can't be too small. Size guarantees anonymity—if you make an
embarrassing mistake in a large city, and it's not on the cover of the
Post, you can probably try again. The generous attitude towards failure
that big cities afford is invaluable—it's how things get created. In a
small town everyone knows about your failures, so you are more careful
about what you might attempt. Every time I visit San Francisco I ask
out loud "Why don't I live here? Why do I choose to live in a place
that is harder, tougher and, well, not as beautiful?" The locals often
reply, "You don't want to live here. It looks like a city, but it's
really a small village. Everyone knows what you're doing" Oh, OK. If
you say so. It's still beautiful.
There's a lesson in here for lots of online initiatives in education: the attempt to encourage rather than lead by mandate the use of Scotland's national intranet Glow, the desire to evolve the TeachMeet form of unconference professional development towards something that 'makes change happen', the desire to shake the often unnecessary constraint of national testing in the US and elsewhere.
I still stand with my gut firmly in place: the niche is useful for getting a new trend or fad started, but to move beyond the fad and into the mainstream, for general acceptance to occur and change to follow, you need size. You need the distractions and noise of the city, the niches you don't appreciate, to make your own ideas fly.
A key point about knowing Where Good Ideas Come From is realising that they don't come from some kind of change management programme, especially in a world where technology has helped change happen quicker than most of us can react to let alone predict. As George Church put it:
"In a changing world, inaction can be the radical 'action'" (cited by Tim O'Reilly)
For most people at any level in an organisation, especially in times where we might all be worried about keeping our jobs, taking time out to not be busy, to not be "doing things" and "fulfilling tasks", might feel counter-intuitive, but arguably it's a key tactic in making things around us slow down long enough to spot the great opportunity, the creative gap that can be filled.
Are we simply diagnosing problems, or..?
Without fail, each day I will see ideas that fulfill needs I didn't know anyone had. Incredibly clever people with huge skill in taking some lines of code and turning them into a product have managed to find a problem that needs solved. Except, unfortunately, it's a problem that most people don't have. Sure, in this Long Tail era we need only to find the 0.01% of the masses who really do need this idea to make it a resounding success, but the reality of the net is that, unless you know where to find these people and how to get your idea across to them, your idea is the equivalent of the tree falling down in the forest that no-one has seen: it doesn't exist. All too often, the engineers have diagnosed a problem that does not exist because they have not taken the trouble to go and speak to the people who they think might want it.
One of the reasons I read so many fewer educational blogs now than I did, say, two years ago is not because I'm less interested in learning and formal, schools-based education, but because so many educators' blogs are overwhelmingly samey. The reason: they're concentrating on tools of social media: "Transformative tools", "new tools", "21st century tools".... They then let me know how these tools are the solution to a problem that has only been waiting for this tool to show up and solve.
Notwithstanding the fact that where I come from a 'tool' is a form of insult ("See you, aye, you, see you, you're a pure tool, soyar!" (and 'Bing' is a slag heap), the tools are not, and have never been, the issue for the pent up frustration of educators the world over.
"It's that 'they' don't get the things that these tools can offer", is the cry. Well, no, it's not really. Because what those tools 'allow' teachers to do has been possible for much longer than that, namely collaboration, shared responsibility for learning, access to resources beyond the one classroom textbook and teacher's brain.
It's just that formal education has struggled for hundreds of years to do things any other way than the first way Scottish priests and Ministers did it back in the 12th Century and that the misunderstanding is therefore not to do with what tool someone could be using for purpose x, y or z, but rather to do with a lack of pedagogical independence and a form of professional arthritis.
Where our starting point is not tools or code, but people, the creative results are often different. Instead of solving problems (that may or may not exist) we instead turn our minds to creating beautiful things that people don't need but want to have. The world's full of them: the iPod (more beautiful, but not really improving on existing MP3 players at the time); BakerTweet (useful for a tiny community of people around a bakery in the North East of London, but beautiful enough an idea to make thousands more laugh on seeing it):
I'd much rather be designing solutions that are fun, engaging, delighting than trying to find problems in our past ways of working that need "improved". The latter is what any "Government Initiative" is about: the previous bunch got it horribly wrong, so we're going to improve it. It's a way of looking at the world that is negative, obsessed with the ills of our world instead of looking for the opportunity that we've been missing thus far. I'd much rather be seeing the gaps between the good-enough solutions others have found, than trying to bulldoze their efforts. Creating more tools is not always the best means of doing this. Creating opportunities (training, conversations, blog posts, and, just sometimes, new tools) that help others also find this positive creative path of designing solutions is much more up my alley. The creator of the tool or Big Idea mustn't have all the fun - the user, participant, learner using the idea must have just as much fun using it, if not more. If you need an example where this is not the case, think of how much fun the cast of a theatre production have putting it together, and then think of the audience that have to endure it.
When it comes to designing tools, therefore, or even just appraising them for educational use, it would be interesting to think in terms of how they fit into the existing infrastructure. This is made easy by my current employer, whose vision is encapsulated in seven words: Do It First, Inspire Change, Make Trouble. As I look through hundreds of ideas I'll often be taken with a few quite quickly, before seeing if I can comfortably distinguish them from anything else that has gone before. I use this phrase to try and hone that decision down to facts:
[My thing here] is the only [thing of its genre] that allows [these folk] in [this geographical or online place] to [achieve this great experience] at a time when [people seek x, y or z]
This means of making decisions is not about a commercial company wanting to be the first in order to make tons more dosh than anyone else. It's about designing solutions between the gaps, rather than trying to bash the competition (bashing the competition or past initiatives is also excruciatingly hard work, and not very pleasant in the process). It's no suprise, perhaps, that this self-questioning approach originates from one of the most creative minds in the advertising industry, Marty Neumeier. Here's how he uses it to describe some great, creative companies that are about designing solutions instead of seeking out problems:
Harley Davidson is the only motorcycle manufacturer that makes big, loud motorcycles for macho guys (and macho wannabees) most in the United States who want to join a gang of cowboys in an era of decreasing personal freedom
or
The White Strips are the only pop music duo that records crude yet hip rocks songs for young urbanites in the US and other first-world countries who long for authenticity in an era of overproduced, me-too music
This should be the goal of any educational institution as much as any company. Pointing out the weak points in a system and then designing a "solution" to them is often the number one priority of any (normally annual) plan or curriculum, at the total expense of undertaking any gap-filling designing. Gap-filling is therefore seen as an additional thing for educators to do, rather than part and parcel of the job. That's one of the reasons for the professional arthritis of schooling and education.
I'd now dare educational leaders to take the jump that commercial operators have done for some time: forget trying to bash the competition (or, in SchoolsLand, trying to improve constantly on the way we did things last year), and instead come up with a gap-filling-only attitude. Doing so shows that you have confidence in the core product you're offering (sound teaching) and are keen to innovate truly in the untouched territory of your professional life, rather than mucking about around the edges of something that works OK. Who knows, you might become the next educational version of the iPhone, iPod or, if you're really luck, the BakerTweet.
Finding a professional pedagogy
How one achieves this change in attitude is certainly not an answer found in our laptops or in new gadgets and tools appearing all over the workplace. It's in attitudes, and knowing where your attitude is in relation to where you want it to be. Bangalore-based Gaurav Mishra shares this view when working with professional corporate clients and has abandoned any quest to explain (again) what the difference between the uses of blogging, social networking, bookmarking, podcasting and lifestreaming might be. Instead, he's distilled a professional pedagogy, if you will, into four main jargon-free perennial stages of development in our ways of working: The 4 Cs of Social Media. Go read, and see if you can correlate the best example of what you've students capable of doing with the progression of Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence.
A pedagogy, scholarly or professional like Gaurav's, provides a vision set around people (the user, the learner or the participant). When we start with people, we end up designing beautiful things as a result of great ideas that come uninvited, that don't fit into our annual or three-year plan but which naturally always seem to fit our people-based (as opposed to results-based) vision. Rather than starting at a blank sheet of paper or computer screen and seeking out problems that don't exist, simply because we have a tool that allows us to do so, we are now crafting towards a known challenge that came to us.
This presents a significant challenge to those who are paid to invent curricula or frameworks or year-long (and occasionally three-year-long) plans. Given that they are no more superhuman than the rest of us how can they be doing anything other than seeking out problems that need 'sorted out'. They're certainly not given the luxury of time to let great creative initiatives come uninvited, at their leisure, based around real participants in the system.
When Michelangelo described sculpture it was as something that had to be sought out, not enforced on the stone:
The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor`s hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone
Michelangelo
The beauty was hidden in that block of stone, needing someone to come along and break that spell, remove the covers of rock that hid the creativity underneath. If we were to take this as our direction it would be at loggerheads with the constraints of curriculum and five-year structures. Curricula, school buildings and "creative processes" have generally been designed on spreadsheets and therefore look like spreadsheets. They have the same unresponsive, inflexible formulae as spreadsheets or, at the very least, require a master's hand to change them (hardly the stuff to inspire the masses in our organisations to take the creative lead and bend those spreadsheet columns).
Creativity is therefore a mixture. On the one hand, it's the ability to stand still and see the overarching line, the challenge that will make us achieve something beautiful while others scurry at ground level achieving tasks and 'doing stuff'. On the other, it's the desire to uncompromisingly seek out the creativity that sits before us in the blunt lumps of stone (and spreadsheets) that the quarrymen of our bureaucracies manage to produce.
The question for a leader, of course, is to work out whether they are a quarryman (or woman), or a Michelangelo. I know which one most leaders' egos would prefer to be, but for many leaders there's a need to spend some time at 35,000 feet working out where they are, and where their colleagues might want them to be.
So, should we be doing this creative leadership thinking in our creative bubble, or aiming to work collaboratively throughout the whole journey? If you're politically correct, you probably think that collaboration and creativity are exclusive bed buddies. As the next post in this series shows, you might be wrong there, too.
This is the first of eight posts on the theme of Where Good Ideas Come From. Pic from Evil Erin, who was looking for some good ideas in her roommate's bed.
The creative industries in the UK alone are worth some £70bn each year, about 8% of GDP and growing at about double the rate of the rest of the economy, made up by everything as diverse as television production to game-making, book-writing to advertising, public relations to jewellery. For the past year I've been contributing to this industry, learning the art and science of commissioning new media ideas, turning internet, mobile and gaming ideas from paper dreams to running code realities.
In the workplace, we have a variety of processes, individual talents and skills to ensure that most of these dreams turn into good ideas in the real world, from designing efficient challenging structures through which people pitch their ideas, to the knack of producing a contract that not only makes sense but is fair to all parties. A fair dose of gut instinct and knowing the shifting sands of the vast new media landscape contribute to building, hopefully, more excellent ideas than fairly good ones. The processes hopefully eliminate the really dodgy ones altogether.
But given the aims of the initiative with which I'm working - Channel 4's Innovation for the Public - to change people's lives for the better, to have a lasting impact, to achieve technological and social firsts, and to do so with a trademark slug of trouble, finding and generating good ideas in the first place is something that, if we could define it, would make life a lot easier.
Knowing Where Good Ideas Come From in any walk of life leads not just to a more pleasant experience in life, but a better experience for others and a more profitable life for everyone.
Knowing what makes an idea good is one thing. 95% of ideas get rejected, a large number fairly swiftly and, say, 5-10% after having looked in more detail at the issues involved. Few, if any, seem to appear elsewhere suggesting that either the ideas are too costly to get off the ground, leaving a Government or private investor struggling to see their investment have the desired tangible result, or they are cheap to produce but aren't seen as Good Ideas by the intended users or participants.
Knowing what we could do to improve those conditions of creativity is another goal, perhaps more tangible. These conditions, these physiological, physical and mental places are Where Good Ideas Come From.
What's important to consider, though, is that "being creative" is not, as is often the assumed case, a result of some form of change management. All too often, change management and the overpriced consultancies that help you get from there to here are in the business of selling the change of a more creative company or self. If tapping into creativity is reduced to change management, then we are indeed in for a rocky journey. Only 30% of change management programmes achieve any change at all, let alone the intended one and not necessarily a change towards a more creative one. Creativity is something most of us can unearth in the right circumstances with enough time, effort and stamina to see us through the darker moments of our "crappy ideas" being mocked or left out to dry.
And, of course, some of us (most of us?) tend to come up with fairly crappy ideas most of the time, and that's alright, seeing if they work before moving onto the next one when we realise we were heading down the wrong path. Not just in the world of new media and technology, though, is the potential for heading down too many different paths and tangents at once so ripe. Never have the options opening up been so great, the tools at our creative disposal so varied. Creativity is attempting to go exponential when often our more analogue brains and bodies aren't really in a mood for catching up.
With this, change management, that sudden jolt of inspirational energy (or brush of quasi-guru-like consultant fluff), is even less appropriate a model on which to base an rebirth of creativity in our organisations. As George Church put it:
"In a changing world, inaction can be the radical 'action'" (cited by Tim O'Reilly)
It is no happenstance that our first main areas of investigation of Where Good Ideas Come From are nearly all about time (and the lack of it) and the need for us to stand still, do nothing and drink it in. Someone, I can't remember or Google who it was, once said that they were in the habit of taking a day return flight, at least but no more than four hours long (the time of the laptop battery) in order to get things done without interruptions. Sometimes it's just the practice of regularly, say, every Tuesday morning, of taking a flight at 35,000ft to see the world move by a little slower and take it all in, before joining the land at a seemingly faster speed later. Of course, that's not really how it works. We all fly faster when we're taking in the overall view of things at 35,000ft and that seems slower than when we're on the ground, 'only' going at 10mph at sealevel but things seeming too fast to take in, let alone control.
Nor is creativity some elusive black art available only to the few, while the rest of us trudge on with our lemming-like routine. As Colin Anderson, MD of Denki Games in Dundee, puts it:
Today we run the risk of thinking of creativity in the same way as we
once thought of electro-magnetism – magical, unknowable, a black art.
Poppycock, I say again! It’s a series of deliberate choices – some
serial, some parallel, some conscious, some sub-conscious – made by
assessing the values of many variables simultaneously through the
filters of knowledge, experience and aesthetic appreciation. More
variables than we can currently define and measure perhaps, but that
doesn’t make it magic. I subscribe to the school of thought that says
“art is a science with more than seven variables”, and from where I’m
looking creativity is precisely that. (emphasis added)
There are indeed more than seven variables to creativity and therefore knowing Where Good Ideas Come From. I'm going to make an attempt to understand what some of those variables are and would ask for your help in the comments to fill in the inevitable chasm-like gaps.
If we all knew the idea we'd not be writing blog posts like this, reading them or doing workshops on the matter. We'd be busy pulling that limitless supply of creativity out of its hole to see the light of day and bring us riches, joy, learning and new friends.
However, given that we're not, over the next month or so (or however long it takes me to splurge out those thoughts) I'll be summarising on this here blog some of the best online and offline reading and viewing that has attempted to answer that question, throwing in my own unresearched but tried and tested notions (and a few that haven't even got that far). This post will change to reflect the updating posts that will take a peek at:
Creative Genius. Man At Work: Arguments for not working as a team
Getting Creativity Done (GCD): How to get productive and clean down the mental decks
Nurturing creativity: Worrying about "Tanya's Bow" or the Dinosaurs: Some arguments for caring about the team, not pissing them off and really understanding what failure is
Finding your tribe
Creating visions, not missions
As they're posted, please leave comments, disagree, add your own links, videos and pictures. I hope that by the end of it we'll have a resource to which we might come back with the stories of how the works, thoughts and attitudes of others have changed the way we operate.
Ken Robinson's "The Element" gets launched in the UK this week. It's a superb tome, and one that every educator, employee or entrepreneur should read, if only to check that they themselves are in the right place personally and professionally. Do your natural talents and passions meet at the same time and place, or are you plugging away at the wrong thing completely? Ken's book contains no simplistic lists of things one must do to survive the 21st century - it's Johnny Bunko for the over-educated.
Many of the messages will be familiar to those who have viewed his famous TED talk which proclaims, rightly in this blogger's opinion, that schools kill creativity. Why? Here's some of the stimulus from Ken's book along with some of my own observations, thoughts and inaccurate takes on the world of education.
Schools are built for, and in the image of, the industrial revolution Schools are not only built for an industrial revolution past but also in its image - my first ever teaching placement in the most deprived area of Scotland was marked by every period of learning being 53 minutes long, something more like a chicken processing plant's shifts than a stimulating learning environment, with students batched by age and subject to standardised tests for quality before shipping to the real world. Conformity has thus always had a higher value than diversity. Disciplines on offer are subject to a hierarchy (maths and native language, followed by the sciences with music and the arts chasing the coattails).
Creativity and standardised testing can't share the same bed We know this set of unchanging givens is killing creativity not just in high schools, though generally to a much lesser degree in primary schools, but also in Higher Education establishments. As the number of school leavers not in employment, education or training (NEET) creates a political headache for governments around the world, they are failing to tackle the continued problem in universities and colleges where the numbers also falling into the NEET category are surpassing the figures for high schools.
From recent personal experience of the 'creative output' of some UK Higher Education institutions I can vouch for a killing of creativity, independent thought and entrepreneurship, as hoardes of undergraduates and MScs fight to conform to what university markers want to see and take advantage of the spread of 'cramming courses' at the expense of pursuing personal passions at their best effort. When working on personal projects that are put forward for commissioning (i.e. asking for several £00,000s from the likes of 4iP) or for national and international media and technology prizes, the constraints of the learning environment ("a one-month unit using only x or y software") are used to justify downright poor propositions. Where's the passion that makes them stay up until 11pm and be up at 5.30am to work on their Big Idea? (These are the times 11 year olds at the New York KIPP schools regularly keep to tackle their learning, something about which they, at least, are passionate).
I said earlier that elementary schools have largely escaped this struggle for conformity, but even this elevated position is being gnawed away by standardised tests and curricula. Nothing in the past three years has made me more depressed about the state of education in England than hearing a young Wolverhampton child, part of a PDA-in-the-classroom project, saying that his prime goal from learning was to "get a five" - I still have no idea what "a five" is, but I have a feeling that it's not something that inspires me.
The death of entrepreneurship This desire to "get a five" or to gain the best possible SAT test result is based on a wrong assumption, both in the creation of such tests and their perceived value in the wider world, particularly in the growing creative sector (worth £50b a year in the UK). Malcolm Gladwell's (right) Outliers, which I read immediately after Robinson's Element, offers a great counterpart in where creative success comes from in the first place. It explores the element of chance, background and opportunity in one's success, but also the need for a serious superhuman degree of practice at something before you reach the beginning of your prime, somewhere, that is, in the region of 10 years or 10,000 hours of passionate practice.
In the schooling environment we still see in most countries' high schools and higher education establishments, it's rare that the personal passion of a young person is given the chance to steer activity, resource and time in order that they might get close to achieving that 10,000 hours quicker. But it's not all the fault of institutions' structures and strictures.
More often than not, the successful student pictures themselves working in the 'safety' of faceless institutions rather than taking their passions and ideas to market themselves. History shows more entrepreneurs who were not successful students making it in the relative unsupported privacy of their entrepreneurship. Most students fail to realise, as Robinson puts it so well, that a degree these days is not so much a passport to a good job and salary, but a visa, something that needs renewed on an ever more frequent basis. But institutions and Governments are not particularly vocal in promoting this fact, thus encouraging the self-perpetuating myth that going to univesrity is better than going to college which is better than following a passion that, while you're willing to spend every waking hour working on it, might not lead to anything.
What is it that needs to change? Clue: It isn't curriculum or assessment Nearly every country I've worked in for the past three years, from India to China, New Zealand to the states and provinces of Canada and the USA, from my native Scotland to our neighbours in England and Wales, is fiddling with two things: curriculum and assessment. Technology is often seen as the means of making teaching and learning better. I don't want to tackle here whether it does, but one thing is sure, as Arthur C Clarke (via Sugata Mitra) put it: "If a teacher can be replaced by a computer, then they should." This doesn't mean that all teachers should be replaced by computers, of course. It doesn't even mean that poor teachers should be, really. What it does highlight is that the myth an education system has no poor teachers or even a large hump of mediocre teachers needs to be met head on.
We also need to recognise that, largely, those teachers who use technology the most effectively and lead the way with its use are also, by and large, excellent teachers with or without the technology.
This helps us see what many of us appreciate already: the one biggest element of improving education, making learning more creatively inclined and entrepreneurial, is the teacher. It's not curriculum, class sizes (though smaller class sizes make the teacher's life easier) or even assessment. This is something I've been reporting back from research for two years (and which I've been blown out on more times than I can count). It's not about letting students lead the way with technology and "show us teachers" how it's done. Students are generally quite narrow in their knowledge of how to harness technology or creative venture.
No, it's how teachers and parents teach that is important. It is, to use a piece of edu-jargon, pedagogy, both at school and at home.
Yet no national strategy - and I would love to be corrected - headlines pedagogy as the key factor. Think about it: A Curriculum for Excellence (Scotland); No Child Left Behind (assessment: USA); New Zealand's curriculum is about values, competences, subject areas... Also, there's no large educational business à la Pearson that places its centre of gravity around pedagogy forcing the issue with superb pedagogy-based programmes of change, and with good reason - the business of standardised testing, where pedagogy must play second fiddle to cramming and passing the test, is worth in the USA between $1.2 and $5 billion per year per state. How much is teaching the teachers worth? Currently, a lot less.
Fundamental change through Brains Trusts When I was having a post-panel-session chat with Clay Shirky (I was on the panel and he was the first question-asker of the day) he talked about my current place of employment not in terms of what it was, but in terms of who was in it: "What a brain trust you guys have there", he said. What did he mean? He meant that the organisation employed what it felt were the best people for the job of moving its business forward, and left them to get the hell on with it. The result of feeling that you're part of this brains trust is that you strive more than you ever have to be the best in the world. How many times has someone called the teachers in your school a "brains trust"? Or, for that matter, the management team? Or the parents? Or the students? How many times a day are you aware that you're goal is to be the best in the world?
When we were developing eduBuzz for students and teachers in East Lothian, we centred it around the people, not the platform or the politique of the education authority's management (who, in some schools and particularly in the early days, riled against what we were doing). In a LIFT talk last year, I made the point of saying that its success as a project was probably down to the fact that it offered an immediate change from the importance placed on the school - school boards, school achievement, school councils - and moved it instead onto a level where individuals - people - were the focus. People, not institutions and paper-borne structures, are the sole way to help individuals find their element, nurture it and take advantage of that for the greater good. It's just that most people who have ound their element have had to go and create their own institutions or projects to find a like-minded tribe - education institutions where one is packed away by age and ability, ability determined through standardised tests, are not the place to find fellow tribesmen and women who want to be the best in the world.
It's the nurturing of the brains trust in one's place of work or place of learning that counts the most if we are to improve learning. Schools are pretty poor at identifying talents that are not testable, yet alone nurturing it (this happens thanks to the actions of individual teachers rather than a systemic ability and framework to nurture talent, in the same way as, say, a broadcaster like Channel 4 does; there, the raison d'être is to nurture alternative voices and new talent, with a budget and infrastructure built more or less solely around this. My own department, for example, manages some £50m of public and private money to nurture new talent in online, mobile and gaming media alone.).
Making sure that our current and future students in schools and higher education establishments are capable of entrepreneurship in many areas of their lives, of coming up with solutions that marry new technology (bringing with it new possibilities we could not have before thought through) with strong understanding of design to tackle issues that really matter is the number one task to ensure that they can fully participate as citizens. Simply providing access to part of that equation is not enough: broadband for all without understanding for all, community without happenstance on a global scale, a child's creativity without understanding of the potential technology brings.
John Cleese provides a ten-minute insight into what many of us know already, but fail to acknowledge:
We do not know where we get our ideas from (but we do know we don't get them from our laptops).
Sleeping on an idea can help make its reappearance later so much better.
Ticking things off and keeping all the balls in the air means you will not have any creative ideas.
In our frenzied connected world we need to make some time to make some mood for creativity: a tortoise cocoon from which we can check it's safe to come out into a self-created oasis in our lives.
We need to set aside time and place where interruptions are not allowed - we need to create boundaries of space with a starting time and a finish time, separate from ordinary life, and only then creating a space and place where we can play.
The problem with some teachers is that they may not know that they are not very creative, and therefore they may not value creativity even if they can recognise it.
If those in charge are egotistical and wish to claim credit for the work of others, then they shall directly or indirectly discourage others from being creative.
I've consistently found No. 1 hard, No. 2 happens all the time and is why I don't respond well to tight tight deadlines, No. 3 is my weak spot while No. 4 tends only to happen once everything (and everyone else) is satisfied. No. 5 I achieve well and is the reason airplane commutes were invented. No. 6 is harsh on most people I know read and comment on this blog but true for oh-so-many more. No. 7 is proven every day in blog posts from some leaders and educators whose wordcount on 'me' and 'I' is top heavy at the expense of 'you', 'we' and 'us'.
I was thrilled to hear that colleagues in Channel 4's Film4 (well, it's a table with two or three people at Horseferry Road) have had a significant hand in winning twelve Oscar nominations. All year they've been winning prizes for Hunger, and now Slumdog Millionnaire, In Bruges and Happy-Go-Lucky add to that.
Working in an organisation where every week its Chief Executive is able to send emails telling the whole staff of the latest world-class awards being nominated or won by colleagues is, I think, quite rare. But it also has the effect of raising everyone's game. How many jobs have you been in where every week, at least once, you're asking if the project you are thinking of doing or stuck in the middle of has the potential to be world class? Even the lead of Slumdog, Dev Patel, was discovered and had his first acting role on another award-winning production shown first on and made for Channel 4's teen channel E4, Skins.
If only more schools set their ambition levels at that level, not at the vagaries of "excellence" and "21st century", but at "world class". If only more teachers saw their role as contributing to the potential of their students to win the imaginary plaudit of educational Oscars or Webbys in the same way as a Commissioner at Channel 4 looks to make their independent companies' productions become the best in the world at what they do.
It's not that every idea gets there, but one thing is certainly true: We all get closer to world class by consistently working towards that level and being around others who do, too.
The film buffs amongst you might want to read more on the fine heritage of Film4. Meanwhile, I wonder whether anyone would have the guts to proclaim their Curriculum is not one for Excellence, but The Best Curriculum In The World. At least at that point, the goal is clearer for everyone involved.
So David's school is a rather expensive one in a nice bit of the South East, but that doesn't negate the fact that his teaching of technology and the issues around it this past term has been astounding.
Students are not just using games for learning but they're thinking about it, too, everyone - including the students - reading Johnson's theories for starters. And they've had talks from half of Web 2.0's glitterati: the founding director of carbon footprint company AMEE, the creator of Pepys' Diary, the company behind Channel 4's latest games project about your genes (Routes), author and hyperlocal website founder Steven Berlin Johnson, coder and writer suprème Tom Armitage, and sci-fi writer, gamer and husband-of-dear-colleague Cory Doctorow.
If schools are worried (and they are) about how to teach technology in an age where students and their teachers think young people know it all, then engaging young people and their teachers in higher order thinking and real-life entrepreneurialism like this is a damned good way of taking the lead in creativity through technology. Congrats, David, on a superb term. Can't wait to see what's in store this Spring!
Schooling, despite the concentration on curriculum and assessment reform in recent years, largely still hasn't tackled the main issue: meaningless (to young people) pedagogy. It's not the fault of teachers, of course, but of those who "manage change" not managing to give enough time for teachers to think about what they would do differently from the last 400 years. One day extra a year for "the biggest innovation in curriculum in a generation" is to ridicule the enormity of the task in hand.
Cue The Alternative School (TAS), a non-profit initiative for those kids who don't 'get' regular schooling, and is arguably doing already what most schools strive for and don't quite attain across the board. Their new blog gives a flavour of some of the activity they have been up to, and their latest post features a superb film starring some of the young people involved in the programme. One to keep an eye on and learn from as things develop more in the open with their new blog. Bunking Off - The Alternative School from Kirsty Anne Pugh on Vimeo.
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