What is creativity? I doubt many people, including teachers, could give you a good definition. In simplest terms, it is the ability to create. However, I like to use a more specific definition:
Creativity is the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.
Above: Leonardo da Vinci was a master of mixing creativity and art.
The key to creativity is the ability and act of transcending tradition. Using this definition, I think creativity is exceptionally rare in schools. Students are almost never asked to transcend tradition and think outside the box.
In fact, doing so is punished. This rarity arises from a confusion about what creativity really is.
If you were to ask most teachers or administrators, you would hear a distinctly different story. Most will says their schools/classrooms stimulate and “unlock” creativity1. Doing a word search on school mission statements will turn up an inordinate number of references to creativity. Someone should replace 99% of those occurrences with the word “art.”
What many school officials and teachers mean by creativity is really art. Art is all about practice and method. Art is about the perfection of technique. Art is about applying techniques rigorously in pursuit of a goal. In short, art is studied action; artificiality in behavior.
Painting yet another landscape is art, and neither is solving a mathematical equation. Both of them involve substantial practice and application of traditional rules.2 Make no mistake: both can be very difficult. The level of effort it takes to perfect any art is astounding. However, this is distinct from creativity. Remember, creativity is all about transcending tradition. In many ways, creativity and art are polar opposites.
Actually, creativity and art are not so much polar opposites as two sides of the same coin.3 Creativity is used to think of new ideas and sources of ideas. Art is used to translate those ideas into presentable forms. To create a brilliant work, both creativity and art must be used.
In many ways, schools fail to recognize this. Art is constantly drilled in schools: when not directly transferring content, teachers often focus on teaching new skills4. However, very little attention is paid to the application of those skills in novel ways. Writing thousands of 5-paragraph essays will give you perfect form and will make you a very precise writer, but it will not make you a great and innovative one. Translating notes into a science fair board will, optimally, teach art to a degree. However, none of these things will teach creativity. When schools talk about their wealth of creativity, they usually mean art.
To a certain degree, I do not think creativity can be taught. The very nature of it makes creativity unteachable — you cannot teach someone to positively ignore convention, since in doing so they would simply be internalizing another rule. However, creativity can be practiced. Constantly making new ideas teaches you to see which work and which will not. Searching for pattens helps you to see patterns faster in the future. Luckily, art can be taught — and it should be taught. Without art, nobody will respect your creativity. The point is, creativity can be practiced but not taught.
Right: A great example of tilt-shift photography from Vincent Laforet.
The next time you brag about how much creativity you foster, ask yourself if you really mean art.
We are truly in the information age. Everywhere, data is being constantly collected, distributed, analyzed, and visualized. Increasingly, government data (which has long been collected, but cumbersome to access) is being opened up. Additional social data augments this twelve-fold. In short, the depth and breadth of data sets are rapidly being expanded. Some applications of this data are very useful, such as Google tracking flu activity through search queries.1 Other implementations are far more fanciful, like the hypnotizing Now dashboard from Sprint. The page is filled with data about now, with a background track of various statistics and slogans playing. Despite its limited practical use, the page serves as an apt example of both the data available and the ensuing information overload. As the voice instructively shares, “please keep your hands inside the moment at all times.”2
One of my favorite things about President-elect Obama is that he is the first president to truly understand the power of technology — to a large extent, it got him elected. Already, he is beginning to bring his powerful technology platform into government. I hope by that the end of his term we will see government data opened up with accessible and non-proprietary formats (like XML) which can be accessed by all citizens. The availability of this data will truly give news organizations, technologists, and students new ways to easily and effectively monitor government activity. Ethan Bodnar has written an excellent letter which reflects these principles and offers specific advice on what to do. Thankfully, these changes can easily be implemented, given the right team, and are (or should be) decidedly nonpartisan. I hope President-elect Obama learns from his success with technology on the campaign trail and brings that same edge to government.
America needs a new direction. For the past 8 years, the politics of fear and hate have divided Americans and thrown the economy into tumult. We need a president prepared to rise above those politics and steer us in a new direction. Barack Hussein Obama is the right man for the job, at this time.
More than anything, my support is based upon his economic positions. John McCain and Sarah Palin have lost no time in tying him to socialism, a suspicious claim at best. The fact is, we have seen a vast redistribution of wealth in the past 8 years: redistributed upwards. Despite once opposing them, John McCain now proposes to expand and renew the Bush tax cuts. Let us not forget the vast government bailout pushed for by the present administration, which John McCain was so quick to “suspend” his campaign to fight for. Though in some ways necessary, the structure of the bill was designed to disguise its true socialist nature. Republicans have been largely responsible for one of the greatest handouts of history, which they are so quick to attack with straw man arguments when coming from Democrats. Naturally, this added to the vast debt which the present administration has pushed onto America.1 The Republican Party has become the Socialist Party of America. Except it is a cruel brand of socialism, which guarantees the wealth of the rich and lets everyone else fend for themselves.
For years, the Republican party has sought to win elections through character assaults. For the most part, it has worked: Americans are consistently distracted from the fact that Republican policies are only good for 1% of Americans. They tried the same thing this year: they have attempted to smear Obama with everything in their barrel, or even with pure fabrication. Despite this, I truly believe it has backfired. As Americans see how cool and pragmatic Obama is in response to every issue confronting him, it becomes clearer that he truly does have the better character. Republicans wanted to make this election about character, since with the economy they’d lose. To their surprise, they’ll lose on this front too.
If I was born in a different time, I would probably be a conservative. I am consistently uncomfortable on a philosophical level with many Democratic policies. Fortunately, with this election, we can elect a true conservative.3 Simply, a conservative is one who thinks that solutions which have worked before will probably work again. Despite his inspirational talk of change, Obama is at heart a pragmatic policy wonk. He has considered policies from other nations across the globe, and constructed a practical agenda. While John McCain makes decisions based upon emotion and ideological dogma, Obama takes a reasoned approach built on common sense, careful planning, and research. Barack Obama’s best experience is how he has run his campaign. If he runs the country as well as he has run for it, he may truly take America in a better direction. Of the many (on both sides of the aisle) who have articulated this, I believe Wick Allison (former editor of the National Review) articulates it best:
Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.
I do not agree with Barack Obama on all fronts: many of his plans are irresponsible and make me nervous about deficit spending. However, the thought of John McCain (or, worse, Sarah Palin) controlling this nation is far scarier. For this reason, I have done what I can to elect Barack Hussein Obama,4 and encourage you to help make him the first great president of the 21st century.
Hello, world. I am back and I am ready to start anew. The perils and the hopes of this time are too great for me to remain silent. The world is changing, and it is changing fast. I want need to document that change—it is in my nature. I am a writer, and this is where my words will be the most authentic. I am ready to write. Hello again, world.
There can be no mistake: blogging is a dangerous game. Even the good blogs espouse enough bullshit to make some fructifying fertilizer. And that’s not even going into the bad ones…. which are most of them. When I quit blogging this summer, I was tired of it—I was sick of shoveling manure, most of it mine. Over the past couple of months, I have had the time to think over my priorities and why I blog. The answer is simple: because I can. My nature is such that I cannot remain silent about the great injustices and the great deeds of our world. I need to play this game, since if I don’t keep rolling the dice I’ll forget how.
In the time since I began my sabbatical from blogging, the world has gone on. I have watched as wealth disappears at an astounding rate. I have plunged deeper and deeper into debt, without buying a thing. Scarily, I have watched as the police state is built. With horror and humor, I have watched a person pursue a job she is horrendously unfit for. I have watched a person I respect gain the respect of the nation, even as someone I used to respect throws lies at him. I have watched enough: it is time to speak.
Going forward, the crucial change I am making is that this is my blog. It is not an edublog; it is not a political blog; it is not a tech blog. I will explore whatever topics interest me, no matter whether they fit within a defined scope or not. Sure, there will probably be the occasional post about education. I’ll certainly be talking about politics. Expect plenty of technology, not because it’s the latest thing, but because I find it fun and cool. Consider yourself warned: I will write what I want to write, not what I think you want to read.
Hello, world.
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