The singer-songwriter is stereotyped as the classic lone genius. Holding a guitar, meditating on life, an idea for a song emerges from the unconscious spirit. In our mythical view, the songwriter can’t tell us how they did it–the song just came to them, an inspiration. But this isn’t how songwriting works, according to a new… Read More Paul Simon: Songwriting as Improvisation
I’m re-reading Steven Poole’s 2016 book Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas. He goes far back into history to find the distant roots of today’s inventions, and here’s what he found: The story of human understanding is not a gradual, stately accumulation of facts…[instead it’s] a wild roller-coaster ride full of loops and switchbacks. Some… Read More The Roller-Coaster Ride of Innovation
A team of researchers analyzed 201 articles in three business magazines and found 17 major claims about creativity.… Read More Can you trust what you read in business magazines?
Do you imagine artists working alone, in a basement somewhere, detached from society? Do you imagine them being poor, bad with money, unable to function well in the everyday world of work? This image is mostly false. Artists are embedded in the world, just like the rest of us, according to a recent article by… Read More Artists Who Work
We still don’t know. Don’t believe the headlines you read about a new scientific study of cave sketches by Neandertals. The study itself is good, solid science: it demonstrates that Neandertals made rough sketches on cave walls–geometric shapes and stencils of hands. The study was published in the leading journal Science (read the article here). You… Read More Neandertals Were Creative! Or were they?
This week in “The Maker Movement and Education,” a UNC undergraduate class taught by Professor Keith Sawyer: This week the students are exploring how to use programmable robots to help children learn. I asked the students to find a lesson plan activity on line, one that uses one of three robots to help children learn… Read More Learning with Robots at UNC
My UNC Spring 2018 class, “The maker movement and education,” is turning out to be a lot of fun! If you want to learn about how making stuff contributes to learning, you really have to make things yourself. So I’m guiding my students through a variety of making activities that have been influential in re-visioning… Read More Carolina’s Maker Class: Using Making To Help Children Learn
A new study from Adobe, on the importance of teaching creative problem solving skills, found that educators and policymakers agree that we need to weave creativity throughout the school day, in all subjects. The study surveyed 2,000 teachers a policymakers from the U.K., Japan, Germany, and the U.S. They all say that creative problem solving… Read More Creativity in the Classroom: Everyone Agrees that We Need More
Creativity is all about what you do afterwards. I’m thinking about something that Miles Davis said about jazz improvisation: It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note–it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong. In improvisation, you don’t know what an action means until later. The group creates meaning,… Read More What You Do Afterwards
It was called Plato, and it was created in the 1960s and 1970s, at the University of Illinois. Even though it was used by tens of thousands of students, all over the U.S., most people have never heard of it. That’s why we need Brian Dear’s new book about Plato, called The Friendly Orange Glow.… Read More Plato: The First Educational Software
The Creativity Guru 