CPD: Creativity and Critical Thinking in Higher Education - Week 1 Activities

WEEK 1: ACTIVITIES

PART 1. First look at Ken Robinson's TedTalk: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html. Then select one from the following Creative Spark playlist to discuss in class:http://www.ted.com/playlists/11/the_creative_spark.html

In our groups we discussed the videos we had reviewed as pre-module activity.

[My Summary]

My views on Ken Robinson's talk are that he is a wonderful polemicist, and a fantastic speaker, but his points on creativity are highly debatable; if schools were killing creativity why is the so much creativity being generated by people who have gone through the school system? both artistic and problem-solving creativity.

He says we don't know what kinds of jobs there will be in 50 years time, we may not but chances are there still will be doctors, lawyers, accountants and street sweepers.

I disagree with his notion that creativity is as important as literacy, it really isn't.

Also I believe his view that we are educating to produce University Professors isn't true, it fails to recognize the wonderful work that so many highly creative teachers do, and it fails to understand that school is more than the classroom, there are sporting activities, and school plays, and all kinds of other non-classroom activities that help educate children (co-curricular activities), and in the case of third-level students, they are often learning to cook, clean and live by themselves.

In terms of the hierarchy in education, if we are ever going to find a cure for serious medical conditions, it's likely going to be achieved by people who studied a science, so there is a reason for this kind of hierarchy.

Finally my own reflection is that if there is anything that is killing creativity, it is rampant consumerism.

[My Summary]

I also shared my views on Amy Tan's excellent talk on her creative process. Which I think is a wonderful, personal, and deeply interesting talk about connecting with people to encourage creativity (like Richard Drew of 3M).

PART 2. Look at Pinterest and identify an inage from "Critical Thinking" or "Creative Thinking" that you like.

We were also asked to find an image from Pinterest, on the topic of either creative or critical thinking. I selected critical thinking and choose an image based on Lorin Anderson's 1990s revising of Bloom's Taxonomy:

[My Reflections on "Why Your Brain Craves Infographics"]

References

• Anderson, L., 2001, "A Taxonomy of Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives", Pearson.

CPD: Creativity and Critical Thinking in Higher Education - Week 1

Today I started a new module as a Continuing Professional Development qualification in "Creativity and Critical Thinking in Higher Education" being delivered by the DIT  Learning, Teaching & Technology Centre.

One of the modules I teach for the MSc in Computing students is "Problem Solving, Innovation and Communications" which focuses on creativity techniques, and part of my reason for doing this module is to look for new and different ways to present the material. Another module I teach for the MSc students is "Research Methods and Proposal Writing", so I'm hoping the critical thinking element will help for that module.

Although I am voluntarily taking this module, nonetheless, as with all new student experiences for me, I approached the first day with dread: Would I be completely lost in this module? Would I be able to cope with the academic demands of this module? Would I have time to do all the activities?

ICEBREAKER

The opening activity involved introducing ourselves to three other people, it's something I'm fairly terrible at, but thankfully everyone I spoke to was so courteous and friendly that activity with very easy.

Reflection: As I hate doing this sort of thing myself,  I never get my students to do this, I generally do an icebreaker with "Two truths and a lie".

SILENT ORDER

The next activity involved going out into the corridor and ordering ourselves left-to-right in order of our month of birth without speaking. This was successfully accomplished, first by going to the place approximately along the line proportionately to the month position, and then using fingers to illustrate the month number.

Reflection: I do something similar in my class where I get the students to guess my age based on "the wisdom of crowds", I'll definitely try this activity next class.

THE MARSHMALLOW CHALLENGE

Following this we were given a task to build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow, when the marshmallow needed to be on top of the tower.

Not a great success:

Reflection: A highly fun and practical activity that helped bring up together as a team, and really helped us get to know each other quickly, and start focusing on something practical. Tom Wujec's talk is good, the bit where he talks about high rewards bringing less success is mirrored by Dan Pink's book "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us".

TREASURE HUNT

The last activity involved us undertaking a series of tasks, included, taking pictures of local monuments, describing Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats, identifying the authors of some creativity quotes, each member undertaking a VARK Learning Styles survey, locating a nice MindMap image, drawing four lines to cover nine dots.

Reflection: A fun activity that helped us get to know each other more, and provided members of the team with activities that helped them learn a little more on eLearning.

WIKISPACES

To help decide what we is going to be the focus of our infographic, and plan next week's activities, we are using the provided platform, Wikispaces.

Reflection: Just spent a few hours using Wikispaces, and it's still as bad as ever, I've had several bad experiences with it already, and really prefer PBWiki or TWiki. As an example of it dreadfulness, two of us were editing the same page and one of us saved their version, the second of us overwrote those changes. Wikispace should lock the page that I am currently editing to others like most other wikis do, grrrr...  Also it is not obvious once you've uploaded a file that you need to click on it to actually add it onto the page.


FINAL THOUGHTS: Any concerns I had about my ability to do the module quickly disappeared after today's class with Roisin and Jen, individually they are excellent lecturers but together they complement each other wonderfully.

References

• de Bono, E., 1985, "The Six Thinking Hats", Penguin.  
• Surowiecki, J., 2005, "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations", Doubleday.

Blogs to support my modules

• Research Methods blogs
• Exploring Research Methods and Proposal Wrting
• Research Methods Links

• Instructional Design and eAuthoring blog
•  Instructional Design and eAuthoring blog  

• Problem Solving blog
• Creativity, Problem Solving, Invention, and Innovation  

• Final Year Projects blog
• http://damiansprojectideas.blogspot.ie/

• Software Testing blog
•  Software Testing blog  

• Algorithm Design blog
• Algorithm Design and Program Design blog

• Universal Design, Accessibility blogs
• Learning about Universal Design and Assistive Technology  
• Man and Machine Blog

• Operating Systems blog
• http://exploringoperatingsystems.blogspot.ie/

Ada Lovelace Day: Professor Jane Grimson and Federated Healthcare Records

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to blog about female computer scientists we admire. Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) is credited with authoring the first computer algorithm (which concerned a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers) in 1843 for use on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.

This year I'm going to write a posting on Professor Jane Grimson, the Dean of Engineering and Systems Sciences at Trinity College, Dublin as well as Associate Professor and Co-Chair for Health Informatics at Trinity.

Professor Grimson was the first female graduate in Engineering from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1970. She did an MSc in Computer Science at the University of Toronto before doing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh.

She was Project Manager of the Synapses Project funded by the EU Telematics Applications for Health Programme and am involved in the follow-on project, SynEx . Under the Synapses project she helped developed a Federated Healthcare Records Server which allowed client applications to request healthcare records (or parts of records) and related medical data about individual patients irrespective of where that source data is stored.

Another major project she worked on is Medilink, an interdisplinary, inter-institutional research programme in Health Informatics funded by the Irish Department of Education and Science under the Higher Education Authority's Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions.

She was awarded the O'Moore Medal for significant contributions to Healthcare Informatics in 2007 in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the development of healthcare informatics within Ireland and throughout the world.

Her current research is in the area of Health Informatics, specifically Electronic Healthcare Records and system integration. Other areas of interest for her include Federated Database Systems, Decision Support and multi-media user interfaces. She is the co-founder of the inter-displinary Centre for Health Informatics, which she is currently Director.

I was blessed to have her as my databases lecturer in the final year of my degree in Computer Science - she is a fantastic lecturer, a gifted communicator, and  presented a wonderfully cohesive and thoughtful course on databases. She has been a significant inspiration for my own career as a lecturer and researcher.

Ted Ed

http://education.ted.com/lessons

Jamie's Dream School: Episode 4

Jamie's Dream School: Episode 4

Headteacher
* John "Dabbs" D'Abbro

This week:

* COMING SOON *

Ada Lovelace Day: Susan Kare and the Apple Mac

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to blog about female computer scientists we admire. Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) is credited with authoring the first computer algorithm (which concerned a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers) in 1843 for use on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.

This year I'm going to write a posting on Susan Kare, whose contributions to HCI (Human Computer Interaction) are immense. She is an artist and graphic designer who created many of the interface elements for the Apple Mac.

She started working for Apple in 1982 and created a number of user interface elements for the Mac, which set the standard for all graphical user interfaces. Some of her contributions are here:
http://kare.com/portfolio/03_apple_macicons.html

As well as the iconic "Happy Mac", she worked on the Chicago typeface, the Geneva typeface, and the original monospace Monaco typeface.

She left Apple to join NeXT (the company Steve Jobs set up after he left Apple in 1986) as the Creative Director. She currently works as an independent graphic designer working with all of the computer giants including Microsoft and IBM. Her work for Microsoft includes the card deck for Windows 3.0's solitaire game:

http://kare.com/
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