Creativity in Las Vegas

by | Monday, October 25, 2010

I was recently invited to present a keynote address at the 21st Century Instructional Technology Conference (titled Elements of Technology) at the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Nevada. Clark County is the 5th largest school district in the country with over 300,000 students and it was a great privilege to be invited to present there. I was invited there by the Instructional Technology Department (led by Loretta Asay) and my contact person was Project Facilitator, Sherwood Jones. They are a great group of people and I truly had a wonderful time there.

Apart from the Keynote I also conducted a workshop on Creativity and Teaching with Technology. I had anticipated having around 25 people for the workshop but the room was overflowing (at least 15 more than I had anticipated). That did throw a few kinks into my routine but nothing that was unsurmountable. I am sharing below some of the things that people created during this two hour workshop.

I explained my idea of a creative idea or product as being Novel, Effective and Whole (the so called New NEW)! This led Terra Graves, Thomasina Rose and Kristina Ernest to create this acrostic poem.

New
Organic
Visual
Engaging
Longevity

Educational
Fun
Freedom
Everyone
Creativity
Teachers
Innovative
Variety
Enthusiasm

Winning
Holistic
Outside the Box
Learning
Exciting

Here are a few more from Lisa Widmer, Katie Jones, Brent Mesenburg and Robert Jackson

The first two are limericks that summarize some of the things we had talked about in the first half of the workshop.

Creativity is our goal
Make it Novel Effective and Whole
When in doubt
Turn it about
And satisfy your soul

A second, funnier, version is as follows:

Creativity is our goal
Make it Novel Effective and Whole
When in doubt
Don’t Freak out
It’s quite alright if you stole

The same team wrote another poem, synthesizing some of the ideas we played with in the second half of the workshop.

Being creative is like heaven
Mimic the great Magellan
And fear not missteps
Just use the five steps
And crank that knob to eleven

The “crank the knob to eleven” of course being a response to the (in)famous scene from This is Final Tap.

A couple of other pieces that emerged from this team (can you tell this was a prolific group) was the quote:

“Tweak it to Teach it”

Somewhat along the same lines was Patrick Whitehead who suggested the following two:

Thinking is tweaking your mind

Think better… TWEAK your mind!

Apart from this display of verbal dexterity, the participants also completed a “letter search” task where they looked for letter that spell out the word “Relax, Repose, Reteach.” I had done a similar activity with students in our MAET program a year ago in Plymouth. Essentially what I did was create a somewhat awkward problem scenario the solution to which were the words Relax, Repose, Reteach. So these were the letters students searched for… and this is what they came up with.

Now for the twist! As it turns out one of the themes of the keynote (and the workshop) were the three words “Explore, Create, Share.” Students watched each of the three videos that we had created (see them here) as well as the mashup that had inspired us to begin with (see the original and the mashup here).

What the students didn’t know was that the three words (Relax, Repose, Reteach) could be rearranged to read… (surprise, surprise) the words Create, Explore, Share!! Here is what that looks like…

I must give a shout-out to High School Freshman Bryan Jones who I “volunteered” to help me out. He had a tough job, collecting all the pictures since there were multiple cameras (from regular digital cameras to iPhones), missing cables, a mac that was running Windows (which mean iPhoto wouldn’t cooperate)… and he had to pull everything together in around 25 minutes while the workshop was still going on… And he managed it without fuss and stress. Thanks!

Finally, we all watched the new Steven Johnson video “Where good ideas come from” and created demotivational posters based on what they heard and saw. Below is the video (just in case you haven’t seen it already) and below that the posters the students created.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU[/youtube]

Incentives
Individuality
Motivation

Choose Wisely

Patrick Whitehead
Tim Hart

Innovation

Karen Decker
Terry Ector

Don’t Worry

Michael C. Gregory

Rewards
Curiosity
Curiosity

This is a hunch

Thomasina Rose
Kristina Ernest
Terra Graves

Ideas

Brandi Mizner
Beth Pearson
Holly Marich
Laurie Koelliker
Gary Eisnor

Creativity?

Roger Mayo
Matt Keener

As you can imagine this was a hectic workshop for all of us. We covered a lot of ground and the participants also created some interesting artifacts that can have a life beyond the immediate workshop. What fun!

A few randomly selected blog posts…

The degradation of Matt

A rumination on goofy sketches, the perils of reproduction as it plays out in a children's game, a B-list Hollywood movie, and botany textbooks I read when in high school, all leading up to some thoughts on the history of scientific illustration. If this sounds even...

Value in an age of free…

What happens when an economy "built on selling precious copies" suddenly confronts the world of the Internet - a world based on the "free flow of free copies?" Kevin Kelly confronts this issue in a recent post titled, Better than free. As he says, "how does one make...

Summer Ball by Lupica

I picked up Summer Ball by Mike Lupica from Soham this evening, and ended up finishing it at one go (another excuse for not working on our AACTE presentation). Lupica writes sports novels for young adults and Summer Ball is a sequel to his previous best-seller Travel...

It Takes Two: A (personal) exploration

It Takes Two: A (personal) exploration

I had written earlier about a contest organized by Dark ‘n’ Light (an e-zine) around the theme of "IT TAKES TWO" and had shared some of my experiments, exploring this theme, using Generative AI. You can see my experiments at: It takes two: A scientific romp using AI...

Visualizing feeds

Sean Nash of Nashworld (recognizing a fellow data visualization junkie in me) had sent me this link a while ago ... but I just got around to it today. Check out FeedVis. So what does FeedVis do - think of it as a tag-cloud generator on steroids. Lots of fun there -...

Senseless signage

Great examples of funny, absurd and weird signage from across the world. Archived for use in my 817 or 917 classes. Check out Senseless signage, parts I through 10.

TPACK Newsletter #22: February 2015

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #22: February 2015 Welcome to the sixth anniversary issue and twenty-second edition of the (approximately bimonthly) TPACK Newsletter! TPACK work is continuing worldwide. This document contains recent updates to that work that we hope will be...

Goldbach is back! New math poem

I guess once the bug bites, it never really lets go. So here's another poem (to follow this and this and this). As it turns out this is my second poem on the Goldbach Conjecture. I realized after I had written the first one that I had actually messed up the history a...

TPACK Newsletter #27, March 2016

TPACK Newsletter #27, March 2016

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #27: March 2016 Special Spring 2016 Conference Issue Below please find a listing of TPACK-related papers/sessions that will be presented at the SITE conference in March in Savannah, Georgia; at the AERA annual meeting in April in Washington,...

4 Comments

  1. Josh G

    Honestly, I think school and creativity are at odds with one another. School is about learning the proper way to do something. On the other hand, creativity is forging your own path.

    Also, I’m a huge fan of Steven Johnson.

    Reply
  2. Mike FD

    Being creative is a great way to “use one’s brain”. It is also a great way to learn because the results are visible and the creator can take ownership and gain a sense of achievement(and pride).

    The comments associated with the photographs showed insight, and highlight the connection between thought and imagery. I felt spoilt as the viewer because the mental work had been done!

    Thanks for the post

    Reply
  3. Punya Mishra

    Brent, you are too kind. It was a pleasure being with all of you for two days. The 2 hr workshop was too short by far – but it was fun, none the less. It was only when I started putting this blog post together that I realized just how much has been done!

    I hope to come back to CCSD sometime… hopefully we will be able to work something out for a more extended session.

    Take care ~punya

    Reply
  4. Brent Mesenburg

    I considered being in your workshop a great honor. Being part of the Nevada Pathway project, we were required to view your Youtube video’s on TPACK. For my masters class we had to evaluate and summarize an article about technology in education….I wrote about TPACK. I consider it a great honor in my professional career that I had the opportunity to not only hear you, but also learn from you. Thank you so much.

    Brent Mesenburg

    Reply

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