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The concept of everyday creativity Ruth Richards suggests(1) that we are forever creative but sometimes its very hard to recognise any sort of creative thinking or activity in a single day. Yesterday was like that. I spent most of it in the garden trying to get it back to some sort of order after being away for a few weeks. The combination of rain and sunshine had made the grass grow to the point where it looked more like a cultivated crop than a garden. It was very physical and I was very tiered at the end. But I suppose that churning in my head were all sorts of thoughts and feelings about my recent visit to China and the people I had met and how I might continue to develop my relationships with some of them. If there was any creativity in my life that day it was in thinking how to build on my existing relationships. I had planned to set up and launch a Tweet Exchange on the theme of personal creativity and I had done this on Saturday so my focus today was in trying to engage people. So I invited all the speakers who had participated in the Chengdu conference and by the end of the day several had replied. It doesn't seem much but it meant a lot to me that people I had met only a few days before where making contributions to our topic and drawing other people in from their own network. At the end of the day I felt we had made some progress and as Teresa Amabile says - the sense of making progress provides the best conditions for nurturing our creativity (see video below ). So perhaps I will be creative today? 1) Far from being a minor or specialised part of our lives, our everyday creativity - our originality of everyday life- is first of all, a survival capability. It is also a universal capability. But,........our everyday creativity offers us more: It offers a dynamic process and a powerful way of living. When developed, it can open all of us to new depths, richness and presence (Richards 2007:3). Richards, R., (2007) Introduction, in R. Richards (ed) Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature. Washington: American Psychological Association. 1-22. Teresa Amabile - Progress Principle One of the ways that personal creativity is more likely to have social value is if the creative object is co-created ie where an individual expresses their creativity through their particular talents and another individual who understands the symbolism in the artefact and guides its creation with suggestions. I have recently experienced an example of this in working with an illustrator to create a cover design for a Guide to Reflection we are publishing. In commissioning the work the artist was sent a copy of the Guide and title page 'Learning through Life' A Guide to Reflecting on Experience. But the first sketch that came back was disappointing seeming to represent life as an up and down linear journey. (image 1). Following an initial email conversation that this did not represent the sort of understanding of lifewide learning that we were trying to convey, K created a series of sketches over a few days and I gave him feedback to move the imagery in the direction that contained more meaning for me and for the other people involved in our lifewide learning project. The following series of sketches depict the evolution of a new design through a continuous email conversation. To: Norman Jackson <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, 24 May 2012, 14:55 Subject: RE: chalk mountain commission Hello Norman, Please find the revised front cover image roughs. I have read the text you sent me and worked on the thought that Lifetime Learning is not linear and introduced a sort of jagged structure to try and indicate this rather that try the mountain based approach. I have also included typography in the illustration, to make the ideas much stronger, as well as adding more colours. The image can be edited and I can move the text around and make them bolder. Please let me know your thoughts and if you feel this is the right direction for the rest of the illustrations. Please also let me know from the previous batch what needs altering or, after seeing this, if you would like all of them redone in similar fashion. I would be grateful if you get back to me as soon as you get this, the quicker your feedback, the quicker I can refine and edit the images. Regards K On 26 May 2012, at 08:38, "norman jackson"wrote: Thanks kiboko this much better. Here is a little more guidance to help us get us there 1) Bottom left box needs the word DISCOVER under it and an image of someone finding something.. like a eureka moment .. perhaps kneeling down to look at a flower? 2) Image of person on the right needs the word LEARN written vertically behind him so the words around him are REFLECT, IMAGINE & LEARN 3 Top right figure needs to be kneeling putting his hand out to help the person climbing the ladder. 4) Get rid of two back packers at top and word DISCOVERY 5) The word next to the top figure lending a helping hand should be SHARE 6) I would also like the word LEARN to be written along the diagonal line where the boy is reading. best wishes norman We were now well on the way to creating an image that I thought had the right sort of meaning. My suggestions were to add an image of someone exploring the unknown and to add another image of the person on the bottom right at the top with the word BECOMING next to it. This is the final drawing which I thought represented the ideas very well. And here is the final image which I really like. Looking back it was an enjoyable experience working with K to produce an image that we both took ownership of. Although I did not create the image I did contribute to the form and content of the image so that it held the meanings that were important to convey in the guide. I am trying to develop a new business idea called storyshare (see April 20 entry). This was an experiment to see if I could produce a flip book using the free software and my chalk mountain adventure story. More about storyshare later.
In thinking about my creativity in everyday experience I am struck by how much of it involves other people. Indeed, I guess a good use of one's own creativity is to help someone else be creative. My work with chalk mountain is very much like this. A few months ago I came up with a business idea which we called storyshare. The idea is that storyshare will enable people to create a real or imaginary story involving themselves and other people who are important and special in their life and bring it to life through pictures, sound or animations that are created by freelance artists working for chalk mountain. The product offer includes 1) Short story in words and pictures printed in colour 2) Cartoon strip poster (could also be printed on a T-shirt) 3) On-line digital story and pictures with or without spoken narrative and sound effects 4) On-line animation To demonstrate the idea I wrote a short story called adventure on chalk mountain and included some photos for context. Then I commissioned an artist to have a go at interpreting the story. Ed created a small sound booth in our studio and we recorded a soundtrack and he added some great sound effects. He then set about creating a website. I got a bit frustrated waiting for the illustrations but eventually they came. Some of them didnt fit the story too well but with a bit of feedback and a bit of doctoring by Ed using photoshop we eventually had the images we wanted and Ed put them into a digital story book together with the narrative and sound effects. Take a look and see what you think. Chalk Mountain Adventure - example digital story with narrative, illustrations and sound effects When I reflect on the set of experiences I think it involved a lot of creativity. It involved generating an idea which I think was quite novel. An idea that could only have been born in the context of our Chalk Mountain enterprise. It was probably driven by the need to create new ideas for business that were consistent with our mission to enable organisations and people to share their knowledge and values. Then together we brought the idea into existence. Each of us making our own contribution and these were combined by Ed, using technology, in a way that achieved what we had imagined. My role was to create the conditions which enabled it to happen (idea, example story, capable people, relationships, resources and interactions). But who is to say its creative? Well the example story was a true(ish) story and I wrote it for my grandson's 5th birthday. I sent the link to his mum and they read it together several times. He loved it and I know he did because he told me the story in exquisite detail. So it made me feel good that our efforts had been worthwhile and it made me realise how much my own creativity can be enhanced by combining my ideas and products with the talents of other people. But then I have always known this.
A new challenge for my personal creativity
I am hoping to attend a conference on creativity in Chengdu in China in June where I will give a talk on personal creativity. I have put my paper together which crystallises my thinking and connects lots of other people's ideas together in a way that makes sense to me and supports my arguments that personal creativity lies in our everyday experiences. So over the next few weeks I am going to think about how and where I think I'm creative. One of my arguments is that creativity is not just about having imaginative and novel thoughts but its about doing things to enable these thoughts to be realised in some way.. bringing new things into existence. We need to engage in activity that is purposeful, deliberate and meaningful in order to stimulate our creativity to accomplish something we value. One of my main work-related activities is writing. I call it work but I have always seen my academic writing as more of a hobby a pleasurable pass time. I think writing is one of my most important creative outlets and I have the sense that it's the way I am trying to communicate and spread my ideas, the way I am trying to have impact or influence on people who care about these sorts of things, the way I am trying to accomplish what I value. So these thoughts are fresh in my mind as I approach this conference in China a country I have read about and seen many films about but which I have yet to experience. In putting my paper and presentation together I was conscious that my ideas will be exposed to a new audience and I want to make them as accessible as possible and try to understand how they might be perceived and have meaning to people living in China. I guess that provides me with a new contextual cultural challenge for my creativity. I have uploaded my paper and annotated slides to my creativity page. Telling a story about myself and the people in my life, seems to me to be so much more interesting and engaging than saying, 'I'm keeping a diary', or I'm recording my experiences and achievements!
There is always a reason for telling a story. Stories, after all, contain and convey our wisdom, and our intuitive knowing. They go beyond facts into feelings. They engage the whole of us--our minds and our hearts. 'By storying my life, that is, by telling about the incidents that give my life meaning I make sense out of it. I begin to connect the dots of my experience and as I do, gracefully, artistically, memorably, I invite you to go inside and begin to connect your own dots to make sense out of your own experience. Michale Gabriel Learning and Growing through Stories I have never been any good at keeping a diary, the discipline of writing about ' myself and other more important matters' to quote Charles Handy, has never really featured in my own self-management processes. I've always told myself that there are always more important things to do. Yet I advocate the benefits of this to others and I helped develop the PDP policy that has led to the process of recording and reflecting on personal activity being systematised in higher education. But as I have begun exploring again the way our lifewide enterprise shapes who we are I can no longer avoid it, I have created a need and a purpose for it. But what is 'it?' I started about a month ago with a word diary, and I'm glad I did. Just writing stuff down in the medium I am most comfortable with is easy. I also tried out a few free blogging sites but I found that none of them really encouraged me. Then my son recommended the weebly to me. Weebly is free (although there is a pro-version if you want to host a lot of media). I found it simple and intuitive to use and over a few days I got sucked in to creating my own website which I set up around the two these of lifelong journey and lifewide activity. I found the tools easy to use and they made me feel creative and this made all the difference to me. I felt I was creating something useful and aesthetically appealing (at least to me) and because of this I kept tinkering and playing. After a week of onscreen prompts telling me I was only 65% complete. I bit the bullet and set up a blog (which I can password protect) and I began telling my stories. I backdated it with the material I had saved in word and so it developed quickly to the point where I thought I had achieved something useful and now I find it easy to add a new story every few days. It isn't easy to make time to do these sorts of things, and I know I have more time know than I used to, but there is a hurdle to get over called 'getting started' and this is the point at which persistence is often weakest until we reach the point of ownership, where we take pride in what we have produced. I have no idea how long I will persist but I am at least developing the habit and I have changed my will to be involved (my intrinsic motivation) because I believe I have a need and I can see value in what I'm doing. Perhaps these are essential pre-requisites for participation in PDP recording/reflecting processes. In a world swamped by information we need the ability to make sense of our experiences and ourselves in those experiences and telling our stories to ourselves is a good way of doing this. We also need to distil, organise and communicate the complex information that makes up our life and so the capability to communicate our stories to others is important. I also think that we all need to be inspired, and there is nothing quite like someone's life stories, to inspire. So telling stories in a variety of ways and through a variety of media is a capability that we all need. Perhaps these are the less explicit reasons for the recording processes we are trying to encourage in higher education and CPD practices through personal development planning. Most of my stories so far are text-based with the odd photo and sometimes a bit of audio. But I can see the value of using media in a more creative way to tell a story and I have made this one of my development objectives. This story, by National Geographic photographer Dewitt Jones about an incident in his professional life, is one that I find really inspiring. It conveys the wisdom of someone who has thought deeply about his work, not only the technical side but the way he inhabits his work spaces and the way he sees the situation, makes decisions about what to do and how to do it and then acts to get the results that he knows will eventually emerge from his actions. Postscript 09/03/12 I have just come across an inspiring TED talk by Andrew Stanton a film director of some repute. He told a story about his life backwards and drew out of the story some really important points about story telling in film making. I thought there were some good points for story telling To engage me with your story - 'make me care,' ''give me the promise of a good story - a well told promise propells you forward to the end', 'make me work to work things out for myself but hide the fact', 'make me wonder how it will all conclude - give it tension', 'tell me who you are', 'enthuse wonder'... The end of the month holds a special significance when you are trying to accomplish something because its the time you take stock by looking back and considering what has been achieved. This is especially so if you are leading something - in my case the two enterprises - Chalk Mountain and Lifewide Education. In February Chalk Mountain has necessarily taken a back seat in order to give Lifewide Education a push. As the month drew to an end I decided to put together a short report (initially for the team but then I decided to make it public so that the whole community could see our activity and where we were going). I have a strange need to make myself accountable to others: by doing this it seems to drive me even harder. The satisfaction comes from seeing concrete achievements and I like to see these written down rather than just sitting in my head.
I attach the report which shows our collective activity and the results of our enterprise. This was the month that we created a core team (rather than a team on paper). We held our first team meeting (Jenny, Russ, Brian and me) at the start of the month and this was a very important point in our history. For the first time we were all involved in a conversation about what this was all about and we got agreement on the way forward. But the most important thing for me to emerge through our conversations, emails and individual engagements during the month was the way in which our core team came together. We are all volunteers and people give what they can when they can but somehow we manage to achieve a lot and I think that makes us feel good as a team. Everyone plays their part and we have already established a culture of participation . I feel supported in my decision making for the company and I think the team feel that they are involved in the planning and decision making. We agreed that we should begin our campaign to raise awareness of the enterprise and invite people to join us.At the start of the month we began with about 30 people registered on the site and by the end we have 156 people. A phenomenal achievement really and one that fills me with hope that there are a lot of people working in higher education that see value in what we are offering. The devil is in the detail and a lot of time was invested in engaging the networks and forming communications that were appropriate and appealing. Written reports rarely convey the detail that underlies the actions that lead to something useful. For example - we decided to look for people who were influential who would be willing to act as patrons. We identified Charles Handy as being someone suitable - I spent time hunting down his address on the net, bought a book he had written about himself and used the information in this to confirm his address - there were several Charles' Handy's listed, then carefully composed a letter that was circulated to the team for comment. After making adjustments in response to feedback I posted the letter with a copy of the book and Newsletter and behold I had a positive response by email, which I then responded to.. The detail gets invented as you act and you are never quite sure what amount of detail will work but at some point you decide yes this gives us the best chance of success. When you look at the whole programme of work there are headings like - engage JISC networks but decisions have to be made and communications have to be crafted, and groups have to be set up to encourage participation.. everything is an unfolding, dynamic story and once committed you have to go where the action takes you. But this is what I enjoy doing. I enjoy creating activity and action that causes things to happen and at the end of the month I can see that we are in a very different place to where we were at the start of the month. So what I have learnt from this first month. Well I am more confident that our ideas and enterprise has wide appeal and in my mind I am already scaling up my conservative estimate of the size of the community we can grow - assuming that we can maintain interest. Activity that leads to good results enhances confidence. I have also developed a lot of knowledge for practice for examples, I now know that we have, through the JISC maillists, and our own community email list extracted from our website, the means to communicate with a lot of potentially interested people. I know that we can produce a good quality Magazine. We have a good editor and we are able to either write ourselves or attract good people. Having invested a lot of time in learning how to manage the website I am also now confident that I can be an effective administrator and with Ed Sillars (Chalk Mountain technology director) we can manage the technical side of the website. I have also built/ created a new website and have begun blogging as a piece of activity-based research in order to get more experience of how we might use technology to support an accreditation scheme. So this website is the result of my efforts. I must say that I have felt this to be a very creative process. I also made my first wikipedia entry 'Lifewide Education' and learnt through the experience how the peer review process works. The article I ended up with was so much better for the intervention of a peer. In the past month I have invested a lot of time in learning how to use different technologies in order to support the lifewide education enterprise. I have also begun to engage with the RSA. I attended two meetings and managed to speak to a number of Fellows. I also registered in the Fellowship Social Network and made my first posts. I now have a better idea about what is possible and I am less optimistic about engaging Fellows after my first attempt to post in the Fellows Social network. Finally, thanks to John Cowan's ideas, we made good progress towards setting out initial ideas for an accreditation scheme. This will be a major focus for work in the next month. Overall the month has confirmed to me that, yes you can have plans for action but the detail of the activity, and a whole pile of new activities, emerge in the process of turning your vision and plans into something concrete. Ultimately, its your ability to sense what is the right thing to do at the right time and to improvise appropriate actions that lead to the effects you want. And if they don't you simply try something else. Originally written 27/01/12 Although we have recorded ourselves on video several times we have never tried to get a good sound recording. In the belief that we will only get better if we can really listen to ourselves when we are not playing - as opposed to the very different experience of listening while you are playing we had a go last night. Thanks to Ed Sillars we had a go at making one last night. What surprised me was the amount of preparation time involved. Ed spent over 2 hours close microphoning all the instruments and testing out levels before the band arrived then another half an hour balancing. But once everything was set we worked for four hours and managed to record 10 songs. What was different to our usual practice was that this was performance involving a level of focus, concentration, self-awareness and self-critical analysis that significantly higher than practice situations. We also had feedback from Ed so that second and third recordings of the same song could be improved. We all found it both more tiring and more exhilarating than practicing and tempers got a bit frayed towards the end as we could see we were making mistakes because we were tiered. Recording adds a new dimension to the pleasure of mastering a tune and creating a sound that you are proud.From a lifewide learning perspective the lessons reflect: 1) the importance of teamwork involving everyone who is playing and the person who is recording - creation is a collaborative effort 2) the importance of preparation in order to get a good performance - we had been practising several songs for four or five weeks and Ed's meticulous preparation before the session. 3) the value of technology in the hands of a skilful technician in the process of creation 4) the importance of feedback in order to improve something that is already pretty good 2 weeks later I have just listed to Ed's recordings and they are great. The best I have ever heard the band and for the first time I can sit and listen to my own contribution. Members of the band are very happy with the results. Here are a few examples |
PurposeTo develop my understandings of how I learn and develop through all parts of my life by recording and reflecting on my own life as it happens. I have a rough plan but most of what I do emerges from the circumstances of my life
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