Born Creative | Demos | Publications
In a series of essays Born Creative brings together the experiences of creative practices in early years education, to show the importance of cultures, environments and networks in the enrichment of the early years learning and interrogates the role of leaders, policy and parents in creating them.
Audio slide show: Pullman porter and family patriarch - latimes.com
At 100, Lee Wesley Gibson is nearly the oldest surviving former Pullman porter. He is one of thousands of African Americans whose lives were transformed by working for Union Pacific Railroad. Gibson was married to his wife, Beatrice, for 76 years until she died in 2004.
How GM Is Saving Cash Using Legos As A Data Viz Tool | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
But beyond their transparency, there may be a bigger advantage to Legos: theyre also fun. By mapping real world problems to an icon of our youth, each challenge must be approached with an inherent playfulness. And because Legos are, by their very nature, expected to be rebuilt, patterns dont appear stuck in stone--or just as bad--printed in ink. Now, if only we could get the Lego pirate ship or a lunar rover in the mix, wed really have something.
Bauhaus: Art as Life – review | Art and design | guardian.co.uk
There is a lesson here about much contemporary art education: the lack of common purpose, the overweening bureaucracy, the disillusionment and grasping for fees, the box-ticking lostness of so much of it. The Bauhaus had a sense of common purpose and shared ideas, of arguments that meant something, of making things up as you go along. And so much that it gave us was practical, and a delight to the eye.
PhoneGap
PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores. PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best... HTML and JavaScript.
Don’t be technophobes, says Russell - News - TES
Education secretary Michael Russell has told schools and local authorities to get over their technophobia and make smartphones and the other gadgets that pupils carry in their pockets a normal part of classroom learning.
Better Teamwork Through Better Workplace Design - Anat Lechner - Harvard Business Review
Give project teams a dedicated space. The concept of 'distributed cognition' suggests that thinking processes are embedded in the physical work environment. A team room can provide "cognitive space" to hold ideas and experiences. Returning to the same workspace each day, keeping meeting notes on the board, and leaving work samples and half-finished prototypes on tables between meetings can help teammates maintain a shared project mindset, sharpening their focus and speeding up the collaborative process.
Introduction | designtoimprovelifeeducation
INDEX: Design to Improve Life takes this a step further by insisting that design thinking and creative methods alone are not enough. We therefore believe it is vital for our common future, that teaching design thinking and creative approaches focus on major global and local challenges, and that a sustainable and user-based design approach. Hence, the need for Design to Improve Life Education.
EDUCATION
Over the next 2 years, INDEX: will develop, test and implement a large-scale education program in the resund Region. The project has been developed in partnership with Malm Hgskola, UCC, SDU, four high schools and four primary schools in the resund Region. The project has two main purposes: to develop new teaching formats based on design thinking and design methodologies in primary schools and high schools, and to educate and re-educate teachers in organizing courses based on the methods, thinking and approach that designers use in their creative processes.
While the students using the format will experience a creative design process where they themselves design solutions for global challenges for example water shortage, millennium goals, health issues or urbanization - relevant to their own lives.
While sitting in on a seminar on Mental Toughness as a teachable, as well as genetic, attribute, I came across the work of Dutch researcher Nico Van Yperen. Being mentally tough means that we take control of our futures, we enjoy challenges as opportunities rather than threats, and we have deep involvement in meeting our own, personal goals. But if you're a leader, your actions can also be responsible for helping or hindering others' capacity to have mental toughness:
Van Yperen believes it is possible to influence achievement orientation. Generally, one's environment will shape these choices. For example, work settings with a compensation system that identifies and rewards individual performance will encourage a performance orientation.
One that rewards groups of people equitably encourages a mastery orientation.
Managers' comments drawing attention to the task encourage mastery. Comments comparing individuals encourage a performance orientation.
Managers who display their own pleasure when performing the same tasks as their people, encourage mastery. Those who don't, encourage a performance orientation.
Hard working, effective employees are a valuable asset we'd like to preserve. Helping them be satisfied in their work by encouraging a mastery achievement orientation is one way to do it.
Design Thinking father Tim Brown blogged a while ago this great pleadingfrom some of Britain's best designers and design educators for Government and schools to heighten the importance of design, technology, design thinking and prototyping skills through the vehicle of engineering subjects such as design and technology. It's a great clip, with many great reasonings as to why making learning concrete makes so much sense.
However, as impatient as I ever am, it's not enough.
Design thinking - learning how to scope out and solve problems within seemingly vast areas of knowledge and experience - is something I believe belongs as a framework across the curriculum. It's as core a skill as literacy and numeracy, but a lot less well understood by teachers outside the design technology world. It needs the time, attention and thinking power of educators to be understood as a framework that contains so many of what we already know are powerful learning and teaching strategies for student improvement.
With NoTosh, I've been fortunate to foster and see the beginnings of this whole-school approach to design thinking in schools around the world, with our partners in the UK, US, Australia and the Far East. The Design Thinking School is taking hold in many areas, and challenging the status quo in some painful ways in others.
But challenging the status quo, that content cannot be covered unless a teacher or day-by-day curriculum is 'delivering' it, is what we're all about. And, school by school, that sea change - design thinking throughout the school, not just in the design technology class - is happening.
In early February I presented, in French, a 90 minute story about how design thinking and the educational worlds of formative assessment, school building, curriculum and assessment strategy are all bound together.
I wanted to show to the audience at Clair 2012 in New Brunswick, Canada, what can happen when these apparently unrelated worlds of technology startups, product design and formal education are bound together by leaders with foresight and an understanding of the detail and complexity of learning, amazing learning opportunities can happen.
It was a joy to speak about the complexity of learning and teaching, with the time and audience who got it - it was, after all, New Brunswick teachers that taught me how to really teach through their French immersion, project-led pedagogy.
It's the first time I've ever had a standing ovation for a talk, especially one that was 90 minutes and between opportunities for the audience to drink wine and eat cheese. I was taken aback by that. And even more humbled by the words from Stephen Downes, who also braved his fears of keynoting en franais at the event:
I've had my criticisms of Ewan McIntosh in the past and I will no doubt have my criticisms of him in the future. But they will be a bit tempered from now on, I think. Ewan McIntosh weaved what can only be called magic at the conference I attended at Clair 2012, in northern New Brunswick. It wasn't simply because his French is easier to follow than his English ;) - he wove a tapestry of ideas together talking about what it is that will draw out students, interest them, engage them, and get them to be more than just followers of orders. It was one of the best presentations I've even seen - visually beautiful, low-keyed, personal and engaging. He has clearly learned a lot from his work with TED, but also, with 90 minutes to work with, the talk was never rush, never forced, and, in the end, exactly the right length. He received a standing ovation at the end, very much (to my observation) a rarity at education conferences. Well deserved.
I think part of it was to do with speaking French, but not because I was making an effort to speak it or anything, more that as a result of speaking my second language in an unfamiliar context I took extra care, and extra time from the normal 45 minute keynote sprint, to weave the complexities of our learning world in a simple way.
It was great fun, and I'm grateful to Roberto Gauvin, the Principal teacher at Clair's learning centre, for the opportunity to come through the metre-thick snow and -30C freeze to work alongside such a dedicated group of franco-canadian educators.
You can download a copy of the talk from the Clair 2012 website(right click/control click and select "Save As..."). Better still, you can see the actions stemming from it and other talks when you dip into the manifesto for change, the DeCLAIRation, a pragmatic document for change based on what we all heard from the four speakers and our many corridor conversations.
How To Start An Education Revolution
Part of the manifesto is an ongoing Revolutionary Google Doc, developed in a furiously productive 50 minute BarCamp session that I led on Starting A Revolution. I've been reading Gene Sharpe's work on real, political revolutions, and wanted to produce a live, step-by-step guide to education revolution, much along the same lines:
This growing document is designed by 100 educators who gave up a Saturday morning in a gym in Clair, to provide links to research that disprove the key naysayer arguments for curricular, assessment and pedagogical change in the classroom. Well, it's a dream document for a keynoter, even one with 90 minutes, because the Saturday morning exercise allowed us to revisit and question all those things we had heard from the keynoters through two days of conference, and back up our views with research and leading practice, rather than anecdotes.
It's open until March 11th for changes, and then we're going to use it to create change in the Francophone and, with some translation, the Anglophone worlds of education, by create a copy that can be sent to every politician and Principal we know.
RSA Opening Minds promotes innovative and integrated ways of thinking about teaching and learning. It helps students to develop the skills they need to be creative, resilient learners, citizens and employees of the 21st century by making its starting point not school subjects, but competences students require to find their place in society.
To help teachers and principals find out more about the curriculum, and how to get involved, the RSA are holdingan event this March 3rd, covering off the key questions and offered a chance to see how a competence-based curriculum works in practice.
Kingsbridge Community College, Devon, will explain the competence framework and ethos of Opening Minds, how to develop and implement a curriculum and the outcomes and impacts it has had for one designated Training School.
Cardinal Heenan High School, Liverpool will explain why one school decided to apply to become an RSA Opening Minds accredited school, their experiences of developing a curriculum and how they have been supported by a Training School.
