Happy New Year!

2009 roses to the old
2010 roses to the new
Rose gardens to all humans anew...

Ayten Suvak

AS-Olive

Of mythology

Los angeles

In the orgy

Viva la sante

Eden's tree contra la muerte...

Ayten Suvak

Innovation and Creativity in Educational Enterprise(6)

Education correctly realized can enhance life, create jobs and make people happy. Good education combines technology, cognitive science, human need and knowledge together with information to produce minds that the world would enjoy their ecological products. According to Pink’s diagram, starting with farmers in the 18th century’s Agricultural Age we pass to the 19th century’s Industrial Age with factory workers; then to the Information Age in the 20th century with knowledge workers¸lastly comes the Conceptual Age of the 21st century with creators and emphatizers. That is to say: “We have moved from an economy built on people’s backs to an economy built on people’s left brains to what is emerging today: an economy and society built more and more on people’s right brains.” (Pink 2005:50)

Because right does not exist without left and left without right, we will all survive through not in contrasting pairs but right and left’s interactive concert in every field we can think of. We name the orchestra Right and Left if you like. So what if the rationalist philosophers turned a cold eye on the workings of the body? Our brains played the God in creating computers designed after our own image. What we hope for science is not to overmaster the scientist, so that our hubris not be rewarded with death as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein(1817) who killed its creator.

To think positively, we can be the masters of technology if we can go on staying human at all costs. That means we are the builders of Ages and the protagonists of Human Age despite all automatization of our own creation. Quoting from the Infoculture:

“The cyborg, like automaton, the science-fiction robot, and the intelligent computer allow us all to project ourselves beyond the possibilities of the world of nature. In doing so, we might reimagine ourselves, free from the bounds of established definitions of humanity and human activities. The computer, born of war and bureaucracy, is against all odds, a most malleable machine, a machine that we can shape as we please. Writers of science fiction and of feminist criticism have shown us how we might shape it, in our imagination. The task before us is to shape the future of computers to our needs and wants, in the real world.” (1993:397)

Unfortunately or not, a gap between the real and the virtual worlds seem inescapable. If we sympathize with Baudrillard’s ‘empty simulation’ we are trying to “relocate the zone of reference, the earlier scene, the Euclidean space of history, in order to separate the human from the inhuman, we are trying to escape ‘the state of empty simulation’”, but in vain. The more we seek to rediscover the real and the referential, the more we sink into simulation...at any event, hopeless simulation. The previous states never disappear, in that ‘hysteresis’ of everything, like nails and hair grow after death, explains us Baudrillard with all his gloom. “However, these earlier forms never resurface as they were; they never escape the destiny of extreme modernity. Their resurrection is itself hyper-real. The resuscitated values are themselves fluid, unstable, subject to the same fluctuations as fashions or stock exchange capital. The rehabilitation of the old frontiers, the old structures, the old elites will therefore never have the same meaning. If one day, the aristocracy or royalty recover their old position, they will nonetheless be postmodern. None of the ‘retro’ scenarios that are being got up has any historical significance: they are occurring wholly on the surface of our age, as though all images were being superimposed one upon another, but with no change to the actual course of the film.” (Baudrillard:1994)

Having Baudrillard’s somehow pessimistic views before us, and Derrida’s argument that goes as ‘what is always deferred, never realized’, we can dare say that the image of symbiosis between knowledge and information and between creativity and innovation, superimposing one upon another, whirl around our heads while we watch the ongoing film they draw for us. Knowledge’s supposed fullness built on a void of information, the goal of an education founded on creativity and innovation are endlessly deferred and never realized. But in the postmodern there is an endless consumation and our lifestyles never know any completeness, we can stand that Derridean deferrence in education as well. Derrida deconstructs education in Rousseau’s Emile; somebody else deconstructs and reconstructs Derrida’s deconstruction. It is an unending process since competence itself is an endless process.What we care is that this process take place not in too monological, too exclusive, too universalistic education.

The picture of our ‘symbiotic student’ does not look like The Man Without Qualities of Robert Musil. Ulrich who seeks neither peace nor enlightenment, finds himself in the midst of an existential crisis. He is in search for truth through love and the natural world first, later he goes on his inquiries through mathematics, only to lose interest after a short while. The unqualified Ulrich is always right but hardly ever productive. He never finds happiness even in love and he is , except momentarily, never engaged. Our symbiotic student might be the heir of modern writer Musil’s sense of humor while commenting on ‘intuition’, postmodernity’s favorite feeling:

“...this non-plussed feeling refers to something that many people nowadays call intuition, whereas formerly it used to be called inspiration, and they think that they must see something suprapersonal, namely the affinity and kinship of the things themselves that meet inside one’s head.” (Musil:129)

Neither Dorian Gray’s portrait matches our student’s. Oscar Wilde’s elite killer Dorian murders his own image out of hubris. May be because he finds ugly meanings in beautiful things and he is corrupt without being charming, as Wilde points out. 

“This is fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.”writes Oscar Wilde in his selected quotations in (Wordsworth editions:1997) Beauty is in the eye of knowledge and information beholder. Those up-to-date zones formed by words are crucial for the qualified, creative and innovative student who may be a fictional hero with all the past narratives within. As Hasan Ali Toptaş imagines in Pleasure With Thousands Of Sorrows (Bin Hüzünlü Haz): “Everything comes from words. I felt myself like a long sentence full of commas and thousands of auxiliary sentences carrying different thrillers within.”(88)

With the thrill of a relationship caused by the mutual needs, knowledge may flow towards information; knowledge adjacent to information; knowledge in front of information; knowledge at the end of information; knowledge following information; knowledge within information, all said by the inspiration of Toptaş’s postmodern novel: “Time flew under time. Time adjacent to time. Time in front of time. Time at the end of time. Time following time. Time within time.” (72)

By a potential symbiosis, knowledge and information are allowed to oppose and struggle with each other but always leaving the door open for a coexistence in the sense of a dynamic pluralism. If the signifier which transmits meaning is information, knowledge is the signified-the content of meaning. For Lacan it was not the content that was important but the symbolic expression of content, its linkings as an event. The unconscious call from the signifier is what made the language function and in that dimension the human being is created as Lacan argues. In our case signifier being information, we are created by it, at least in postmodern conditions. Information stimulates and enlivens knowledge. Our creative and innovative future student will hopefully be recreated by the both, knowledge and information.


Ayten Suvak

Innovation and Creativity in Educational Enterprise(5)

Our aim in this paper is not to provide a set of prescriptions for the symbiosis of knowledge and information-creativity and innovation since first of all we are not experts and secondly expertise suggests power-knowledge claims. We just want to suggest milder ways of looking differently at education with the helping hand of symbiosis and with the bodies of knowledge and information-crativity and innovation to draw a student’s picture posing both for modern and postmodern artists of education. We do not want to promote the aim of an unconscious reproduction of a student who becomes the puppet of individual self-fullfilment discourses. Neither knowledge nor information, neither creativity nor innovation are in the center, otherwise student may be trapped within dualism again. Since decentering is another trap, a harmonious way in between may be a dextrous symbiosis.

Whose knowledge and whose information we are dealing with, you may ask. Has the rational control and total knowledge by science led us to safe grounds? Can decentered knowledge be defined as information which is not total and all empowering? Definitive information with totalising explanations and with the elimination of differences can equally have oppressive consequences. Education needs critical questioning and a certain degree of uncertainty before structuring new methods after careful deconstructions of the old. 

For Usher and Edwards “knowledge is understood as a matter of standing outside or apart from that which is to be known and from the activity of knowing”. (1994:34) Knowledge desires the process of standing outside to be attainable. This notion makes us feel outsiders in the realm of knowledge. Who are the insiders? The answer is natural sciences. ‘A supra-historic, neutral enterprise and the sole mode of acquiring true knowledge’, a phrase borrowed from Bleicher quoted by Usher and Edwards.

That means in a way education should be conveyed by those who are in the knowing position. We are what we are taught. Through learning process we become human and knowledge tames our natural instincts replaced by reason. As modern philosophy of education instructs, we are enlightened and thus emancipated by education. Educator’s first task is of producing and disseminating certain knowledge. Truth is determinate. Nothing goes without meaning. Knowledge is the power which shapes human beings. Knowledge creates the rational human fit to live in a rational society. In postmodernity the absolute power of knowledge and knowledge givers are challenged and undermined. Legislators’ emphasis on the sameness changes into difference. Identities are no longer fixed but multiple. Homogenity turns into heterogenity and diversity. At the age of indeterminate and multiple truth, creativity and innovation denote survival strategies.

As Byrd L. Jones and Robert W. Maloy explain in Schools For An Information Age:

“Information technologies make it possible to assess diverse learning approaches and achievements so that students practice making choices on a daily basis. A growing inequality of incomes affects households and makes the equalizing functions of public schools more important than ever.” (1996:346)

Economical problems still play a crucial role in distributing knowledge and information. Those two protagonists, knowledge and information, try their best in acting for the social welfare to get the Nobel prize or Golden Globe awards in the end. But is it possible to write The End at the end of this movie? Is human progress not a continuous search for the best? “Postmodernism is marked by uneasy doubts about human progress, the singularity of truth, and the likelihood for compromise among conflicting interests” argue Jones and Maloy in Schools For An Information Age. They add to this that: “The affective domain-personal interactions involving emotional and volitional responses- are awkwardly handled in most classrooms. (1996:359)

A powerful and errorless computer cannot be a better friend than a trustworthy colleague who shares in mistakes and learn together from them. Instead of a selfish individualism, emphatic patterns of social interactions may bring equality in teaching and learning. One of the new graduate teachers in Jones-Maloy class wrote in the description of a future class in 2010: “We really do need to break down those classroom walls and make the world a classroom and everyone who is a member of that world, a teacher” (1996:11)

Borrowing from Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition , as long as no self is an island, each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile more than ever, knowledge and information find their validity in humans interacting with each other.” (1984:15) 

The interaction among inventive, emphatic minds can make the right hemisphere of our brains active. It is where nonlinear, intuitive and holistic actions take place. The out-of-date left hemisphere although sequential, logical and analytical need not be parallysed forever. As Daniel H. Pink examines in A Whole New Mind, the brain metaphor can be used to interpret our present and to guide our future.

“...Today, the defining skills of the previous era-the ‘left brain’ capabilities that powered the Information Age- are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the capabilities we once disdained or thought frivolous- the ‘right brain’ qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness and meaning- increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders. For individuals, families and organizations, professional success and personal fulfillment now require a whole new mind.” (Daniel H. Pink:2005)

It seems credible that a whole new mind may be gotten by joyful plays with inventive ideas. Thus we can create the right human minds capable of communication since for Pat Kane, “play will be to the 21st century what work to the last 300 years of industrial society-our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value.”(quoted by Pink) Even Albert Einstein is for play while he appreciates games which for him are the most elevated form of investigation. A good education system depends on using games appropriately in teaching and learning. The mind gets its best food through games. Strict authority allowing no games in learning makes the best part of the mind starve. The key to success is to risk applying unconventional habits. We are our risks. All humans may not be ideally set up to understand great thoughts, but they are ideally set up to understand them if presented in game forms. It is what is understandable that is useful.

Ayten Suvak

(To be continued)

AS-Innovation and Creativity in Educational Enterprise(4)

To harness the free flow of information is crucial for the success of this symbiotic process. If information needs arise then there is a gap in the state of knowledge. Information seeking and use are inseparable from our human and social activities. Without information, without fresh knowledge and without their derivatives such as creativity and innovation, we cannot become contemporary humans. Being informed is a dynamic, non-linear, disorderly, chaotic, postmodern process. Student’s cognitive needs, affective needs, situational demands should be taken into consideration in the manufacturing process. The student’s surging feelings of confidence and self control add much to the quality of the product.

By processing information, we acquire new knowledge. According to Chun Wei Choo, eight classes of information are used: Enlightenment, problem understanding, instrumental, factual, confirmational, projective, motivational and personal or political. The principal information activities in sense making are scanning, noticing, and interpreting, Chun Wei Choo adds. The main medium of sense making is face-to-face conversation between different sets of people who engage in human activities such as talking, thinking, and seeing. This can remind us of Levinas’ face-to-face encounter with the other for the sake of peace making by the ‘sameness’ process which installs a responsibility for the other in the Self. By Choo’s understanding of face-to-face feature of the process, the output is a net of shared meanings which assigns significance to ambiguous cues. Information can be meaning oriented allowing dissimilar interpretations to coexist. Mobilized internal knowledge helps to promote the sharing of information. By the symbiosis of knowledge and information, the market and information technology rejuvenate in this Symbiotic Era.

We murdered the real, if we comment on Baudrillard’s Murder of the Real in the Vital Illusion. “The perfect crime no longer involves God (of Nietzsche), but Reality, and it is not a symbolic murder but an extermination” writes Baudrillard. Nothing is left of reality, no trace, not even a corpse as ‘extermination’ suggests. Nothing is either true or false, but reality is not dead absolutely as no crime is perfect, jokes Baudrillard.

“...today there is nothing left but a map (the virtual abstraction of the territory), and on this map some fragments of the real are still floating and drifting.” (2000:63)

The hyperrealization of the real is a crime with a total mystery. There is no suspect. There is no weapon. All traditional functions, the critical, the political, the sexual, the social survive only in simulation.

“We seem to be driven by a huge and irresistible compulsion that acts on us through the very progress of technologies ( expanding for example in what we call ‘information highways’ and could as well call ‘disinformation highways, a compulsion to draw ever closer to the unconditional realization of the real.” (Baudrillard 2000:65)

Because there is too much of the Real, it is disappearing, Baudrillard acknowledges, just as the excess of information puts an end to information, or the excess of communication puts an end to communication and too much creativity puts an end to innovation.

Until now in this paper we advocated the idea of symbiosis between Information and Knowledge, between Creativity and Innovation. But now we should add that we would better not exaggerate this notion as well, taking the French philosopher’s warning into consideration against excess. Just like Plato, we would better champion his well known phrase ‘moderation in everything’. In the cases of too much reality, too much information, too much innovation we do not know exactly what is taking place. That is true Messieur Baudrillard, it may be that humankind is doomed to disappear in this catastrophic process.

Baudrillard’s solution for this problem of total disappearance is that we must no longer assume any principal of truth, of causality, or any discursive norm. Instead, we must grant both the poetic singularity of events and the radical uncertainty of events. It is not easy, as he says, to renounce truth is the most difficult thing although truth no longer affords a solution. To crown it all, absolute truth is another name for death. We must find better quests than going after the absolutes.

An underlying and unifying truth and certainty that can render the world coherent and meaningful can be split into a multitude of reigning units, can be pluralistic with no horizantal or vertical order by the power of popular culture. Decentered knowledge can produce multiple meanings. The unified subject of modernity can be the fragmented subject of postmodernity. Maybe only a symbiosis can reduce the drawbacks of the fragmented whole to turn into dust and irritate humans by whirlwinds. The expected result is certainly not nihilism.

A symbiotic student should not deny truth altogether, but should be aware of the multiplicity of local contingent truths; should not claim to abolish all norms but should know that they have to be struggled over and should assume a personal responsibility in this struggle. To the Enlightenment ideals of critical reason and humanistic individual freedom, it is only added a rational subject capable of exercising self motivation and self direction. There is still subjectivity but more ambivalent and less fixed in positioning. The symbiotic student’s education is going through profound changes as well. Interdisciplinary and experiental approaches in teaching and learning can help to realize the promising symbiosis: To create and produce the symbiotic student educated both by modern and postmodern practices. In Postmodernism and Education Robin Usher and Richard Edwards warn us against ‘emancipatory intentions’ which can turn out to be the means of a new oppression.

“Self-referentiality is perhaps one of the key aspects of a postmodern perspective. Its particular significance lies in providing a constant reminder that all discourses can have power effects. It is, for example, attractive to replace notions of individualistic humanism with those of social empowerment but care is needed to ensure that this does not result in the substitution of one oppressive discourse for another. As Foucault reminds us, discourses of emancipation despite their emancipatory intent, are still bound up with the ‘will to power’. Educators find it hard to accept that their emancipatory intentions, their desire to enlighten may be implicated with the ‘will to power’ and may, therefore, have oppressive consequences. A postmodernist perspective reminds us that historically this has been the case and that we as educators, therefore, need always to question any discursive practice, no matter how benevolent, for the configurations of emancipation/oppression within it.”(Usher-Edwards 1994:27)

Ayten Suvak

(To be continued)

Innovation and Creativity in Educational Enterprise(3)

This transformation occurs in teacher-student dichotomy as well. For Paulo Freire, the Brasilian educational theorist, there is a teacher-student in the classroom, a teacher who learns and a student-teacher, a learner who teaches. That way teacher-student dichotomy could be completely abolished. Freire’s ‘banking concept of education’ takes the student as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. Locke’s ‘tabula rasa’ becomes the ‘banking concept’ and both of them handle the student’s mind as an emptiness to be filled, a ‘fill-in-the-blank’ test. Hopefully with the symbiosis of teacher and student this void is reciprocal. The movement towards symbiosis in every dimension has begun as Kurokawa believes:

“The symbiosis of humankind and nature, the symbiosis of intellect and emotion, the symbiosis of science and technology and art, the symbiosis of commerce and culture, the symbiosis of public and private...the symbiosis of different cultures, the symbiosis of work and play...” (Kurokawa:45)

We can playfully add to this list, the symbiosis of knowledge and information, the symbiosis of creativity and innovation. When knowledge is decentered, the outcome is information, and when creativity is applied it is called innovation. Modernist certainty undermined, the consequent uncertainty pervaids knowledge which is constantly changing. Knowledge without having fixed references is open to multiple interpretations. Information can be called hyperknowledge, borrowing Jean Baudrillard’s term ‘hyperreality’.

Hyperreality is the product of Information Age where something becomes information when it is assigned a Saussurrean significance through the processes of signifier and signified. Their blend, signification, namely information, finds its way in the mind of the receiver by some cognitive agent. Philosophers who prefer to think about knowledge with different sets of analytical tools, may dismiss the scientist’s computer programs, feedbacks, flowcharts loaded with information. If knowledge is for the elite, information is for the common. Information need not have any meaning in order to be communicated. Information yields knowledge, knowledge requires truth, information may require it as well. This fact reconciles knowledge with information, the elite with the common, modernity with postmodernity, the whole with the fragment. The symbiosis of knowledge and information is possible since both depend on truth altough “information is after all a valuable commodity” in Fred I. Dretske’s opinion. Who cares if information may not provide us with any meaning at all? We can tell what a computer is, without telling what it means.

“Information is a commodity that, given the right recipient is capable of yielding knowledge”. (Dretske 1999:47)

While student’s mind is a ‘bank account’ to be filled by education, it is also a commodity. Information loaded student mind is twice commodity, given the right recipient, it is capable of yielding creative and innovative knowledge. Our thesis statement to make a symbiosis of information and knowledge, creativity and innovation turn out to be valid in line of this logic. As Dretske observes:

“What we learn, in terms of both content and amount, is limited by the information available. It is moreover a commodity, that can be transmitted, received, exchanged, stored, lost, recovered, bought and sold. In terms of what it can do and what can be done to it, this is the sort of thing we are referring to when we talk about information.”. 

A traditional answer to the question of knowledge is that, it is a form of justified true belief. What if beliefs can be false and the truth may not be believed any more? Then in an easy way we can support the idea that knowledge is information produced belief since education as an organization sets its agenda for learning and knowledge building. Quoting from the Knowing Organization ( How organizations use information to construct meaning, create knowledge and make decisions):

“The result is fresh knowledge that leads to innovation in the form of new products and new competences. When it is time to decide a strategy or a course of action, decision makers need to know which elements are most important to the organization, what options and capabilities are available and how to disentangle a complex web of factors and contingencies to make an acceptable choice.” (Choo Chun Wei 1998: 25)

‘The knowledge creation process’ can be utilized in manufacturing creative and innovative students capable of a symbiosis which uses the right amount of information and knowledge as ingredients. One way to extend communication and information services is to allow markets to work. Information service should be available to the entire population. New technologies and new business models must be revised for narrowing gaps in educational institutions since “ access to and use of communication and information services present major inequalities among and within countries” as The World Bank acknowledges (2006:41)

Ayten Suvak

(To be Continued)

Innovation and Creativity in Educational Enterprise(2)

Starting to the enterprise aspect of our topic, we can say that a large industry of educational materials is invading the world markets today using individuals as their brainstorming agents. Teachers, students, families are all being treated as commodities. Every year all sorts of techniques appear in the educational market. Teachers are postmodern pilgrims of our age, working as disseminators of learning techniques, of knowledge, of information. All are devised to motivate and control the on going educational industry.

The process of building an enthusiasm for learning in this hectic age of ours is really a very challenging job. We can imagine it as a battlefield where individual wants and needs of the learner, the goals of the parents, the widespread goals of educational institutions, private educational centers of Turkey and the goals of society in broad sense of the word, are engaged in constant row.

As inventors of technology, the ‘developed’ counties are in master positions against ‘under-developed’ ones. Users or appliers of technology may be considered as slaves. Turkey is an open market for all kinds of technologies but we may be called masters of imported goods if we do not like the term ‘slave’.

Turkish high school students are stuffed with an excess of educational material unable to know how to apply their skills outside of school. But thanks to quiz shows of TV which make millionaires out of tenacious memories, we can have a chance to be ‘somebody’. Maybe teachers should be oriented to endow students with that kind of commercialized knowledge.

Education and being educated take their toll on students and families in Turkey. A large percent of Turkish population is under an enormous constraint on account of anxieties caused by the educational system. Since spiritual richness is devalued by economic exigencies, nearly every one of us is after quick gains leaving morals and ethics amiss. 

There are no traditional role models any more. No examplary heroes from family circles. Heroes arise among celebrities who also serve as role-models. Media members who introduce these new heroes to the public should be educated properly first, as long as they are new age teachers for the masses. This may count as a kind of open education. Since knowledge is considered as a human construct, the most suitable construction for our survival should be created by mass-media.

To educate students for the business world, for the great enterprises, we need great visions for educating teachers subordinated to this entrepreneurial system of education. Both students and teachers have fallen prey to education in the 21st century. The world is relentlessly commanded by financial kingdoms. Who cares whether peoples of the world are properly educated or not! We all are produced according to harsh, competitive capitalistic expectations.

Excessive work and hardship in teacher training in USA, as shown in the seminar titled ‘Becoming a Teacher’-August 2009 at Bogazici University in Istanbul, are seemingly for the benefit of the people in general but looking from the illeteracy perspective in the States, good teaching is not enough for learning. Can we say that is because people have generally lost trust in institutions which cannot prevent the world from being torn down to a chaotic hell: Famine, redundancy, inequality, incessant wars, massacres everywhere. We as humans have no time for self-discovery in this mind-blowing world.

We would better focus on character development, ‘sensitivity training’ based on innate benevolence, if one may trace an inkling of it in us, human beings. A life lived closer to nature could be better than nurture. It will not be surprising if we all become cyborgs, half human, half automats in the nearest future. We must be reminded of our old moral values by the God in ourselves if it is not dead already in this Age of Digital Slavery where new ethical problems arise together with technology, new life styles and destructive social changes.

With the aid of creativity and innovation , can we imagine of a future education that will be a symbiosis of knowledge and information to meet the new life demands?

We are widely informed in this Digital Age of ours. We know a bit of everything, one can say we are erudite readers as long as we can spend long hours in front of the monitor without any complaints. Innumerable sites offer us a rich variety of information and knowledge on all fields of research. Do you wish to be informed about life and deeds of Oscar Wilde? Just put down his first and last names in the google. You will be informed until you will not feel your buttocks under your stylish velvet pants on the chair. Your neck will get stiff as if you swallowed a walking stick. Your watering starry eyes will reflect the impression of a mourning widow.

Every one of us as postmodern individuals is doomed to be overeducated by information technologies, by postindustrial society’s highly competitive expectations on creativity and innovation and by postpsychoanalysis’ chaotic debates on whether to choose between the whole and the fragmented selves for case studies.

The educational problems arise while molding students for modern centers of production or for postindustrial social formations such as centers of consumption, shopping malls, financial services or entertainment centers. Since attaining knowledge is a deep down, tiresome and long process compared to the informative one, in the general sense, we have to welcome shortcuts in education in order to keep pace with the ‘speedy Gonzales’ walks of posteducation.

Our aim in this paper is to draw a creative and innovative poststudent picture through a philosophical symbiosis of knowledge and information: A student who smartly adapts the Platonic phrase ‘Know Thyself’ into its popular variety ‘Inform Yourself’ by your creative and innovative skills.

Just as there is a continuity between modernity and post modernity, between creativity and innovation, it is expected to exist one such continuity between knowledge and information. Knowledge carries modernity’s faith in rationality and science as it uncovers the natural order of things. Its main task is human betterment, nevertheless it is questioned either epistemologically and metaphysically. By the continuation of disease, famine, want and destruction, that ‘noble’ task is rendered somehow incredible. The progressive and humanizing missions of universal and transcendental foundations of knowledge proved themselves to be false by inhuman practices of power, examples of which exist everywhere. Yes, knowledge is power, but informative technologies are more powerful in making the posthumans reject universal claims and more successful in making them accept the partial, the local and the specific.

In education as well there is no authorising position of the former mass-student production. As Kisho Kurokawa states in the Philosophy of Symbiosis: “The transformation from the age of the machine to the age of life is a simultaneous transformation from industrial society to information society.” (Kurokawa 1994:43)

Ayten Suvak

(To be continued) 

AS-Innovation And Creativity In Educational Enterprise

We start our paper with an examplary paragraph on creativity paged from an internet site with the title:

“A new idea for a few minutes of your time- Saturday, June 06, 2009

Through a colleague, I found a very interesting and creative businessmodel. Christine Santora and Justin Gignac are a couple from New York City who started with quite a special project: they have defined some wants for example - an Iphone, chicken wings, some sleep, ... and they create a painting about that need (so they paint an IPhone or some chicken wings). The price for the painting is exactly the price for the item that they want. So if you buy 'a slice of peperoni', then you have to pay 3 dollars and they buy it and enjoy it.” (www.creax.net)

Where creativity is defined as a derivative of freedom, playing with ideas, refraining from the judgement of people in a climate of challenge and high goals, innovation is definded as applied creativity. If we can give our age the name of the above internet site ‘Creatopia’ which suggests a kind of utopia, similarly we can call our innovative aspirations as ‘innovatopia’. Utopia in the latest sense points at an age of hope. Creatopia supports the idea of optimism through its logo ‘No time to be a pessimist. It is experience time. It is time to trade ideas for money. A workshop’s topic being ‘The art of doing nothing and everything’ values the abilities of an innovative and creative brain.

“...In a lot of cases, when you do nothing, you are probably doing a lot somewhere else. So the topic is still going on and we didn't come to one conclusion and I guess that's very good. Leave the open space so nothing can happen ;-)”. (www.creax.net)

Creativity and innovation may be regarded as two siblings who play in the school yard together. They do homework sometimes together, sometimes apart. They exercise practical jokes on each other, sometimes quarrelling sometimes in peace. They acquire skills for an ever expanding globalized market place. They learn that to be successful means to be creative and innovative in order to allure diverse customers to the market. An increasing competition among students is inevitable. New and clever strategies are needed to win the battle or at least to end the match without a tie-breaker. If a granny has difficulty in comprehending such a bitter use of brains as weapons, an unnamed author may remind him or her ‘the law of years’:

“Youth does not want to be understood, it wants to be let alone. The grown up who would approach it too importunately is as ridiculous in its eyes as if he had put on children’s clothes. We may feel with youth, but youth does not feel with us.” (Author unknown)

Taking down barriers to inquisitiveness, creating unrestricted atmospheres for children and youth to pose questions in whatever subject imaginable are today’s globalized education’s main aim. To let young people’s curiosity know no boundaries can open the way to raise new generations both with ‘personal and social capitals’, if I may borrow the term from Henry Etzkowitz. (http://create2009.europa.eu/press/news_archive/news_singleview)

Project based, student centered education’s emphasis on collaboration and communication of brains are expected to create active minded co-creators of the new culture. Interdisciplinary studies on group projects are highly recommended. Time is a crucial factor for obtaining creative output. ‘Ten-year-rule’ works in that creation process. In order to be creative, ‘in-depth domain’ expertise is proven to be highly important according to the psychological research done by Dean Keith Sminton. Knowledge, creative thinking, and motivation are said to be three components of creativity. “Team work of people with different knowledge degrees improves the breadth of knowledge”, writes Karlyn Adams in her websited article in 2006. (www.skillscommision.org/pdf/commissioned_¬papers/Sourcesof Innovation). Feeling free to disagree with others, combining knowledge of the past with that of the present and ‘incubate’ or sleep over knowledge for a later remembrance with a relaxed mind-set just as English poet Wordsworth did before he put down his poetic verses are higly recommended for the creation of a creative mind.

Basic techniques used in modeling creativity are questioning assumptions; defining and redefining problems; encouraging idea generation; cross-fertilizing ideas by allowing time for creative thinking; instructing and assessing creativity and rewarding creative ideas and products which are said to be the best predictors of future creative products. Because creative work takes much time and energy, students with creative minds may be discouraged by either teachers or peers but some little games with the letter P may help to relax the tension:

Portfolios of work
Patterns of creativity
Pondering time
Pastimes spent on innovation
Pedagogic knowledge of creativity
Pathways to creativity and innovation
Public and peer estimation

For (P)erfect creativity, test scores are found to be better predictors of creative life achievements than IQs or school grades. As an unnamed author suggests “it is essential that the student be led to do what is to be learned. A student does not learn what is in a lecture or a book. He learns only what the lecture or book caused him to do.”(Teaching in Further Education-2004)

This paper’s topic being on mainly creation and innovation, we attempted to use the popular technique of brainstorming to clarify those two phenomenon in an informal way. As the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein nicely said:”Whatever can be said at all can be said clearly, and whatever cannot be said clearly should not be said at all (1922)”.

Brainstorming is a process that works best with a group of people when followed the following four rules, as it is made clear in CREAX-Creative Workforce Innovation:

“Have a well-defined and clearly stated problem 
Have someone assigned to write down all the ideas as they occur 
Have the right number of people in the group 
Have someone in charge to help enforce the following guidelines: 
Suspend judgment 
Every idea is accepted and recorded 
Encourage people to build on the ideas of others 
Encourage way-out and odd ideas”.

(To be continued)

Ayten Suvak

C1P1

Cat1Purr1

Constant sneezing

cat's purring-

I have flu...

Ayten Suvak

Education for All...

Abstract of Educational Enterprise

Innovation And Creativity In Educational Enterprise

Where creativity is defined as a derivative of freedom, playing with ideas, refraining from the judgement of people in a climate of challenge and high goals, innovation is defined as applied creativity. Creativity and innovation may be regarded as two siblings who play in the school yard together. They acquire skills for an ever expanding globalized market place.They learn that to be successful means to be creative and innovative in order to allure diverse customers to the market. Thus our future education would better take a way towards a symbiosis of creative and innovative knowledge and information.

Our aim under the above title is to draw a poststudent picture through a philosophical symbiosis of knowledge and information: A student who smartly adapts the Platonic phrase ‘Know Thyself’ into its popular variety ‘Inform Yourself’ to be creative and innovative.

We use brainstorming as a method to clarify our views. Our examples are somehow fictional while we try to draw the picture of a symbiotic student in between modern and postmodern tendencies experienced in the problematics of education. We endeavour to base the creative and innovative knowledge and information on the philosophies of British, American, French, Asian, Latin thinkers. 

Among many categories of educational research, ours can fit into The Educational Philosophy. Our method is also a literary quest which borrows some fictional figures of worldly known writers such as Oscar Wilde, Mary Shelly, Robert Musil, and last but not the least, our contemporary writer Hasan Ali Toptaş. Rather than finding an absolute solution for the ongoing problem of education, we attempt to adapt the idea of symbiosis, which we borrowed from Kisho Kurokawa, to the creation of a symbiotic student who stands for the reconciliation of knowledge and information.

Ours may pass as an humouristic essay on our digitalized existence which can be elegantly summarized as ‘we are our memex.’ Our boss is creative and innovative information technologies which use knowledge as their recruit. If we are allowed to make a joke on this, we are doomed to be lifelong learners in order to survive in this era of communication which may be called as well, a type of cultural industry where there is always the danger of producing individuals in the service of business world. In a way they are creative and innovative slaves perfected by education. Future studies may further delve into drawing that slave student portrait in minutest details.

Ayten Suvak

AS - An Unusual Clash . . .

AS - An Avarage Clash

I fell in love with his voice
Without seeing his face
Every morning he was on the air
Flying right through my ear
A radio DJ's sonorous voice
Dripped into my heart
With the curious effect of the running water
Which builds the Turkish saying:
'Nothing matches with the sound of music
Made by water coins and woman'
And by man
My own addition to the whole damn phrase...

Ayten Suvak

AS - Holiday is over...

Holiday is over
Vagabonds are bonding-
To school

Love is over
Hearts are bonding
To nowhere..

Ayten Suvak

AS - S k y . . .

S atellites fill it
K ind hearts fill it
Y ou unload it...


Ayten Suvak

S e p t e m b e r . . .

On the fifteenth

Year's neglected

Ayten was born

The day's worn

Like a fall's leaf

She's perpetually

Celebrating her teen

Evergreen...

Ayten Suvak

Writing

W hat have you done

R ight

I n your life

T ell me light

I gnoble is fllight

N one in the darkness

G ives me a chance to write with delight . . .

Ayten Suvak

A Fucking Question...

http://imbleedingprofusely.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/01_god.jpg

What would you do
If God slammed you
In the face
Like your father
When you started
A love race
With boys
Who fucked God
Always?


Ayten Suvak

L-ove in the Oven

http://img.blogcu.com/uploads/deepsea_Love-II-700px..jpg

Start with L
O O O
Vulnerable
E-love so and so
My heart in the
Oven
I love you so...


Ayten Suvak

Master Symphony

Mother's Day
Master Symphony's on
Let her play...

Ayten Suvak

Famous Singer

http://pelerinimvardi.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/zeki-muren.jpg


Zeki Muren was gone
And put Bodrum in his statue
Thousands of songs in the panoramic view
Seen from his beloved chevrolet
Placed in the front garden
Where his soul rests
Among Bodrum's pink begonvillen...

Ayten Suvak

S a l e s

Without your approval

I sold my apartment

The one you liked best

Among three of them

I changed the lock

So don't try the key

Keep it together with my heart's

To unlock with dexterity...

Ayten Suvak

Undoing Reason

The tree adjacent to my balcony is alive

Spring's on the way

My feelings are alive

There's no reason to die

With a cold heart

With veins as dry as autumn leaves

My soul leaves

Undoing my reason

I call after it:

Don't let my body go hot

With that undoing season

Called spring...

Ayten Suvak

Laments

 

Justice is unserving 
A conventional distrust
A Frankenstein in disguise
Created by manpower
To serve for the greedy self
Of the advantageous stronger
Who cares for the laments of the weaker
But is there a limit between the two
As the exploiter and the exploited
Since both are ruled by a kind of justice
In the hands of vagabonds
In search of a true Ruler
Someone or something
Who or which is not a spoilsport
In the toystore of the Just
Being a pawn or a trickster
Is no matter of Fate
But of a manufactured evil


Ayten Suvak

A Bird's Wish

I don't want to be in a cage

Just like a flower in a vase

I don't want to be used in lovers' case

Don't ask me either to sing my best

I would like to perch on The Happy Prince's shoulder

On Oscar Wilde's page...

Ayten Suvak

Under The Surveillance...

If you stare at me like this
I will be the object of your whims 
A complete mess of purple dreams 
That enslaves me even awake 
Sometimes it is nice to be fake in love 
Without dedication 
Without hesitation to be able to run away 
There shines the gleams of pure logic 
Kicking away the sentiments catastrophic 
You just escape leaving everything behind 
And every impulse of returning 
Passes away with a new feeling 
Towards a handsome guy 
That you catch staring at you in the bar...

Ayten Suvak

I Guess I am...

 


If I have your phone number

And your credit card for our dreamy slumber

And if I see you act as a founder

Of an unshaken relationship

That sings the song of a divine thunder

And everlasting surrender

I guess I am your lover

And I will spend your money forever

In the name of our love

At all costs...

Ayten Suvak

Loose Relationship

In a hurry we moved to a new flat

We also moved to a higher rank

We pay more to shopping

But we are not paid more

We can even be jobless soon

Still in the hope for a better future

We swoon we swoon

Even if we are left penniless

We will laugh inside the tomb

As long as our relationship has become loose

With God and everything

We are changed into a different kind of human

We stink we stink of some faithless inhuman...

Ayten Suvak

I know I saw you Einstein...

You were there standing by the lamp post

It was raining cats and dogs

You were counting the stars in every drop

Then it started showering you with stardust

Your hair was whiter than ever

You told me to stick out my tongue

While I was passing you by

Your very tongue was already out

You were licking the stardust of the Big Bang...

Ayten Suvak

Sports

S aves man

P airs with soul

O n the whole

R ed in the face

T his is a very healthy case

S ane for whatever race...

Ayten Suvak

Love Alert

At the window waits the maiden

To blossom at the sight of her watchman

Days from now he will pluck the flower

To place her on his own window sill

To make her the angel of his own sweet will

In the most intimate zones

He will create out of her the unique flower 

Of a legendary love affair

A flower that only for himself

Blossoms under the warm rays of the sun

With or without any fragrance

On a hot tin roof with a cat's love alert...

Ayten Suvak

Unconsumated Marriage

There lies a girl
In a bed with red blankets
Warm in her nightgown
Styled after the wedding ones
On the wall just opposite
Is hung a picture of newly weds
A bride and a groom
The girl wears a red ribbon
Around her waist
That means she is a virgin
She still is
Since her husband was killed
Right after the ceremony
With a bullet fired
For the honour of their wedding...

Ayten Suvak

Haikus to Myself

Happy-go-tedious me
embellishes every corner-
In her haiku set

Abundant hair
hides and seeks in the bush-
A reddish ribbon

Be simple minded
I repeat constantly to myself-
Then complication occurs

A new leather jacket-
A fresh brand-new skin
after the costly cosmetics

Meaningful envy
in a rough competition-
Meaningless friendhip bursting

Ayten Suvak

W...

We have something
We  are proud
We can live penniless in a shroud
Global crises don't effect us
The problems are nuts
We eat them for breakfast
For lunch and dinner we are served TV serials
We are full to the brim
Our soldiers are grim
We don't want war
We want to make love for a dream
To live in peace in our melted pot
Which is the Turkish art of living...

Ayten Suvak

Womanish

Always nagging
With a boring headache
My mom complains of her life
Of her constant backache
Of her demoded outfits
Of my dad’s financial fits
Hot boiling kettle screams
My mom also screams off her fits
A cold wind screams through the panes
And I scream in pain:
I don’t want to grow up to be a woman
With a hubby so vain
While my dad leaves home again
God knows he also might be  screaming and cursing
Those womanish complaints...

Ayten Suvak