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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
