Promoting Creativity in the classroom

I was inspired by this video I recently viewed on YouTube.  I plan on sharing this with my students next semester and hope to find ways to inspire them to view their activities in the classroom and as future information systems professional as creative work  .

On Improvisation

I’ve been thinking about improvisation a lot lately. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the increasing number of headlines about the economy encouraging us to make due with what we have.  Perhaps it’s my theatrical training trying to find an outlet in the quantitative and largely deterministic paradigm of my research.  Then again, it could be a desire to learn to think better on my feet, or a yearning to push the learning experiences in my classroom to another level, or a desire to experience and enjoy my academic writing in a more fluid, personal, and perhaps human, manner. 

And then quotes like the following get me thinking that perhaps I should be researching and teaching principles related to improvisation to my students:

“Everyone is at a loss, this is the start of a period of huge improvisation. There is no longer any best practice around to refer to,” says Victor Halberstadt, professor of economics at Leiden [in a WSJ.com article on the attitude at the Davos conference]

I think learning to improvise — to follow general principles with available though admittedly imperfect or incomplete resources in an environment of uncertainty — is an increasingly important skill to develop. I’m also trying to figure out how to align my work with principles such as

“teach [others] correct principles and [let them] govern themselves” (Joseph Smith, Jr.)

and

“Neither take ye thought beforehand what ye shall say; but treasure up in your minds continually the words of life, and it shall be given you in the very hour that portion that shall be meted unto every man.” (D&C 84:85). 

As I start identifying the connections between improvisation and my research and teaching, I’ll likely post more here.  If you have any suggestions, please feel free to share.

Joining BYU Hawaii

 

The CIS Department of Brigham Young University – Hawaii has invited me to join its faculty, and I am delighted to do so. I will join the BYU Hawaii faculty in July 2009.  I look forward to contributing to the incredible work occuring at BYU Hawaii and to teaching and learning with the remarkable faculty and students there.

Teaching Programming … to Visual Learners

I think it’s out of pedagogical interest rather than a nascent love for programming that I’m sharing another tool for teaching programming. This one, DrawBot (Mac OS X) starts with visual experiments (a reversal from the introductory programming courses I took which focused on text-based activities first before moving into graphical interface activities).  According to the software home page,

“DrawBot is an ideal tool to teach the basics of programming. Students get colorful graphic treats while getting familiar with variables, conditional statements, functions and what have you.”

I’ve been reading some works by phenomenologists like Heidegger lately, and I’m starting to think perhaps much of our pedigogical approach to teaching technical skills focuses too much on abstractions and not enough on rich experiences. If expertise can be developed in some cases through experience and feedback without abstraction perhaps there’s a way I can change my approach in the classroom.

Storytelling and Scholarship

In this video, Ira Glass from NPR talks about developing the craft of creating great work. His advice is applicable to scholars as well as creative artists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE

Teaching Programming … to Children

I came across some research out of MIT recently featuring an innovative approach to teaching programming to children (ages 8 and up).  One of the products they’ve produced is a application called Scratch. Using this tool, the user fits lego-block like programming modules together to manipulate graphics, sounds, and video on the screen.  The emphasis of the application is on helping children understand and get used to working with programming concepts such as logical structures (i.e, if statements, for-loops), screen coordinates, objects, etc.  without having to worry about syntax. I downloaded the program the other day onto my home computer and showed it to my seven- and five-year old boys.  We were learning how to use the tool together, when after about five minutes, I realized my seven-year old was picking things up faster than I was.  My five-year old also enjoys playing with it and is asking for father-son time so I can teach him to use it.  As a geek, I’m naturally thrilled. As an educator, I’m intrigued by the implications of how this will help children develop math and logic skills, and as a father, I’m thrilled for another way to spend time productively with my children.

In my undergraduate program, I remember that the programming courses were something of a barrier for business students who were interested in information systems, but did not have any background in programming. Perhaps tools like this could be useful on the college level as well.

Preparing for an academic job interview

I came across an informative post on the OCIS doctoral student blog providing some helpful suggestions for preparing for job interviews. The photo included in the post alone (duplicated here, image source: rickz on flickr) was worth the link.

I think I’ll dedicate a future post or two to answering the sample questions included in the post.

Constrained by our own myth-conceptions

I read an article in the New York Times this evening summarizing a position paper by a physiologist arguing that reticence about exercising in cold weather is largely a product of 1) misconceptions about the safety of exercising in the cold and 2) inappropriate dress–driven by misunderstanding the nature of our physiological response to cold–for cold-weather exercise. The author of the paper argues that exercising in the cold can be safe as long as you keep moving, you are sufficiently covered but not overdressed so much that you sweat, and you don’t overstress yourself by being paranoid of the cold.

This reminded me of a book I read recently by Ellen Langer entitled Mindfulness.  In this practitioner-oriented book, Langer summarizes over fifty social psychology studies that demonstrate how people live up to and within constraints that are frequently artificial and that are either placed on them by others or self-imposed. Langer cites the example of the paradigm shift that occurred when an athlete disproved the widely held belief that it was physically impossible for a human to run a mile in less than four minutes. Once it was accomplished, multiple athletes have accomplished similar feats over 100 times.

So whether its exercising in cold whether or running a mile in less than four minutes, it seems we (rather than the physical world) often define what is possible and what is impossible. I wonder if someday, we’re going to learn that humans really can hold more than 7 +/- 2 pieces of information in working memory at a time, or that it is possible to read several thousand words per minute.

In my own scholarship, perhaps I can look at applying this principle by setting incremental goals (i.e., to write 1,000 words per day for a month, 2,000 words per day for the following month, etc.). Obviously, quantity and verbosity doesn’t equate to quality and simplicity, but such an exercise would give  me more practice in my writing and allow me to exercise this aspect of my scholarship more.

Group awareness in a digital world.

After I finished teaching class one day, I walked in late to a presentation. Almost immediately, I could tell things weren’t going well for the speaker. There was an uneasy tension in the room. The facial expressions of the attendees were masked or furrowed, and the questioning was not very energetic. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of the presentation, I am amazed at how readily apparent the group feeling was to me.

Thinking about this experience has lead me to question whether I would have had the same experience had the interaction occurred in a virtual environment. Recent psychological research (Oberman and Ramachandran 2007) indicates that our brains are especially effective at simulating the observed behaviors and intentions of others within ourselves. When we see an acrobat walking a tight-rope we naturally tense as if we were on the line ourselves. In my situation, I was able to enter the room and see and hear my colleagues. My mind simulated their expressions, body language, and words and mapped the feelings and intentions I would have had had I made those same actions. To some small degree, I became one with my colleagues and was able to experience empathy for them.

When these empathetic simulations are occurring reciprocally among group members, I believe this could be described as a group-level instantiation of the organizational construct of the collective mind (Weick and Roberts 1993). Unlike its organizational counterpart, the group collective mind hinges on empathy rather than on interrelated specialization. Both require synchronized interaction. But the development of a group collective mind allows the group members to achieve this synchronization through psychological and behavioral alignment (Pickering and Garrod 2004), whereas the organizational collective mind facilitates synchronization through identified expertise within the organization and through coordination among specialists (Weick and Sutcliffe 2001).

With regards to the development of the group collective mind, I’m wondering how well we could mentally simulate the actions of others in a computer-mediated context. Perhaps a better question would be under what conditions do different media enable the development of a collective mind (i.e., empathetic alignment)  among group members? I this regard, I don’t think text is consistently inferior to speech. Rather, I think it’s the forms of communication that facilitate or inhibit the development of a collective mind. A well constructed narrative of a tragic event can bring me to tears whether it’s written in print or displayed on a movie screen. But does this process of developing the collective mind work differently when groups use different tools to communicate electronically?

When picking tools, less is often more.

I had to put together some instructions for our secretary to enter a considerable amount of data into a series of web-based forms.  My first impulse was to create a series of screen shots, dump them into Microsoft OneNote and annotate the screen shots with the instructions. (I’ve done that in the past for a similar type of task.)

However, I caught myself, picked up a pencil and some scratch paper, scribbled out the instructions, and wrote the date at the bottom of the page. I took the paper upstairs to our secretary, and she was able to follow the instructions perfectly.  The tech-heavy solution would have generated some glamorous pictures. But it would have used up a lot more time and paper to accomplish the same job. It would likely have been more difficult to follow as the instructions would have been spread across several pages as well. I’m finally learning that, particularly when delegating, it’s important to keep things as simple as possible.