Creativity

The New York Times offers the following suggestions about increasing creativity:

Innovators at the 2008 IdeaFestival offered the following suggestions on how to come up with new ideas:

1. Think when you are not thinking, for example, on a run or walk.
2. Listen to classical music, go to a concert or a play or sit quietly in a park to daydream.
3. Read periodicals you would not typically read — a scientific magazine, for example, if you are more interested in business. Same with books outside your typical genre.
4. Attend a conference outside your field.
5. Surround yourself with creative thinkers.
6. Immerse yourself in a problem; ask questions, investigate possible outcomes.
7. Keep an idea journal.
8. Take a course to learn a new language or some other skill outside your expertise.
9. Be curious and experiment.
10. Articulate your idea, seek feedback, put structure on it, harvest it.

Newspapers Are Dying...

As I have written before, from a very early age, I was a big fan of newspapers. But something has changed lately, and it really doesn't bode well for the future of the newspaper industry. When I was young, newspapers were my window on the world. When I grew older, I thought the very height of luxury would be to have a subscription to BOTH the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Somewhere along the way, I realized that each paper had about 500 reporters each working for them, and the thought of having 1,000 people scouring the world looking for information just for me was positively intoxicating! As a matter of fact, for a brief time after I moved to Florida, we had 4 papers delivered to the house every day.... the two local local papers from Tampa and St. Petersburg... plus the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The trouble was that much of these papers were taken up with things that did not personally interest me in the least. But to get at the good stuff I really wanted, I had to wade through a whole lot of things that I didn't want... plus, of course, mountains of ads for things I didn't need and didn't want. I had an early inkling as a kid of what was to happen when my mother took me on a cruise ship in the late 1950's. Every day, the Ocean Monarch published the ship's newspaper, really a mimeographed sheet with wire headlines from around the world. Here was a concise, easy to read summary of world events. I was impressed!

I imagined that the President of the United States received something like this in greatly expanded form... today known as the President's Daily Brief. When I was in service at the Pentagon, I noticed that the Department of Defense published a similar, expanded version of that ship's paper, known as the "Early Bird", but that publication was not made available to civilians on the outside. Then the Internet came along, particularly with RSS capabilities through Google Reader. Now I could find correspondents that mainly focused on things that I was interested in... plus I found sites like Digg that aggregated interesting postings selected by members from all over the world, which enabled me to learn much more about the world at large and occasionally find an author that I wanted to continue to read on a regular basis... online... for free. What I found was that I was seeing items online about two days before they appeared in print in newspapers. Combine hefty subscription prices (together with a delivery surcharge!), limited personal time, the rise of Craigs List as an online free substitute for classified job ads, and the decision by the St. Petersburg Times to meat ax business coverage, and I found that I wasn't really reading the local paper at all. I haven't missed much. I noticed that newspaper business sections gave inordinate attention to the newspaper industry itself, which I could easily do without, of course. Plus my local paper seemed to reprint stories frequently carried elsewhere. However, I have noticed that I don't know as much about what is going on at the local library and stuff like that, plus I really haven't been paying attention to sports news, particularly with respect to local teams. But I suppose that is a small price to pay. I tried to help the local papers, actually. One paper is owned by a nonprofit foundation, and I emailed them with an offer to help them focus on new media issues. After one courtesy reply, I have heard nothing from them since, even though I've followed up with several interesting reports about the dire condition of the newspaper industry that I found online. I guess they really aren't motivated... or interested. So... I have stopped mentioning newspapers to my students as a vital part of their education, and I have completely stopped reading newspapers myself. Aside from the fact that I don't have dirty hands from all that newsprint ink on my fingers, I really don't think I've suffered at all. Plus I seem to get up-to-the-minute notifications of important events electronically, without having to wait two days to find out in my driveway in the morning. And of course, no more water soaked and entirely missed papers to deal with. I will certainly miss you, newspapers! Reading newspapers will soon become, if it hasn't already, a pastime as quaint as travel by sea. Kids born today will have fond memories of daily newspapers as nostalgic as my own fond childhood memories of an Easter cruise on the Ocean Monarch in the late 1950s. But I really think we are all better off for having moved on. Progress!
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See this:

One Less Newspaper Subscription

Suckers 'r' us

Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe offers some interesting ideas in her latest column.

Highlights...

The outsourcing of work to other countries has produced endless ire. But what about the outsourcing of work to thee and me?

For every task shipped abroad by a corporation, isn’t there another one sloughed off onto that domestic loser, the consumer? For every job that’s going to a low-wage economy, isn’t there another going into our very own no-wage economy?

What’s happening on land is happening in air. We are now expected to book our own itinerary, print our boarding passes and do everything at the airport except pat ourselves down for liquids.

In this self-service economy, we also serve (ourselves) by having intimate and endless conversations with voice-recognition machines simply to refill a prescription drug or check our bank balance. We are expected to interact with “labor-saving technology” without realizing that it’s labor-transferring technology. The job has not been “saved,” it’s been taken out of the paid sector, where employees have a nasty habit of expecting salaries, and put into the unpaid sector, where suckers ‘r’ us.

The Internet ad for a do-it-yourself eye surgery kit might be, I pray, a hoax. But in an era when every operation short of brain surgery is done on an outpatient basis, nursing care has already been outsourced to family members whose entire medical training consists of TiVo-ing “Grey’s Anatomy.”

The axis of this evil isn’t really globalization, it’s privatization. Consider all the major jobs that have now become part of our personal portfolio. We’ve become our own computer geeks as help lines become self-help lines. We’ve become our own pension planners and financial analysts left to manage our 401(k)s. We are even expected to be health care analysts, determining which star in the galaxy of drug prescription plans covers the ever-changing cast of pills in our medicine cabinet.

All of this is framed in the language of free choice. As opposed to, say, free time.

Remember back when women were asking “Can We Have It All?” The answer turned out to be that we could have it all only if we could do it all—and all by ourselves. Now men and women have both won equal opportunity in the do-it-all-by-yourself world. We have officially become our own nonprofit centers.

Welcome to the self-service economy where we are never without work to be done.

Ellen Goodman is a columnist for the Boston Globe. Her e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com

Learn Something New Every Day

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A Nation of Dunces?

I recall a conversation I once had with a fellow professor, wherein he remarked that he enjoyed teaching, because anything that he told his students in class seemed to come as an exciting new revelation to them.

I thought of this remark when reading an article in the Sunday paper by Susan Jacoby entitled "A Nation of Dunces" based on her book entitled "The Age of American Unreason".

According to Jacoby, the three trends fueling this "new anti-intellectualism" are ... excessive video, the erosion of general knowledge, and arrogance about the lack of knowledge.

Powerful stuff!

Need proof?

See...

Budapest is the Capital of?

Why Can't 20% of Americans locate the US on a World Map...

Global Classrooms

From the New York Times... Published: February 10, 2008

Global Classrooms: U.S. Universities Rush to Set Up 
Outposts Abroad 

Yes, they kinda get the idea... but not quite...

Physical campuses... lots of cost... lots of logistics... tiny 
enrollments... face modality only... no effective, planned use 
of advanced technologies... 19th Century approach... 
"research oriented", meaning dependence largely on 
government handouts... break even business model (at best)... 
minimal social and business impact (except for elites).

Virtual campuses... minimal cost, spread worldwide... 
simple, well understood web logistics... high enrollments... 
all modalities, but primarily online... embrace of all rational 
cutting edge technologies... 21st Century approach... 
"teaching oriented", meaning focused on student 
development and achievement... profit business model... 
dramatic impact across all segments of developing 
societies.

Which one makes the most sense to you?

UK Scholarly Search Engine

Sure, you use your university's online library... and maybe even Google Scholar... but you now have another great choice:

Intute... based in the UK.

Try it!

My List of "TOP 10 TOOLS FOR 2008"

Today, I was recognized and honored by the Centre for Learning Performance Technologies in the United Kingdom with a web page listing my personal picks for the "Top 10 Learning Tools for 2008"!

Check out my recommendations!

http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/danoshea.html