Intel Visual Life
I really can’t think of anything more profound to say, other than, I love this video.
Close your other windows/tabs, shut down your Tweet Deck, put your phone on silent, turn on your Facebook notifications…if nothing else, just for six minutes (I promise you won’t regret it, you will survive AND be inspired – what a deal!).
…then, enjoy:
not adding trash to the ocean this christmas
Contributing to the garbage island wasn’t high on my priority list this holiday season, so this year I used a little creativity and wrapped gifts with newspaper:
Call me a granola, but I think that’s better than have our ocean filled with crap. Garbage. How disgusting. And depressing.
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Nurturing Creativity
Well, I read Eat, Pray, Love a few years back and really enjoyed it – just watched Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk – makes me feel a little better and certainly reminds me alot of the great minds in the j. school:
hairballs, creativity and bedbury
After the branding America workshop a few weeks back, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with a few fellow students, professors, and Scott Bedbury and Stu Redsun. At one point, we began discussing the Curiosity for Strategists class taught by Dave, which led me to discuss the term project – take something you are curious about, study it for the ten week term, and present the findings to the class. For my curiosity project, I researched how various school curriculums fail to include creativity and “outside the box” teaching/learning methods
So with this said, Scott Bedbury recommended the book: Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie:
I’ve been reading the book since it arrived in the mail a few days ago and…love it! The basic premiss of the book is to discuss why the incorporation of creativity and “outside the box thinking” is crucial to success.
In addition to the text, the book includes beaaaautiful images such as:
These mind maps and flow charts make me feel better about my note taking habits. Such as these notes from my span 490 class:
Or the NVC campaign class last year:
school report cards and what they really mean
As I look back at what went down during my education…wow, so much hoop jumping just to get to the next level…not because it made sense, but because that’s just how the system worked.
We worked so hard to pass the CIM/CAM, preparing work samples and had so much pressure to pass. So much time was used to prepare for the CIM – ironically, regardless of if you passed or did not pass the CIM, you graduated…so ultimately it did not matter whether we passed or not – makes sense, right…?
What about the COG test, the IOWAs, district work samples? Do those mean anything? Are they accurate representations of one’s intelligence? Not all people learn the same, and not all people’s strengths are in reading, math or science, so why are we pigeonholing kids into three categories? Why don’t we have state testing in soccer? Or web code? Or cello? Or welding? It’s just as relevant than reading, writing and math, is it not?
I was always the kid who got #16 and #21 – consistently produces high quality work and student’s classroom behavior was commendable (one of my personal favorites…what the HECK does that mean, anyway??) So, after years of #16s and #21s, I finally got a #1 and #2 – the dreaded comments – “classwork was no completed and/or turned in” and “homework was not completed and/or turned in” – so this being the case – right next to these traumatizing comments, I receieved an A and E – can’t get a higher grade than that – if that’s the case, who cares that the work wasn’t completed? obviously it wasn’t important enough to affect my grades…
Maybe it’s good thing? It opened my eyes to the reality that so much of what is out there is not because it make sense, but because it’s what has been accepted.
Like anything else – it’s far easier to criticize than to make change – so perhaps this will be a challenge to myself – what can I do to influence a system I consider to be severely flawed?