Creativity
Video: Evolution of the “Social Media Revolution”
Here’s my edit of the original Did You Know? 2 video from 2006.
Read MoreVideo: Kate Bush – Cloudbusting
Based on a true story set in Maine. Wilhelm Reich 24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, along with being a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. It was shortly after he arrived in New York in 1939 that Reich first said he had discovered a biological…
Read MoreVideo: Sparks – How Youth Thrive – Peter Benson
No one has ever said, oh this child of mine, my fondest wish is they will ace statewide benchmark math and science tests when they’re 16… When you actually listen to people’s statements about their dreams for our kids, you hear a very different language. Kids who experience joy. Kids who are connected and engaged.…
Read MoreVideo: Let Kids Rule the School
I recently followed a group of eight public high school students, aged 15 to 17, in western Massachusetts as they designed and ran their own school within a school. They represented the usual range: two were close to dropping out before they started the project, while others were honors students. They named their school the…
Read MoreVideo: The Koh Panyee Football Club: A True Story
In 1986, in a floating village in the middle of the sea that has not an inch of soil, the kids loved to watch football but had nowhere to play or practice. But they didn’t let that stop them. This film is based on a true story about a little island in the south of…
Read MoreVideo: How Eric Whitacre conducted his virtual choir of 2,000 voices
With an emergent technology, something happens that you’d never imagined. Here, YouTube and Hulu, via WordPress, Facebook, and Twitter — and built upon the Internet — bring something new and wonderful to life. In a moving, madly viral video last year, composer Eric Whitacre led a virtual choir of singers from around the…
Read MoreVideo: An Idea is a Curious Thing…
An idea is a curious thing. It can be hard to find, and then suddenly appear. It can be simple or complex, big or small. An idea can come from anywhere, and go anywhere. And once you have an idea, the real fun begins. By 90˚W. Video and Bad Dog Pictures. Original composition by Mark…
Read MoreVideo: Thought of You
“Thought of You” video from YouTube From Open Culture Ryan Woodward has worked on the art direction of many big name Hollywood films – Ironman 2, Spiderman 2 & 3, The Iron Giant, the list goes on. But he had an idea for a short animated film, a love story expressed through dance, and it…
Read MoreVideo: Derek Sivers – How to Start a Movement
With help from some surprising footage, Derek Sivers explains how movements really get started. (Hint: it takes two.) “Leadership is overglorified…. It was really the first follower that transformed the lone nut into a leader. So, as we’re all told that we should be leaders, that would be really ineffective. If you really care about…
Read MoreCreative Destruction
Just as the cassette tape replaced the 8-track, only to be replaced in turn by the compact disc, itself being undercut by MP3 players, … online free newspaper sites such as The Huffington Post and the National Review Online are leading to creative destruction of the traditional paper newspaper…. In fact, successful innovation is normally…
Read MoreThe Internet doesn’t need your ‘great idea’
Great ideas. That is what we are all after isn’t it? That one spark that leads to an empire, money and power? Well, I’ve got news for you. Ideas are yesterdays news. Passé. Done. Last century…. The difference between a nice idea and a very successful idea has always been execution, timing and a large…
Read MoreAmerican creativity is declining
The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result)… Highly creative adults tended to grow up in families…
Read MoreIn Small Towns, We Get to Know People in a Fuller Way
Dr. Collier represented for me what living in a small town is all about: we don’t just make quick, specialized appearances in each other’s lives.
Read MoreDIY: From Whole Earth Review to This Old House
“In the 1970s, DIY spread through the North American population of college- and recent-college-graduate age groups. In part, this movement involved the renovation of affordable, rundown older homes. But it also related to various projects expressing the social and environmental vision of the 1960s and early 1970s. The young visionary Stewart Brand, working with friends…
Read MoreThe Benefits of Publicness
“Publicness builds trust. Secrecy doesn’t. Publicness kills the myth of perfection. That is, when we open our process, we are showing our faults and are no longer held at every moment to the myth of perfection that has come to rule our industrial-age processes. Publicness enables the wisdom of the crowd. If we all keep…
Read MoreAlexis Madrigal on “weak ties” and activism
“I’ve been watching some people’s minds work on [Facebook] for years. Every day I see their faces in my feed. To label these weak ties is just inaccurate. And it makes me wonder, can’t we know people through their writing? Is face-to-face contact the only way to build strong ties? “University of Maryland-Baltimore sociologist Zeynep…
Read MoreOn the science of creativity
The University of Chicago’s John Cacioppo … has helped pioneer research that shows how social connection shapes everything from depression and anxiety to high blood pressure, obesity, and heart disease. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, cognitive experiments, and brain scans, Cacioppo and his colleagues make a persuasive case that what we consider the “self” is in…
Read MoreOld Peter’s Russian Tales retold by Arthur Ransome
The stories in this book are those that Russian peasants tell their children and each other. In Russia hardly anybody is too old for fairy stories, and I have even heard soldiers on their way to the war talking of very wise and very beautiful princesses as they drank their tea by the side of…
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