iLibris

I found Sir Ken Robinson’s Creative Places + Spaces video titled Collaboration in the 21st Century to be especially inspiring. Author of the books The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything and Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, Robinson is a lead promotor of creativity and innovation in education and the workplace. I had such an “aha!” moment during his talk, that I found myself taking notes, and writing down nearly every word he said. This is his initial description of creativity:

“one of the reasons  so many people loose confidence in their own powers of innovation is that their imaginations have been left to wither, but they can be revived…Creativity is a step on from imagination because you can be imaginative all day long and never do anything…to be creative you have to do something. Being creative is a process of putting your imagination to work, you can think of it as applied imagination…”

He goes on to define creativity as:

1. a process that we can understand and teach to others, “most people start with an idea and have to work on it, and the idea evolves in the process of it being formulated and often the idea you end up with is not the idea you started with”
2. something that is original, novel, unique or different from previous ideas
3. something that has value, because “some creative ideas are highly original but useless…and very often people misjudge the value of a new idea, because they apply the wrong values to it, they apply their present values to it rather than seeing how they might evolve. I mean, nobody would have given much for the internet 20 years ago as an idea…”

After Robinson’s initial video, I did a bit of exploring and discovered his TED Talk titled Schools Kill Creativity, and this video doubled, maybe even tripled, my initial “aha”. In this video, Robinson argues that as a society we tend to educate our people out of creativity. Here is an excerpt from the video:

“…the hierarchy [of education] is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful [school] subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that…don’t do music, you not going to be a musician, don’t do art, you won’t be an artist, benign advice… The second is academic ability which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think about it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. The consequence is that many highly talented -brilliant- creative people, think that they are not. Because the thing they were good at school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized, and I think that we can’t afford to go on that way…”

Public education values disciplines that either support the job market or the academy, thus leaving people who are unable to fulfill these values by the wayside. Admittedly, this is a rather depressing outlook, but I must say that (based on my own experiences) I have to agree with Robinson. The costs are high for students who fall prey to this system and for students who fall out of the system and, as a result, those who drop out of the system come to conclude that they aren’t valuable contributors or good at anything.

So, following that rather depressing video I found Tim Browns TED Talk on Creativity and Play and it offered a bit of hope and a breath of fresh air. Brown’s very simple and straightforward argument is that creativity and play in the workplace is valuable, generative, important, and should be consistently supported. Workplaces should encourage and support divergent play in order to generate as many initial ideas as possible and converge those initial ideas toward the aims and goals of the project. It’s creative play within a certain context and within a few paramaters that can bring about wonderful innovations.

Now, what does all of this have to do with information organizations, information professionals, and social media? I think that information organizations and information professionals can take quite a bit of inspiration from these talks when considering the potential use of social media to support creativity in learning, and innovation in the workplace.  As Henry Jenkins mentions in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Cultures: Media Education for the 21st Century, new media skills that can be supported in participatory cultures include play, performance, simulation, and appropriation, all skills that support creativity and innovation.

Dynamic social media has the potential to support various learning types and creative engagement. What can be taken away from Brown’s talk, is that creativity and play in work environments support innovation and creative problem solving. Can information professionals adapt his process of creativity and play in order to develop project ideas or problem-solve within the organization? What sort of social media tools could be used to support innovative creativity and play? Finally, to relate these ideas back to the quote above, what role does creativity play in the new epistemology of information professionals?

I think that these are all very important questions to consider, and I think that if we are to continue to ignore the importance of creativity and play in learning and workplace environments, we run the risk of being left on the outside of the global trend toward participatory cultures.

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