Creative Outlet

A colleague and I ran a guest session on e-learning in one of our school’s other masters programmes yesterday, part of which was a practical exercise exploring different ways of delivering and discussing information online. The focus of the exercise (which was fairly arbitrary) was on how to nurture creativity. One group watched a couple of TED talks, by Ken Robinson and Elizabeth Gilbert, which are both good viewing if you haven’t seen them yet. The other looked for whatever they could on the web. Then they paired up online to discuss their impressions.

I did the same search myself alongside the second group, combing through pages of Google hits to uncover the following. A few of these look like sites worth returning to, and they’re all worth a look.

Writer’s Block: The Solution to Good Ideas. A playwright recommends forcing yourself to come up with 100 ideas when you’re having trouble finding one.

The 6 Myths of Creativity. A Fast Company article with an organizational focus.

Creativity and Innovation Techniques—an A to Z. A long list of practical techniques for encouraging creativity. A bit workshoppy.

Jeffrey Baumgartner’s 10 Steps for Boosting Creativity and creativity pages in general.

Creative Creativity: Inspiration and Tools for Creativity. A blog by David Wahl, with archives running from February 2007 to February 2011.

Fostering Creativity. School-level material from Education Scotland.

The Creativity Post: Quality content on creativity, innovation and imagination. Running since November 2011, with a lot of material already.

Are Today’s Youth Less Creative and Imaginative? News report on some 2010 US research.

30 Days of Creativity: like a NaNoWriMo for stuff of all kinds, held in June.

Creativity: A Guide for the Advanced Learner (and Teacher) [pdf].

How to Be Creative at WikiHow.

15 February 2012 · Weblog