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Moving on after Cities and Creativity, the third session explored Classrooms.

Marshall Seese Jr

Connecting Beats

  • When people are presented with too many options they shut down and don’t choose anything (agreed! If you’ve ever been to Which Wich you know the feeling)
  • Constraints actually guide creative freedom
  • Their site – http://www.mashupdj.com/ – is a gateway drug to creativity
  • Next time, think about what you can do to encourage creativity

A bit ironically I had trouble getting started on the MashupDJ site. I was hoping to create my own mashup but am not finding any recognizable songs so am not sure if I’m doing something wrong.

To the point about this site becoming a gateway drug to creativity, I wonder how long the creativity lasts. Is this true creativity they’re fostering, or just a fad? To take the drug metaphor further, does this leave newly developed creatives wanting more?

Aurora Robson

Trash + Love

  • Exercise you can try – next time you’re cleaning a local park/riverbed/etc, take 1 piece of trash with you and create something new with it (that can’t be confused with art)
  • She’s turned this into a short course that any school can implement – Project Vortex
  • The value of something is merely perception – in her case, waste – so shift your perception of waste

Aurora had a bit different aspect “recycling”, although I’m not sure she’d even call it that. It’s no longer about re-use, but re-purposing. The concern I have is that in a certain (somewhat pessimistic) light, we’re essentially just relocating the waste. While it’s of course better to get it out of our oceans and rivers, it’s still something that’s not going to biodegrade quickly.

This sculpture consists of Plastic debris (PET), rivets, tinted polycrylic, + mica powder.

updroplet

Daphne Greenberg

Do We Care About Us?

  • Low adult literacy impacts all of us
  • Takes great courage to enter an adult literacy program

Wanda Hopkins-McClure

Re-Imagining the Teacher

  • Great teachers encourage risk and failure
  • “Just” is a very diminishing word; e.g. “I’m just a Teacher.”
  • Educators need to think of themselves as entrepreneurs
  • Teachers want to connect and learn to co-create solutions for much needed educational reform – help them do so

What’s come of her work? What are some of the by-products that’ve come out of the EdCamp she started?

George Yu

Measure Anything, Anywhere

  • Sensing feeds knowledge, which in turn feeds action
  • Measuring feeds monitoring, which in turn feeds sharing
  • There’s an incredible amount we can learn about the environment around us that our bodies can’t sense

George’s Node Kickstarter is a “powerhouse” of sensors. Brett’s ordered one for the office so we’ll get a hands-on look shortly. But how do you separate the signal from the noise? If you’re goal is to Measure Everything, how do you turn it into something meaningful without drowning in data?

And I’ll wrap up next time with the last session of the day – Crowds.