Agenda 3 for Class Meeting on February 14

Last updated: 2/17/02 Link back to course Welcome
Agenda for Creativity Class Meeting on February 14

Changed after class to show [what was not covered], [what was added during class] (one section only) and [what was added after class] (two places only).

Announcements:
1. Do an online signin tonight
2. Do weekly course reports: Ken Corley, Theresa Jones. Everyone: one per week, rain or shine.
3. Computer conference - what has happened? Ideas about or descriptions of creativity
4. Miss a class? Go to the course web site, read the Agenda, contact me by mail or phone or in person or whatever, if you have questions or comments or need further information.
[Review of Essay form from Syllabus
1. Content - Use readings, your own thoughts. No extra research required.
2. Form - Title, Introduction, Body, Conclusion - do thinking before writing
3. Mechanics
  1. Punctuation : / ; / ,
  2. Homonyms: two, to, too / their, there, they're / due, dew, do
  3. Be consistent with capitalization: Creativity everywhere or creativity everywhere
  4. Subject-verb number agreement: A group of artists ( is | are ) going to the gallery.]
Taking an online course. Not about waiting for the course to come to you. You have to go out after the course. Be active, not passive. (Transparency)
Significance of Creativity
1. Made us what we are - take a look around you, take a look inside you
2. Keeps economy and society rolling
3. Major world problems of 21st century threaten human species, will only be solved creatively
  1. Population Vs basic human needs - food, air, water
  2. Dominant species - too dominant?
  3. Living space
  4. Intensive use of energy and stuff, but how to have a quality of life?
4. Personal Creativity - quality of life. Creativity pg 344.
5. [Creativity is not:
  1. Doing something well. A performer or interpreter is generally not counted as creative. Musician, conductor, actor/actress, movie producer (movie directors are often counted as the creative people).
  2. Being a genius - IQ does matter up to about 120 (high normal) but not above that (genius is usually felt to be around 150 and higher)
  3. A starving artist working alone in a garret]
Review of Corporate Creativity
1. Why are corporations interested in Creativity?
2. Six principles - Csikszentmihaly and Gardner will use different words for most of the same ideas
  1. Alignment
  2. Self-initiated activity
  3. Unofficial activity
  4. Serendipity ("chance favors the prepared mind")
  5. Diverse stimuli
  6. Within-company communication
3. What is alignment about?
4. [One more reason - that's my company]
5. Extreme corporate creativity has usually involved setting up a new company, or at least a new division - entrepreneur or intrapreneur - missing from Corporate Creativity and from Creativity. Even small groups or individual artists find that they are a business.
6. [Ultimately about external conditions to allow Creativity. Idea is that individual Creativity is "natural" - allow it to happen and it will. Csikszentmihaly and Gardner continue with external conditions (Systems Theory) but add how it happens. The sequence
  1. Corporate Creativity. First, many people say or assume that business cannot be creative. (How, then, do we account for the stream of new things in our lives?) Also, range of Creativity in there (Big C to little c.)
  2. Creativity. Csikszentmihaly forms a group that does more-or-less standardized interviews (Pg 393) with ninety-one elderly but living contemporary productive Americans (Pg 373). He finds that these people are uniformly happy, in an uncomplicated way. He also finds that they have paradoxical qualities - introvert Vs extrovert. These ninety-one are not household names (only a few from Business world, sort of throws them a bone). These people are probably creative, but there will be disagreement. Also explains "The Systems View of Creativity" - interaction between (i) the individual talent, (ii) the field, and (iii) the domain.
  3. Creating Minds. Gardner studies existing literature on seven dead "Big C" people active during 1890-1930 or so, writes uniform biographies and finds basic principles. These people will almost always be judged as creative, although perhaps not of the first rank. Their Creativity was also a dominant factor in their lives, so that this is a way to isolate Creativity and study it.
7. Why study highly creative people? If we are not sure about what Creativity is or how it works, a very good approach is to study people which are widely agreed to be creative, and in whom Creativity is a dominant factor.]
Ideas about Creativity
1. Something new that solves a problem or meets a need. With this, have we solved the problem of what Creativity is? No. Why not? Here are some remaining questions, questions that are not resolved by this description, but contained in it.
  1. Is Creativity a "yes/no" thing or a "more-or-less" thing (a continuum)? I predict that everyone here will use different answers at different times. And if not, then everyone else does. (To some extent, Creativity research is devoted to just trying to settle what we mean by it. The approach is often to use a panel of some kind to judge Creativity.)
    
    (Can we be creative in the study of Creativity?)
  2. Something - does there have to be a product for a person to be considered creative? Can Creativity be a personal style or attitude? ("Oh, she's so creative.")
  3. To whom is the "something new", new? To the individual only? To a family, a region, a country, the world, to the world throughout all of recorded history?
  4. How important or widespread is the problem or need? Can someone say, to themselves alone, "I have a need to be Creative, and what I do satisfies that need, and so it is Creative?" Or, at the other extreme, do we require a problem that is fundamental for all of society? Sometimes only the creative person sees the need beforehand. Sometimes the "something new" becomes a problem for others.
  5. Is Creativity a mystery that is "unitary", that cannot be analyzed, and perhaps even present only at birth (innate), or can we understand, more or less, how it comes to be? If there are qualities of creative people, are these qualities innate, or learned, and is there an overriding principle, or do all of the qualities act independently? The original ideas about a creative person was that s/he was a "genius" - tending to equate Creativity with intelligence.
  6. Creative people have many characteristics in which they differ from the general population. Is Creativity just a toolkit of unconnected special abilities and tendencies, or is there a unifying, driving force?
  7. The paradox is in there - love Vs paying the bills, rebellion Vs connection, divergent thinking Vs convergent thinking.
  8. Something that is not well-defined and is paradoxical [Paradoxical - may mean contradictory, or may mean appraently contradictory until really understood, then consistent.
  9. What is it fair to ask people in this course to learn, then?
    1. The range of Creatvity
    2. Your own informed opinion
    3. Where you fit in the range
    4. What you can do to further your own goals (self-determined)]
    5. [Examples of Creativity, creative people, and how Creativity is studied]
2. E. Paul Torrance
  1. Measuring characteristics of creative people
    "A list of abilities demonstrated by testing visually creative people [The Nature of Creativity pp66 & 67]:
    1. Fluency, number of responses
    2. Flexibility, number of ways circles or lines were used
    3. Originality, unusualness, or rarity of the response
    4. Elaboration, number of details that contribute to the 'story' told by the response
    5. Abstractness of the title, level of abstraction of the response
    6. Resistance to closure on the incomplete figures or the ability to "keep open."
    7. Emotional expressiveness of the response
    8. Articulateness of storytelling, putting the response in contest, giving it an environment
    9. Movement or action shown in the response
    10. Expressiveness of the titles, ability to transform from the figural to the verbal and give expression
    11. Synthesis or combination, joining together two or more figures and making it into a coherent response
    12. Unusual visualization, seeing and putting the figure in a visual perspective different from the usual
    13. Internal visualization, seeing objects from the inside
    14. Extending or breaking the boundaries, getting outside the expected
    15. Humor, juxtaposition of two or more incongruities
    16. Richness of imagery, showing variety, vividness, liveliness, and intensity
    17. Colorfulness of imagery, exciting, appealing to the senses, flavorful, earthy, emotionally appealing
    18. Fantasy, unreal figures, magic, fanciful fairy tale characters, science fiction characters"
  2. But Torrance changed his mind about the importance of these abilities. You can score people on these abilities, and creative people do score high. You can and came to be convinced that the specific characteristics were secondary (The Nature of Creativity pg 68)
  3. "The Blazing Drive" (Jonathan Livingston Seagull pg 101) and "Creativity Is..." (The Nature of Creativity pg 49 ff)
  4. "How to Grow Up Creatively Gifted [The Nature of Creativity pp
    E. Paul Torrance
    1. Don't be afraid to "fall in love with" something and pursue it with intensity. (You will do best what you like to do most.)
    2. Know, understand, take pride in, practice, develop, use, exploit, and enjoy your greatest strengths.
    3. Learn to free yourself from the expectations of others and to walk away from the games they try to impose on you.
    4. Free yourself to "play your own game" in such a way as to make good use of your gifts.
    5. Find a great teacher or mentor who will help you.
    6. Don't waste a lot of expensive, unproductive energy trying to be well-rounded. (Don't try to do everything; do what you can do well and what you love.)
    7. Learn the skills of interdependence. (Learn to depend upon one another, giving freely of your greatest strengths and most intense loves.)"
3. [How do you get to love something - a field or domain?
  1. Interest and commitment
  2. Success and acceptance - a child earning being taken seriously by a knowledgeable grownup
  3. Turn-ons or instant gratification (my own guess)
    1. "Aha" or "Eureka"
    2. Epiphany or arriving at a comprehensive overview
    3. "Flow" or, in sports, "The zone". Csikszentmihaly, Flow and Finding Flow
  4. Can you love something too much? - Csikszentmihaly's subjects Vs Gardner's subjects
4. The study of Creativity is interdisciplinary
  1. Examples of Creativity in all disciplines
  2. Many disciplines are needed to study Creativity
  3. Can we be Creative in the study of Creativity?
5. Refinement of statement that Creativity is shut down if it is evaluated or required. There is one type of evaluation that seems to foster Creativity - evaluation from someone who understands and even appreciates what you are trying to do, like a colleague
6. Possible models for creativity - I don't think we went over this one from the last class
  1. Restructuring the field, for example going back to basics ("a new paradigm") [paradigm - a pattern or model, here, for the way in which the field is conceived. Example 1950's life paradigm for a male was grow up, get a job, get married, buy a house, have children, participate in the community, grow old, retire, die soon afterwards]
    1. What are the assumptions in the field, even the unspoken assumptions?
    2. What would happen if we reversed this one, that one?
    3. Example - Euclidean geometry (life on a flat surface) says that parallel lines never meet. What if we negate this - parallel lines do meet? Geometry of a spherical surface, or other types of surfaces.]
7. I think you will find that Creativity is not a well-defined field with a strong consensus. In such a situation, I think the goal of the course must be for you to become aware of the range of thought, to recognize where a given opinion fits within the range. Also, there are many different types of studies, and you should try to understand their strengths and weaknesses.
  1. Can we be Creative in the study of Creativity?
8. [Refinement of statement that Creativity is shut down if it is evaluated or required. There is one type of evaluation that seems to foster Creativity - evaluation from someone who understands and even appreciates what you are trying to do, like a colleague
  1. That is one of my personal goals in this course - to help you identify what you are interested in and what some next steps might be. If I make wrong assumptions about what your goals are, correct me.
Discussion of reading in Creativity
1. Pg 11 at bottom - importance of Creativity
2. Pg 16 ff - happiness of the creative people
3. Pg 25 - different meanings of Creativity, which one he will use
4. Pg 32 ff - effect of field
5. Pg 39 ff - effect of domain (Physics Vs Psychology) - what does this remind you of from Corporate Creativity?
6. Pg 58 ff - List of contradictory personality traits in creative people. Hint from Freud.
7. Pg 79 ff - Five-step creative process
8. Pg 81 ff - Freeman Dyson's "aha" - joining two things previously seen as separate
9. [Pg 95 - Significance of the choice of problem.]
Choosing fourth book for 4-credit people
1. Discussion of interests Vs books
2. Follow your interests - Creativity is about going with it, not hanging back. (But must be ruthless in discarding dead ends.)]
Coming up
1. Next class is in two weeks, February 28. Then we have a long time without class meetings until April. Are you ready?
2. New computers over Spring Break
3. [6 to 8 instead of 7 to 9?
4. Can we move the class on April 11 to April 4 instead?]
5. Postings: zero last week -can this be true?
Assignments
1. Reading
2. Conference postings - sixth week, should have twelve
3. Weekly course report
4. File test - link off of "Online tools". This is a test to get ready for online submission of homework - essays
  1. Download and save the file by clicking on the "File test" link
  2. Open the file, and resave it adding your three initials in from of the file name (for me, my middle initial is "R", so I would change the file FileTest.doc by adding "drb" in front, to get "drbFileTest.doc", and save under this name
  3. Follow the directions in the file.
  4. Email the file to me at "d.r.bowen@wayne.edu"
  5. I will return it with an additional change (an additional word or phrase at the end). Email me what the change is.
5. Essay 1
6. Choice of fourth book (four-credit people only)