Agenda 2 for Class Meeting on January 24

Last updated: 1/24/03
Link back to course Welcome

Agenda 2 for Creativity Class Meeting on January 24

Personal introductions and pictures for the course web site.
Review of assignments - see Syllabus for schedule and descriptions
1. Getting ready - all were due by last Friday, January 17
  1. File Test
  2. Email me your contact information: mail address, email address, phone numbers
  3. Three initial postings on computer conference: Introduce Yourself, What About Creativity is Interesting To Me, Creative People We Know
2. Regular
  1. Weekly course report
  2. Check email, computer conference at least once each week
  3. Reading, reading, reading
  4. Essays for ISP 5660, Exams for AGS 3340
Using the computer conference
1. Posting messages, keeping the conference organized. Categories are judgment calls.
  1. Post. Starts a new main topic. Use only if you are posting a new main topic.
  2. Reply. Use if you are responding to another message, and if your Topic is all anyone needs to know about the context.
  3. Reply/Quote. Use if you are responding to points in another message. Edit the original message down to only the point you are replying to.
2. Refreshing your list of new messages (REFRESH or MARK ALL READ > ???)
3. Saving messages you want to keep - there are two ways
  1. Pull the message up on the screen, then use the File > Save As... menu item to save to the destination of your choice. All the file names will be the same unless you change them, but leave the extension at htm or html.
  2. Pull the message up on the screen, drag over the text to select it, use Edit > Copy to copy the selected text to the clipboard, start Notepad, Wordpad or Word, and use Edit > Copy to paste the text in from the clipboard.
4. Managing your list of new messages (MARK ALL READ but refresh first)
5. Personal profile - why and how - "PROFILES" button, then "Change your personal profile." Scroll down to the bottom to see the signature block.
6. Searching - "SEARCH" button, select the conference to search in.
7. Quoting the conference in an Essay. Pull the message up, then copy and paste. Or, if you have savid it, work from the saved copy.
What is creativity?
1. Creativity is not
  1. Feeling good about yourself or what you are doing (in fact it might even depress you at times)
  2. Being popular, famous or rich, or selling lots of records.
  3. Doing something well (may in fact lead you to do some things you do not currently do well)
  4. Juggling many tasks at the same time
2. There is no good clear definition of Creativity that everyone agrees with. A start: something new that solves a problem or meets a need. This will do to get started, but there are several problems with it.
  1. Is the something necessary? Flow or "personal" creativity Vs "small c" Vs "Big C"
  2. New to whom?
  3. How do we know there is a problem? Whose problem?
  4. Big C: Changing the culture. Perhaps the clearest and most easily demonstrated. What is culture? Often this means "high culture" or "artistic culture" such as symphonies, operas, poetry and literature, and so on. What is meant here is instead the anthropological meaning which, like creativity itself, is not precisely defined, but generally "the customs, civilization and achievements of a particular time or people" (The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, 1996) including food and its preparation, clothing and style, social and legal customs such as courts and marriage, education and training, the general assumptions of the society such as, "a painting is a representation of our inner state of mind," and so on.
    1. physical Vs symbolic culture, we almost always use Creativity for symbolic
  5. Imagine being a reporter on a local paper, and assigned to write an article on the most creative artist in the five-county area. How would you go about this?
  6. Csikszentmihalyi in Creativity: Creative person, field (roughly, the experts, but the domain is an open group), domain (the field of knowledge or work, e.g. music). Creativity is about convincing the field that there is a better way. Then the field will adopt your better way. For an outsider (you or me), watching the field adopt the new way is the best proof of creativity.
    1. This makes it difficult to judge the creativity of contemporary people - there has not been enough time to have had this degree of influence. Also, creativity for contemporary people is tied up with fame and income, and they often have publicity staff paid to claim that they are creative. Any popular musical artist who does not pay someone to say that "X has changed music forever," let's face it, is simply not trying. What are the chances that we will remember them all in fifty or a hundred years?
    2. This is the basis for Csikszentmihalyi's point about the nature of the domain. If the field does not agree about what constitutes an improvement in the domain, then it is very difficult to convince the field that you have a better way.
Writing for the Essays
1. Basic description from the Syllabus
2. Online Writing and Grammar Tutor at http://www.cll.wayne.edu/olgt
3. More detailed handout
4. I assign Essays for two purposes:
  1. If you demonstrate recalling the reading and understanding it, that confirms for me that you have actually done the reading
  2. Writing forces you to think about what you have read, and your own reaction to it
5. Before you write:
  1. Concentrate on the topics that you are interested in. Pretending to be interested works! If you don't like the listed topics, suggest another.
  2. Try for accuracy in seeing what the author is saying, keeping your own reactions separate
  3. Keep your own reactions flexible - respond to the whole, not only an isolated part - be aware of your reactions, talk to yourself
  4. Make notes about what you might include in your Essay as you read
  5. Allow yourself time - for example, to put the Essay to the side for a couple of days, then reread it with "fresh eyes" before turning it in - be your own worst (but honest) critic. Up-front time for thinking and organizing is also important.
  6. Have clearly in mind what you want to say.
  7. Think about your voice - who are you going to be this time? Expert researcher, a creative person, an interested bystander - who?
  8. Use the computer conference to try out ideas for your essay.
6. Address your essay to a general reader - not me. Not someone who is taking this course, but an outsider, say the reader of a newspaper or general-interest magazine. You will want an interesting title to catch their eye. They will not be interested in your having to write an essay to fulfill a course requirement, but will want you to explain why they should be interested, or at least why you are interested. You need to introduce them to the topic, and explain the significance (the point) at the end. They will want you to lead them in an orderly manner through the topic, and anticipate the questions they might have.
7. Common mechanical problems
  1. Sentence structure
    1. Subject, verb, complete thought - find the verb (action) first.
    2. Sentence fragment - not a complete sentence. Look at each sentence by itself. "John hit."
    3. Run on sentence - two sentences just butted together. "John hit Jim I went to the store."
  2. Phonetic spelling. Words that sound the same but are spelled differently. Many examples. See examples in Online Writing and Grammar Tutor. Example effect, affect.
  3. Punctuation.
    1. Start each sentence with a capital letter and end with a period. This is the only use of the period.
    2. , joins a subordinate clause to a sentence (not two equal parts) "John hit Jim, so I went to the store. Also joins items in a list, usually.
    3. ; joins two equal sentences implying causality "John hit Jim; I went to the store." Also joins items in a list if one or more items in the list contains a comma. "Some examples are commas, but only if they are needed; periods, at the end of each sentence; and semicolons."
    4. : Can introduce a list.
  4. Spelling. Buy a dictionary and use it.
8. Form
  1. Heading, Title, Introduction, Body, Conclusion. Try the Essay Planning Sheet.
  2. If you change your point of view during the Essay, without realizing it, this make sit clear to me that you have not yet finished your thinking about the essay.
  3. Introduction, Body and Conclusion correspond to a lawyer's Opening Statement, Case Presentation and Closing Argument. The lawyer uses this form to convince the jury. You use it to convince your reader. Put detail in the Body - that is what is convincing. The Introduction should be a roadmap for the Body, and the Conclusion should sum up and remind the reader about the way you demonstrated the point. Also you should say why your topic is important.
9. What I will do to create a space for you to experiment with your own creativity as part of this course
  1. Computer conference.
  2. Essays. Can be in the form of a poem, play, short story, etc. The content must be the same as the content of an Essay. I will not grade you on the creative aspect, but I will be a careful reader for you.
10. Please note: the high writing standards for the Essays do not apply to the computer conference or to the Quizzes and Exams.
Taking an online course (or at least this one). It is not self study, unless you make it that way by hiding from me. Staying involved:
1. Contact Instructor for help - technical, computer, software, writing, posting, reading, writing etc. Telephone, email, appointment, before/after class, conference, weekly course reports.
2. Weekly emails from me. Course ListServ well be crtvyw03@lists.wayne.edu - send an email to the ListServ and it will be distributed to the class and me.
3. Weekly course reports from you.
4. Computer conference.
5. Classes.
Will you like an online course? Some people like online courses, some do not. As long as you are here, why not enjoy it? For people who like online courses, what is the #1 thing they like?