"Creativity in Action" by Mona Leiter

 

Kudos to Mona Leiter on her excellent multimedia presentation Creativity in Action at last Tuesday's Owl & Ibis - A Confluence of Minds meeting! A PDF of creativity resources Mona introduced may be found here.

During the evening Mona's multimedia presentation and the discussions it generated covered a number of areas: myths about creativity; how creativity can be life enhancing, changing and saving; "creativism," creativity can be put into, made part of anything - relationships, daily living, business, time management, leisure, education methods, etc. An old and still contested question was also discussed: Is the goal of public education to produce thinking, informed citizens or train obedient, productive workers?

Important creativity resources presented included:

Do Schools Kill Creativity?, TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson, 2006: "creativity is as important in public education as literacy;" "if you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything worthwhile;" "we get educated out of creativity;" "education exists to produce university professors - academic facility is the mark of intelligence;" "intelligence is diverse, it's dynamic, it's interactive, it's distinct - dancers have to move to think."

Pike Place Fish, Documentary of creativity applied in an unusual place - a fish mongering business in Seattle.

The Deep Dive, ABC Nightline documentary featuring Ideo, a design company in Silicon Valley, CA. How an egalitarian team approach to design creativity works - "enlightenment by trial and error."

Mona summed up the evening most appropriately: "Creativity is in all of us."

Thanks, Mona. Great job!

O&I

}:>&~:)