PostsSSAT, Sir Ken Robinson and Creativity
We’ve been exhibiting Magic Studio again this week – at the 16th National SSAT Conference “Leading System Redesign”. Once again, SSAT put together a challenging and inspiring programme.
Probably most inspiring of all was Sir Ken Robinson’s Keynote on Wednesday – standing room only in the ICC’s Symphony Hall! His enthusiasm for education reminds us why we all got involved with it in the first place.
The subject was a familiar one – Creativity – and explored many of the themes from the RSA lecture “Changing Paradigms“.
He spent a lot of time talking about ‘transforming education’, arguing that the current system – based on a linear subject-based curriculum with standardised testing – must be redesigned. Primarily, because it discourages creativity and the ability of people to fully achieve their potential.
He also defined Creativity as “the process of having original ideas which have value”. Which got me thinking about how we can use technology to try to support creativity – and also about what the future for technology in education should aspire to be.
Since the internet has had the largest single impact on how we use technology to access our media, it seems sensible to assume that a future for technology in education is likely to be online, web-based for the learner.
If we look at patterns of use of media, web technologies provide us not just with unprecedented access to information – but also to unprecedented access to small bite-size chunks of media (YouTube, Wikipedia, ..) in a disaggregated form.
These small chunks of content are provided to us in a context which encourages re-use and collaboration – with web applications that empower us to pull content from many sources, to manipulate it and self-publish. And to do so with each other online and in real-time (Facebook, Flickr, blogs ..).
Fundamentally, the way we use the web is one of the most democratic methods of communication – it provides us with a means of expression and the ability to reach an audience.
It enables us to be creative and to share ideas – just one element of what we need to support the redesign a future education system!