Angels, tooth fairies and ghosts: thinking creatively in an early years classroom

This chapter offers an evaluation and interpretation of the creative thinking and collaboration that took place in a class of five year olds in an English primary school during the academic year 2004–05. This school was committed to developing itself as a creative learning community by participating in a creativity-training programme, Synectics, more usually employed in an adult business context. This school wanted to develop its capacity for creative teaching and learning. This intent was in tune with national and international developments in education where strenuous efforts were being made to extend the reach of creative education which had for a long time been more or less exclusively associated with the arts. The chapter offers an outline of these developments to set the research in context. The research described is a case study and second phase of an evaluation of the project EXCITE! (Excellence, Creativity and Innovation in Teaching and Education) and was carried out by researchers from the Open University. Previous research suggests that when children first start school, they are already competent creative thinkers and storytellers and that both creative and narrative modes of thinking involve abductive rather than deductive inferential reasoning. It is argued that although children may need training in paradigmatic (deductive) modes of thought, they do not necessarily need further training in narrative modes of thought. The examples of young children’s thinking discussed in chapter support this argument. The Synectics creativity-training programme does not claim to ‘teach’ creative thinking per se. The evidence presented suggests that when teachers use Synectics tools and techniques to inform practice, these allow them to create a positive, emotional climate that allows young children to use analogy and metaphor to construct creative explanations and narratives through collaborative discussion

Crowdsourcing Consciousness: You Think, Therefore I Am

The challenge to understand consciousness is a centuries-old interdisciplinary research program. The search entails fundamental questions about our nature - the desire to understand who we are has been around for nearly as long as experience itself. It is also one of the most important questions we can ask; meaning itself is predicated on having some sort of conscious experiencer for whom something can matter. Given the magnitude and intractability of explaining the paradox of how consciousness can be at once the most obvious thing in the universe, and also the most inaccessible, the endeavor is a tremendous undertaking. Until somewhat recently, there has been little cross-talk between these disciplines; and in the absence of collaboration, a territorial dispute has emerged. The purpose of this thesis is two-fold: first, to trace a narrative thread across the history of thought by exploring philosophical theories dating back to ancient Greece, through the authoritatively scientific thought of the modem day. The second aim of this project is one of consilience, wherein by starting a dialogue between two approaches, that of science and philosophy, sincere progress can be made. In conclusion, the thesis ends with a provocation: much of our intimate experience is crowdsourced, and we are inescapably social

International Language and the Everyday: Contact and Collaboration Between C.K. Ogden, Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath

Although now largely forgotten, the international language movement was, from the 1880s to the end of the Second World War, a matter of widespread public interest, as well as a concern of numerous scientists and scholars. The primary goal was to establish a language for international communication, but in the early twentieth century an increasing accent was placed on philosophical considerations: wanted was a language better suited to the needs of modern science and rational thought. In this paper, we examine the example of the English scholar C.K. Ogden’s international language Basic English and his efforts to win the Vienna Circle philosophers Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap over to the project. Basic is shown to be an implementation of key ideas in Ogden’s philosophy of language, ideas shared to a large extent with Neurath and Carnap. This we see through an examination of their unpublished correspondence, as well as through the collaboration that emerged between Ogden and Neurath, in which Neurath’s Isotype, a system for graphically representing statistical data, became closely aligned with Basic. Through the ideas and endeavours we investigate here, we gain a new perspective on this crucial period in the history of analytic philosophy

Faculty Seminar On Collaboration Syllabus

This is a collectively-built, in-progress syllabus for a faculty seminar on the topic of collaboration at Swarthmore College, Spring 2016. Topics include competing definitions of collaboration across disciplines, formal and informal collaboration, rich descriptions of collaboration, metrics and measures of collaborations, digital and analog tools for collaboration, literary and historical forms of collaboration, cost/benefit analyses of collaboration, crossinstitutional collaborations, institutional versus individual collaborations, collaboration narratives, failed or tragic collaborations, and teaching collaborations. Seminar members include statisticians, historians, psychologists, visual artists, literary critics, physicists, philosophers, engineers, education studies researchers, linguists, art historians, and computer scientists. Our format will accommodate both discussions of readings based on the syllabus as well as small experiments, and planning for possible future related projects

Using 2D photography as a 3D constructional tool within the second life environment

As digital photography became more accepted, influential and widespread, artists / designers started to take advantage of photos to create novel 2D / 3D entities. Panoramic photography, photo-mosaics, stop-motion studies are examples of 2D creations using numerous photographs. Microsoft’s Photosynth, PhotoModeler, DigiCad, ImageModeler are some software where one can employ photographs to create 3D scenes and environments. Photography is a powerful 2D representation tool to document 3D volumes like architecture. It is possible to manipulate photos with 2D tools like Photoshop in order to suggest new 3D re/formations, re/interpret architecture. One can alternatively use 2D textures as mappings to create realistic 3D model renderings. My project is a combination of these two approaches: Photographing architecture, turning the resulting photos into transparent PNGs and then mapping these photos onto 3D volumes in order to create a “new” architecture from an “existing” architecture… There were various offline and online 3D environment alternatives at which I could carry this experimentation out. Second Life (SL) was the one that I selected among these since I thought it had a powerful 3D construction interface. More importantly, SL is a global(ized) milieu on which you can have people from all over the world try your 3D creation interactively. One of the advantages of using photographs to create architecture is that your photo pool can easily be composed of visuals from various cultures and you may end up using an amalgam of visuals from, say, two supposedly “opposite” cultures. This possibility reminds the peaceful collaboration of musicians from different cultures to create a unique music. In addition, this act can also be taken as a migration of media through appropriation of photography for 3D volume creation and re/presentation. At this point, we are talking about a double representation, since photography is a representation tool already and it gains another representational dimension when it is re-mapped onto 3D volumes for the construction of an alternative reality. This sort of constitution of space involving multiple incompatible perspectives to be present in photos to be used, can be likened to Ottoman miniatures where various conflicting perspectives can co-exist. This diversity of perspectives takes us to the idea of “perspectivism” which, after Wikipedia, is “the philosophical view developed by Friedrich Nietzsche that all ideations take place from particular perspectives. This means that there are many possible conceptual schemes, or perspectives which determine any possible judgment of truth or value that we may make; this implies that no way of seeing the world can be taken as definitively ‘true’.” If we take this a little bit further, there is no strictly objective “reality” to be re/presented, but instead, the detailed depiction of our personal perception is closer to reality since it describes a particular experience (which is to be different for every individual). This paper concentrates on using a representation tool (photography) to construct a 3D space (architecture) within a virtual 3D environment (Second Life). During the process; the concepts of perception, reality, cultural context, re/presentation and appropriation will be examined. Keywords: Photography, re/construction, construct, perception, Second Life, reality, virtual reality, cultural context, re/presentation, appropriation, metaverse, virtual architecture, depiction, perpectivism, Ottoman miniatures, experience

Wikipedia and the politics of mass collaboration

Working together to produce socio-technological objects, based on emergent platforms of economic production, is of great importance in the task of political transformation and the creation of new subjectivities. Increasingly, “collaboration” has become a veritable buzzword used to describe the human associations that create such new media objects. In the language of “Web 2.0”, “participatory culture”, “user-generated content”, “peer production” and the “produser”, first and foremost we are all collaborators. In this paper I investigate recent literature that stresses the collaborative nature of Web 2.0, and in particular, works that address the nascent processes of peer production. I contend that this material positions such projects as what Chantal Mouffe has described as the “post-political”; a fictitious space far divorced from the clamour of the everyday. I analyse one Wikipedia entry to demonstrate the distance between this post-political discourse of collaboration and the realities it describes, and finish by arguing for a more politicised notion of collaboration

Teacher Development and Emotional Intelligence

Abstract During my final semester as a TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) student–while also teaching college ESL classes–I found myself curious about the emotional aspect of teaching. An education class I was enrolled in at the time happened to be covering a unit on “Teaching the Whole Person”, in which we discussed ‘emotional intelligence’ or EI (Diaz-Rico, 2008, p. 35). The construct of Emotional Intelligence (EI) is comprised of five main categories: intrapersonal, interpersonal, stress management, adaptability, and general mood (Bar-On, 1997). I began to contemplate whether or not traditional methods of professional development (PD) address EI. This led to my own investigation – a project – or thought experiment – to link the emotional aspect of teaching to best practice pedagogy. PD in the form of graduate seminars and teacher education programs is ignoring something that appears so simple and obvious to me–time spent in teacher talk is worthwhile. Teacher talk, or what I will refer to here as the Conversation Circle, provides the practitioner with a built-in mode of reflection using authentic content, and reflection is widely known in our profession to be a fundamental component of teacher development. Using a strategy from, “Teaching with Emotional Intelligence” (Mortiboys, 2005), I set out designing the Conversation Circle. Analysis of the Conversation Circle identified salient features of teacher talk, which by its casual nature fosters collaboration and reflection, and presents possibilities for application to teacher education and professional development. Keywords: Emotional intelligence, reflection, collaboration, professional development, communicatio