On Creativity

This week in #rhizo14 we’re meant to be thinking about creativity.  Some people are running with this and going and doing lots of lovely creative things, like this image on this, others are engaging with #ds106. I’ve been really busy catching up after a week off work, so I’ve limited myself to posting a few links to the Facebook group such as this one (love number 9) and this by Poincare.

I’d started thinking about creativity a few months ago, and gave a talk to our Research and Scholarship group called Collaboration in the Arts and Humanities:
[slideshare id=32889269&doc=collaborationintheartsandhumanities-140329132012-phpapp01]

In case you can’t be bothered to read it all, or it doesn’t make sense without the words I spoke, I talked about originality, creativity and plagiarism and suggested that there was a tension between the need to assess arts and humanities students and award them individual marks for assignments; and the fact that (imo) many of our social and academic practices are inherently collaborative – as Ken Bruffee writes:

pueblo

I’m sure that Deleuze somewhere makes a similar point, but I have no idea where it might be … anyway, you get the point, I hope.   Originality and creativity are not particularly easy to assess in a formal academic environment.

A related point to what I am trying to say is that we are not cartesian ghosts in machines, we are what Heidegger calls Dasein (this is a brilliant wee video, btw, and I highly recommend it):

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZznldvBP-G8&w=560&h=315]

We are beings in the world – we are thrown into our embodied existence and we are naturally social beings (and I really should be hyphenating all of this).

This is all fairly rough and messy, and I have no idea how I will ever write it up into something that will satisfy formal academic standards, but I am starting to make connections between philosophers who have inspired me, at least.

Sapere Aude, as they say 😉

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10 Responses to On Creativity

  1. balimaha says:

    Hi Sarah, i think you are getting there (to a stage where you can express it academically). Think about that Heidegger cartoon video. Hilarious, right? But also helpful to understanding the concepts (though, again, for the life of me i will never understand why philosophers spend so much time making explicit the obvious, and saying it in complex terms – BUT i do often reap the benefits when applying the ideas in contexts, e.g. How Habermassian or Foucauldian ideas have been applied to particular pedagogical or edu research contexts). Anyway my point is that you seem to be getting there. Since my PhD is in education and u seem to be planning to go that route, let me know if i can help along the way 🙂 I’ll miss the Heidegger parts but i can give good fb on the edu parts 🙂 haha

  2. Cheers, Maha, I’d like that.

  3. Simon Ensor says:

    Sarah. I am beginning to think that I shall need a few more lives to investigate all these new creative playgrounds which are revealing themselves. Goodness, philosophy I had never really heard of it before arriving in France. Ignorance may be bliss but it gives me a feeling that days are rather too short to develop my ignorance to another level…

  4. Well, yes. Rhizo14 opened up whole new worlds. I wonder what I used to do before I met all of you.

  5. Sarah, it has, hasn’t it… I am trying to make sense of it. I might have found something which I’m passionate enough to pursue an academic route on: education and complexity. I’ve recently come across, totally by chance (if that even exists), an article written by Brazilian professor called Maria Cândido Moraes called Complexity and Pedagogical Mediation. I don’t think it’s been translated to English and I’m thinking about attempting to produce an Engish version of it just so you guys could savor it. It’s amazing. Have you ever heard of the concept of pedagogical mediation?

  6. x28 says:

    Sarah, I think you would like this course https://twitter.com/hrheingold/status/450146986713288704 on Literacy of Cooperation.

  7. Thanks, Matthias, that looks very interesting. Lots for me to read 🙂

  8. Pingback: The trouble with agency | Reflecting Allowed

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