Olympic Mash-up

This looks like a lot of fun. I'm popping along to see the Ron Arad show at the Barbican later this week and I'm very partial to a spot of ping pong.

I wonder if we could attempt something similar during one of the Olympic days during the Past, Present & Future festival? Perhaps we could create a whole series of strange sports in a kind of Olympic mash-up?

Any suggestions?

Childish Creativity

Photo courtesy of Leo Reynolds

"You are 7 years old. School is canceled, and you have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?"

"School is canceled, and you have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?"

In a recent study about creativity these two sentences were given to two different groups of undergraduate university students. After a period of activity, the students were given several tests to assess their creativity. Which group do you think scored higher? It seems that the inclusion of the words "You are 7 years old" made all the difference. Why is this?

Jonah Lehrer argues that it's got something to do with the way our brain develops as we get older. Scientists have been able to show that we get increasingly less adept at divergent (or lateral) thinking.

We trade away the ingenuity of our youth for executive function. As the brain develops, the prefrontal cortex expands in density and volume. As a result, we're able to exhibit impulse control and focused attention. The unfortunate side-effect of this cortical growth is an increased ability to repress errant thoughts. While many of these thoughts deserve to be suppressed, it turns out that we also censor the imagination. We're so scared of saying the wrong thing that we end up saying nothing at all.

Encouraging older students to imagine that they are young again, to literally think like 7 year olds, is a recipe for success when we want to develop creative learning. I wonder if it has the same effect on teachers?

Tallis Creators

Tallis Creators, the new student commissioning group, now has its very own blog. The group has met once and will begin its work in earnest when it meets to discuss the Tangled Feet residency with Kat and Nathan after the Easter break.

I need a pair of 3D glasses

Google street view now in 3D (or is it April fools)

SoundCloud

I've just registered and uploaded content to a great web based music hosting, sharing and publishing solution called Sound Cloud. What I like most about it, apart from the great design, is how easily it is to share the files you've published via the embed code. The player is customisable and includes the really cool wave pattern of your track.

Here's an example that, in best Blue Peter fashion, I made earlier:

Discrimination by fotologic

Cultural Learning

I've just signed up with the Cultural Learning Alliance. If you believe in the power of cultural learning to transform lives, raise aspiration and bring joy to millions, I strongly suggest you do the same.

Check out the website for more information.

Stupeflix TV

Watch the Creative Tallis channel on Stupeflix.tv.

I've been playing with Stupeflix this evening and have just discovered that it allows you to create a TV channel based on feeds from both Twitter and Flickr. Once you've identified your key words (I just used @creativetallis for Twitter and creativetallis for Flickr) Stupeflix automatically generates a TV-like programme featuring the relevant content. I've also tried to make a couple of Stupeflix presentations but with less success. They seem to be having difficulty with their servers this evening. I'll try again tomorrow.

Anyway, I can think of lots of interesting uses for Stupeflix TV. Imagine typing in searches for popular hashtags in Twitter (let's say #fairtrade) and keywords in Flickr and creating an up-to-date feed of the latest images and tweets from across the world on any particular topic? Cool. As you can see from the example above, these channels can then be embedded in your blog to share with your audience.

What do you think?

The internet is BIG!

Some interesting statistics surrounding the web on a day to day basis, Click the image to veiw large

A visit from our School of Creativity Advisor

On Monday we had a visit from Julian Sefton-Green, our national School of Creativity Advisor. His role is to help us reflect on our progress as a SoC. He popped into 208 for a working lunch with the ARG and we took some time to collaborate on creating ideas for this year's Arts Festival. I explained that the theme was "Past, Present & Future" and that we were hoping to curate a more joined up festival so that the Tallis community had a better idea what was going on and a better opportunity to take part. We would also like to experiment with more mixed media and inter-disciplinary performances/exhibitions with a view to preparing for next year's event which would be a proper celebration of our time on the current site before we move to the new school.

The group came up with some excellent ideas which we have added to the Wallwisher. These included a fashion show of all the past school uniforms, a late night film screening using sheets draped from the link followed by a sleepover on the concourse and an episode of Doctor Who visiting Tallis Past, Present & Future. Genius!

If you're interested in reading Julian's report of his visit to the school, you can find it on the Documents page of our Creative Learning site.

Literacies

Typography Animation project for class

Poem by Taylor Mali (www.TaylorMali.com)

Friday's whole staff literacy training day was really fascinating. I was reminded how important listening and speaking are to the development of language and how we often neglect purposeful talk in class to focus too early on writing. I spent the morning working with Mr Hawes encouraging a group of colleagues to begin a blog and play around with lots of the Web 2.0 tools we've had fun with in recent months. Folk seemed to have a good time and quickly got going on their blogging. We had everything from a lateral thinking Maths blog to ones created to promote community cohesion and aid tutor group communication. My afternoon was spent with the Performing Arts faculty thinking about how we could develop literacy through talk. We decided to feed back our ideas using Audioboo, having generated them with a mixture of Mindmeister and Wallwisher. There was a very pleasing emphasis throughout the day on the value of the creative use of ICT for developing language, media and digital literacies.

I found the video above on Doug Belshaw's blog. I really like the way a poem, a strong sense of humour, typography and a brilliant animated design come together to communicate a clear message about the value of talk. Seemed appropriate.

Julian Sefton Green, our national School of Creativity advisor, is visiting us again on Monday. He's going to spend some time with the ARG over lunch as we get to grips with plans for the summer. I hope we can create some really exciting suggestions for ways in which the school building can become a backdrop for a series of inter-disciplinary, site specific interventions. I've had several responses to the invitations to nominees for the Josh Beasley Award for Creativity to join the new Student Commissioning Group. I'm really hoping we can get that group up and running before the Easter holiday.

See you on Monday, period 4 in Room 208.

IAMS Creative Leaders Blog

Check out the IAMS Creative Leaders Blog and add comments and/or posts based on the visit yesterday!

Visit from IAMS

We had an action packed visit from several student Creative Leaders from Islington Arts and Media School today. IAMS is also a School of Creativity and we are keen to collaborate with them more closely on a whole range of initiatives. We met for a couple of hours, firstly playing with web 2.0 tools (Google Docs, Tumblr, Xtranormal, Voki, Audioboo and Wallwisher) to explore just how easy it is to create content online and use it for collaboration. Then our students arrived and we were able to quiz the IAMS crew about how they set up the Creative Leaders programme and the role that these students have in evaluating creative learning across the curriculum. As well as the I AM Creative film, the group brought with them the following documents which they are using to evaluate learning. I think we can really learn a lot from IAMS and their approach to engaging students in the process of gathering evidence about successful creative learning strategies. Hopefully, we can stay in touch online and pay a return visit soon.

Here's the link to the IAMS blog with related products that we made this morning.