TDU E-Learning Blog

The other week I came again across a 30 min presentation from Tim Brown entitled “The powerful link between creativity and play” (see an earlier post from Rheinard in Nov 08). A friend of mine was telling me about how his team at work are trying to define their role and values within the larger orgainsation they work at. Some of the themes that come from this video would be good inclusions in such a dicussion.

Tim comes from a corporate design background and talks about how a playful work environment can be used to facilitate the creation of great ideas. You’ll need to watch the video (see below) to really get the points, however here is a quick overview.

As most of us don’t work as designers it can be easy to write off creativity as something we don’t need nor should there be an effort to facilitate it. The vast majority of jobs require solutions to problems (even if they are small) and this requires some form of creativity. In an attempt to demonstrate that play can be a critical element of creativity,  he refers to the example of young children learning while playing without inhibitions and fear of making mistakes. They consequently learn various concepts that we as adults take for granted….but are not explicitly taught as when we were children there was an opportunity to discover through play.

I don’t see anything entirely new with the message, however the message is one worth re-circulating as it is very easy to focus on being operational…whether that be in the classroom and/or in the office. By operational I mean simply to work directly at fulfilling targets that the respective work environments demand. For example Jay Cross has flagged a concept of “tinkering” which builds on many of the aforementioned points and attempts to contextualise them for the corporate workplace.

The other important point that Tim raises is that of trust. Well the old adage is that you “earn trust”, however for a student and or employee entering a new environment…how can they earn trust if they don’t feel empowered to give things a go and experiment. Without trust there is no possibility for students, employers etc to play, tinker etc.

I would then like to pose some questions for consideration (I have my thoughts) to anyone who ends up viewing the video….

1.  How do we facilitate and then subsequently manage a workplace where play is an accepted component? You may already work in one…

2. Can this principle be applied in the classroom?

3. Can social media facilitate this process in both a blended and distance learning environment?

I think the answer is yes for all three questions and that to some degree it already happens… but only you can answer whether it is supported (atleast somewhat) in your area.

Its rather interesting how quickly something can gain momentum. About a month ago I read the book, “A Whole new Mind” by Daniel Pink. Soon after that I saw some videos (see post: Flat Classrooms) released about a flat classroom project that used some of the concepts outlined in the book mixed with another book called, “The World is Flat”. This was quite interesting watching these two philosophies together.

Essentially what Dan Pink’s book boils down to is that left-brain thinking is as important as we’ve been taught it is… or as another educator somewhere on YouTube stated… it’s become part of our DNA (at least a large majority) … but Dan also then reveals the importance of the right-brain as we move from an information age to a conceptual age. All in all, we’re not trying to replace one with the other, but as the book states we need to develop a WHOLE (left and right) new mind.

Not long after I read the book (ok, I cheated, I listened to the book which I purchased from Audible) I started seeing more and more posts in blogs referring to this right way of thinking - highlighting aspects such as story, play, empathy, symphony, etc.  Dan Roam’s book (The Back of the Napkin) surfaced that teaches exactly that… solving left-brain business problems with right-brain drawings… it’s not new theories, but it re-surfaced as we’re trying to make new meaning from it. Even the other day as we had George Siemens show up in a video conference the things that he was addressing was primarily around our shift of thinking…

Why am I telling you all this?  Simply because I thought that you might appreciate this TED Talk a bit more

A few months ago the thought of engaging workplace cultures also came up in a staff meeting… and just yesterday I spoke to another staff member praising the workplace culture of Jimmy Possum Furniture (who’ve grown incredibly from broke to incredible turn-over in just 10 years). The staff is the number one asset in the business, not the products. The quote went somewhere down the line of “if you take care of the people, the business will take care of itself”. This made me think of places like Google, Mahalo (”the human-powered search engine”) and some of those other funky workplaces out there (major contrast to Henry Ford, “if we work, we work hard. if we play, we play hard” no room to blend the two).

What does this have to do with e-learning? I think quite a bit… if we can develop a playful culture and an engaging environment at work… just maybe we’ll feel playful enough to give some of these tools we’ve been hearing about a go - thinking out of the box…  turning a roll of aluminium foil into a space-suite… engaging in unimaginable possibilities (even in those “hand’s on” trade environment).

Can I get a big barrel of Lego blocks for my office?

If anyone hasn’t yet seen the University of Illinois’ Visual Cognition Lab’s video of the team of basketball players you should definitely have a look at it - http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/flashmovie/15.php .   Unfortunately the experiment is not outlined as well as it used to be now that it has gone commercial. Basically the question is - “How many times do the players in white shirts pass the ball to each other?”

I’ll digress for a brief moment and talk about the picture that reminded me of the above experiment. It was posted on the TED blog, but originally posted on Cognitive Daily.

Which direction is the woman spinning in?  Clockwise or counter-clockwise? Can you change her direction?

The point that I am trying to make here is that it is virtually impossible for us to determine exactly what our students see. However, for decates we’ve been taking the objectivist approach and tried to force students to see the world the way we see the world (I’m generalising here, I havn’t even taught for a decade).  Even when we try to gently guide our learners to see something we can be imposing limits on them (see the basketball test posted above, did you see the gorilla?) .

When we design instruction for our learners we try to present them with real world problems (or at least we should), but we also need to give them enough variables so that they can see application in a diverse field - so that they can see more than we show, learn more than we teach and hopefully even teach us what we cannot see.