Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Re-creation

One of the most thought provoking videos and professional development learning opportunities I’ve had in the past six months was watching and listening to Dr. Lawrence Lessig at Wizards of OS4 in September 2006 (via podcast) share his “Read/Write Culture” keynote address. These are a few notes I took awhile back about some of the ideas he shared in that presentation, as well as a few personal reflections. (I’m going through and throwing away old notes, and I want to digitize/share some of these thoughts before they enter the circular file.)

Digital creativity is now invited directly by technology. The capacity to create “special effects” has been democratized by the Internet and digital tools at the fingertips of millions, and now form new “tools of speech” for people across our planet.

Art and music are now “tools of speech” which are used every day to communicate with and influence all of us. This new potential to speak, to share, to learn, and to collaborate with interconnected digital tools represents a sea change for information communication which is and will continue to have dramatic impacts on almost all facets of our society.

The tools of creativity have been democratized by the Internet and digital resources. People located anywhere on our planet, connected to the Internet, have the capacity and potential to powerfully and meaningfully speak to our culture and CREATE their own cultural artifacts which can influence the minds of others. “Texts are the Latin of our generation.” This is a new potential to speak, to learn, using the new literacies of this century.

What is “recreation?” According to WikiPedia:

Recreation is the use of time in a manner not designed for financial gain, though in many ways it is a therapeutic refreshment of one’s body or mind.

According to Dr. Lessig, “recreation” can literally mean a “re-creation” of ideas and concepts.

My own thought on this is that if we consider the Anderson and Krathwahl revision to Bloom’s Taxonomy from 2001, we should elevate the priority and importance of re-creation, recreation, and creative acts within and outside of formal classrooms across the PK-20 educational continuum. This means we must provide more TIME for creative play, which is the environment in which most of us (or perhaps all of us) are able to authentically re-create ideas.

I also continue to see a strong connection here to citizen journalism. I would love to see every school and community library across our planet offering workshops for learners of all ages on how to become constructive citizen journalists in their own locality.

(Powerful tools + Powerful ideas) x (the amplification potential of the global stage which is the Internet) = Powerful influences to effect change.

A few of the books Dr. Lessig mentioned in his keynote that I’ve added to my own Amazon wish list include:
– “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom” (Yochai Benkler)
– “Democratizing Innovation” (Eric Von Hippel)
– “The Success of Open Source” (Steven Weber)

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