Skip to main content

# 6754 Creative education

I know. Creative teaching environment, blahdy blah, frrrt. The fact is while education has become more creative, it still is lacking. And even if the teaching has achieved something on the creative scale, testing is still very much not.

A few truisms that made me stumble on this.

- One of the reasons I tank on tests is because there's something inside of me that always wants to find a clever, innovative something. I never get rewarded for clever new ideas on tests and I sometimes get penalized. The rigid test structure is set out beforehand (that's the point) and thinking outside the box isn't encouraged.

- This even happens in creative subjects. I made a film shot in reverse (people walking backwards, etc.) that my teacher barely acknowledged. True, it wasn't a very good film, but I think he was instantly turned off by my 'gimmick'. (Which of course has been done before, if it was 'creative' from his well-informed perspective he would have been all over it. Why should a person need to be fully aware of the field before creativity is rewarded? Especially in a learning setting. Re-inventing wheels is actually a fantastic way to learn how wheels work.)

- Course structures are linear. (At least all the one's I'm aware of.)

- Sports seem to be quasi-linear. There's a regular season of so many games and then some sort of bracketed championship where you don't know the path your team will take. Even in the scheduled games, you don't know what path the game will take and creative approaches are rewarded if they are effective. (Uncreative approaches are rewarded as well, so there's something to be said for that.)

- In society we have a hard time judging creativity. The method of using a measuring stick to size up something doesn't work when the something keeps changing the nature of the measuring stick. I've noticed so many 'best actor awards' have gone to actors in bio-pics where they act like people who really existed. It's almost like the judges can finally say "now that's great acting. He totally nailed the JFK impersonation."

So could you design a course that has the linear textbook replaced with a computer program with a tree-like structure. The class is presented with a problem and they have to come up with a solution. Their way is paved with aided discovery (the teacher is the aid) of the principles/theorems/facts/logic/etc that have already been established from past academia. At the end of one branch of the tree, the program would evaluate if there are any substantial portions of the tree not covered, and would present a new problem that would take students across that ground. This sounds a bit like a computer game and I think that's a good thing.

How do you test creatively? I dunno. Perhaps it isn't possible. So maybe the test would be a similar problem to what students encountered in the course to see if they could do it again on their own.

Some of you are probably saying "yeah, this has already been done before. Do your homework." Well that's my point. So what if I'm reinventing the creative education wheel. And I do actually need to get on that homework.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#7844 Electronic voting

Electronic voting. Yea, even internet voting. Really shouldn't be impossible. Tom Scott says this is a terrible idea, but I don't think it's so unsolvable. The ways to cheat are: - stuffing the ballot box with bogus votes - counting or recording the votes bogusly - voting more than once or voting for someone else Voter confidentiality must be preserved.  Here's my solution.  - every voter must authenticate with some non-government system that 1) ensures user ID uniqueness 2) contains a method for contacting the voter (can be a form obscuring contact details) 3) creates a random code which is not retained by the system. This is easily done by Google, Facebook, or any tiny NGO. They would need to register and be subject to audit. - when a user votes, the data is logged in two public registers. 1) a voters register showing the person's user ID (or a unique variant from the authenticator) 2) a vote register showing the random code and how they voted
Post a Comment
Read more

#7483 Broadcast Café

This café is wired. There are cameras and microphones everywhere. What goes on inside is constantly broadcast in real-time on the café's website. There is a bold disclaimer on the front door telling everyone who enters that their conversation and image will be viewable by anyone accessing the site. It is open from 6am to 2am the next morning to maximize global viewing time, without becoming too seedy. It is located in New York or LA or maybe both. Another option: At the same time, monitors in the cafe show analytics in real time of how many people are on the website and where they are located. Maybe it even shows how many people are watching each camera and listening to each microphone. Perhaps people on-line could post chats and be active participants as well. Would no one want to go to a café where their privacy is completely nil? Would no one want to sit at their computer and watch people living instead of doing it themselves? Or do people have an inner desire to be seen, especi
4 comments
Read more

# Disinfectant coffee mug wipes

What do you do when you've finished your coffee in your personal cup which remains at your desk with a residue of drying coffee in the bottom? If you have a kitchenette in the break room there might be soap and a sponge for washing. If not, do you rinse it in the bathroom sink? Do you pour water into it, slosh it around and then dump it in a plant? Do you take it home and wash it? Or do you, eh, just pour some more java in the next morning crossing your fingers that nothing anthraxy got in there overnight? I propose a handy packet of coffee mug wipes. They clean and disinfect as well as with dish soap and water and don't leave any residual nasty taste.
2 comments
Read more