So I am still struggling with the concept of 'delight' in this context.
Can creativity be taught?
See Blair's blog for more details
This may seem a million miles away fom what I should be working on for report 5 but I am starting to think that this is what I want to do in the longer term. To teach (or perhaps 'enable' is a better word) people to be creative and perhaps to do it using digital tools. This makes sense of my growing interest in blogging, web design etc. The only way I can cope with this module is to make it as real as possible and part of that reality is accepting that I do not want to stay doing this job forever.
Some one was telling me recently about being taught to be creative and what a painful experience that had been. It had involved letting go of many preconceptions about what the participants wanted to produce and accepting the limitations of the technology they were to use to produce their work. The implication was that these limitations actually forced them to learn to be creative. It reminded me of learning to write poetry and the demands that using a particular form such as the sonnet (or the hiaku) places on the writer.
Another incident also made me think more about this issue. I watched an adult 'playing' with technology to produce a piece of art and saw a very similar kind of intensity of concentration, frustration and pleasure to that displayed by the reception class.
Richard Millwood's The New Learning Landscape gives some interesting insights into why we all need to play. I saw this last week but he has added a lot more detail since then. In a comment on an earlier entry to my blog Richard says of play
"We need this because it allows mistakes to be made with delight, and sustains improvement / perfection of ideas."
I think this permission to make mistakes is key, at least in this culture. Not sure about in the US or even New Zealand.
