Jun 07
In a recent blog post, Three Reasons I think “Art School” is the next “Dream School,” I wrote about why I think creativity, essentially, is the biggest factor that determines the (personal) leadership styles required in 21st Century Education. Recently, I read a tweet that states that creativity is the most needed leadership quality required in 2010. I didn’t open it, but I don’t think creativity is not just a fad of the current times.
Creativity is required for the present and future as we catapult into an emerging era of excess and abundance of resources of multi-dimensional degrees.
Two questions emerged from these thoughts as I put together that blog post:
Who is the artist?What is the role of art and the artist in the 21st Century?
After exploring who I perceived as an artist, I determined three qualities essential to the thriving century nouveau Picasso:
- “feeling,” or rather, giving meaning to
- “creating” an authentic and balanced life in order to navigate through the required
- “transformation,” or ability to flow, along the basic priciples of Liquid Modernity.
To further explore the story of these qualities, I pose two more traits:
The artist “manifests.”
Inspired by Zero Limits, a somewhat sketchy self-help book based on an ancient Hawaiian teaching, Theory U, Daniel Pink, and a variety of other sources, I was inspired by inspiration itself.
How can the artist act from inspiration in order to go from a state of merely dreaming into a state of doing by simply being?
I believe a certain state of effortlessness and willingness is the basis to this concept.
Manifestation is a process of looking at the intentions, or motivations behind our conscious will to act. Daniel Pink explores this motivation in a beautifully visual and motivational map. Check out the video here. Imagination is thinking at it’s best and in order to manifest, or harvest, dreams for the future, your perception or way of thinking is imagination’s only limit. One rule of the ancient teaching states “I am 100% responsible for creating my physical universe the way it is (not the way it should be.)”
By working from the “I” and believing in the “we,” one can successfully work on change beginning with the self. Famously put, “Really, it’s not you, it’s me…” From this, transferring authentic knowledge to others is the necessary ingredient to make ideas spread, change yourself, and change the world. By acting creatively from this viral imagination, there lies a transformation from imagination to inspiration, or the will to creatively think and act quickly in rapidly-changing ordeals.
Suddenly, these ordeals become opportunities. In other words, there is no such thing as “out there,” but rather, reality exists in each thought that enters the mind. This is entrepreneurial behavior at it’s best. This is the sort of spirit I’ve come to Knowmads to learn.
The next “artistic” quality I’ve explored in the transformation of education is the artist’s ability to “play.”
In the Ted video, Gaming Can Make a Better World, Jane McGonigal of the Institute for the Future begs us to play more games! Here’s how she sees play as a possibility to increase productivity in a generation that has evolved into a completely different way of thinking.
The facts are:1. The youth of modern society collectively play 3 billion hours of video games a week.2. World of Warcraft, which is second only to Wikipedia as the largest online information database, claims an unbelievable amount of collective hours played online since it’s debut in 1994.3. The exact amount is 5.93 million years of collective playing by 500 million people, with one billion more to come in the next ten years. 5.93 million years is the same amount of time it took primates to first stand.4. By 21, the average gamer will have spent 10,000 hours playing. This is the same amount of time a student will have attended seven years of school– with perfect attendance.
As you can see, there is an invisible learning revolution, a parallel education taking place as we speak. Describing Malcom Gladwell’s theory in Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours of failing for a person to become an expert at anything, or fail less, rather. She asks, what exactly are these gamers getting so great at?
You can see the word ‘collective’ as an essential element required to effectively succeed, or win the game. Theorizing that we are evolving into a more collaborative species, games are the perfect example to build trust, create urgent optimism. This is what she believes is the necessary ingredient to create the desire to act immediately and actually believe you will succeed. By giving the game a ‘purpose’, or clearly defined goal, gamers are happier because they are pushing themselves just enough to struggle but thrive in a ‘meaningful’ experience.
They are experiencing what she calls “epic wins” creating an epic adventure, a story based on a knowledge resource of super-empowered and hopeful individuals who give better feedback and support to keep us trying.
The challenge she attempts to tackle is what she states is a “mass exodus to virtual reality.”How can we transform our virtual realities into an opportunity to learn and change the world?
Developing games like World Without Oil and Superstruct, the important collaborative quality of “play” can be used to a better understanding of reality in the un-virtual realm. These games actually tackle real world problems such as poverty and environmental impact.
The advent of social media is a clear example of the evolution of technology, society, and education. Better understanding their relationship is the biggest challenge we face in this era.
Stay tuned for my next post on the subject and please feel free to take a look at the Invisible Learning Project of John Moravec, from Education Futures at the University of Minnesota. I will be having a webinar this evening with the scholar himself to better explore the subject as I prepare for what I think will be a fascinating future Project Dream School, under the artistic design of Marcel Kampman.
For more great things I see out there, subscribe to my twitter feed, and check out this video link:
That’s all for now, but until then, bring it on!
Related posts:
