Question: Where do you do your best thinking?
My daughter studies with her iPod on – I used to do the same (with my Sony Walkman) – but it probably contributes to her slower pace. Does it affect her retention rate too? I don’t know. Anyway, when you get away from school learning, there are probably times when creative thinking emerges. Short spurts of creative imagination probably lead to nowhere and are easily forgotten, but sometimes you might just get into one of those really deep moments and think that you’re a genius. I get my best ideas in the shower (can you think of another place besides the bathroom where you get 10 minutes or more of privacy…every day?). Sometimes, I get good ideas on my commute (if I’m alone and the radio isn’t on). Where do you get your best ideas? The strength of our program is that we create that moment of privacy and make it long enough to get somewhere. As icing to this experience, we enlist peers and counselors as a focus group to give you feedback.
Exercise: Looking into the Future
Have students make a list of things that they use now, then have them start reducing the list for things they believe will be around in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 25 years, 50 years and 100 years. Items could be products, brands, places or characteristics of something (eg, touch screen computers).
To provide a background for this exercise, students could research how long something has lasted before (eg, how long did a brand survive?)
Challenge-Based Learning (Apple)
http://www.apple.com/education/challenge-based-learning/
1. The Big Idea
Every challenge starts with the selection of a big idea — a broad topic that has importance to students and their community. Topics like democracy, the environment, or sustainability. Using Safari on a Mac, students can browse the web to quickly define and better understand their big idea. Let’s use food as an example.
2. Essential Questions
Students explore their big idea by asking questions that reflect their individual interests and community’s needs. How does food impact our health? How do our diets impact the environment? What are the benefits of organic farming? A simple way for students to keep their questions organized is with Pages. This streamlined word processor and page layout tool is included in iWork — a powerful suite of applications for creating amazing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
3. The Challenge
From the essential questions a challenge is developed to guide students toward a real-world solution. Like, let’s improve what we eat. Snow Leopard Server can help students collaborate and communicate throughout the challenge by ensuring safe and secure access to email, chat, calendars, wikis, blogs, and more. Documenting the process is also key. With iPod touch or iPhone 4, students can record audio and shoot HD video of themselves in action and on the go.
4. Guiding Questions and Activities
To meet their challenge, students need to ask guiding questions. What exactly do we eat? What nutrients do we need? What foods can we grow locally? To find answers, teachers work with students to identify guiding activities they can do at school and in their community. Students can interview people about their diets via FaceTime* and analyze nutritional data in Numbers — the easy-to-use application for creating spreadsheets included in iWork.
5. Guiding Resources
Students take advantage of websites, podcasts, apps, audiobooks, and other resources to help answer guiding questions and develop solutions. iTunes U provides instant access to some of the world’s best thinking for free — including lectures, videos, and articles from hundreds of distinguished universities, libraries, museums, and news organizations. And with iPad, they can find what they need anytime, anywhere.
6. Solutions and Presentations
With their research complete, students choose one solution to develop. In this example, creating a school garden. To showcase their thinking, they can build engaging slideshows in Keynote — the presentation application in iWork. Once the solution is approved, students implement it in the real world. The challenge is now complete and can be shared via a video made in iMovie or a website built in iWeb — apps included in iLife, the creativity suite that comes with every Mac. At the end of each challenge, students reflect on the entire process to help deepen their learning and enrich future projects.
Learning with Apple: Challenge Based Learning
http://edseminars.apple.com/event/3145/163631
Tuesday, November 30 2010 10:00AM to 11:30AMAdd to iCal
During this online session you will learn about Challenge Based Learning, an engaging multidisciplinary approach to teaching and learning that encourages students to leverage the technology they use in their daily lives to solve real-world problems.
Challenge Based Learning is collaborative and hands-on, asking students to work with other students, their teachers, and experts in their communities and around the world to develop deeper knowledge of the subjects students are studying, accept and solve challenges, take action, reflect on their impact, share the experience, and enter into a global discussion about important issues. During this online session you will learn about Challenge Based Learning, and hear from practitioners who have successfully implemented Challenge Based Learning.
This event is intended for both K12 and HiED faculty, site or department level administrators, curriculum directors, deans, department chairs, curriculum and instructional technology departments, and faculty and staff from career and technical education programs.
Seafood Watch
A good case study of a sustainability public awareness/public education (PAPE) program may be the Seafood Watch program headed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. This may be a good role model for students to use in developing their own PAPE programs.
Perhaps we could even arrange a visit to the MBA.
Is there a Chinese language equivalent?
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx
The Seafood Watch-Whole Foods seafood labeling program is a good example of a partnership to expand information utility.
The 50 Most Innovative Companies 2010 (Bloomberg Businessweek)
This is a useful reference (but really reflects business trends as opposed to individual traits)…
http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/innovative_companies_2010.html?chan=magazine+channel_special+report
Apple is ranked #1. Google is #2. (Surprisingly) Microsoft is #3.
Amazon’s ranking at #6 is informative in that it is more challenging to distinguish innovative processes (Amazon’s forté) as opposed to innovative products (eg, Apple’s and Google’s forté).
Interestingly, if you compare this list with this article about Singapore having “government policies and corporate performance most encouraging to innovation”, no Singapore company is on the top 50 innovative companies list. Again, this reinforces the notion that if you focus on companies for innovation, you miss (and forget about) a lot of other innovation activity that is happening from personal levels. This supports the thought that youth are a tremendous innovation resource and largely un-recognized/un-respected.
Invention vs Innovation
It is useful to define (and distinguish) the terms “invention” and “innovation.” It would also be useful to help clarify that “invention” tends to be absolute whereas there are many grades of “innovation” – false (just not widely known or previously failed), incremental vs whole.
invent (in·vent)
verb
create or design (something that has not existed before ); be the originator of
innovate (in·no·vate)
verb
make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products
An interesting exercise might be to put up an innovation scale and stick up images of various inventions and innovations – the aim is to scope the scale. Does an environment that achieves 100 small innovations (locally adopted) compare with that which achieves a single 1-in-a-hundred years (global shifting) innovation?
Definitions obtained from oxforddictionaries.com.
Parents: How to raise a creative genius (CNN)
This article by Elizabeth Landau actually describes children who already possess the gift of a thirst for knowledge and application thereof. However, it reminds us about not stifling creativity [by imposing a rigid rate and measuring by a universal scale of knowledge growth] as a blanket approach.
These are the essential suggestions of the article:
Sparking curiosity (aka motivation)
Setting up challenges (aka setting goals)
Being open-minded (aka encourage)
Making ‘teaching moments’ (aka mentor)
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/10/22/motivation.kids/index.html?hpt=C2
Dealing with opportunities
This is an idea for situational exercises related to youth leadership (pertains to leadership at all ages but will try to keep the contexts within appropriate youth age range).
One is dealing with (leadership) opportunities. Create a basket with slips of paper with the following situations. Have students vote (gut reaction) or act out in a small group.
How do you behave if an opportunity presents itself?
How do you behave if several opportunities present themselves at the same time?
How do you behave if a new opportunity presents itself after you’ve just started to seize another?
How do you behave if no opportunities seem to be presenting themselves?
How do you behave if it seems that every opportunity you seize ends in failure or turns out not be what you expected?
How do you behave if an opportunity changes direction?
How do you behave if an opportunity vanishes?
How do you behave if an opportunity you want has been seized by another person?
How do you evaluate opportunities in personal terms (eg, matching your goals, interests and skillset)?
How do you evaluate opportunities by project terms (eg, risks, chance of success, support, resources, beneficial outcomes)?
Preliminary Timeline for 2011 Program
[Edited out prospective schools – 4/27/11]
[This program is no longer current but maintained for planning future programs 4/27/11]
Brochure Design Complete ~November 15, 2010
Beijing Office Open for Enquiries ~November 20, 2010
Preliminary Program Rollout ~December 1, 2010
Web Page Rollout ~January 1, 2011
Application Deadline ~February 8, 2011
Chaperone Confirmation ~February 15, 2011
Reserve Facilities at Stanford ~March 1, 2011
Confirm speakers and site visits ~March 5, 2011
Admission Decision ~March 8, 2011
Acceptance of Offer ~by March 22, 2011
Deposit Due ~by March 22, 2011 (with acceptance)
Visa Application ~March 29, 2011
Send Welcome Letter ~April 5, 2011
Content Drafts Submitted ~April 16, 2011
Content Drafts Reviewed ~by April 23, 2011
Balance due ~May 1, 2011
Welcome Presentation (in China) ~May 2, 2011
Content Finalized & Documents Sent to Printer ~May 31, 2011
Pre-Orientation (in China) ~June 28, 2011
Departure to US ~ June 29, 2011
[Stanford Summer Session begins June 20, 2011]
Wednesday June 29, 2011 Arrival
Thursday June 30, 2011 Day 1: Orientation & Ice-breakers
Friday July 1, 2011 Day 2: Creativity & Idea Development
Saturday July 2, 2011 Day 3: Teamwork
Sunday July 3, 2011 Day 4: Computer History & Youth Leadership
Monday July 4 2011 Day 5: Free day (Stanford holiday)
Tuesday July 5, 2011 Day 6: Sustainability & Jasper Ridge
Wednesday July 6, 2011 Day 7: Open Forum & Demo Day
Thursday July 7, 2011 Day 8: Photo Blog (recount) & Wrap-up
Friday July 8, 2011 Day 9: Free day (SF Giants Baseball vs NYM)
Saturday July 9, 2011 Day 10: Departure day
