Our final assignment for the course Creative Problem Solving: a reflection on our experience:
- Creativity techniques – I’ve used all of those offered in the course for many years – I taught people how to mind-map, brainstorm, free-writing, how to use webbing, W5 questions, look for examples… I learned a long time ago that just opening my mind and letting ideas out can be trusted. The latest instance was a recent writing task – I had to come up with a bunch of surveys for people involved in the Canadian Path (Scouts Canada’s new, revised program) pilot program. For several weeks I let the ideas roll around in my brain (not actually putting anything on paper, although I know my brain was working unconsciously on the problem), but I couldn’t actually sit down and produce the surveys until the planning team had an online meeting one evening and with an audience the barriers disappeared and the survey questions came flowing out (fortunately, a couple of the others on the call took notes so I could return to the surveys and extend and edit them! In this case, instead of “freewriting” I was “freetalking”). With the quilting I do, I regularly spend time online looking for ideas – I collect photos from which I generate ideas – I never replicate a quilt I’ve seen, but am able to improvise around an idea. Really, my life is a continuous search for solutions to problems – little problems: how to replace a sock heel without having to reknit the whole foot; bigger problems: how to convince Scouts Canada’s leadership that this program revitalization ought to be driving all other decision-making they’re engaged in (about transportation policy, risk management, volunteer recruitment and training) – they aren’t there yet but they have to get there and I have to find ways to help them understand the problem.
- Choose one DSD to do-over – truthfully while the DSD challenges were “fun” to think about and execute, they were just exercises I did for the sake of the course – I wouldn’t bother to do any of them over. I thought people were far ranging in their interpretation of each task and it was clear they were having fun executing them but nothing really motivated me to redo any of the DSD exercises. They were interesting to think about – certainly caused conversation with people when I did them in public. But since a lot of what I do daily seems to involve innovative problem solving these DSDs were just exercises for me.
- Creativity Engine: that was a disaster – I stopped doing it quite quickly since it was obvious that the more I tried it, the worse I got. The fact that it was timed froze my brain – not that couldn’t think of unusual uses for the objects I was shown when I had time to think about it, but in the timed context I came up with less and less. Probably a factor of my aging brain – I am aware that it takes me longer to process than it used to, but I still innovate and make new connections when I’m not under pressure.
- Where Good Idea Come From by Steven Johnson was interesting from start to finish. I downloaded the book from Kobo about three weeks before the course began and read through it. It was well written, organized in an interesting fashion – I liked the way he used historical examples of “creativity” (most in science, which I thought was interesting), to illustrate his main ideas: the adjacent possible, the characteristics of liquid networks, the slow hunch, serendipity, the role of error, exaptation, and platforms to show that creativity is dependent on a host of conditions to bloom which, when present, support the generation of unusual ideas that open windows on new possibilities. While Johnson doesn’t discuss the arts much (if at all) the arguments apply to people engaged in the whole gamut of creative endeavours.
- My reason for taking the course was to see how a topic like “creative problem solving” might influence the online learning situation. I’d just worked about half-way through a course on Strategies in the Virtual Classroom that was dreadful – completely prescriptive, no room for the learners to interpret tasks in open ways or be involved in setting the criteria for their learning; the whole experienced annoyed me. I stayed with it because I’m currently involved as a member of the program rollout team in a humungous online learning situation with Scouts Canada as the Program Team attempts to help Scouters understand the experiences with/for youth have to have youth input into the planning – that’s a HUGE leap right now given that for the past 60 years Scouting has been predominantly adult-led and as a consequence enrollment has fallen sharply in the last decade. Any “training” we provide has to have learner input if we want the adult volunteers to reciprocate with the youth!
Did Creative Problem Solving offer me any useful insights into the problem of student-led engagement in online learning – some. The tasks were interesting, and being able to respond to other people’s interpretation of these tasks in a couple of different ways was useful. Each of the DSDs required me to make sense for myself of something that was minimally defined. I wasn’t bound by any particular way of interpreting the tasks. The part that wasn’t helpful were the rubrics for evaluating other students’ input. While the categories for considering each project were reasonable, the criteria within each weren’t broad enough to allow me to discriminate among the presentations; I wanted to be able to choose among many more options within each category. As a result I found myself selecting “2” for most of the categories most of the time, unless the DSD represented minimal effort and then I was forced to choose “0” which wasn’t always a good choice. I could have written more in the comments text box, but having given maximum scores for the categories I didn’t feel it worth the effort to do an in-depth analysis of those presentations I was responding to.
As I participated as a learner in the course, I really was watching the “teaching” – trying to understand the goals of the instructors as well as the impact the challenges had on the learners. I was thinking about how the context limited what learners were able to do as I explored this online learning environment. While the discussion forums provided an opening for me to express my responses and thoughts, it’s not a vehicle that supports real conversation – which is one of the elements Steven Johnson pointed out was essential for creativity. I think we’re still some distance from being able to replicate the face-to-face learning situation in an online world. The tools aren’t there for large groups to allow vibrant small group interactions. Attempting group tasks in this formal situation bears little resemblance to the online meetings I’ve been having for months with people in this Scouts Canada project – we spend an hour or two at least once a week working through an agenda, brainstorming ideas, problem solving, planning experiences for our adult volunteers, discussing new materials. We are totally engaged as our personal learning unfolds. There was an artificiality to my engagement in “Creating Problem Solving”.
On Learning 