Where has creativity gone?

Findings from this post on creativity sounds too good for me.  Thanks to Ana Cristina for the link.

For all the talk of creativity in business, industry and academia, there’s evidence that it’s implicitly discouraged in these areas as well. Although leaders of organisations say they want creative ideas, the evidence suggests creativity gets rejected in favour of conformity and uniformity (Staw, 1995 cited in Mueller et al., 2011).

I shared this in my post.  Here in Creativity and creative learning, how is it valued in community, and schools?

So really, what we are being told is, “be creative, but not TOO creative”. Any creative ideas that attempt to shift the current paradigm or reject a paradigm completely are usually driven by extreme passion, and almost always met with some type of resistance from society. We are left with the choice of (1) give up on our ideas, or (2) put up a hell of a fight to defend them.  Those who decide to stand their ground and fight for their creative ideas are the ones who are generally seen as “rule-breakers”, “rebels”, “trouble-makers”, or simply, “obnoxious”. And the ideas generated by those individuals are generally the most creative, innovative, and necessary ideas to support.

That may be the protocols and norms set by our community, society, as part of the cultures.  How to be creative, yet be perceived as constructive, as a valued citizen (a worker, an educator, a researcher, an artist, a learner) could be interesting for me to re-visit.

What we need would be renewed ways of supporting and developing ours’ and our fellow students’ creativity in their search and exploration of knowledge, whilst constructing and navigating through the networks and communities, and  the teaching and learning activities and tasks in classes, networks and communities.

These need to be based on creative learning principles where strategies could be developed ranging from different pedagogies – including peer-to-peer learning (peeragogy, as espoused by Howard Rheingold), and peer learning with active learning, participatory pedagogy,participatory action research, and online conversation as part of the learning pedagogy etc.  These aligned with some of the elements of networked principles and Connectivism as discovered in MOOC, as elaborated here by Stephen Downes.

You may find this interesting to watch:

I will come back to reflect and comment.

How about you?

Postscript: Another video on Creative Genius.