At Sussex, I attended a conference on Creativity in Teaching and Learning, sponsored by LINKS+II, a Franco-Anglo consortium of universities that share knowledge for mutual economic benefit. You can take a look at the slides from the presentations at the creative links site.
The keynote speaker (sorry, her name is not with me at this Internet cafe – I’m in Glasgow at the moment) described what she considered to be the nature of creativity, as falling into three types: combinatory, exploratory and transformational, and she expressed concern that teachers have caused great damage by teaching our students to believe that they are not creative. She emphasised that we need a scientific explanation of these three creative processes to effectively support and encourage creativity.
She mentioned that creative ideas can be generated by first generating lots and lots of ideas, and then throwing out the bad ones. Well, I’ve already citing this idea several times over the past 10 days, so I guess this means that I like it.
