Webinar on serendipitous learning with Jane Hart

Last week we discussed the term 'serendipity' in our learning trajectory on social media. One participant thought this might be a country in Africa :). Serendipity doesn't seem to be a very commonly known term for learning professionals, at least not in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, it is something that deserve more attention in my opinion. Therefore we are organising on December 15th from 20-00-21.30 hours Amsterdam time a webinar with Jane Hart, international expert in social learning and writer of the 'social learning handbook'.

What is serendipitous learning and how might it this type of learning be stimulated through the use of social media? Definition from wikipedia: Serendipity is finding something unexpected and useful while searching for something else. The word was introduced in English by Horace Walpole in the 18th century, in a letter talking about a story he read: the three princes of Serendip. In that context serendipity is associated with the capability to draw conclusions from apparent coincidences. In other words: smart, prepared people are better capable of making discoveries based on coincidental circumstances.  The discovery of both penicilline and the post-it notes are known examples of discoveries by serendipity.   

Post-its are an example of serendipity (accidental discoveries): the glue from the post-its was already discovered by researcher Dr. Spence Silver, small sticky bullets. Because there is only a small proportion of the bullets in contact with the surface, this provides a layer which sticks but is easy to remove too. The intention of Dr. Silver, however, was to make a very strong glue. Hence the practical application of this glue was not immediately apparent.  The real invention was by Art Fry. The story goes that Fry was frustrated about the bookmarks that kept falling from his book. In a moment of Eureka he thought of using Silver's glue to make a solid bookmark which is easy to remove.  Source: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-it

A good illustration of the fact that serendipity is not about finding weird and unexpected information but is about making the connections, finding applications without the context of your own work. Social media is excellent for stimulating serendipity, not only at the level of new inventions, but also at the leven of finding creative solutions for problems in your own work.  Jane Hart has written extensively about these possibilities and calls these workers using social media:  'the smart worker'. Click on the following links if you want to know more:

• 1 – The Smart Worker learns continuously as she does her job
• 2 – The Smart Worker wants immediate access to his performance problems
• 3 – The Smart Worker is happy to share what she knows
• 4 – The Smart Worker relies on a trusted network of friends and colleagues
• 5 – The Smart Worker learns best with and from others
• 6 – The Smart Worker keeps up-to-date with what is happening in his industry or profession
• 7 – The Smart Worker constantly strives to improve her productivity
• 8 – The Smart Worker thrives on autonomy

In addition to working smarter I would also like to emphasize the creativity aspect. Social media offers many new connections, but the art is making the connection to your own situation and coming up with new solutions to old problems. For instance, you can stimulate serendipity by looking across various disciplines. Social media can play a large role is this. Here's an example of spaziale, space where Naomi den Besten is blogging about the connections between process and spatial design . Below you find an interesting TedTalk from Joris Luyendijk (thanks Josien!) talking about  'share your learning curve'. Share your learning proces (for instance via a blog), start from zero and be curious. By sharing it, you create new avenues for unexpected connections.


Would you like to work with the concepts of the smart worker or serendipitous learning in your organisation? Then you should definitely read Jane Hart's blogpost: 10 steps for working smarter with social media, helping you with steps to take in an organisation.
 
Are you interested in joining the webinar? Please find more information here.

Some ideas on Innovation versus creative thinking

Image via Wikipedia

In Wageningen I attended the launch of the Centre for Development Innovation (previously Wageningen International) with a talk by John Elkington, a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development. I enjoyed his definition of sustainable development: imagine the world in 2050 with 9 billion inhabitants and think back what decisions we should make now to make that world possible... He mentioned social enterpreneurs (and social intrapreneurs working within companies) as the key people to drive innovation. In his book they are called the 'unreasonable people'. Innovation often doesn't start within the system, but on the edges or outside the system.

I made me wonder about innovation and the way I use the term. It's probably become another fad word with many different meanings. In the innovation 2.0 group on LinkedIn there was a discussion about 7 months ago about the definition of innovation. One person said: Innovation is the succesful introduction of an 'invention'. A bit the Willie Wortel definition of innovation I guess :). Someone else introduced the term 'social innovation'. And what's the difference between change en innovation? One definition shared was: Innovation differs from 'normal change' because a prevaling thinking pattern is disrupted.

My interest is not so much in innovative products and services but in stimulating professionals to continue innovating their thinking and not to get stuck in their thinking pattern. Maybe creative thinking is a better name for that. An example: this afternoon we played a game in which you have to guess. My daughter had to guess 'pyama's'. She got stuck because she mentioned all the clothes you put in daytime (shoes, sweater, socks) but forgot that you also put on clothes at night. She needed a hint to think about that and it was suddenly so logical for her. In Ethiopia I once did an exercise with a rope, which needs creative thinking to get the solution. One of the farmers was the first to find the solution- not the development workers. That's creative thinking if you don't stay within the limits. Creative thinking is not something you do on your own, but you rather need to be challenged.

In my painting class, there are various forms of painting that stimulate you to paint with a new perspective like:

• Draw without looking at your paper, just look at the model
• Use paper snippets in stead of paint
• Paint in negative (make everything light dark and everything dark light)
• Paint upside down
• Use only lines for shading (form oriented)
  
• Draw with a ruler (teaches you the direction of lines)
• Rotate your drawings and work on somebody else's drawings

A nice toolkit with forms to stimulate this kind of creative thinking (in Dutch) is Samen vernieuwen in de praktijk by Verdonschot, Keursten and van Rooij. Full of techniques and methods to stimulate creative thinking. (also for reasonable people :).

Heike Sperling on visual music and limerence

My second life-blogging blogpost! Heike Sperling works for the Institute for Music and Media. (IMM) She teaches visual music.

She talks about 3 subjects:

1. Her institute IMM

2. Visual Music

3. Current research project: music and limerence (?)

When she studied there were no computers. MTV started when she was in her 20's. Then works as a creative director. In the 90's she worked with clips and invested in experimental music videos. Now Managing Music Director of IMM.

1. IMM- based in Germany

Evolved from training sound engineers. Since a decade the IMM has incorporated video, which is unique in Germany. Sounds and visuals have different languages, so there is mutual learning between the students and herself. In October two new bachelor will be launched: program music and media, the other sound and media. The idea is to bring the two cultures together to inspire each other. Students enhance their personalities on the basis of an instrument.

2. Visual Music

Term is 90 years old. Visual music refers to the use fo musical structures in visual imagery. Many aspect of music are visual, think of the covers etc. From experimental films. Audio and visuals are considered as equally important. This is not common. They take a close look at the coherence between technical innovation, new artistic languages and contents. this requires constant dialogue and reflection. She learns a new language from the musicians. Audio and visuals together should be more than the sum. She shows a visual music clip called light/speed by Maurice Braun one of their students. The clip won a the visual music award. (she didn't tell us this, but I saw it when googling!). In visual music the musician and visual person need to communicate because they can not understand each other. the goal is to develop assertiveness, self awareness and communication skills, so visual music is rather the stepping stone, not the goal.

3. The next project: Limerence

Limerence is an involuntary coginitive and emotional state in which a person feels an intense romantic desire for another person (Dorothy Tennov). (in English: to have a crush)...

She is the only female teacher, all 40 students are male. So she thought to study a cliche topic for a woman: romantic love. It is a sort of tabu in the scientific world to talk about it. Limerence involves acute longing for reciprocation, and a general intensity of feeling that leaves other concerns in the background, amongst others. Love has been called a madness, which implies loss of control and inspires fear. Limerence hence conflicts with the idea that human beings are free and rational creatures. 85% of populair music concerns love and limerence. Limerence as an ideal is financially profitable. She will cook up a question for a project, whose ingredients will be identity, society and interface. Interface looking at the connection between limerence and music. Why is it so connected? Falling in love has the same effect as cocaine. Have you seen Stanley Kubric's films? If not, you have to see them as soon as possible.

I ask her whether she encounter a lot of conflicts between the two world, audio and visuals. She does encounter conflict all the time, but sees conflict not as something negative, but the reason to dialogue. Musicians sometimes say she doesn't understand at all. Especially when both are equal, you need to work through your conflicts. That's exactly what makes her so interested in it.

Reversing familiar ways of working stimulates creativity

During my last painting class, we did an excercise painting our model in negative (black= white and vice versa), a very good exercise that turns your thinking and way of looking at a model upside down. When I reversed later, it took some time to get used to 'normal' painting.

At Picnic, I was suddenly asked to interview Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon.com for the Picnic daily newspaper. We had only 5 minutes, I didn't have a clue who he was, so I proposed to do it with someone together, so Kerim Satirli and I worked together. My 'normal' interview mode is to listen to a person for a long time (eg. during a presentation or conversation), understand his view and then do an informed interview. In this case, we were advised to ask personal questions about his Picnic experience. Soon we found out the question: 'what's an idea that struck you so far?' didn't work because he had just arrived! Reflecting back, I think Werner might have been surprised that I asked him questions like 'what brings you to Picnic' when he is invited as keynote speaker :). But that may be refreshing too (hopefully!). The rest was improvisation.

The collaboration worked out well, without knowing eachother since Kerim knew the context better than I did, he had a video camera, I had a laptop, I started the questions and he added another one.

You can find our interview on the weblog of Kerim Satirli, the video will be there too- soon. The most interesting thing he said was that the way social media enterprises start is changing so rapidly, you don't need a lot of money to start something. On the other hand, everyone seems to want to design the next youtube or facebook and there needs to be more attention for sustainable models. I feel very much like a newcomer here, because I'm not a start-up, but rather a user of social media! (and not knowing the heros of the crowd like Werner Vogels..)

Paul Keller about Creative Commons

This is my first attempt at live blogging, I've never been in a conference or workshop where it's allowed to sit and type during a presentation.. I'm at the European Bloggers Lab of Picnic 2008 and Paul Keller from Knowledgeland is going to talk about Creative Commons. He has a t-shirt of Che Guevara, who wrote the motor cycle diaries, which is in a way one of the first weblogs...

The revolution of the internet is that it enabled small organisation and individuals to publish like all the big players leading to a more level playing field. No technical barriers left from getting your message across if you have a message and can write well- you can blog. Previously specialists in publishing were publishing and had access to lawyers etc to deal with copyrights. Copyright law had evolved as a complex system over the 19th and 20th century. Now come the internet where every body can copy, and suddenly these regulations apply to ordinary citizens.

Copyright basics: it is an exclusive right to interdict any uses of the copyrighted work. It arisen when a work of sufficient originality is created. Expires 70 years after the death of the author. It protects authors, artists, etc. Technical protection measures (DRM) forms a protective layer on top of it. Copyrights protect people to stimulate them to create.

Two types of copyrights:

• Right to reproduce, modify or broadcast
• Moral rights- to protect the integrity of her personality

Exceptions: the right to make quotations with proper attribution, educational exceptions and private copying, public interest, reuse of press materials by the press.

Now- there's an explosion of creativity for other motivations than rent seeking that's not really recognised by the copyrights. For most people the problem is not being copied, the problem is not being read/seen/ copied enough.. it limits authors and access to orphan works.

Creative commons was set up in 2002 by US non-profit corporation (by Prof. Lawrence Lessig) similar to open source licenses. As long as you adhere to certain principles, you can use it freely. Now in 44 countries though the concept of national licenses may be outdated. There are now more than 250 million CC licensed objects available on the internet, like good quality pictures on flickr. There are 6 different licenses that allow sharing, or transfer the work into another format. Give proper attribution to original author. licensor can choose if she wants to limit this to non-commercial uses of the work or include commercial purposes as well. You can choose to allow performance of derivative works. See the 6 core licenses here. Important is that they do not limit the 'fair use' rights and do not exclude the use of other licenses simultaneously.

Good news: Adam Curry has a flickr account with a creative commons account! Which the tabloids took to use in an article. Adam sued them and won (because it was commercially used), which was the first court case involving a creative commons license.

- By the way life blogging doesn't distract me it keeps me quite focused! though during boring parts you start to do other things on your computer and that's really distracting.. I wonder why the topic of copyright always seems slightly boring to me whereas it seems important enough.

Serious Creativity

I read Edward de Bono's Serious Creativity after someone was raving about it when we asked people to mention their favorite literature. Some time later, another person said she started reading it too and I became curious. Though I heard about his the six thinking hats before, it seemed a little simple to me.

What I enjoyed about this book was the thorough explanation of the theoretical basis of creative or lateral thinking. Creative thinking as in 'unexpected' and 'change'. Our patterns of perception guide what we see and what we think. Creative thinking is walking 'off the beaten track'. I became very enthousiastic when he linked creativity to humour; in a joke we are also taken on a surprising track. But creative thinking is not yet about crazy ideas, there must be a 'logical link-back' to our beaten track, to make it valuable.

Some misperceptions tackled:
1. Creativity is a natural talent and cannot be taught
2. Creativity comes from the rebels
3. Right brain/left brain concept
4. Art, artists and creativity
etc.

I think that happens too when you work across cultures, your 'beaten track' way of thinking gets challenged. If you manage to make the link back to your own way of thinking, you'll have enriched your ideas and you'll have widened your number of thinking tracks for other situations. You'll be able to see more alternatives and will have enlarged your imagination.

The second part of the book deals with tools and techniques. Some sound funny - take a word from the dictonary - but I tried and it works! Some well throught through session are presented mixing individual and group effort for optimum result.

The last part with creativity in organizations. I'm not sure I'd advise an organisation to have a 'concept manager' but I definitely thinking organizations can look at their processes critically and see where some more creative thinking may help move general thinking forward.