"The point here is this: Were it not for those “disordered” genes, you wouldn’t have extremely creative, successful people.  Being in the absolute middle of every trait spectrum, not too extreme in any one direction, makes you balanced, but rather boring.  The tails of the spectrum, or the fringe, is where all the exciting stuff happens.  Some of the exciting stuff goes uncontrolled and ends up being a psychological disorder, but some of those people with the traits that define Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, ADHD, and other psychological conditions, have the fortunate gift of high cognitive control paired with those traits, and end up being the creative geniuses that we admire, aspire to be like, and desperately need in this world.

…If we were to be able to identify the genes for Schizophrenia, or for Bipolar Disorder, or for ADHD… would we want to eliminate them? If we were making a “designer baby”, would you choose those genes to be added into your child’s genome?

I say yes."

"But even if the problems are different, human nature remains the same. And most humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.

To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work."

"So imagine a commitment to learning that involved making regular learning walks with high school students as a normal part of the "school" day. Now, these learning walks should not be confused with walking tours, which are designed based on planned outcomes. One walks to point X in order to see object or artifact Y. The points are predetermined, hierarchical in design.<br />
<br />
Instead, learning walks are rhizomatic. They are inherently about being in the middle of things and coming to learn what could not been predetermined. Learning walks are part of the "curriculum" for instructional seminar (which I described here)."

[My comments cross-posted here: http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/7182110515/walking-and-learning ]

"The sway that the subject of technology has over discussions about education and learning, is giving me increasing cause for concern. Absent from the explanations of new understandings of knowledge and learning, and their arguments for change, is some balance to the largely utopian ideals. The sub headings in the 'entrepreneurial learning' article for example, read like evangelical slogans, without a single word for caution or circumspect (that I could see by scanning). What would one include to strike a balance? Most obvious would be Postman, in particular his warnings in Technonopoly, but their could and should be many others. Surely we agree that technology gives potential to all traits of humanity, not just the bits we'd like to pick out."

"Many of us find gamification not offensive to game *developers* but an insult to Actual Games. And, for some of us, an insult to actual people who are the targets of gamification efforts. Not denying that they can often *work* given that slot machines work, quite well, by employing many of the same underlying principles.

If gamification were merely *not that useful* from a long-term, sustainability perspective, many of us would not care. But it risks de-valuing some of the very thing we-society, educators, developers, designers, etc. -- actually care about. In the wrong context, gamification can cause a short-term sugar rush of engagement followed by a crash from which a company's "brand" may not fully recover. Not if they ever care to have sustained engagement based on ACTUAL value…

…read every word of Dan Pink's Drive…[and] for a REAL understanding of the difference between shallow and deep engagement, read "FLOW""

"If the sources of genius remain something of a riddle, Robinson is emphatic about what does not contribute to creative excellence: higher education…academy's emphasis on specialization & its "inherent tendency to ignore or reject highly original work that does not fit existing paradigm" is an impediment to creativity…points to several intriguing studies. One, by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psych at UC Davis, suggests that creativity flourishes best among those w/ equivalent of 2 years of an undergraduate education—no less, no more. Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate U, has also looked at the relationship btwn education & innovation. In his 1996 book, Creativity: Flow & the Psychology of Discovery & Invention, he argued that formal education has historically had little effect on the lives of creative people. "If anything," he wrote, "school threatened to extinguish the interest & curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls.""

"… [E]udaemonia, the good life, which is what Thomas Jef­fer­son and Aris­to­tle meant by the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness. They did not mean smil­ing a lot and gig­gling. Aris­to­tle talks about the plea­sures of con­tem­pla­tion and the plea­sures of good con­ver­sa­tion. Aris­to­tle is not talk­ing about raw feel­ing, about thrills, about orgasms. Aris­to­tle is talk­ing about [the new-ish psy­cho­log­i­cal the­ory of flow], and that is, when one has a good con­ver­sa­tion, when one con­tem­plates well. When one is in eudae­mo­nia, time stops. You feel com­pletely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You’re one with the music."

"This study uses an adapted gatekeeper‐model by Csikszentmihalyi to reveal the different stages of the innovation process and to build a theoretical framework of the relationship between both parties. Through the complexity and the interconnection of all the different aspects it is designed as a “door opener” to a rich field of further research as well as it is aimed at helping practitioners understand the innovation process within a complex and dynamic environment."

"The clarifying metaphor that strikes me, however, is that autonomy, mastery, and purpose — which are really the core ingredients of generative thinking — can be made available to students if we can get our young people out of the single-file line that has formed in front of the counter and motivate them to grab an apron and explore what’s behind the counter."

"People have been “gaming” life in the pursuit of fun and profit for centuries. From collecting toys in cereal packets to gathering air miles via credit card purchases, it’s possible to give an activity “hooks.” What videogames bring is an unprecedented degree of automation and feedback: an aspiration towards a mental state first described in the 1970s by the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as “flow.” This, he argued, was the mental state experienced by a top athlete executing a perfect sequence of manoeuvres or a musician losing themselves in performance; a kind of “optimal experience” gained from reacting to constant, shifting stimuli. It’s a state of harmony to which most forms of play aspire, and a perfect metaphor for the balance of rules, actions and consequences that all videogame designers aim for."

"What would it mean to create schools in which one of the explicit goals was to create as many opportunities as possible for students to experience flow? What would that mean for bell schedules, required classes, and standardized tests?

"Flow, as defined by Dale McGowan, is when we’re completely in the moment, so intensely focused on the activity at hand that we lose track of time. It’s one of the most deeply satisfying and meaningful states we can enter.

"What makes you come back to the game for “one more try” or “just a little longer”? Once again, it can be tied back to the pleasure centre (nucleus accumbens), as we saw with the enjoyment of all games. ... I call this phenomena of compulsion in play Grip, and consider it to be a complimentary behaviour to Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, which I deconstructed in neurobiological terms the other week. If Flow is the constant and steady supply of the “reward protein” dopamine from the pleasure centre associated with a period of intense focus, then Grip occurs as a team-effort between the pleasure centre and the decision centre (orbit-frontal cortex), two parts of the brain that are very closely linked. The decision centre generates rewards (dopamine from the pleasure centre) when we make good decisions, and thus encourages us to learn good strategies and behaviours."

"Social theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow.""

"Furthermore, people who bring about an acceptable novelty in a domain seem able to use well two opposite ways of thinking: the convergent and the divergent. Convergent thinking is measured by IQ tests, and it involves solving well-defined, rational problems that have one correct answer. Divergent thinking leads to no agreed-upon solution. It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most workshops try to enhance."

"mental state of operation in which person is fully immersed in what s/he is doing, characterized by feeling of energized focus, full involvement, success in the process of the activity. Proposed by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi"