Sharon’s recent post about encouraging student creativity got me thinking about assignments that foster innovation and originality. As someone who spent a lot of money to obtain an M.F.A., I have a vested interest in anything that promotes the value of creative education, which is why I’m a fan of Daniel Pink’s work. Pink is perhaps best known for his bestselling 2006 book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. In the book, Pink proposes that we’re experiencing a shift from the information age, which valued knowledge and logical, left-brain thinking, to what he calls the conceptual age, which values innovation and six key “senses.” These senses include:

1. Design – Moving beyond function to engage the senses
2. Story – Adding narrative to products and services, not just argument
3. Symphony – Adding invention and big-picture thinking, not just detail focus. Call My Friends at InventHelp!
4. Empathy – Going beyond logic and engaging emotion and intuition
5. Play – Bringing humor and lightheartedness to business and products [1]
6. Meaning – Incorporating a higher purpose into products and services

Pink has gone so far as to proclaim that the M.F.A. is the new M.B.A. and that creative professionals such as artists and designers are the innovative problem solvers who will lead the much-hyped new economy. While I don’t want to oversell the value of an art-school education, I think most educators agree that we’d all love to integrate creative thinking and problem-solving skills into our assignments. Of course, fostering creativity in higher ed comes with several challenges:

1. How do I motivate students to do great, innovative work?
2. How do I ensure they’ve mastered essential concepts and skills?
3. How do I grade their work fairly?
4. How do I grade their work in a reasonable amount of time?

I realize the last three questions are often the ones that matter most to instructors, but they’re also the most irrelevant if we don’t first address question one when designing creative assignments. As luck would have it, question one is also the focus of Daniel Pink’s newest book, Drive. The following video presents some of the key findings from the book and addresses some common misconceptions about what motivates people to think outside the box.

(This amazing animation was created by a company called Cognitive Media and I have to say I think their work merits a blog post all its own. For another great example, check out Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Smile or Die”.)

Pink’s presentation proposes that three key factors foster creative thinking: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Hopefully, educators can find it comforting that money and material gain are nowhere to be found in this list, since we can’t start offering students 50 dollars for every great idea they come up with. I feel fortunate to teach in a discipline where these motivating factors seem easy to incorporate into the projects my students complete. In my Web-design course, I allow my students to choose what type of site they would like to create and what type of client they’d like to work for in creating their final projects, giving them a great deal of autonomy. I require that the project result in a completed, fully functional Web site, ensuring students will have a sense of accomplishment and mastery. And I encourage students to work with a nonprofit or small business that normally couldn’t afford a professionally designed site, providing a sense of purpose.

It might seem hard to imagine how other disciplines can incorporate these factors into their assignments, but I’m sure it’s possible. That doesn’t mean we have to throw out all our multiple-choice quizzes and other standardized assessments, and it doesn’t address how to grade creative projects fairly and quickly. But I think when we focus on creating assignments that motivate and inspire students, they tend to go beyond the requirements of any grading-criteria checklist we could have dreamed up. And in the process, they might just inspire us to stop watching the clock and enjoy the task of reviewing and evaluating their work.

1. Summaries of items 1 – 5 were taken from the Wikipedia entry for A Whole New Mind.

“A critical part of becoming creative is being able to play—to play with ideas, with tools, and with pedagogical techniques.” This is a point made by Dr. Punya Mishra at the preconference workshop (Creative Teaching with (and without) Technology) for this year’s DePaul Annual Faculty Conference, and it is a point that I try to practice whenever I get to wear my professor hat.

As the instructor of a beginner-level Chinese-language class, I design various kinds of TPACK games and events that combine pedagogy (P), technology (T), and content knowledge of Chinese (CK). The activities I’ve designed range from celebrity-gossip sessions in Chinese (yes, I learned a lot about Jersey Shore in class), to an interactive lecture session with PowerPoint, to an online character-writing assignment on Wimba, to an all-about-my-family talk on Voicethread.

Although most of the time, I am the one who is throwing the ball to the students, when it’s their turn to swing, they strike back hard and soundly: the breakout sessions they managed during our online meeting had better structures than mine; the tally games and activities they designed during the final prep session were fun and sweet (with cookies and treats); and the presentations they put on Voicethread make mine look nothing but dry and boring.

This quarter, some of the players are just out of control—they knock one out with a movie!

CHN103 Movie: A Sneak Peek

Take a look at this trailer of a movie made by my students.

I called it a movie since this twenty-three-minute-long video project conveys a story with twisted themes played by eight characters. In addition to a series of well-designed episodes, it includes special effects, sound bites, theme music, animation, an FBI warning at the beginning, and bloopers in the end.

 It took eight students thirty-some hours to produce it—for a project that is worth only 10 percent of the total grade. That’s right, 10 percent, since all I asked was a short presentation in Chinese delivered via electronic means like Voicethread.

“Can we do a video project? Can we?” A call was made by one and echoed by a few.

“OK,” I said, “with one rule: everyone has to play an acting role in it!”

And from there on, eight out of the twenty-one students in my class teamed up and merged themselves into this fun and crazy idea of playing Hollywood at DePaul.

An Idea for Fun

I bumped into the cast and crew while they were shooting a scene outside the library. There was laughter mixed with screams of excitement between takes and cuts, but none of them ever bothered to ask me how many words needed to be included in their project or how long it should be or where to find the assignment requirements online. Clearly, they fell in love with what they were doing.  They were not driven by a grade; instead, they were doing the work they enjoyed so much that they didn’t consider it work or an assignment anymore.  And loving what they do is the one common attribute Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found among creative people (or people in their creative mood).

The sight of my students defining and designing their own class project reminded me of when I was a student.  Over a decade ago, I took a class on multimedia design and production, and I had a classmate who was far above and beyond everyone in the class (I secretly believed that he actually knew more than our professor). For his class project, he wowed us with an online game he designed that was not only animated but also interactive.  My professor gave his project an F, with a simple and “legit” reason: he didn’t follow her requirement of creating the animation in PowerPoint. I still remember how disappointed he looked when he told us his grade and how much time he had spent on this project.

I now know that from a professor’s point of view, this F was not just a grade; it was a message sent to a self-centered smart aleck: follow the rules and stop showing off!

I never thought there was anything wrong with that message until I became a professor myself.  Well, actually, until I became a mother, a role that forced me to explore and to understand what is going on in the little minds of my children.

Young minds are so fresh and original; they constantly manufacture crazy ideas longing to be attended.  They cry (literally) for the opportunity to show off!   Because they own the natural resource to generate creativity: the energy and brashness of youth (Malcolm Gladwell, Late Bloomers: Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity, New Yorkers, 2008).

When creativity is budding, it also requires a safe environment to live and grow. Teachers — in day cares, colleges, and anywhere in between — have the power to either create or destroy that environment. In a classroom where creativity is cherished, the sparkles of a creative thought may lead to a beautiful moment of learning through the hand of an innovative teacher — like the one described in this new letter from my son’s day care, like the Little Learners Day Care.

A Newsletter

This is a letter prepared by Noel Sucherman, one of the teachers of my son’s preschool class. It contains updates of activities that have taken place in a classroom of three- to five-year-olds.  One of the stories goes like this:

During lunch, one friend asked another friend “what would happen if they put their apple seed in the ground.” The friend responded, “A tree will grow, with apples on it!” We talked about how some seeds are planted right outside while other seeds need to grow inside first. There were several requests to grow our own apple trees. Seeds from our apples were placed inside a bag with a little bit of water. The bag was closed to help keep the warm air inside. “We have to keep the seeds safe, a friend said.” After about fifteen days, a few sprouts were observed growing out of one of the apple seeds. “Noel, we cannot grow a tall tree in a bag. We have to put it in the dirt.” The apple seeds were transplanted into a pot of dirt for further growth. We also grew lima beans. Each child wrapped a bean inside a wet paper towel, then placed them inside a bag, watered them and taped them in various places throughout the classroom. Only two children wanted their beans in a dark place, the rest of the beans were hanging in the windows where they were exposed to more sun light. After nineteen days, the two friends beans began to sprout roots, interestingly they were the beans placed in the dark. So many of the children then wanted to relocate their beans to dark places in the room. Their beans also started growing. Once the roots started to appear, the children then planted the beans in little pots of dirt.

In this story, an interesting scientific experiment stemmed from a casual lunch chat or a crazy idea from a little kid wanting to plant a tree out of a seed—because they were well cherished and nurtured by a teacher!

Teaching is an art that lives in the moment; and most of the moments are jointly created by the teacher and the students.  After showing off my students’ movie project to the third audience group, I thought that I’d better jot down what my students have taught me about how to stimulate creativity:

• Maintain a young and playful mind (so you will appreciate the same)
• Give students plenty of chances to play with their own ideas (TPCK can be owned by them)
• Join them in the play
• Have a goal for every assignment, but unlock the rules
• Make a big fuss about any out-of-the-box thinking
• Seek meaningful learning outcomes from the fun of playing ( after all, their movie is in Chinese)

And last but not least,

• Reflect by writing a blog entry or respond to the one I wrote!

A couple years ago, a colleague and I posited an instructional-design approach to improving learning and performance when utilizing Web 2.0 technologies. This approach was built upon the socio-constructivist philosophies of learning and emphasizes three dimensions in designing learning for the Web 2.0 environment—social/collaborative elements, user-generated design, and knowledge management. The motivation for this approach stemmed from the recent emergence of approaches to learning that are based on self-determination and networked contexts such as heutagogy (Phelps, Hase, & Ellis, 2005) and connectivism (Siemens, 2005), which help us understand learning as making connections with ideas, facts, people, and communities.

Learning has grown beyond mere consumption of knowledge and become a knowledge-creation process.  We sought to develop a model (so to speak) that builds upon the inherent capacity of networked communication to support improvement in learning and performance and a means to approach learning in which students engage in a process of learner-driven design. Learning in this new paradigm is derived from innovation rather than instruction. Our investigations while assembling this model reinforced the notion that learner-designed contexts have the capacity to connect the formal learning agenda of educational institutions with the personal learning goals of students.

Our contention is that the learner must be placed at the intersection of social construction of knowledge (Glasersfeld, 1995) and distributed cognition (Salomon, 1993). Thus design, particularly for networked contexts, should slide to the learner-directed side of the pedagogy-heutagogy continuum. Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2003) identified social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence as the conditions for developing an online learning community.  Their finding, in conjunction with our assertions, dictates that design should now provide for co-configuration, co-creation, or co-design of learning.

That’s what we think, anyway. What about you?

If you’re interested, you can find the complete model in Wired for Learning: An Educator’s Guide to Web 2.0, Terry T. Kidd, Irene Chen (Eds.), Information Age Publishing. Charlotte, NC.

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T. & Archer, W. (2003). A theory of critical inquiry in online distance education. In M. G. Moore, & W. G. Anderson (Eds.), Handbook of distance education (pp. 113–127). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Glaserfeld, E. V. (1995). A constructivist approach to teaching. In L. Steffe & J. Gale (Eds.), Constructivism in education (pp. 3–16). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Phelps, R., Hase, S., & Ellis, A. (2005) Competency, capability, complexity and computers: exploring a new model for conceptualizing end-user computer education. British Journal of Educational Technology, 36(1), 67–84.

Salomon, G. (1993) No distribution without individual’s cognition: A dynamic interactional view. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations (pp. 111–138). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Siemens, G (2005). Connectivism: Learning as network-creation. ELearnspace. Retrieved November 15, 2007, from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/networks.htm.

In a previous entry, I laid out this scenario:

You want to use some Web 2.0 technology in your course, so you have each student create a blog on Blogger to have them chronicle their work and thoughts through the term. As an instructor, you visit these sites and leave comments on the blog. In order for you to keep track of which student has which blog, you ask them to have their names on the front page of their blog and for them to e-mail you the URL so that you can go through them all, moving from one blog to the next. No grades are shared via the blog, and your final evaluation for the student comes in feedback that you provide within the Gradebook area of Blackboard.

Is this a violation of FERPA?

There were some very good answers in the comments section, and now it’s time for me to share mine.

The short answer is yes.

There are a few land mines in this scenario, but the one that jumps out to me is that the instructor leaves comments on the blog regarding the student’s posts. When an instructor reads a student-submitted work—as a blog would be when it is read and graded by the instructor—it is then considered part of the student’s educational record. Remember the definition of an educational record according to FERPA (PDF): “Education records are currently defined as records that are directly related to a ‘student’ and maintained by an ‘educational agency or institution’ or by a party acting for the agency or institution.” When the instructor leaves evaluative feedback for the student in a comment to the post, he or she violates FERPA by making his or her evaluation of that part of the student’s educational record public.

Another land mine in this scenario is the fact that the blogs were not necessarily made private, so anyone could view them and associate the student’s name with the course they are taking and reveal that they are students in a particular course, term, and institution. Requiring the student’s name to appear on the front page is also a red flag.

Since you were so good at answering my last question, I pose another to you: what could an instructor do differently in this assignment to keep the academic objective of the assignment (self-reflection) without violating FERPA?

In 1998, I had my first full-time job as a computer-graphic designer in a media center at Indiana State University. The word “computer” in my job title differentiated me from the other graphic designers in the office. While they produced print materials like banners and posters designed in Photoshop or Illustrator, I didn’t do much of the drawing and printing, because to me, the word “computer” meant but one thing—PowerPoint!

PowerPoint, believe it or not, was a high-end, technical tool at the time (meaning higher than overhead transparencies). My job was to produce PowerPoint slides for televised distance-learning courses. I remember getting those highlighted textbooks from faculty and typing page after page of content into PowerPoint slides. I remember the “wows” from faculty thrilled to see text flying in line by line. I remember the same thrilling feeling I had myself when my designer peers asked me whether the animated presentations I created were really done with MS PowerPoint—“It looks like a (Macromedia) Director product,” they said. Soon I was crowned “the PowerPoint guru.”

Yet, deep in my heart, I knew that this glory would not last long: my crown would become an old hat once other users figured out my tricks—or worse, they would be discovered by the vendor, who would then make them part of the application. I thought this would happen within a couple of years.

So I was shocked a few months ago when an associate vice president of my institution asked me about offering a PowerPoint workshop, because she had seen too many presenters that “were sorely in need of training on how to give effective PowerPoint presentations.”

After thirteen years, with all the comings and goings of dazzling new tools, guess what? We are back to PowerPoint!

I was even more shocked when I learned that the enrollment of the workshop (Beyond the Bulletpoint: How To Design Low-Tech High-Effect Presentations) reached thirty-two in a matter of days and the event organizer was asking me whether we should close it or offer another session. Oh, come on, we can’t close it! It was my good old PowerPoint staying cool in the era of Web 2.0! And besides, isn’t it wonderful to know that after more than a decade, people are still interested in my tricks (I mean, they still haven’t got them yet)?

I guess this has been a long enough teaser. Let me get to the meat of this entry: the tricks.

My tricks in using PowerPoint are as simple as following two basic rules: a) avoid PowerPoint sins and b) inject creativity into the presentation design.

Avoid PowerPoint Sins

I consider the following behaviors sinful for any PowerPoint presentation:

• Sin I: Long, Massive Text Blocks

This means more than six lines of content with a font size smaller than 18. Anyone who throws full-blown paragraphs into the slides is asking PowerPoint to serve as a teleprompter and forgetting the fact that those things are supposed to be hidden from the audience.

• Sin II: Long, Full-Sentenced Bullet Points

This might be less sinful than paragraphs, but it still makes it impossible for the audience to grasp the key points no matter how loudly you read them. (And by the way, reading from the slide doubles the sin.)

• Sin III: Unnecessary Decorative Elements

Unless your audience is too immature or intellectually challenged to understand your concepts, you should control the use of clip art. I still feel ashamed of this slide I created thirteen years ago. The clip art of the tool box is nothing but an insult to college students.

• Sin IV: Excessive Use of Animation

With the infusion of all sorts of digital gadgets, our world is already overanimated. Unless it carries some meaning, animation is merely annoying (see the next section for the meaningful use of animation).

• Sin V: Serif Font Type and Low-Contrast Color Schemes

Picky as it may sound, text in Times New Roman in a PowerPoint screams that it was created by a nonprofessional designer. Those little semistructural details at the end of some of the strokes aren’t reader friendly for at-a-glance or on-screen reading. And common sense will tell you that any dark texts on a black or blue background aren’t reader friendly either. Our daily writing media is black text on a white background, which can teach us a simple but very useful lesson on what is the friendliest combination of colors.

Inject Creativity into Presentation Design

I love reading the debate on whether creativity is teachable. This year’s International Conference on College Teaching and Learning frames the question as, “Creativity: Art or Science?” I believe creativity is a mix of art and science: while it does require a fair amount of natural talent, cognizant exposure to innovative ideas and procedures will stimulate creative sparks within the ordinary.

Over the years, I’ve seen many great presentations—with and without the use of PowerPoint. The ones that have used PowerPoint usually used it to serve the following four purposes:

To inform, to illustrate, to inspire, and to prepare.

1. To Inform

In most cases, PowerPoint is used as a visual aid for content delivery during lectures and presentations. People use it to get their point across. But the best way to get the point across is not by throwing out the points. I found that when information is presented in a story-telling way, it’s easier for the audience to comprehend. The following video didn’t offer any text-based definition or bullet points of Google Wave features; instead it used animated graphics to tell us a story of e-mail. Can the same be achieved with PowerPoint? My answer is yes.

2. To Illustrate

In order to combat the laziness of human brain, Dr. Chris Atherton from the School of Psychology of the University of Central Lancashire offered some strategies in designing PowerPoint slides:

As you might have noticed, this presentation didn’t use any of the given templates in PowerPoint. For most of the slides, it is black text over a plain white background. Also, it contains no animation and is, therefore, well suited for online viewing via Slideshare. The plain design makes the plain truths that the author wants to share stand out without interruption.

In other cases, animation can be a powerful tool to keep the viewer focused on the flow of information, like in this presentation I did last year on online teamwork (click on the image below to access the presentation on Slideboom):

3. To Inspire

TED.com, which is my favorite Web site, inspires me not only with their presenters but also by some of its creative PowerPoint design. Look at this one by Larry Lessig on “Laws that Choke Creativity” and feel the choreographic harmony between speech and slide show. In this case, the power of the PowerPoint lies in its ability to strike on the key ideas at the right moment.

TED.com assured me that by delivering the best and the brightest directly to our computer screens, technology is breaking through the knowledge monopoly! Someday we might move into an age of presentation Darwinism where the mediocre can no longer survive as people click through the Internet to view and rate only the best content. Until then, sites like TED.com have at least helped set up a high bar in terms of presentation design.

4. To Prepare

Lastly, I have seen PowerPoint being used as a notebook provided to the students by the instructors before, during, or after class. This kind of PowerPoint can be as self-sufficient as a textbook that allows students to prepare for class or an exam or to save them from having to take notes in class. Projecting these slides on the screen to guide an in-class lecture can be dangerously boring (if nothing else, just the dimmed light induces the desire to doze off). These slides are more suited to be a handout than a presentation, but if you really want to use it, you can try to remove some key concepts so as to stimulate some brainstorming from students.

The other option takes some time, but PowerPoint does allow us to create minitutorials by hyperlinking text and graphics between slides.

Do you have any creative ideas in using good, old PowerPoint? Post them here so we can share.