Education and creativity

When my niece was 2 years old, she was absolutely in love with the Disney short film “Peter and the Wolf”, based on Tchaikowsky’s classical piece. She knew all the parts by heart and could match the instruments to the characters, and got really angry when we switched them when we sang with her.

One day she asked me to draw the characters. My drawing skills are practically inexisten, but I managed to draw a very simple Ivan (the cat) and Sonja (the duck), and could even sketch a skinny Peter. She then asked me to draw the wolf. Oops, I can’t draw a wolf, I told her – it was far too advanced for me! She just got the pen from my hand and doodled something on the page. ‘There’, she said, ‘there’s the wolf. It’s easy’.

What happened was that I was trying to be logical and rational and really draw something that would actually LOOK like a wolf. But Clara didn’t need that. She already had the wolf in her mind, and with my ‘adult mind’ I didn’t see that.

Why am I telling you this little anecdote? I remembered the story after watching this informal presentation given by Sir Ken Robinson during the TED talks in Monterrey, California. Here he talks about creativity and how schools systems in general work against it. A very interesting talk I would like to invite you to watch and reflect on. 

Houston, we have a problem!

 

Today I tried to insert a widget on the sidebar. I say ‘tried’, because after going back and forth a hundred times, I still couldn’t get it. I did manage to post the message ‘get cool widgets at Widgetbox’, but my cool widget never showed.

What I thought I was supposed to do was to get the widget html code on the widget website and insert it in one of the ‘text’ boxes we find when we click on ‘widgets’ here (after clicking on Presentation). When I checked ‘View Site’, the widget wasn’t there…

At first I thought I hadn’t copied the right code (there are two options) or the code right, though I was pretty sure I had highlighted the whole thing. But after trying over and over, the code was still appearing on the ‘widget’ box, but the widget itself was nowhere to be found on the blog.

I’ll have to get back to that later, as I’m leaving for a class… I’ll keep you posted. Wish I could get the widget posted! 

A few impressions…

Creating the first post was very easy. One great thing I found out was that posting a link here is actually easier than in Blogger, as they ask you whether you want it to open on another page. I always do, because then I make sure my reader will always go back to my main page, no matter how much he wanders off in cyberspace. With Blogger I must turn to html mode and insert the right code after the link (thanks for teaching me how to do that last year, Erika!). Here the whole process is much simpler!

I chose the default template (it’s a bit like those ice cream shops that offer you 200 different flavours – I get so lost with the variety of choices that I usually stick to vanilla). This template allows me to customize my header, so I used a picture I already had in my computer to make the blog a bit more personal. And then added a Tangram image: a cat, simply because it was one of the few pictures I found that faced the centre of the screen. I saw a cute one of a man running, but it was facing right and it looked as if he was actually running away from the blog! 

So there you go: two posts in 30 minutes. Now it’s time to get back to work…    More later!

Kicking off

Right, so here goes my first post. It’s not even the first, really, because I have deleted two old ones I had written a couple of months back, before abandoning the project altogether to open another blog in Blogger.

I’m still very much a Blogger person but I kind of like trying new blog hosts to see what they have to offer, how they differ from each other, what they have in common. This hands-on is actually very important as it helps me to choose the best platform to work with in different situations, blogging alone or with my students.

Last year I tried Multiply, which is really much more than a blog, and it was really fun. The problem was that sometimes, for no apparent reason, a post would take forever to load, and broadband connection has made me very impatient with slow-loading pages…

This time I first tried Edublogs, a host I hadn’t used yet. I signed up and they promised they would send a password to my email address, which never happened. I tried to sign up again (perhaps they hadn’t really registered it the first time?) but the message said the email and username had already been taken. Of course they had, it’s just that I couldn’t access them!

So it was back to WordPress. I know a lot of people who are huge fans, so I thought I should bring Tangram back to life. I guess it’s going to be a blog about creating a blog…

In case you’re curious about my other blogs (yes, I’m afraid it’s quite addictive), here’s the list:

Project Platypus - the blog I keep with/for my students

Movie Reviews - part of my master’s project

Tangram - the twin blog, where I post bits and pieces which, hopefully, will make sense when seen together…