Thanks to Kevin McGuire who noted this talk from TED by Evelyn Glennie in a comment a few posts back - inspiring on so many levels, which is why I’m reposting it. Hard to pick out individual moments of greatness (her work on behalf of disabled children in music and education is remarkable), but one of the less prominent observations - that the harder you hold a drumstick, the more tired you’ll get and the less sound you’ll make - teaches a lot of lessons.

And here’s another one that I’ve been pointing people at recently - Tim Brown on creativity and play, reminding us - again - of what we once had as children, what we lose as adults, and giving us permission to be playful in the pursuit of innovation.

This survey as reported in the Guardian worries me. Even accepting the caveats noted by the writer, the fact that 29% of teachers disagree with this

Creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science national curriculum programmes of study and should not* be taught as science.

is grounds for real concern.

*oh, and the article misquotes this by omitting the “not” …

From a great blog on Britannica by Michael Vesch:

I marvel at what a remarkable achievement it is to bring hundreds of otherwise expressive, exuberant, and often rebellious youths into a single room and have them sit quietly in straight rows while they listen to the authority with the microphone. Such an achievement could not be won by an eager teacher armed with technology alone. It has taken years of acclimatizing our youth to stale artificial environments, piles of propaganda convincing them that what goes on inside these environments is of immense importance, and a steady hand of discipline should they ever start to question it. Alfred North Whitehead called it “soul murder.”

The other day, looking at some music theory workbooks (ah, the dear old ABRSM) destined for my wife’s piano pupils led me to thinking about how it is that every four-year-old is visually, verbally and sonically hyper-inventive, and yet by the time we’re adults we’re so out of touch with innovation that we need to attend courses and read books on it. The AB workbooks were a case in point - dull, neat, and so very adult, a shame to mess them up with anything as freeform as writing… and very intolerant of mistakes.

Taking a cue from some of the facilitation work we do in team training: so much education is on the basis of “yes, but…” - Yes, but you need to write neatly now. Yes, but that’s not the way to draw a face. Yes, but you’re only allowed to put these sounds together this way. At some point thinking about technique and mechanics is essential, of course, but how would it be if this were approached in the spirit of “yes, and…”. Yes, these words aren’t in the dictionary, but what might they mean? Yes, and if you take that bunch of notes and do this then you have all these new possibilities?

Lessons here for team and corporate innovation too … next post!

I was reminded by seeing this Rembrandt self-portrait in the flesh last weekend of the amazing and uplifting effect of outrageous virtuosity. Here’s the artist at around 22, painting one of his first self-portraits, in a way completely at odds with the more formal portraits he and others were producing at the time. Lit from behind, the hair details scratched into the paint, a gaze that’s felt rather than seen, and a wall as background whose texture takes on a life of its own.
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Love the way that in Google Mail, when you delete spam, the helpful related link so thoughtfully provided usually points to a recipe involving Spam. Who, for example, could resist these Savory Spam Crescent Rolls? Mmmmmm….maybe not tonight, dear.

Back from a holiday (long walks in Swiss mountains) to look alarmingly at the pile of books that’s built up before and during my trip. I like the way some schools/colleges give their students a reading week half way through a long term*, though I think in my case a reading month would barely do it.

Courtesy of JP’s blog, a stimulating article by Nicholas Carr - Is Google Making Us Stupid? - along with a set of rejoinders on The Edge from the likes of George Dyson and Jaron Lanier.

I like the article a lot (it passes all my criteria for non-fiction writing I wrote about a couple of weeks back). There’s a self-consciously contrarian side to it that goes too far - Carr seems to suggest there’s an evil conspiracy amongst software developers in general and Google in particular to overthrow Civilization As We Know It. I don’t think there’s an argument with his key thesis - that the nature of the way we interact with information on the web, and the way it’s replacing the sustained narrative of the media of yore with a multiplicity of fragments of information, changes the way we structure our attention, and changes the structure of thought and hence the mind. I’m not going to comment on it directly (read it!), but here are some of the resonances that it evoked for me, from my own experience and from other bits of reading and thinking I’ve done over the past few years
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The Eccles centre for American Studies, based in the British Library, hosts an annual lecture - the Douglas W. Bryant lecture - in memory of a former President of the BL’s American Trust. They’re given by international figures, the subjects ranging from political to economic and cultural concerns, and I’ve attended the last three or so.
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