Symposium on Creativity: Synectics Presentation by NMC Fellow Ted Kahn
The Friday schedule for the NMC Symposium on Creativity in Second Life opened with a very special presentation by SynapticWizard Karas (aka Ted M. Kahn) of DesignWorlds for Learning, Inc. but also the very first NMC Fellow. Ted brought us a classic theoretial concept of Synectics into the virtual space through this session and his activities.
Synectics, Everywhere and a Virtual Museum of the Future: Educreation in Second Life
This session will give a very brief overview of the history of research on creativity—the personal, process, product, environmental, and social dimensions—and its application to education and learning. Two specific approaches to developing creative thinking and innovation practices will be introduced: "synectics," developed by the late W.J.J. Gordon et al., involves the use of personal and fantasy metaphor for both learning and discovery. "Everywhere," developed by Hebrew University Professor Emeritus of Education, M. D. Caspi, includes the design of a set of spaces and methodologies to experience, develop and enhance creative self-education.
Since Ted shared with us a PowerPoint file whose images were imported into Second Life for this session, and we were able to record his session, this is combined in Slideshare to bring you the presentation with the session audio:
The last part of this session included an activity where participants engaged in Synectic brainstorming.
In addition, the chat portion of the session is also available:
http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=71
Ted delivered his presentation with help from his colleagues at Stanford University -- and shared a photo that showed the set up he used and assistance from Alisha Martynov (aka Sona Chaudhuri, an intern with the NASA CoLab) and Caroline Gainey (aka Dr. Martha Russell with the Stanford University Media X project).
During the session, Ted showed some video clips from Why Man Creates, the 1968 film by Saul Bass -- since it is copyrighted, the portions played is edited out in the audio above, but you can find a preview of the film on YouTube.
This was a first presentation for Ted in Second Life, and he did wonderful! In fact, the day before when we rehearsed, we felt his "just of Orientation Island" avatar needed some dressing up, which was easy with the free outfits we showed him available in Farnsworth Station on NMC Conference Center:
