Jennymackness.wordpress.com Website Review

Although the final week of the E-Learning 3.0 course is almost over, I haven’t yet finished thinking about the penultimate week on Amy is a creativity expert, who tries to ‘make’ something every day. She believes in remix as a culture, transparency of work and published a creativity handbook for teachers, which has recipes for creative thinking and has been designed to be remixable. Teachers are encouraged to take a prompt, work with it and share it with a given hashtag. Interestingly, Amy said that a community was growing around this hashtag, which is what Stephen thought could happen around the #el30 hashtag for this course, when the topic focussed on community. Stephen sees creativity as pattern recognition and Amy suggested that creativity is being able to see juxtapositions and relationships that Amy also believes that constraints help creativity and that learners should be encouraged to articulate why they made what they made. I’m not sure about this. Whilst I can see the value of articulating learning processes for the learner, a part of me says that a work of ‘art’ should be able to speak for itself, and doesn’t need to be accompanied by the artist’s explanation, but I think it depends on what the work of art is. A question has just entered my head – Is art that is created online, using technical tools, always conceptual art?  This question feels significant to me, but at the moment I can’t put my finger on why. For Amy a computer can create art, but she asks where is the backstory that touches her heart and makes the emotional connection. I think this is why she feels that learners should be encouraged to explain their art. She says we are craving experience rather than stuff and agrees with Stephen that the creation of the content is part of the content. I can see that the creation of content is part of the content and that art should touch the heart and make an emotional connection, but I am still not convinced that this needs articulating.