The book discusses creativity as thinking outside the box. Essentially, it is building on something that is already established and coming up with a new form of doing things. I always look at the iPod and the iPhone as a great example of creativity. A portable music player was not a new idea – cassette players (walkmans) and CD players (discmans) were very popular, and as the digital age grew, it was bound to happen. Then of course the iPhone just combined and iPod and a cell phone. Of course a lot of the selling points in it are the sleek designs and interfaces with touch screen, but the idea of it is very creative – combining old ideas with new technology.
Personally, I applied that concept a few years ago, my first semester of junior college. We were doing an ENGLISH 1A paper and the professor told us to think outside the box for sources on our topic. I went to Youtube which was a brand new website at the time. Back then there was a lot less users online, and it was more informative than what it is now.. Or at least, there was less silly stuff. I got video clips of a documentary on electric cars and used that as source material. My professor was very impressed and I can remember him writing down the URL of the site for everyone to check out for their topics as well.
I always remember this because Youtube has grown into a phenomena but at the time I got creative and used it as a new resource to write a paper. Now plenty of scholars use it for source material and it’s a very well-known website.
Hi Happy Waiter :)
ReplyDeleteYour example of YouTube was an excellent way to show how a concept unrelated to your task helped support its content. In class notes, the professor mentioned one aspect of creativity as "an underlying, unifying system beneath the surface of apparently disparate, unrelated phenomena. This unifying system means numerous ways of getting to same place" By using YouTube links for a topic, it showed how the subject of English meets online sources. Video clips are a relatively new obession on the web, and prior to YouTube's popularity this was definately thinking outside of the box for material to work with. Great post!
Hey there Waiter. I thought you did a good job on your post for this week and you defined creativity very well. I thought that it was really neat that you talked about youtube as a scholarly source. At first I thought "is this person serious", but as I read through your post and thought about it I realized that you have a very valid point. Youtube is the place that many people go when they want to find things out. There are many educational videos that are posted on the website and available for people to view. I thought that this idea really hit the nail on the head when it came to being creative.
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