Wise Words

Margaret Mead wrote:

" Never underestimate the power of a few committed individuals to change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

They are very wise words indeed. Jesus and his friends comes to mind.

CV Update

What a strange situation to be in. I have been forced to take voluntary retirement, yet have three years work in me till I am sixty-five and a half. I have taken my lump sum, yet find I am thinking about work as an academic more than before. I have come to realise all that an academic can be, and am now captivated by three jobs advertised at Brunel for lecturers who are "Creative Multimedia specialists." So I am going to apply. An ex-student, F, begged me to apply and several others have made encouraging noises.

What is going on? Ageism is supposed to be rife, but I see this as a chance to create the MSc in Multimedia, Animation and Creativity. So I have turned to my CV to update it and make it relevant. And what a surprise that was! As I added this and that, and put in some of the esteem things I have done in the past decade, the CK took shape. My wife said "it looks strong" and she does not normally concern herself with these things.

So why the surprise? Having helped the BSc MMTD course at Brunel since 1999 I assumed people knew my strengths. But now (April 2006) I have come to see it has taken the Engineering staff some six years to get a proper handle on their new flagship course. But the recent reorganisation lead by Schwartz and Jenks has given many staff cause to pause. "What ARE we doing? Where ARE we going?" questions are abuzz. Dr Ian Dear said to me earlier in 2006 "This is the only course where the staff are passionate about what they are doing!"

It has always been clear to me that a fully functioning multimedia area needs lots of technology resources. That is what we have. But we also have a lot of Engineers of the electrical systems side, hard problems and mathematical solutions. People that do not work with students and their creativity, do not align them in the directions they might go. Their espoused "Technical Rationality" does not lead them to passion and fervour in their teaching.

Perhaps the time has come for change, and perhaps the times are changing. The students need an MSc course to move on to. That will be my goal. I have seen sufficient creative work by the students to believe they can do it. Even in the second year the eGames and eMarketing assignment revealed some interesting stuff (but perhaps not at the level of Jenova CHEN and his game of "flOw" at the University of Southern California. ) The School of Engineering & Design has advertised for Creative Multimedia staff. It is so amazing! "The BIT Lab gathers dust" (to quote R Dreyer) and the student experience is poor - particularly the way they are treated (as numbers not by name, as 03756629, not John) - yet Phoenix like this opportunity has arisen.

So to the CV. It really was a case of my knowing more than I had written (to paraphrase Polanyi). As I added my small achievements over the past five to ten years, I began to see how action fed on previous actions. A snowball effect was taking place in my mind, and on paper. Dr Tony Cockett said of my first multimedia paper, written in SED during the six months Aug - Dec in 2005, titled "Blogs, ba and Care: Virtue in a virtual world", the following:

"That was a very good paper. It was the first paper the team has written that rings true about multimedia education. It describes you moving on from straight computing to creative approaches in Multimedia. You do not regard multimedia as a bolt-on but as a revolutionary change. You have really been thinking about a multimedia world."

So, when updating the CV, I had the strange sense that I was revealing myself to myself! I was encouraging myself to apply! The deadline is in a week's time!

Surprised by Flow from an unexpected quarter

The result of two hours exploring: look at it! A ghastly sea creature.



Coming across the eGame "flOw" (go to http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/ ) I was surprised to see Csikszentmihalyi mentioned. His typical challenge-ability axes were shown, with anxiety above the challenge-ability match (challenge too difficult) and boredom below the challenge-ability match (challenge too easy).

I dabbled at the game and, after an immersive two hours. I created a creature from a basic amoeba. By working out how to get my amoeba to eat plankton it grew healthily, with many segments to its body. The creature is shown above.

The wonderful realisation is: I was choosing to organise myself, to deal with the amiguity of no rules in a game with no objective (other than my need to construct my own meaning), and slipping into a state of flow.

In an inchoate way I was pathfinding and generating heuristics to make sense of my explorations.

This is something the student Cara found with her project work. She chased up a comment I made a year ago, for she recognised the state she was in (i.e. flow) from what I said. Not playing a game - rather, working on a project, Cara still entered a state of flow. She was alive to what she was doing and was insensitive to time. She had become absorbed in her work. As I had become in feeding my amoeba to become the monster shown in the diagram above.

This idea of flow has implications for creative work and how it is managed. Creativity needs long stretches of time. It cannot be turned on and off like a tap. Current timetabling systems follow the "tap model". What did Amabile say in her HBR paper "How to kill creativity?" She said "Carry on doing what you are doing now."