According to new research, American’s creative abilities are on the decline. Newsweek reports that while teachers are feeling the heat of standardized testing, students’ critical thinking and problem solving skills are suffering.

I had a fascinating conversation this past weekend with an extended-family member who is a teacher at a low-income grade school. It was amazing for me to hear just how hard today’s teachers are pressing (and being pressed) to see their kids’ test scores improve. If they don’t, there are often dire consequences.

Meanwhile, programs that foster cultures of explorative learning, imagination and creativity seem to be almost extinct.

I personally wonder if our shortcomings in education have a lot to do with a failure of imagination in us as adults? In schools, churches and other learning environments, we’re often so slave to the “deliverables” that it becomes difficult to foster the creativity and imagination necessary for learning and growth.

What do you think? Can this trend be reversed? What can our schools and churches do to help? What do you imagine?

(via Collide)

I have long felt that our educational institutions and churches are way to entrenched in one particular learning style and mode. Being visual learner, I’ve often struggled to engage in learning environments that seem to be designed for only one kind of learner (auditory).

I recently read an interesting article about how touching certain textures can alter a persons perception of events.

…touching puzzle pieces covered with sandpaper made participants in the experiment less likely to describe a social interaction as having gone smoothly than if the participants had held smooth puzzle pieces.

This makes me want to push myself when planning my next teaching opportunity to incorporate more tactile or kinesthetic learning techniques.

Stanford University just removed 70,000 of the 80,000 books in it’s engineering library.

Where I live in Elgin, IL we have an amazing library. With technology drastically changing the ways that we gather information,  I wonder what the future uses of buildings like this be? Maybe they will be more about face to face interaction about ideas rather than gathering information? Training centers? Community centers? What do you think?

Facebook hit the 500 million user mark this week, and Mashable takes a look back at the last 5 years in social media.

I wonder if in 2005, may people expected what has happened in the past 5 years. Back then, we talked most about page views, site traffic, etc. We weren’t talking about connections. About videos or articles or blogs going viral. (at least not to the extent we talk about it now). We didn’t have conversations about the newest pop superstar, and how he or she was discovered by making videos of themselves and posting them online.

Of course, all of these things were happening in small part 5 years ago. But now, they are woven into the fabric of every day life. Perhaps that’s the most stunning thing about social media’s development over the past 5 years … how pervasive it is.

I wonder if the next 5 years will be just as amazing to us when we  look back in 2015.

There is some great artwork being created on the iPad. I wonder how digital art will change as a result of inputing information directly with your hands on a screen, rather than using a mouse or tablet. By eliminating the gap that exists mentally when controlling the cursor with a separate device maybe the art will feel more fluent or organic because the process more closely resembles brush to canvas or pencil to paper? Undoubtedly the way we interact with technology changes the way we think and create.

Our friends at NURU just released their latest video, entitled Phillip’s Story. If you haven’t already, check out their website for some incredible pieces of visual storytelling, as well as to learn more about what this fantastic organization is doing.

Great article in wired about how new devices like the ipad that use our hands and have simple clean interfaces may improve learning. This is in opposition to several studies that say that the internet is making our learning more shallow.

(ht to michael novelli)

“If … the tendency to make remarks and adopt positions you would never consider in person can be overcome, online society stands a very real chance of taking interpersonal relationships to a level never before possible. Balancing out the anonymity and lack of physical contact is the ability to mask a plethora of medical and psychological conditions that until now have proven serious handicaps to social interaction. No one stutters or stammers on Twitter.” - Robert G. Ferrell, Former Systems Security Specialist, US Department of the Interior

Mashable has nice synopsis of the report, including other quotes from some of the 895 tech industry insiders surveyed for the report.