Kandinsky’s Composition VIII. Click to see more of his work.
Step #4: Digital Presence
With today’s iteration, the complete guide to this Pareto Project has been rolled out to you, and you can now move at your own pace through the prefatory assignments and into the project itself. Start with version 1.6 of the guide:
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Step #4 asks you to set up Twitter and Medium accounts to use throughout this process. It also encourages you to think critically about the other sites you can use to develop and eventually share your work. Most of this will be done in class under our atelier model — i.e., under teacher or teacher-proxy supervision — but you can begin at any point.
For Medium, exploring the site is the key. You will eventually hope to have a curated set of writing like this:
That is Gina Arnold, a graduate of Brewster and the student who first suggested that our makerspace might be able to use Medium. She predicted its rise as a digital platform, and she continues to use it for academic and job purposes. Your planned updates, which are identified on the Pareto Project calendar, will be posted to your Medium account, which should emulate the professional tone Gina uses.
Otherwise, explore the site. You’ll find everything from national newspapers to online comics, and your voice will eventually join these ranks. (You can do the same sort of exploration on Twitter, but stick to Medium for now. The Twitterverse is a labyrinth that would panic Asterion.)
Step #5: The Work
Step #5 has you start the work of this project. So that you’ve seen it twice, here is the complete guide again:
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Notice that Step #5 gives you access to your peers’ concise ideas. Their projects are part of your environment for the rest of the year, and the more aware of each other you become, the better your own work will be. This is your “network of possible wanderings,” as Teresa Amabile once wrote in a discussion of creativity:
Expertise encompasses everything that a person knows and can do in the broad domain of his or her work. Take, for example, a scientist at a pharmaceutical company who is charged with developing a blood-clotting drug for hemophiliacs. Her expertise includes her basic talent for thinking scientifically as well as all the knowledge and technical abilities that she has in the fields of medicine, chemistry, biology, and biochemistry. It doesn’t matter how she acquired this expertise, whether through formal education, practical experience, or interaction with other professionals. Regardless, her expertise constitutes what the Nobel laureate, economist, and psychologist Herb Simon calls her “network of possible wanderings,” the intellectual space that she uses to explore and solve problems. The larger this space, the better.
Creative thinking, as noted above, refers to how people approach problems and solutions—their capacity to put existing ideas together in new combinations. The skill itself depends quite a bit on personality as well as on how a person thinks and works. The pharmaceutical scientist, for example, will be more creative if her personality is such that she feels comfortable disagreeing with others—that is, if she naturally tries out solutions that depart from the status quo. Her creativity will be enhanced further if she habitually turns problems upside down and combines knowledge from seemingly disparate fields. For example, she might look to botany to help find solutions to the hemophilia problem, using lessons from the vascular systems of plants to spark insights about bleeding in humans.
Expand your expertise and experience, and this 20% really will contribute to the majority of your learning.
As always, ask questions below.