I ran across an interesting lecture by Sir Ken Robinson, Senior Advisor to the J. Paul Getty Trust, in which he speaks about the importance of nurturing creativity within education.

In the piece inserted below, he suggests that we should reflect upon how we encourage or discourage creativity in the formative educational experiences of our youth.

Here, he seems to be tangentially mirroring the sentiments expressed by Daniel Pink in his text, A Whole New Mind. In my view, what connects these two, is the notion that the economy of the near future is going to require a much different approach to thinking and problem solving.

Just a thought about our title pages and the aesthetics of our visual media.

We are thinking about how we can add a bit of Victorian punk sensibility or some other "look" to our video work. Regardless of what we use, we want to come across as being as "in touch" with youth culture, as possible... therefore, our new motto is:

"EdLab, keep it funky."

As video production folks, we may need a little design help in this regard but here's a rather conventional sample of how this might filter into our new look:

Here's another bit of footage from our recent trip to the DigitaLife Expo 2006. This clip is a little more developed and polished than the last two pieces that we have published on the blog. In this video, I comment on the advertising saavy of a few of the corporate sponsors at this event and suggest how education, perhaps, needs to catch on to this trend.

In this piece, you will notice a few ideas that we are currently experimenting with. I hope that this clip will give everyone a taste of what we are thinking of in terms of experimenting with and using "broadcast conventions". We have many more ideas in our video developmental pipeline... so stay tuned.

Naturally, your comments and suggestions for improvements are welcome as we are currently "tweaking" the video design engine, so to speak.

Here's a link to a CNN.com interview with Bill Pepicello, the recently appointed president of the University of Phoenix, a for-profit educational institution that caters to mostly working adult learners.

While I admit that the for-profit education industry is an interesting paradigm to watch (from a distance), I personally think that Dr. Papicello misses his mark when he states, "We've got 250,000 graduates and close to 300,000 enrolled. I believe that this says something about the quality of what we do."

In my view, I believe that this actually says something about the public or cultural pressure in the US to complete an undergraduate degree, rather than being directly demonstrative of the quality of the education provided.

The University of Phoenix provides a reasonably legitimized means to an end for many working adult learners, but in the end, it is just the degree that they need... any way that they can get it; this is where the analysis of consumer preference really gets interesting.

I just wanted to post a quick entry that summarizes some of what we experienced at DigitalLife 2006 today at the Javits Center. In this rough-cut clip, EdLab's very own Anthony Cocciolo describes his impressions of the expo.

There is much more to follow, so stay tuned.

Thinking in terms of potential future capabilities for a PK 2.0 search tool and even the basis of research tools for Website X's "teachnology", I think a great search tool to evaluate is ThinkMap's visualization technology.

According to ThinkMap's website:

Thinkmap allows users to make sense of complex information in ways that traditional interfaces are incapable of. For instance, Visual Thesaurus (www.visualthesaurus.com) showcases this unique capability by transforming the thesaurus into an interactive tool that encourages exploration and learning. Users can instantly see the relationships between words and quickly change views to discover hidden correlations and connections.

This is a licensable technology which many corporations and governmental agencies are currently evaluating. I am not sure if it has been used within a educational context... YET.