Blooming…..

I love butterflies and their association with the symbolic notation of change and renewal. Combining Bloom’s renewed taxonomy with the image of a butterfly is a perfect graphic to encapsulate the desired flow from this junk called knowledge, to creativity.

Blooms’ taxonomy has never been far from my hand as a teacher. In my early days of teaching, when I would leave school with the students to hit a beach somewhere close by, it was always taped to my teacher’s desk. There it would be a constant reminder to me as teacher, to endeavor higher order thinking skills, to lead towards synthesis and evaluation. Creativity replaced evaluation as the epitome of higher order thinking when the revised Bloom’s taxonomy was published in 2001.

It’s a tough brief to be creative. We can teach creative thinking, as it is a skill. Teaching students to synthesize and combine existing ideas but creativity, can that actually be taught? True creativity is more of a phenomenon than a skill. The act of creating something new, that has never ceased to be before in its present form.

Scott Klososky in a workshop on creativity defined creativity with three forms. Omitting the first, as it no longer resides in the recesses of my mind, the second form, mashups a recombination of separate elements into some new development or separate entity.

Digital media facilitates mashup as no other, empowering users to combine separate elements into something new. The ability to source and combine media to produce something new whether it is remix of sound or movie clips, combining code is something that can be easily performed in a digital environment.

View these samples of some popular mashups below; they’re intriguing but also assumptive in nature. They leave you with an impression that is formalized by you the viewer. It leaves me wondering though is this as creative as we’re going to get, reworking other peoples ideas to create a new form?
Examples:
China –

Dove commercial, viral advertising but that is another post.

This is the point in relation to mashups, someone taking the idea above and mixing it up.

Blooms Butterfly Source: http://blog.learningtoday.com/blog/bid/22740/Bloom-s-Taxonomy-Poster-for-Elementary-Teachers