"I see where you're coming from Monique. I agree that there are cultural forces that connect creativity with "mood disorders." Creativity seems abnormal in the statistical sense that average people don't seem creative. I agree with Sir Ken Robinson that all humans have creative potential but that this potential is drummed out of us by schooling and other institutional forces. This makes the mental/affective state of creativity even less "normal," and we tend to pathologize abnormality. The question, in my view, is about the relation between creativity and depression. Obviously there can be people who are creative and depressed, just as there are people who like roller coasters and asparagus. That doesn't mean a causal relationship. Does creativity cause depression? or visa versa in some people? Or is there some kind of harmonic resonance between these mental activities? I think our cultural tendency to internalize the creative process and to view affectivity as being "inside" leads to..." - Alex Reid
"That's a good point about learning Charles. I was trying to get at that point in my discussion about note-taking. There is another angle to this though. Are our conceptions of what learning is technology-specific? That is, if we define a good outcome of a pedagogic experience to be what happens when lecturing and textbooks and FTF discussion are done well, then learning online or multitasking in the classroom would not make much sense. On the other hand, online pedagogies and and in-class, networked multitasking (like twittering), when done well, would almost certainly lead to outcomes that would be difficult if not impossible to achieve by traditional means. As such, the question becomes: are we going to be able to value the cognitive experiences of networked interaction as worthwhile learning experiences? And perhaps more pointedly, what happens if teachers are unable to adapt their pedagogies to the shifting technocultural contexts in which we all live? As I pointed out above,..." - Alex Reid
I'd be intereseted in hearing about the sl conversation. I'm working on an SL article and it's drawbacks. In fact, I'd be interested in hearing about your ups and downs with SL. Care to comment? - Robert
"I certainly don't object to genre theory Lauren. My colleagues in professional writing take up that approach. Of course we have to remember that theories are ways of seeing, that they are conceptual tools. The problem is that as well as we know such things, we tend to forget them as practices pass into institutionalization. There's much that is valuable in the process approach, but look what happens to it once it goes through the textbook-institutional mill." - Alex Reid
