Yes, that is a lawn chair these guys are riding down ice-covered Brown Boulevard in Arlington, Texas. Folks around here have been seen sledding on everything from trash bags to ironing boards. (Put to other/new uses.....!)

The icy mess - an inch or two of hard ice under a light coating of snow - we have in Texas this morning has cancelled almost everything. Much to the delight of many kids, including my own, a day off from school today means a day’s reprieve in taking the TEA’s shiny new standardized test, the TAKS, which this year replaces the old TAAS test.

TAKS is supposed to be more difficult than TAAS, testing for “higher-level” thinking skills. Also, the writing portion is supposed to be graded for creativity and “voice.” By creating a test that’s aligned with the state curriculum, the TAKS is supposed to get around the problem of forcing teachers to “teach the test” instead of teaching the curriculum.

But TAKS already seems to have failed in that regard, partly because it's Texas' first go at “high-stakes testing” (other than exit-level testing for high-schoolers): A passing score on the TAKS will be required for third-graders to advance to the fourth grade.

“Parents say some teachers are already saddling kids with TAKS worksheets and take-home packets, and preparing them endlessly with test-taking skills. ‘Every day is just hammering and hammering,’ said Jeannie Macadam of Fort Worth, whose daughter attends third grade at Bluebonnet Elementary in the Keller school district. ‘It's the test and the test and the test. The poor kids are just tired.’ "

The Texas State Teachers Association polled Texans last September and found that “59% believe that [standardized] testing discourages innovation and creativity in the classroom.” I realize that these numbers are suspect because it was the TSTA that commissioned the poll. That indicates to me that, whatever parents think about TAKS, teachers sure don't like it.

TAKS is supposed to test for higher-level thinking, creativity and voice in writing, and whether or not kids are mastering the curriculum. And it’s supposed to also serve as the “gatekeeper” test that will end social promotions at the fourth grade level.

That’s a lot to expect out of standardized tests. No wonder everyone’s happy the first one's on ice - at least until tomorrow.

Jonathan Peterson’s conversation with Marc Canter about user-created content veered off into a strange place when Marc started talking about the creativity of everyday people:

“5% of the populace (probably even less) can create. The others watch, listen, read, consume. I think one of the destinies of digital technology is to enable the other 95% to express their creativity somehow. That's the gestalt view.”

Hmmmm. Does he mean that 95% of people are just sitting on their hands, watching TV, listening to the radio, and playing video games while waiting for user-friendly digital multimedia so they too can create?

Or perhaps he means that 95% of people are either not sufficiently inspired by the currently available forms of creativity (including analog forms of creative expression), or are dis-inspired by the complexities of the existing multimedia authoring technology.

In any case,the availability of higher-quality digital multimedia authoring tools is not going to make people more creative. If people are not intrinsically motivated to create – to tell stories and swap stories and conversation with each other - then the nicest, shiniest, easiest-to-use multimedia authoring new tools will still not be adopted.

So let’s hope that the incidence of people who create is greater than 5%. Fortunately, I believe it is - last year we tested 11,000 everyday people for creativity, and found higher-than-average creativity in about 25% and very high creativity in about 4%. Only about 10% showed little to no creativity at all.

Maybe I misread what Marc said, but it seems to me it would be better to assume that some in the 95% group would express their creativity more readily if publishing the results of that creativity – and connecting with others and their creative outputs - were easier.

Dan Bricklin, who was a panelist, has photos, commentary and links; Dan Gillmor did some real-time blogging; Sandra Gitlen of Network World Fusion:  "Ask computing industry legends Dan Bricklin, John Patrick, Mitch Kapor and Les Vadasz if innovation is dead and they scoff. Instead, they say, it's just in a not-so-obvious place." (she did real-time blogging as well).

Leslie Walker of the Washington Post quoted Leslie Vadasz of Intel Capital:  "Today's inventors are still trying to make yesterday's inventions work, which means innovation is more about tweaking old breakthroughs than seeking new ones." Walker (or maybe it was the copyeditor who wrote the headline) referred to this as "reinventing the wheel," which to me just shows she doesn't understand that particular metaphor (OK, it's a cliche!) very well. Tweaking the wheel to make it roll smoother and faster isn't the same thing as reinventing the wheel.

Thanks to Mark Pilgrim. Try it, it's fun!

Even more intriguing than the question "where do ideas come from?" is the question "where did the human ability to have ideas come from?"  One possible answer, announced this week by Stanford anthropology professor Richard Klein, is that "a creativity gene that evolved about 50,000 years ago was the spark that kindled the development of the modern mind."

Persuasive evidence in support of this theory has emerged recently in the shape of FOXP2, the first gene proved to affect the ability to learn and process language. ... Professor Klein ... believes that the most likely moment for [the] emergence [of FOXP2] was 50,000 years ago, when human behaviour began to change in remarkable ways. Human populations that previously had produced similar functional tools suddenly began to make artefacts that looked very different according to local style, and to create symbolic objects with no practical function at all. That idiosyncratic creativity is generally accepted as the defining quality of the modern human mind.

A "suite of language and creativity genes, perhaps as few as ten or as many as 10,000, developed as a result of random mutations, giving rise to a new pattern of human culture," Professor Klein posits. Further analysis of the human genome will prove or disprove this theory.

Heath Row emailed the CoF Creativity & Innovation cell-mates this info on a free, live web event: "Intuitive Intelligence - Innovate or Evaporate," led by Edie Raether, a trainer and performance coach, is about “the ROI of intellectual capital.” This webinar/event/thingy will be at 8:45 a.m. PST on Fri., Feb. 21.

It’s hosted by SpeakersLive so go there for more info. If you want to view this, register at http://www.speakerslive.com/?page=/registration/, using "Guest" as your password.

1. Some software developers use blogs to communicate with their users during development: “What Web logs do is let there be more serendipity of ideas. I'm already finding bugs and looking at ways to do a better job based on what people have shared with me after reading the blog," quoth Dan Bricklin.
2. Always On is a relatively new “business blog” with a collaborative model. Heath Row discusses it here.

You’re already looking at blogs to track new social trends for potential new product ideas, yes?! If you’ve been looking for an algorithm to help you do that, here’s one (via BoingBoing) from computer scientist Jon Kleinberg at Cornell University. Kleinberg’s computer algorithm searches not just for the number of citations of a word, but for sudden "bursts" – increases in the rate at which words are used.

More from Kleinberg: this presentation on analysis of the link structure of a hypermedia environment seems to mesh with what I said about the contextual creativity of the blog environment.

Chuck Frey has started a brand-new Creativity and Innovation CoF on Fast Company’s revamped Company of Friends network. Not much happening yet, but if you join, there will be!

My .02: I’ve gone on and on before about blogs as “collective creativity.” And while I do mean the posts themselves, there's more to it than that. The creative richness of a good blog experience is in the context - the whole world that’s built out of a blogger’s past (through bios and archives), their connections (in the blogrolls), and their tracks - of the places they’ve been and the sites (and sights) they’ve seen and posted about.

Blog trails (marked often by “via”) in particular fascinate me, as a sort of ethnographic picture of how one person’s mind creates, through the builds and jumps they make. Can Google figure out a way to make this contextual creative richness more accessible, more useful?

FastCompany posts 50 winners of its “in-the-trenches achievement” contest, culled from 1,400 entries and 20,000 online comments from people in 30 countries and 45 states. My advice: The “how we did it” parts tend to be very interesting, but skip the “parting tips” - they’re pretty lame (example: “don't be afraid to innovate”).

Amusingly illustrated in this short film for the Bessies, the Television Bureau of Canada's ad awards. Thanks to Laszlo Perlorian for the link!

Sign of the times, sighted on the web:

Due to the heightened demand and accelerated sales of duct tape as a result of the Department of Homeland Security's recommendation to keep duct tape on-hand in preparing for a biological attack, Henkel Consumer Adhesives has increased duct tape production by 40%.

When last we discussed duct tape here, it was because someone discovered that it can be used to remove warts. Now, duct tape has become positively famous.

I'm with the people who say that by the time you realize a bioterror attack has happened, it's pretty much too late to duct-tape the vents and put up plastic sheeting.

But fear not, all you purchasers of duct tape: If, as we all hope, it turns out you don't need duct tape to fend off anthrax and smallpox, it looks like you can use this stuff to do just about anything (except maybe this and this):

• Here's a handy primer (you have to scroll down a little to get to it) on duct tape, including a list of books about it (examples: Duct Shui, the ancient art of finding balance and happiness using duct tape; Ductigami, the art of using Duct Tape as art).
• The Duct Tape Guys offer a free Brainstorming and Creative Thinking Curriculum using duct tape.
• Finally, here's a slide show of photos from the annual Duct-Tape Ball, held in Anchorage, Alaska.

"It is as important for a modern enterprise to have been born in a garage as it was for a 19th-century presidential candidate to have been born in a log cabin." - Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class

Florida's right - is there any innovation cliche as pervasive as the business start-up in the garage?! (Well, except for maybe the band start-up in the garage.)

Here's a little twist on the cliche: The Business 2.0 article The Garage That Saved Whirlpool's Soul, which details how a worker-run innovation team created Gladiator, Whirlpool's first major new brand in nearly 50 years. Gladiator was created not in a garage but for the garage:

Gladiator doesn't wash clothes, do the dishes, or make dough. It consists of slick-looking appliances for tidying up a garage: hooks for a wall organizing system, tool chests, even a "Beer Box" -- a supersize fridge for suds. ... Gladiator is expected to generate $300 million in annual revenue by 2007.

….Corante grew and grew:

- Connected by Sarah Lai Stirland: “how our networked world functions - how people, tools and technologies interrelate and the social, technological, economic and political implications of connectivity.”

- Conferences, currently featuring reporting by Zack Lynch on “NBIC (nano, bio, info, cogno) Convergence 2003: Improving Human Performance.”

I’m still catching up, and catching my breath, but in the meantime I want to point you to some intriguing ideas being discussed elsewhere on Corante:

- In Amateur Hour Jonathan talks about Live Public Broadcasting Through WiFi Networks.

- In Bottom Line, Arnold discusses potential innovations in email, namely Bayesian-based (or not!) spam filters, and new models for the music business. Scroll down and you can see a number of posts on both of these topics.

- In Copyfight, Donna’s excited about the new weblogs at Harvard experiment with Dave Winer (currently a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center). Tonight Dave will be blogging live in a classroom at Harvard Law School, and Donna will be blogging Dave’s live blogging (I’m pretty sure I’ve got this right!). Potential topics, says Dave: “How should we do weblogs at Harvard? Will the Red Sox ever win the World Series? How to use the technology in law, medicine, education, government, business.”  LATER NOTE:  Donna confirmed more details about this, here.

- In Moore’s Lore, Dana is posting simultaneous threads: one about a possible Space Elevatorand one about Tiny OS (tiny, always-on network systems).

- Hylton says he’s going to stop updating Premium Blend, but as of yesterday, he was still there, and of course, he’s always here.

- And even though Chris Locke never seems to be here anymore, I’m not going to quit going to watching that space, because you Just Never Know with Chris!

Rafe Needleman says wireless blogging makes business conferences better:

At PC Forum last year, some people were busy blogging (keeping a real-time online opinion diary) as Qwest (Q) CEO Joe Nacchio delivered his talk. The color commentary from certain audience members, who kept one eye on the stage and one on their screens, made Nacchio's talk a lot more interesting. It also made the audience better informed, which spiced up the Q&A session.

I just spent last week blogging from a conference, although not the instantaneous, wireless blogging Needleman talks about here. Yet even the slower pace at which I was blogging CPSI last week is a much quicker turnaround of ideas and opinions about the proceedings than was available in pre-blogging days.

And not only does wireless conference blogging vastly increase the flow of ideas and opinions coming from the conference, it also opens the proceedings in real-time to people who aren't physically there - some of whom may then blog on what they read about in a conference blog, that may in turn be read by someone at the conference with wireless access, who may then ask a question about what the non-present blogger blogged, or otherwise insert that new idea/question/information into the conference proceedings.

And all likely in less time than it took to either read or write that last sentence!

Real-time conference blogging really taps into your ability to do "in and out thinking." Apparently, American Psychological Association research has shown that while listening to a speaker, people do the following things:

• 18% are really listening to the speaker
• 25% are having erotic thoughts
• 57% are thinking about something else

(Note: I say "apparently" because I read this in a handout I got at the CPSI conference, and haven't been able to find any actual confirmation of this research on the APA site.)

Most people can speak about 150 words per minute, but can hear and comprehend 900-950 words per minute. So after the first 20 seconds or so of a presentation, the audience will fade in and out and think about other things. So, we were told, you can make this work in your favor by drawing a line down the center of your notepaper and recording "in" thoughts on one side, and the "out" thoughts on the other side. This is supposed to free you from trying to remember "out" thoughts, and encourage you to generate ideas without losing track of the presentation.

Well - what is a conference blogger doing, but recording these "in and out" thoughts, making connections, and generating ideas? And then, if the blogger is looking at what others are blogging too, there's more input, probably both on the "in" and "out" sides. And pretty soon the conference bloggers are surfing the idea flow.

Frank Patrick blogged on my reports from CPSI's Winterfest so far: "While I might quibble with her comment that a specific 'CPS process' is 'the basis for almost all other creativity and innovation processes,' as an example of common confusion of correllation for cause-and-effect, her description of cycles of convergence and divergence does apply to the TOC Thinking Processes, and probably serves as a common thread -- a meta process -- to any problem solving effort."

That's certainly a reasonable quibble. I did say "almost," though!

Patrick goes on to document similarities between TOC (Theory of Constraints) and CPS, mostly regarding the cycles of convergence and divergence I described yesterday. He ends, "In and out, up and down. Hopefully, not round and round."

My metaphor of the two-step dance didn't serve me as well there as it might have. "Round and round" isn't exactly correct, except in the sense that in solving a problem we are going 'round the hermeneutic circle (or spiral).

Patrick's absolutely right - an up and down motion is definitely at play. Part of our Springboard training was how to frame questions that would move the inquiry up and down. "Why" questions tend to build and move upward in more abstract directions. "How" questions drill downward; they focus and lead to specificity. This was described as moving "up and down the ladder."

But I don't want to give you all the impression that this was all work! We also played games that were meant to foster creativity, open our minds, bring us together as a team, and energize us. In one game we were all blindfolded and asked to find and pick up a rope, then arrange ourselves in a perfect sqaure while still blindfolded and holding on to the rope. The 16 of us managed to get square in 21 minutes.

In another very fascinating game we paired off and "sculpted" each other. That is, one person was "clay," allowing the other person to arrange their limbs whatever way they wanted (with some ground rules for the clay's comfort, of course!) that would showcase a "creative spirit" in the clay. This fostered an amazing sense of intimacy between the partners. The person who "sculpted" me looked at me more thoroughly and carefully than probably anyone has in a long long time, as she gently placed my limbs this way and that, trying to get at whatever she was seeing in me. Finally she stood back, cocked her head to one side, and muttered to herself, "Beautiful!"

We actually did have a little graduation ceremony, which we were allowed to plan ourselves. At the end we tossed our blindfolds (the ones we had used for the "making a square" game) in the air like some graduates toss their caps.

So ended Springboard training, though the conference goes on through the weekend with some "extending activities" scheduled. But I'm flying home tomorrow morning - my daughter is playing Yente the Matchmaker in her high school production of "Fiddler on the Roof" and I don't want to miss it!

My question’s been answered: Our Springboard facilitators are teaching us the dance that gives CPS its power.

We’re also learning how to frame the questions that drive this process, and the tools that help all along the way. But the basic step is in fact a two-step:

Step One - Diverge, or make a list

Step Two - Converge, or make choices

We dip and sway across complex problems, dancing in and out of the lists and lists and lists we make. Diverging and converging at every stage of the process. “Round and ‘round the problem we go, developing a goal statement here, honing a problem statement there, brainstorming criteria, facts, ideas, and, finally, a solution and an action plan.

Tomorrow, we will practice on each other until hopefully by the end of the day we will not only be able to do this on our own, we will actually be graceful as we lead a client or a group through this dance.

Sorry for the blog silence from here of late. In addition to watching hours of NASA press conferences (Ron Dittemore is now my hero, and I'm not alone there), I have been getting ready to travel to where I am now - in San Diego, at the Creative Problem-Solving Institute's Winterfest, which starts today.

A little CPSI background: This foundation exists to teach creativity skills, most notably using the Creative Problem Solving (CPS) process developed by Dr. Sid Parnes and Alex Osborn (who coined the term "brainstorming"). CPS is the basis for almost all other creativity and innovation processes. It's also the basis for the Triz creativity and innovation software products.

I'll spend the next three days with the same group of 18-22 participants also going through what's called Springboard training in CPS, since although I've had some creativity training, Springboard is a prerequisite for all other CPSI programs. Updates to follow!

LATER #1:  While I was waiting for the opening remarks to begin, an older gentleman with a twinkle in his eye and no nametag hurried in and sat down at my table. "Hi, I'm Sid," he announced to us all. It was Dr. Sid Parnes, one of the creators of CPS. His main interest these days: Planning for next year's 50th anniversary of CPSI.

LATER #2:  A terrific keynote presentation by Kerry Ruef of The Private Eye, and certainly the first time in years I've seen a presentation given using transparencies and an overhead projector! Ruef wielded these low-tech tools masterfully and artfully. We were each given bags containing two jeweler's loupes (singly, each offered 5X magnification; we put them together for 10X) and a variety of everyday items. Looking closely at an object through a jeweler's loupe, Ruef said, "helps strip the ordinary of its cliche."  She stepped us through her process of working with the questions ("What else does it remind me of? What else does it look like?")  she calls "the tools of the private eye." Next step: Use analogy and its "compressed forms - metaphor and simile" to theorize - and create. Powerful and fun.

Here's Ruef in her own words:

In a hot summer day, five years ago, I'd been thinking about the enormous power of the metaphor mind, the mind that sees the world but through the lens and network of analogy. The doors of my studio were open and bees sometimes swept in and began banging their heads against the skylight. The bamboo outside was rustling like taffeta skirts and it was an altogether lovely day to be thinking.

LATER #3:  Springboard participants were split into groups, so we'll spend the remainder of the daytime sessions this week working with the same 20 or so people. Three facilitators led us through the six steps of CPS, teaching us at the same time the process and tips on how to facilitate the process in a group setting.

I've already had some training in the "generate ideas" step since we use that in our ideation sessions, so I'm focusing on picking up more insights and tools there and learning more about the rest of the steps in the CPS process. The six steps are:

1. Identify goal, wish, or challenge
2. Gather data
3. Clarify the problem
4. Generate ideas
5. Select and strengthen solutions
6. Plan for action

We'll be delving more into these six steps the next two days. It's clear to me that the CPS process is complex when done correctly, but still I wonder what we'll do to learn it that will take up two entire more days?!!