One of my first thought’s after our week with Gardner Campbell was a of TED talk by Ken Robinson on creativity and education.

Robinson asserts that school kills creativity.  As we progress through our educational lives, the focus becomes more and more specific.  By the time we reach university, none of our body matters except the right part of our brain, where we are trained essentially to be university professors writing papers.  He evidences a stigma against dance and how unheard of it would be to have all required to take dance in high school or a university setting.

From my personal experience, I’ve avoided creativity for seven years since I failed miserably in my high school art class.  I was terrible in shop class, and my only talent with some push, writing, was never engaged beyond writing essays while at this university.  During my first year here, my freshman seminar class “The Human Animal” used UMW blogs and besides making a post or two, I thought nothing more of it.  We were required to use it and I did.

So going back to Campbell, these same threads are interwoven.  Creativity is only set aside for those who want it (or often those who despise the primary subjects of education).  We fret personal cyber infrastructure because it is an art.  Yet I say we fret this realm more then the creation of painting because we must open and expose ourselves to anyone.  Who knows who is out there.  Further, we ask ourselves why does it matter?

In other interfaces like Facebook, the answer of why it matters is simple.  We can collect a set of friends of our choosing and they must engage with the content we publish.  When we blog, however, anyone is out there.  And the template is larger.  We can share a great deal more about ourselves, and we can recreate ourselves.  And we aren’t given a set 160 characters to do it.

So there are two important things about why people don’t want the bag of gold.  We are afraid of exposing ourselves or even pseudo creations of ourselves to strangers and a strange world, and the entirety of our education experience hasn’t primarily focused on creativity.  What do we do and where do we go?

I think Campbell is correct that building a cyber infrastructure should be an integral part of a university community.  This class evidences that people are capable and desire to do it, far more than I could have imagined.  Yet I believe the process must start sooner and not just in the manner of personal cyber infrastructure.  The entirety of education must be reworked to incorporate creativity and to shed our anxieties about personal expression.

I know the answer is unsatisfactory and lofty.  The better one, is that we be the pioneers.  Ds106 is our example that personal cyber infrastructure works and that it’s really cool.  My accomplishment, beyond my own satisfaction is that others down the road will want to continue the process.  I am but one thread of a whole tapestry of human creativity.  (I couldn’t help myself)