Tag: Productivity

Imagination, Augmented: How AI Can Be a Creativity Amplifier

Artificial Intelligence, CreativityPublished onUpdated on

Your Snapshot

A summary of the key insights from this issue

⬩ Research shows Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT-4 generate diverse ideas faster and with higher quality than humans, benefiting creative problem-solving.

⬩ AI can exhibit types of creativity—combinational, exploratory, transformational—sometimes exceeding human creativity by exploring broader possibilities and taking more risks.

⬩ The future of creativity combines AI and human input. AI enhances creativity, but requires human oversight for idea evaluation. Real-world applications like TextFX, an AI-aided tool for rap writing, exemplify how AI can empower human creativity.

Can artificial intelligence (AI) unearth hidden layers of creativity within us? Have you ever wondered if a machine could help you generate ideas more swiftly, diversely, and effectively?

A burst of innovation often emerges when our minds are sparked by an external stimulus. AI, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, can serve as that catalyst, enhancing our ability to generate ideas and solve problems creatively. This is because AI not only processes information at high speed but also explores a vast universe of possibilities beyond our immediate perception.

Harnessing the power of AI requires some effort, but it can significantly amplify our creative prowess and transform the way we innovate. The future of creativity is not just human or AI, but a blend of both, offering us a unique opportunity to reach new heights of creative potential.

The Power of LLMs for Idea Generation

How do Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT stack up against humans in generating ideas?

​A recent study by researchers from Cornell Tech and the Wharton School tackled this question. They tasked ChatGPT-4 and students from an elite university with generating new product ideas for the college student market, retailing for less than $50.

While it’s no surprise that LLMs like ChatGPT can swiftly produce ideas, the study unearthed some unexpected results regarding AI’s quality.

ChatGPT-4 not only churned out ideas faster than students, but the ideas were also, on average, deemed higher in quality based on purchase-intent surveys. Moreover, they displayed a higher variance in quality. This variance indicates that ChatGPT-4 can produce a broader range of ideas, some excellent and others not as good. This diversity benefits creative problem-solving, raising the likelihood of finding standout solutions.

Interestingly, the paper highlighted that feeding ChatGPT-4, a few highly-rated ideas, further improved its performance. It concluded that, for focused idea generation, a human using ChatGPT-4 is roughly 40 times more productive than a human working alone.

Can AI Be as Creative as Humans?

The debate around whether AI can match human creativity or even surpass it continues. Before we dive into this question, let’s first define creativity.

Margaret Boden, a renowned philosopher and cognitive scientist, defines creativity as the ability to produce something new, valuable, and surprising. She identifies three types of creativity:

  1. Combinational (combining existing ideas in new ways),
  2. Exploratory (exploring the possibilities within a given framework),
  3. Transformational (transforming the framework itself).

According to her, AI can exhibit all three types of creativity, albeit within certain constraints. While she acknowledges that human creativity has nuances that AI has yet to replicate, she believes that human creativity isn’t unique or superior to AI creativity.

Echoing this sentiment, mathematician and author Marcus du Sautoy suggests that AI can exceed human creativity in certain areas. He attributes this to AI’s ability to explore more extensive possibilities, maintain objectivity, and take more risks.

Implications for Innovation

The study by Cornell Tech and the Wharton School suggests that LLMs like ChatGPT can significantly enhance your creative prowess, generating many novel concepts. However, with idea generation becoming quick, cheap, and easy, effective processes for evaluating and filtering the most promising ideas become crucial.

​MIT professor Mitchel Resnick views AI systems as a new category of educational resource with unique strengths and limitations. He highlights that while LLMs can inspire human creativity by providing new examples to build upon, they should not replace human ideation.

“encourage learners to use ChatGPT and other generative AI tools not to produce the final result but as a resource throughout their own creative process.”

Mitchel Resnick

How AI Can Collaborate with Humans to Create Multiplicity

Professor of Engineering and artist Ken Goldberg presents a new paradigm of “multiplicity,” where humans and machines collaborate to generate diverse ideas. He argues that multiplicity, defined as “the quality or state of being multiple or various,” is indispensable for creativity.

Goldberg provides examples of multiplicity in practice, such as crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk or Wikipedia and collective intelligence systems like Google Search or Netflix Recommendations.

He suggests that diversity can help overcome human and AI creativity challenges, including cognitive biases, information overload, groupthink, or ethical dilemmas.

Even the simple prompt, “What might I be missing?” can shift your perspective and challenge a bias.

AI and the Future of Creativity: A Case Study of TextFX

In practical terms, we can expect to see the convergence of generative AI capabilities into tools specifically designed to bolster elements of the creative process.

A prime example is the collaboration between rapper and professor Lupe Fiasco with Google and the Palm API. They developed a suite of AI-powered tools called TextFX, created to aid in the rap writing process.

​TextFX doesn’t generate complete lyrics. Instead, it “explodes” words into multiple phonetic possibilities and explores a vast universe of potential meanings and interpretations. This design is inspired by Fiasco’s technique of dissecting words and phrases into various semantic and phonetic components.

The suite includes ten tools to generate similes, create acronyms, and parse words. It can take any word as input and provide many interpretations, similar to Fiasco’s approach in his songwriting. I can see lots of uses to support young people and their writing or creative thinking.

However, the aim of TextFX isn’t to replace the rapper in the songwriting process. Instead, it’s designed to empower and inform them. Fiasco emphasises that the joy of rapping stems from work and struggle, and these AI tools facilitate that journey.

The promise of AI in the creative landscape is vast. Not as a replacement for human creativity but as a collaborator. AI amplifies our creative process and pushes the boundaries of what’s possible. Do you want to be 40 times more productive?

The future of creativity is not just human or AI but a blend of both, enriching our capacity to innovate and solve problems.

⏭🎯 Your Next Steps

Commit to action and turn words into works

⬩ Explore and Experiment: Start using AI tools like ChatGPT in your creative process, learning their capabilities and your limits through hands-on experimentation.

⬩ Learn and Develop: Invest in AI-related training to understand its potential and ethical implications in your field.

⬩ Collaborate and Share: Share your AI experiences with your team, fostering a collaborative environment for navigating the future of creativity with AI.

🗣💬 Your Talking Points

​Lead a team dialogue with these provocations

⬩ What are the potential benefits and challenges we might encounter as we integrate AI into our creative work?

⬩ What might the future look like as we continue to blend human creativity with AI’s capabilities, and how can we prepare ourselves for this future?

⬩ As AI becomes more integrated into our creative processes, what ethical considerations should we keep in mind?

🕳🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

Still curious? Explore some further readings from my archive

⟶ Time for Creativity in Schools – Tom Barrett (edte.ch) My article explores the challenges and possibilities of fostering creativity in schools, which often operate on rigid timetables and structures that hinder the creative process.

⟶ Can machines be more creative than humans? | Arthur Miller | The Guardian The article explores the implications of AI art for human creativity and knowledge. It suggests that machines may be able to surpass human creativity by making connections across different fields and domains. It also proposes that machines may enhance human creativity and help solve global problems.

⟶ A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be an artist | MIT Technology Review The author argues that creativity is not just novelty or skill, but a vision of the world that changes our understanding of what is good, true, or beautiful. Machines can mimic or assist human creativity, but they cannot produce it on their own.

What motivates students to learn?

LearningPublished onUpdated on1 Comment on What motivates students to learn?

Top 3 factors that predict academic motivation

Here are the top three ranked, according to this meta-analysis, from l’Université Laval, Monash University and Curtin University.

1 — 🪡 Competence (I can do this!)

Students experiencing competence are confident that their actions are impactful in shaping their academic experience.

2 — 🆎 Autonomy (I get to choose)

Students experiencing autonomy perceive that they are engaging in learning tasks freely and voluntarily, without perceived coercion.

3 — 🏠 Belonging (I am not alone)

Students experiencing relatedness feel connected with important others in their school (e.g., teachers, friends)

As reported here by Jill Barshay,

Bureau [Julien Bureau — the lead author] describes the three needs — competency, belonging and autonomy — as “kindling” for intrinsic or internal motivation. “If you start doing a task,” he said, “and it’s a new task, and you feel competent in it, and you feel connected with others, and you feel autonomous in doing the task, you’ve chosen to do it. You’ll have fun doing it. You’ll want to do it more. And you’ll be interested in learning.”

We love to use the spark and fire metaphor for learning, and here Bureau explores the fuel or ‘kindling’. But I think this is limited.

You will have your preferred metaphor for learning too, but I think of competency, belonging and autonomy as part of the conditions for growth, not destruction.

Along with many other variables and environmental factors, competency, belonging, and autonomy are the nutrients in the soil that trigger growth.

Connection to Place

Reference to belonging and connectedness makes me also think of the physical learning environment. This week I have been immersed in collaborating with primary school teachers about contemporary learning environments.

When children feel ownership of the classroom, it appears the stage is set for cultivating feelings of responsibility (DeVries and Zan 1994). Classrooms that feature the products of students’ intellectual engagements, projects, displays, and construction are also found to promote greater participation and involvement in the learning process (Ulrich 2004).

This is from the Clever Classrooms, a summary report created by the Holistic Evidence and Design Project at Salford University.

They found that the physical characteristics of a learning space related to individualisation: ownership, and flexibility were particularly influential in learning progress for the 3766 primary students in the study.

Clever Classrooms is an accessible report I highly recommend. Here are some of the checkpoints for teachers about ownership (p32).

  • A classroom that includes pupil-created work in displays is more likely to provide a sense of ownership.
  • The classroom can be made readily recognisable from others by distinctive class-made displays/artwork of, for example, people, houses, animals, trees.
  • Opportunities should be grasped to allow pupils to personalise aspects of the classroom, e.g. named lockers or drawers.
  • Good quality, child-centric, furniture, fixture and equipment can be used to strongly support learning and indicate that pupils are valued.

Combine these findings and ideas with the original paper we are focusing on this week, and you have some valuable provocations.

Emotions are the Rudder

A notable missing piece of the student motivation paper is the role of emotion in learning. When I search the document for reference to ‘emotion’, the only returns I get are from citations and other works.

The role of emotion is a silent backdrop to some of these findings. Despite not being overtly stated in the paper in focus, emotion is inextricably connected to each element of competence, autonomy and belonging.

As neuroscientists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio explain:

Cognition happens because of emotion. There’s really no such thing as a thought that doesn’t have an emotion attached to it or that doesn’t have an emotion that follows it. When we take in the world around us, we have an emotional reaction to that appraisal. That emotional reaction changes the way we think in the next moment and cumulatively, over time.

And this following extract, Immordino-Yang illustrates the connection between emotion and competence.

if you’re solving a math problem and you think, Oh yeah, I recognize this; that’s a quadratic equation. That little moment of, I know this! (or alternately I don’t; am I on the right track?), that’s emotion steering the way you access your memory. Recognizing that a skill (like solving a math problem) is relevant in a particular context is an emotional recognition. We need these subtle emotional intuitions for minute-by-minute problem solving, and therefore, they become a dimension of the skill itself. As teachers, we can help students become aware of how emotions steer thinking, and help them develop well-tuned academic intuitions.

The comment that a student’s emotional intuitions become a dimension of the skill itself is fascinating to consider. A further illustration of how complex these experiences are and how emotion is independent of competency, autonomy and belonging.

I will leave you with a final provocation from Professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang,

It’s literally neurobiologically impossible to remember or think deeply about anything that you haven’t felt emotion about. It just doesn’t happen because it would be a waste of the brain’s resources to think a lot about stuff that doesn’t matter.

Your Talking Points

Instead of more ideas, I want to close with a reminder of critical questions and provocations to grapple with when exploring evidence and research.

  • How do the cultural norms in my school intersect with these findings?
  • The Clever Classrooms findings focus on primary or elementary-age students in the UK — what is relevant for my setting?
  • Have we systematically identified the right approach to achieve these goals?
  • Is there reliable evidence it can have the desired impact if implemented well?
  • Are these concepts feasible within our context?

Detached, Distracted and Disillusioned? Regain Control Of Your Boundaries

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Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20

Detached, distracted and disillusioned.

There have been times in my life when my career was happening to me.

It seemed that the control over the direction, intensity and pace of teaching and leadership was out of my grasp. This lack of control and agency coincided with times when I suffered the most with poor mental health, and I was detached, distracted and disillusioned.

The change in my career — I became an education consultant and now run my own business — pushed me to develop boundaries around my work time.

These self-authored boundaries were (are) even more critical because I could work from anywhere, and it was easy to take the laptop into the kitchen and answer the email from the school excited to start a partnership.

Work did not have the same physical pattern as teaching, and it took on a different type of rhythm and cadence, unbound from a timetable.

Work did not have physical premises, and to this day, I have always worked from home. The lines and thresholds intertwined.

Looking back on my teaching life, I can see that the distinction of boundaries was just as blurry. I took work home, and there was always something more to do, weekends engulfed in planning and other spreadsheet related leadership responsibilities.

Do What You Love Until It Kills You

There is that phrase that you are lucky if you can do what you love because it doesn’t feel like work. The downside people don’t speak about is how boundless this can become.

A never-ending vista of possibility that excites terrifies and induces tension, in a heady mix of simultaneous endeavour.

We are victims of Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.

To counter this, establish clear boundaries that give you cues to align with.

  • What is essential?
  • What are my priorities?
  • When am I overstepping the mark?

Here are some strategies that resonate with me you might have a go at adopting.

Strategies To Help You Regain Control Of Your Boundaries

Say No

This strategy has been a work in progress for me for a decade, but I improve all the time. The key is to understand the most fulfilling work to make a better decision when opportunities arise.

It is much harder to say ‘ no’ if you are unclear about your Northstar, how you have the most significant impact, or what you truly care about.

“You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage — pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically — to say ‘no’ to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside.”

Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Shut The Door

One of the first pieces of advice about working from home after leaving the classroom was from serial educational entrepreneur Ben Barton.

“Find a place that allows you to shut the door on your work.”

We have all noticed the physical location as work has come home during these troubled times.

By creating a physical boundary at home, I could walk away, take a break, move to another place for a different activity and ultimately close the door on ‘work’ at the end of the day.

“No is a complete sentence.” — Anne Lamont

Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20

Control Your Calendar

I block out periods in my calendar for writing, research and sometimes for reflection after workshops or intense periods of client work. For this weekly email, I often block the time.

A difficult tactic for teachers and educational leaders to apply because there is so little scope for change in work patterns.

Once again, though, we can abstract a deeper insight about purposeful time and intentional work to help and instruct us. Try on some of these questions for size:

  • Which time of the day or week are you most open to new ideas and insights?
  • How do your disposition and mental energy change throughout the day?
  • For every face to face meeting, do you have an equivalent amount of time for reflection and to process the experience?
  • When do you get to create?
  • Look at the time you spend at home or work and consider the categories of activity. What proportion is operational, relational, creative, research, exploratory, learning, teaching, preparation etc.?

A critical insight I have learned is that we need to be intentional and proactive in organising our time.

Wrestle back control of your calendar.

Share Clear Expectations

You see this all the time with the email Out of Office reply — I will be slow to respond until I return if it is urgent.

The opportunity is to use the auto-reply email strategy when we are in the office to help set clear boundaries for focus and communication.

There is, of course, this strange assumption with email communication about the response time and what is deemed polite and acceptable. Our appetite for instant messaging does skew this expectation considerably.

One of the best examples I have seen with email expectations was in the signature line. It stated the times of day when the responder checks their inbox.

I only check my emails at 930am and 330pm

Whether it is in meetings, emails or how you speak with colleagues, setting clear expectations about what is appropriate for you is proactive — you control the pace and timing of your activity, not someone else.

Your Talking Points

  • What opportunities do you care about the most?
  • Reframe your situation to understand what you can control.
  • You cannot hold people to expectations that are not shared.
  • What are you saying no to, so you can say yes to what motivates you?

Time To Move On From The Battle Between Productivity and Presence

Mental Models, MindsetPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on Time To Move On From The Battle Between Productivity and Presence

The collision of commitments caused by COVID restrictions highlights our priorities. What we once thought was important dwindles in our estimations. 

The structures of life are stressed and challenged, which reveals what we value and what remains true.

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Photo by travelnow.or.crylater on Unsplash

I know you grapple with the ‘great struggle’ of our times, the ‘ultimate juggle’ of professional and personal commitments intertwined. Or perhaps it is the equilibrium between productivity and presence, as Maria Popova describes it.

Of course, we are talking about our work/life balance. I endeavour to update my mental models around this concept, and I want to share some progress.

You will be pleased to see we begin on a practical footing. Your first step to updating your mental model for professional and personal commitments is a ‘find a replace’.

Find what: balance

Replace with: cycle

Yes, replace all.

The current understanding of work-life balance is too simplistic. People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. Some other dynamic is in play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and then set them against one another. We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way. ~ David Whyte

Let’s move from seeing this as a binary or opposites to a cycle of change and inquiry.

What could a cycle of inquiry look like?

Here are five phrases to reflect, adapt and take action (repeat). I summarise and adapt the work of researchers Ioana Lupu of ESSEC Business School in France and Mayra Ruiz-Castro of the University of Roehampton in the UK.

Ioana Lupu and Mayra Ruiz-Castro

1) Pause and denormalise.

  • What am I sacrificing?
  • How are they impacting my personal life?
  • What is currently causing me stress, unbalance, or dissatisfaction?
  • How are these circumstances affecting how I perform and engage with my job? 

2) Pay attention to your emotions.

  • Do I feel energised, fulfilled, satisfied?
  • Or do I feel angry, resentful, sad?

A rational understanding of the decisions and priorities driving your life is important, but equally important is emotional reflexivity — that is, the capacity to recognise how a situation is making you feel. Awareness of your emotional state is essential to determine the changes you want to complete in your work and your life.

3) Reprioritise.

  • What am I willing to sacrifice, and for how long?
  • If I have been prioritising work over family, why do I feel it is important to prioritise my life in this way?
  • What regrets do I already have, and what will I regret if I continue along my current path?

4) Consider your alternatives.

  • Are there components of your job that you would like to see changed?
  • How much time would you like to spend with your family, or on hobbies?

Before jumping into solutions, first, reflect on your work and life aspects that could be different to better align with your priorities.

5) Implement changes.

Ioana Lupu and Mayra Ruiz-Castro describe two different action settings.

  • a “public” change — something that explicitly shifts your colleagues’ expectations
  • a “private” change — in which you informally change your work patterns, without necessarily attempting to change your colleagues’ expectations.
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The key takeaway is not the phases — you can create whatever suits you — after all, it is a simple inquiry sequence. You know this cycle already.

What is critical is the change in your mental model from balance to cycle.

Change starts with your mental models and the language frames you use. It is not a balance +/- it is a continuous reflexive process of review and improvement.

Your Talking Points

Beyond the critical questions highlighted above, here are some further provocations:

  • What assumptions are you holding on to?
  • Why does the balance mental model not work for you?
  • What will it take to shift to a sustained level of practice?​
  • How do other people’s expectations of you create pressure?
  • What are you going to stop doing to make this work a priority?

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