I want to share a remarkable educational vehicle for stimulating creativity and engaging students. Through the “The Daily Create” participants are offered a unique invitation to engage in creative exercises which help individuals look at the world differently. Too often, we become complacent and approach day-to-day events in much the same way with little opportunity, or time, to think or act in a creative manner.

To challenge and engage readers, I decided to describe one aspect of “The Daily Create” (TDC) in a somewhat creative manner. Can you interpret the descriptive words that are displayed in the following nine character word puzzle? If you are correct, you should be able to complete the following sentence:

Many who think outside the box* would consider “The Daily Create” as a rather …

To help readers better understand “The Daily Create”, I thought it might be interesting to compare it from the following two points of view – the teacher and the student.

TDC – The Teacher Point-of-View
The “Digital Storytelling” DS106 TDC web site states:

“The Daily Creative is an exercise in the continual practice of spontaneous creativity through short exercises. Each “assignment” should take no more than 15-20 minutes. There are no registrations, no prizes, just a community of people producing art daily.”  

Individuals share their daily “creations” through their respective blogs with appropriate links to one of three sharing mechanisms: Flickr (photos), YouTube (videos), and SoundCloud (audio clips) where free accounts can be established.

TDC – The Student Point-of-View
“The Daily Create” is an inspirational and engaging activity that is part of the free Digital Storytelling DS106 MOOC (massive, open, online course) in which I have enrolled. The DS106 course is facilitated through Jim Groom’s hard working team at Mary Washington University in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Students in DS106 are not required to buy a textbook but they are required to purchase, if they do not own one, their own domain (e.g. www.ideasandthoughts.org or www.life-long-learners.com) together with hosting services to set up their own blog. This blog will become their online diary where they will document and reflect about their engagement in this important educational process.

The DS106 course just officially started last week and for many students new-to-blogging, their task was to secure their own domain, write their first post, and ensure that all necessary “feeds” were linked back to the DS106 learning community. One might think that because I already owned my “life-long-learners.com” domain and was somewhat familiar with the WordPress blogging process, that I would be idle waiting for the “newbies” to catch up. I assure you nothing was further from the truth!

Enter “The Daily Create” … an amazing adventure to help students express their creativity, to explore some of the DS106 linking mechanisms, and to provide an activity to stimulate the sharing of experiences through student blog posts.

In my opinion,  “The Daily Create” fosters the contagious creativity that Albert Einstein recommended we share, as illustrated in this month’s “Teacher Feature” remix:

Teacher Feature #15 – Albert Einstein – January, 2012

To help the reader gain a better perspective, I will list some on “The Daily Create” tasks. These descriptions are purposely short because they are shared using Twitter’s message limitation of 140 characters. Online readers are encouraged to view these links to gain an understanding of the creativity demonstrated by this amazing DS106 community of learners:

• Jan. 8 – Create a photograph that features a repeating pattern.
• Jan. 9 – Make a photo that looks better in black and white than it did in color.
• Jan. 12 – Record a sound that represents the sound of a meal you ate or made today
• Jan. 13 – Create an audio of two sounds not normally heard together.
• Jan. 19 – 1 Take Tongue Twister – Record the following tongue twister in one take.
• Jan. 25 – Show us your keychain and tell us about the keys and things you have on it.

From a student perspective, I am so amazed at the creative ideas that are showcased by my fellow DS106 learners. In addition, one of the important aspects of the entire DS106 environment is that most of the engaging assignments, together with “The Daily Create”, activities are suggested by those who have enrolled in the course. Furthermore, as a K-12 educator, I am wondering if we might modify this “daily create” mechanism to stimulate engaged learning by our own students. I welcome readers’ thoughts on how such an “outside the box” process might be accomplished.

Take care & keep smiling

* Outside the box challenge – I purposely have not provided the answer to the above nine character word puzzle which describes “The Daily Create”. Rather, I encourage risk-taking readers to share their interpretations in the comments below.