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Rob Jacobs commented on Milton's blog post 'Twitter on the wing?'

Twitter has to be experienced to find the value. The value looks different for everyone. For me, it is the ultimate real time idea exchange system. I have seen too many say, "I am trying out Twitter." but they don't do anything. It's like wanting t…

May 29

Rob Jacobs replied to Hal Portner's discussion 'Creativity in Education'

Interesting article. I am always a bit confused by how we close an achievement gap, or a gap on any kind. Let's use two groups to represent achievement scores. For the gap to close one group has to move toward the other. Option 1 The lower gap mov…

April 22

Rob Jacobs replied to Hal Portner's discussion 'Creativity in Education'

Hal, isn't it amazing what students can produce. Two things jump out at me. Opportunity and Expectation. These students are given the opportunity to create amazing things. Their parents, teachers, and they themselves have the expectation that they…

April 13

Rob Jacobs commented on Hal Portner's blog post 'Lets Doodle!'

Speaking of doodling, have you heard of DoodleBuzz. It is a typographic news explorer that is, "experimental interface that allows you to create typographic maps of current news stories." As they describe it, "...DoodleBuzz was born out of an idea…

April 4

Milton and Rob Jacobs are now friends

March 30

Rob Jacobs commented on Milton's blog post 'New book experiment - Ingenuity Arts: Adaptive Leadership and the New Science'

The concept of your book sounds very interesting. I have been doing a lot thinking about creative team development and leadership of such, myself. I will have to check out your book. BTW Following you on Twitter. I am Eduinnovation.

March 30

Rob Jacobs replied to Tim Hurson's discussion 'Creative Whack Pod'

Sweet. I hope he does the Innovative Whack Pack too.

March 30

Rob Jacobs added a video:

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do

TED Talk by Gever Tulley

March 21

Profile Information

Location:

Orange County, CA

About Me:

By day I am a Program Specialist on the management team for an Orange County School District. I enjoy brining creative ideas to old problems and facilitating discussions and thinking sessions. By night, I love practicing, studying, reading, and talking about creativity, innovation, thinking, and their relationship to education. I have a bachelor's degree from Cal-State Fullerton and a master's degree from Azusa Pacific University. Proud to be a former Marine!

Website:

http://educationinnovation.typepad.com/

Rob Jacobs's Videos

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do

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"Mankind Is No Island"

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Rob Jacobs's Blog

"Everything Is Miscellaneous" Meets "Lateral Thinking"

Lateral Thinking: Because Everything Is Miscellaneous

In his fantastic book Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger takes the reader through a tour of the digital order that is changing how we approach, knowledge and information. This new digital order, built on… Continue

Posted on October 11, 2008 at 8:19pm —

Greg Fraley Inteview: Education Innovation Puts Questions to Greg About Education and Creativity

Here is an interview I conducted with Greg Fraley. It is cross posted at Education Innovation. It is based on Greg's book, Jack's Notebook. Greg shares his thoughts on education and creativity.

1. At one point in the story, one of the characters suggests that a test students could be given is to make a long list of possible solutions to a problem. What is the power of “the list?” Why is list making suc… Continue

Posted on July 14, 2008 at 6:09pm — 1 Comment

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At 11:57am on November 10, 2008, Mark_Abrahams said…: Let's follow together.

Happy Marine Corps b-day.
I salute all.

At 6:06pm on November 9, 2008, Mark_Abrahams said…: OK Rob,
I'll follow this with great interest.

My following comments are all but irrelevant since I do not know the detail of what you, at OC, are planning. I offer them only to engender further debate.

In Norwich UK, a totally new campus is proposed. I'm not totally in favour because I have observed other politically driven major development which ended up bringing about a major revenue drain on the local economy (it was a new DG hospital).

I could keep you in touch with what is being proposed in Norwich – for the sake of interest.

However, as a construction professional and a bit of a sustainability expert I could easily produce figures that would identify the business case need for a new this that or the other. What bothers me is that these projects can be driven by enthusiastic individuals bent upon, as it were, getting a medal. Perspectives can be bent. A productive thinking approach is required to generate and engineer long-term solutions whilst maintaining focus on what goes on in the schools, colleges or whatever. New building work can deflect from so many other problems. It is a bit like going to war to keep political office, to refocus people’s attention away from core issues, becoming the be-all-and-end-all. I hope I do not offend your sensibilities (you being an ex marine and all). I have nothing but respect for the armed forces and everything that matters. All I am saying is that politics can, on occasion, skew away from logical reason.

At 4:55am on November 8, 2008, Mark_Abrahams said…: Guess we'll have to wait for the press hounds to deal with the more important question of the White House puppy.

I thought Barack showed insightful thinking process in his response (must consider allergy; wish to select from Sheleter, a mutt - like him).

Just hope people don't misusnderstand or misquote on purpose.

The press concerns me!!!

But, as Catherine Zeta-Jones was quoted as saying, "if I told you about everything that worried me you'd think I needed therapy".

FYI tracking and being followed by OC on Twitter. Are you in there somewhere?

Will stay on as supporter and go-between regarding whatever can be done to bring about good change and shared resources in education. As B.Obama says - 'it could take some time'. As I have said - we must carefully lay or adjust the foundations.

Keeping on thinking and doing......

At 11:42am on November 7, 2008, Mark_Abrahams said…: Hey Rob,

For info only, I've copied your website http://educationinnovation.typepad.com/ link to my wife, Barbara.

I'm afraid that it may be parked for later but we will be discussing how good it is. Within education and with websites like your's and Mary's (Whelan), there is great hope for a lot of joined-up-thinking in the world of creativity and shared resources.

Coincidentally, I dropped a line to Mary before I looked at your website. Also coincidentally, I've been in communication with Gregg (Fraley) and, as you'll probably know, he is in London.

I guess I should not be surprised by such coincidences. If we link up and loop our thinking then we are, exponentially, extending our capacity to act as a bigger mind at work. Having read your Gregg F interview I can witness the thinking in action, given that we must focus on our specialities to assure greater value from our joining-up across the world.

Thanks for the Twitter link. I'm locked against too much Twit activity because my professional world doesn't require a wider network. However, I aim to act as a well-informed go-between concerning my wife, Barbara's work in education. Hopefully we can share what may be useful between us, to increase the possibilities of realizing greater potential. Twitter could certainly be useful to distribute links where they matter or to places we didn't even anticipate. As an observer, it will be a question of what value and what use the links can be best put to. We may need a bit of a think, following the best laid plans principle.

The main thing in all of this is to help things go live, to ensure receptive ears across the world of education and to avoid any false starts or unnecessary failure.
It's a bit like the old latin phrase "quis custodiet ipsos custodes" which translates to "who guards the guards". In education we need a latin phase for "who educates the educators". Do you think that Hillary (Clinton) is going to get involved in this area of work or is she likely to lead on health?

Anyway, thanks
Mark

At 6:42pm on November 6, 2008, Mary Whelan said…: Thanks Rob!
Your interview with Greg Fraley was really interesting. I think one of the most difficult things to teach is the deferring of judgement - people, young and old, jump to edit ideas so quickly and automatically that they rule out a lot of possibilities. Is there an easy way to encourage people to hold onto ambiguity for a bit longer?

On the theme of hope for students, there's a wonderful book called 'The Art of Possibility' by Benjamin Zander, in which he talks about awarding his students an 'A' grade at the beginning of the term, and then getting them to write a letter to him describing what they'll do to achieve that grade by the end of term. Straight away he's getting them to visualize the possibility of their own excellence. I think this is a technique we can all use - it's very powerful.

At 11:23pm on September 24, 2008, Michael Michalko said…: Hi Rob,
Just happened to browse some of the web sites of Hub members and wanted to tell you that I'm impressed with your insights and work in education. Educators like you give cynics like me hope.
Best,
Michael

At 7:35am on September 7, 2008, Jim Canterucci said…: Thanks for linking to my blog post on math word problems.

At 10:46am on September 6, 2008, Bobbie M. Cornett said…: Thanks for the welcome. Looking at everybody's bios I feel like a wall flower. We go back to school Monday here in Jena, Louisiana after being off for a week because of Gustuv. He hit us pretty hard.

Two things happened to me recently in a classroon and later a social setting with educators - my superiors most of them - that left me feeling discouraged briefly. First, I used the term, "avant garde". Nobody knew what it meant!

The second source of discouragement was in a math class - 8th grade pre-algebra. We were reviewing GCF and LCM. We might as well have been teaching it for the first time. Once the fun is over pulling out the prime factors, the big questions is which ones do you use for your purpose? Well, for GCF I came up with bachelor 2 looking for a mate or "match" - another 2 -in the other number's prime factors. Then it would be Mr. and Mrs. "2". To help our students remember the idea I tried to use the song from Fiddler On the Roof, "Match Maker, Match Maker...." Nobody, not even the teacher knew the reference! Now that could have just made me feel old, but that's not how I felt. I felt sad and discouraged for all of us. If it were my classroom, I would have had the song there the next day! First rainy day we would be watching the entire musical.

Now, this is probably not the creativity that is being spoken about here, but I do think it is at least a thread. Bottom line, we must all do better in education.

I have found that kids are immensely interested in learning. They want to learn languages. We don't teach them, not even their own. They are interested in new ideas if you are. I could go on and on and apologize for taking up too much of you time. I just came across this web site last night and was very intrigued with the videos. They beat T.V. any day of the week! Thanks for the welcome Rob.

At 11:17am on July 11, 2008, Tim Hurson said…: Rob, I love the Piracy piece you started on your blog. How about posting the video and starting a discussion on The Hub as well. This could be a great subject for discussion.

At 7:21am on May 29, 2008, Tim Hurson said…: Rob, thanks for joining and welcome aboard. I'm looking forward to exchanging ideas about creativity and education. I posted a recent talk by Sir Ken Robinson in The Hub's blog area. Sir Ken is always fun to hear and makes a powerful case for revolutionizing our educational systems.