Some of the ideas I’ll be exploring in the months — my research semester starts in 18 months — to come.

Dewey’s pragmatism, as laid out in Democracy and Education, How We Think, and Art as Experience.
Experiential learning, as laid out by David Kolb and critiqued / refined by several others since.
Donald Schön’s observations and theories on reflection in action / praxis, with special attention to Lisa Candy’s The Reflective Creative Practitioner.
Vygotsky, of course. The zone of proximal learning and scaffolding are key concepts in any educational programme geared towards developing both technical and artistic skills.
Seymour Papert’s constructionism. In filmmaking programmes, the students learn best when actually making films, both for purely internal critique but also for public distribution through festivals and the like.
Situated learning and «legitimate peripheral participation» as analysed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger.
And, as I’ve already mentioned, 4E cognition, with special emphasis on how it relates to creativity and craft.

* I’m lousy at titles. I might end up using some variation of the number of the post for 2024. Or not.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but am motivated to get into a writing habit. Yesterday, I was part of a discussion about it on Mastodon, started by Kate Bowles where I jumped in and suddenly realized — inspired by yesterday’s post — that I want to write. I want to be one of the people who find writing a necessity and something one must do in order to think properly. We’ll see if it actually becomes a daily habit, but for now, I will try.

But why?

Much of it has to do with my field — pedagogy for fine arts filmmaking — and some very interesting things I’ve been reading lately about “4E cognition”¹ and especially how it relates to creativity. Also, I’ve been reading a lot about the various so-called AI tools that have appeared in the public eye over the past 18 or so months.

The confluence of these things is an interesting thing to muse about. It also necessitates, I think, a concerted effort to, well, think. Writing, as many people have pointed out, most recently (for me), Sarah Honeychurch, writing is thinking and is the one thing we cannot — must not — outsource to a machine.

Thinking, creativity; these are part of what makes us human, what makes us conscious. And while AI
can help us in many ways², and become a tool that enables forms of creation we perhaps did not have access to previously, it cannot replace human creativity (at least, not yet!).

Footnotes

In Schiavio, Andrea, and Dylan Van der Schyff. 2018. “4E Music Pedagogy and the Principles of Self-Organization” Behavioral Sciences 8, no. 8: 72. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs8080072, the
authors define 4E as: – Embodied: Cognition cannot be fully described in terms of abstract mental processes (i.e., in terms of representations). Rather, it must involve the entire body of the living system (brain and body). / – Embedded: Cognition is not an isolated event separated from the agent’s ecological niche. Instead, it displays layers of co-determination with physical, social, and
cultural aspects of the world. / – Extended: Cognition is often offloaded into biological beings and non-biological devices to serve a variety of functions that would be impossible (or too difficult) to be achieved by only relying on the agent’s own mental processes. / – Enactive: Cognition is conceived of as the set of meaningful relationships determined by an adaptive two-way exchange between the biological and phenomenological complexity of living creatures and the environments they inhabit and actively shape.↩︎
Assuming the companies that have created the most high profile AIs survive the barrage
of lawsuits being launched against them by the artists whose work they have stolen…↩︎

Tag: creativity

Three*

2 of 366?

Footnotes