Author: andrewcareaga

Former higher ed PR and marketing guy at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) now focused on freelance writing and editing and creative writing, fiction and non-fiction.

Friday Five: 23 minutes till lunchtime edition

Contextless links on a Friday morning:

  1. answering emails/ Video chatting on skype/How ridiculous. That’s just one example — my own — of the latest literary rage, Twitterku. That’s hiaku created from found Twitter texts. Via Boing Boing. (Being a non-Twitterer — or non-Twit, as I prefer — I had to go to the Twitter website to get my TwitterKu text.)
  2. No. 11: Doing a Friday Five when your stomach is growling. When is blogging a waste of time? 10 nasty examples.
  3. So many social networks … so little time. Struggling to manage all your social networks? MyLifeBrand may be your savior. The service lets users aggregate all their social networks and navigate between them from one place. TechCrunch reviews the service. It sounds promising.
  4. A Second Life for higher ed is the topic of Karine Joly‘s latest column for University Business. She plans to post interviews she conducted for this column on her blog in a couple of days.
  5. Seven alternatives to Wikipedia. Students of the world, rejoice! No longer do you have to rely solely on Wikipedia for your research papers. Via David Weinberger.

It is now 11:59. Time for lunch.

Conceptualists are from Picasso, experimentalists are from Cezanne, popularizers are from Gladwell

Interesting bit on Fast Company Now about a talk by Blink and The Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell on two types of creativity. Great popularizer of obscure ideas that he is, Gladwell latches on to an idea from a book by David Galeson to explain how two artistic masters — the cubist Picasso and impressionist Cezanne — embody two types of creativity/innovation.

As FC Now puts it:

Picasso, a conceptual innovator, pretty much knew what he was going to create even before he created it, and came up with new ideas at a rapid pace early in his career. Cezanne, by contrast, was an experimental innovator, slowly rehashing and improving on a particular concept until he nailed it. … Consequently, his greatest works–or at least the ones most valued by collectors–didn’t come until later in his life.

What troubles Gladwell is that so many companies today favor “precocious innovation [of the Picasso kind] and have lost patience with innovation that takes a long time to mature [a la Cezanne].” In order to be successful, he argues, you need both.

Seems this idea might extend to educational institutions as well.

The post points out that so many businesses go for the quick fix because “It’s a lot less riskier.”

The conceptualists, says Gladwell, can approach a company’s board and say, We’re going to solve this problem, and this is how we’re going to do it. Experimentalists, on the other hand, don’t necessarily know where their research is going to lead them, will probably take longer, and have a tougher time articulating their plan of action. With limited budgets and patience, it’s the former that get funded. But increasingly, Gladwell says, we’re encountering problems that can only be solved through extended trial and error.

Sounds like most faculty would side with Cezanne, while many administrators — and marketing types — would favor Picasso.