9 Strategies : Thinking creatively

Nine strategies towards creative thinking and meeting challenges:

• Re-think:
  Look at a challenge in new or unusual ways.
• Visualize:
  Picture your problem and its solutions.
  Map it!
• Produce:
  Don't be lazy! Get busy!
• Combine:
  Make new combinations-- in considering options, put them all on the table to find grains of truth or possibility. Then refine!
• Form relationships
  Make connections--similar to mapping but adding text as to why concepts connect.
• Think in oppositesOften extremes present middle ground where solutions lie.
• Metaphor! Simile!
  Build an image.
• Fail:
  Learn from experience: think as if you have eliminated a solution toward finding one that does.
• Practice patienceOutlast the challenge!

Text of the exercise: Looking for a job?

Re-think:

Look at a challenge in new or unusual ways.
Find new ways that others are too lazy, or don't think about, to try:
Example: Finding a job or internship.

Expand your target visits:
What class did you do well in, and what jobs might be related?
What other fields are interesting?

Market yourself: develop your "brand."
Develop a portfolio, a list of qualifications, and or examples of your work that match each company you visit. Prepare a summary of each company you go to and how you match their interests.

Check every resource you can think of:
online Web employment sites; your school's job search; business windows

Ask friends, friends of your parents, neighbors, teachers, and/or community leaders about opportunities and referrals

Visualize: Picture your problem and its solutions.
Map it!

In just a couple words, summarize a challenge you are facing.
Then add three related concepts.
Then draw lines to connect the words.
Remake the map on a separate piece of paper; add images.
Play with this idea and find your solution.

Produce:

A genius is productive.
Don't be lazy!

Combine:

Make new combinations.
Combine and recombine ideas, images, and thoughts
no matter how strange or unusual.

Form relationships; make connections.

This applies to people and objects.
Get to know the people in your area of interest that can help you improve. Demonstrate interest in them; ask questions! At the arrow, enter some contacts, either by name and/or by title and/or by qualification.

Opposites
Think in opposites.

Think opposite these words:
Hip hop | Flow | Employment | Organic | Blue | Nature
Then find a middle concept for one

Metaphor! Simile!
A simile uses "like" or "as" to build an image. Examples:

The jungle's river was like a peaceful path through a chaos of green.
The bird rose straight and fast as a rocket.
The service line moved as fast as stalled rush hour traffic.

A metaphor is more direct:

The event was viewed through the mist of sadness.
The garden became a quilt of cared-for colors.
She led them with the carrot of reason and the stick of embarrassment.

Now create your images:
The exercise illustrates how situations can take on new meaning, problems new solutions. Enter your thought quickly for the following phrases with the first image that comes to mind. Print, reflect, and make new connections if inspired.

The football team played as if they...

The computer screen looked...

My study schedule is a...

Fail!

Great accomplishments are often the result of chance, but chance born of many "unsuccessful" experiments. Learn from these experiences; preparation to fail is the path to success.

Patience

Some people are not recognized until their "later" years.
Paul C�zanne (1839 � 1906), French impressionist, did not have his first exhibition until age 56. Accomplishment does not come in 10 minutes. Give yourself ten days, or ten years! Practice patience.

We hope one or two of these tips serve you well

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Benefits of positive thinking

It should come as no surprise to you that there are so many benefits of positive thinking! Not only can it really improve your life and make you happy, but it’s also great for your health! Here are four of the top benefits of learning how to stay positive:

1) Avoid Depression:

This one may seem pretty obvious, but positive thinking is a great way to stay happy and to avoid getting depressed. This is possible even if you have been prone to depression in the past. No matter what we may think, positive thinking is a choice and we can make that choice to be happy.

2) Live Longer:

That’s right, positive thinking can increase your life span! Our happiness has a huge role in our health, and we will be less susceptible to a whole range of health problems just by learning to think more positively.

3) Improved Immune System:

Due to the fact that our body is less stressed and we are constantly more relaxed, it is in a better position to fight of illness. This means we are a lot less likely to come down with problems such as the common cold – only making us even more happy!

4) Coping Better With Stress

This is the main reason why we’ll see a dramatic increase in our health once we start to think more positively. Though it may seem as though stress is a psychological problem, learning to cope better with stress leaves our bodies a lot less stressed and more able to cope with any problems – physical and psychological – that come our way.

And these are just a few of the benefits of positive thinking! 

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CATS: The Nine Lives of Innovation

Curiosity might have killed the proverbial cat, but without it very real achievements would never occur. With CATS: The Nine Lives of Innovation as your guide, you’ll learn how to spark your innate curiosity, pounce on problems in ways you never imagined, and enjoy greater success and satisfaction at work and in your personal life.

Playful, profound, and positively upbeat, CATS provides what you need to tap into your power of innovation and then unleash it in every member of your organization. While most business thinkers view this challenge from the top down, Stephen Lundin sees the subject from a CAT's-eye view, explaining how to get every employee--no matter what level--to think and act in innovative ways. Stephen Lundin examines the four challenges to innovation and offers practical measures aimed at conquering them:

• Be brave ('fraidy cats never innovate)
• Stop being “normal” (make your own rules!)
• Embrace failure (it's the only way to learn)
• Foster creativity (don't be a control freak)

Lundin then describes the Nine Lives of Innovation, each of which is a step toward realizing your inner CAT and becoming a fully contributing member of an innovative organization.
Prowling inside every employee is a questioner, a creator, an innovator claws out and ready to pounce. Become a CAT and you may find yourself springing on ideas in a way that surprises you and everyone around you.

Nine Lives of Innovation

• Overcome Clutter
• Always be Prepared
• Understand That Innovation Isn't Normal
• Welcome Real Provocation
• Promote Imaginary Provocation
• Say, 'How Fascinating'
• Fail Early and Fail Well
• Pounce on Change
• Master CAT Wrangling

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Strategi Lautan Biru

PUTRAJAYA: Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak wants every civil servant to adopt four important elements enshrined in the Blue Ocean Strategy when dispensing their daily duties.

The Prime Minister said the four major elements are 'reduce', 'eliminate', 'create' and 'increase opportunities'. 

By inculcating such elements, the delivery system of the civil service would achieve the desired results and objective to become a major catalyst for growth, he said. 

"Through the initiative, I believe we can see the government's holistic approach and objectives, not only through main agendas.

"We will use whatever management tools needed... creative thinking to achieve the desired success, improve the delivery system and results," Najib told the Prime Minister's Department at its monthly meeting here Monday. 

Also present were Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin and Chief Secretary to the Government Tan Sri Mohd Sidek Hassan. 

He said the Blue Ocean Strategy requires civil servants to be more creative and innovative in their thinking and avoid the conventional style of thinking by insisting on allocation and extra manpower to carry out additional duties. "We have identified the right structure needed by the government to move forward and implement a delivery system that can propel the nation forward. 

"So, from eight strategic reports, we have identified initiatives and approach that need to be implemented. We have indeed implemented such initiatives at various levels," he said. 

For example, to ensure an efficient delivery system in the issuance of international passports, the element of 'reduce' need to be applied in the process. Similarly, the move to detain Customs officers of various ranks and posts recently, is an effort by the government to 'eliminate' corruption, money laundering and abuse of power in public service. The Prime Minister said the government would continue to 'create' and at the same time 'increase opportunities' for every Malaysian, including those in the civil and private sector. Najib who has completed two years in office yesterday, said civil servants must observe the principle that the government of the day is the government for the people and continue improving their performance and objectives under the New Key Results Area (NKRA). He said as a responsible government, the interest of the people must be paramount in any initiative, as per the 1Malaysia concept of 'People First, Performance Now'. When a problem crops up, the government would look at it from the peoples' interest, just like when our students were stranded in Egypt, the government decided to bring them back, he said. He added that a similar approach was taken to resolve the Interlok issue. "This is the government of the day, we must not look at our interest but instead the interest of the people first," he said. - BERNAMA

Komen:

Kumpulan TEMAN berbangga telah menggunakan BOS dan tools kualiti (yang sah dan dipercayai) dalam projek Kumpulan Inovatif dan Kreatif 2010. Tetapi oleh kerana "otak kemetot" panel dari Jabatan Kastam, kami "kalah". Antara komen panel dari jabatan kastam ini yang teman istilahkan kemetot adalah beliau hanya menekan penggunaan tools kualiti  'wajib'  (seperti peratus, carta bar, pareto dan rajah ishikawa). Sedangkan dalam penggunaan tools kualiti yang lebih mempunyai kesahan dan kebolehpercayaan yang tinggi, beliau kata 'sunat'. Hmmm.. Kalau panel tidak menguasai BOS, t-test, kolerasi dan tringulasi data, upgrade lah ilmu. Kalau panel macam ini diambil, saya hanya mampu tersenyum..kalau kail panjang sejengkal, lautan dalam jangan diduga (bukan sahaja laut biru, laut merah, laut hitam, laut kuning)...yang lebih malangnya.. panel ini menobatkan jabatan kastam juga sebagai pemenang.... patutla SPRM serbu Kastam

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The Global Classroom

Every day students from countries all over the world collaborate on important projects. The web site, ePals, is a site where teachers and students can go to join or start a collaborative project with anyone in the world. According to ePals, Inc., “Our Global Community™ is the largest online community of K-12 learners, enabling more than 325,000 educators and 126,000 classrooms in over 200 countries and territories to safely connect, exchange ideas, and learn together. Award winning SchoolBlog™ and SchoolMail™ products are widely used and trusted by schools around the world.”


As we have seen from our own experiences, from the media, from university research, and as it was demonstrated in the Did You Know? video, technologies, especially the Internet, have resulted in a globalized society. The world is now “flat”. Our world has been transformed, and will continue to change at ever-increasing rates.


In order for our students to be prepared to navigate this 21st century world, they must become literate in 21st century literacies, including multicultural, media, information, emotional, ecological, fİnancial and cyber literacies. Collaborating with students from around the world in meaningful, real-life projects is a necessary tool for developing these literacies. Students can learn that through collaboration, not competition, they can work together to make the world a better place. Students will use technologies, including the Internet, and global collaboration to solve critical issues.

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21st Century Skill

21st Century Schools,we recognizes the critical need for developing 21st century skills. However, we believe that authentic education addresses the “whole child”, the “whole person”, and does not limit our professional development and curriculum design to workplace readiness.


21st century skills learned through our curriculum, which is interdisciplinary, integrated, project-based, and more, include and are learned within a project-based curriculum by utilizing the seven survival skills advocated by Tony Wagner in his book, The Global Achievement Gap:

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Collaboration across Networks and Leading by Influence
Agility and Adaptability
Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
Effective Oral and Written Communication
Accessing and Analyzing Information
Curiosity and Imagination

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“School”, “Teacher”, “Learner” and “Curriculum” for the 21st Century

How should education be structured to meet the needs of students in this 21st century world? How do we now define “School”, “Teacher” “Learner” and "Curriculum"?

Schools in the 21st century will be laced with a project-based curriculum for life aimed at engaging students in addressing real-world problems, issues important to humanity, and questions that matter.

This is a dramatic departure from the factory-model education of the past. It is abandonment, finally, of textbook-driven, teacher-centered, paper and pencil schooling. It means a new way of understanding the concept of “knowledge”, a new definition of the “educated person”. A new way of designing and delivering the curriculum is required.

We offer the following new definitions for “School”, “Teacher” and “Learner” appropriate for the 21st century:

Schools will go from ‘buildings’ to 'nerve centers', with walls that are porous and transparent, connecting teachers, students and the community to the wealth of knowledge that exists in the world.”

Teacher - From primary role as a dispenser of information to orchestrator of learning and helping students turn information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom.

The 21st century will require knowledge generation, not just information delivery, and schools will need to create a “culture of inquiry”.

Learner - In the past a learner was a young person who went to school, spent a specified amount of time in certain courses, received passing grades and graduated. Today we must see learners in a new context:

First – we must maintain student interest by helping them see how what they are learning prepares them for life in the real world.


Second – we must instill curiosity, which is fundamental to lifelong learning.


Third – we must be flexible in how we teach.


Fourth – we must excite learners to become even more resourceful so that they will continue to learn outside the formal school day.”

So what will schools look like, exactly? What will the curriculum look like? How will this 21st century curriculum be organized, and how will it impact the way we design and build schools, how we assess students, how we purchase resources, how we acquire and utilize the new technologies, and what does all this mean for us in an era of standardized testing and accountability?

Imagine a school in which the students – all of them – are so excited about school that they can hardly wait to get there. Imagine having little or no “discipline problems” because the students are so engaged in their studies that those problems disappear. Imagine having parents calling, sending notes, or coming up to the school to tell you about the dramatic changes they are witnessing in their children: newly found enthusiasm and excitement for school, a desire to work on projects, research and write after school and on weekends. Imagine your students making nearly exponential growth in their basic skills of reading, writing, speaking, listening, researching, scientific explorations, math, multimedia skills and more!


It is possible. It has happened, and is happening, in schools across the country. I have seen this first-hand with my classes, and I have seen it at other schools with whom I have worked. And there is growing evidence of schools everywhere having the same results when they implement a 21st century curriculum.

20th Century Classroom vs. the 21st Century Classroom

USA 1960’s typical classroom – teacher-centered, fragmented curriculum, students working in isolation, memorizing facts.	A classroom at the School of Environmental Studies, aka the Zoo School, in Minneapolis.  A perfect example of real-life, relevant, project-based 21st century education.
Time-based	Outcome-based
Focus:  memorization of discrete facts	Focus:  what students Know, Can Do and Are Like after all the details are forgotten.
Lessons focus on the lower level of Bloom’s Taxonomy – knowledge, comprehension and application.	Learning is designed on upper levels of Blooms’ – synthesis, analysis and evaluation (and include lower levels as curriculum is designed down from the top.)
Textbook-driven	Research-driven
Passive learning	Active Learning
Learners work in isolation – classroom within 4 walls	Learners work collaboratively with classmates and others around the world – the Global Classroom
Teacher-centered:  teacher is center of attention and provider of information	Student-centered:  teacher is facilitator/coach
Little to no student freedom	Great deal of student freedom
“Discipline problems" – educators do not trust students and vice versa.  No student motivation.	No “discipline problems” – students and teachers have mutually respectful relationship as co-learners; students are highly motivated.
Fragmented curriculum	Integrated and Interdisciplinary curriculum
Grades averaged	Grades based on what was learned
Low expectations	High expectations – “If it isn’t good it isn’t done.”  We expect, and ensure, that all students succeed in learning at high levels.  Some may go higher – we get out of their way to let them do that.
Teacher is judge.  No one else sees student work.	Self, Peer and Other assessments.  Public audience, authentic assessments.
Curriculum/School is irrelevant and meaningless to the students.	Curriculum is connected to students’ interests, experiences, talents and the real world.
Print is the primary vehicle of learning and assessment.	Performances, projects and multiple forms of media are used for learning and assessment
Diversity in students is ignored.	Curriculum and instruction address student diversity
Literacy is the 3 R’s – reading, writing and math	Multiple literacies of the 21st century – aligned to living and working in a globalized new millennium.
Factory model, based upon the needs of employers for the Industrial Age of the 19th century.  Scientific management.	Global model, based upon the needs of a globalized, high-tech society.
Driven by the NCLB and standardized testing mania.	Standardized testing has its place.  Education is not driven by the NCLB and standardized testing mania.

  

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Educators as “digital immigrants”

One of our goals is to help students become iKids and truly global citizens. 

In many countries today’s students are referred to as “digital natives”, and today’s educators as “digital immigrants”.  Teachers are working with students whose entire lives have been immersed in the 21^st century media culture.  Today’s students are digital learners – they literally take in the world via the filter of computing devices:  the cellular phones, handheld gaming devices, PDAs, and laptops they take everywhere, plus the computers, TVs, and game consoles at home.  A survey by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that young people (ages 8-18) mainline electronic media for more than six hours a day, on average.  Many are multitasking – listening to music while surfing the Web or instant-messaging friends while playing a video game. 

Even toddlers utilize multimedia devices and the Internet with tools such as handheld video games like Leapster and web sites such as www.PBSkids.org and www.Nick.com. Preschoolers (including my 2-year-old grandson) easily navigate these electronic, multimedia resources on games in which they learn colors, numbers, letters, spelling, and more complex tasks such as mixing basic colors to create new colors, problem-solving activities, and reading.

However, as Dr. Michael Wesch points out, although today’s students understand how to access and utilize these tools, many of them are used for entertainment purposes only, and the students are not truly media literate (such as, how to use the tools to enable our students our students to become truly media literate as they function in an online collaborative, research-based environment – researching, analyzing, synthesizing, critiquing, evaluating and creating new knowledge)

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Siri 2: IPG Di mana gamaknya?

Kali ini, kami ingin kongsikan kepada anda ranking terbaru universiti bagi tahun 2011 di Malaysia. Rasanya ramai di antara anda juga bakal melanjutkan pelajaran ke peringkat univesiti tidak lama lagi.

Jadi, sedikit sebanyak, anda dapat mengetahui mengenai kedudukan universiti yang anda bakal menjadi tempat pembelajaran anda selama 3 atau 5 tahun selepas ini.

Berikut dibawah adalah senarai Top 50 universiti terbaik di Malaysia.

• Universiti Sains Malaysia
• Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
• Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
• Universiti Putra Malaysia
• University of Malaya
• Universiti Malaysia Perlis
• Multimedia University
• Universiti Teknologi Mara
• Universiti Malaysia Pahang
• International Islamic University of Malaysia
• Universiti Utara Malaysia
• Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia
• Universiti Tenaga Nasional
• Universiti Malaysia Sabah
• Open University Malaysia
• University of Nottingham Malaysia
• Universiti Teknologi Petronas
• Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia
• Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris
• Taylor’s University College
• Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka
• Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman
• Universiti Malaysia Terengganu
• Universiti Malaysia Sarawak
• Universiti Tun Abdul Razak
• Monash University Malaysia
• Universiti Industri Selangor
• Wawasan Open University
• UCSI University
• Curtin University of Technology Sarawak Campus
• Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology
• International Medical University
• Help University College
• Tunku Abdul Rahman College
• Al Madinah International University
• Universiti Kuala Lumpur
• National Defence University of Malaysia
• Segi College
• Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin
• Universiti Malaysia Kelantan
• Limkokwing University of Creative Technology
• KDU College
• Selangor International Islamic University College
• Sunway University College
• Malaysia Theological Seminary
• Malaysia University of Science & Technology
• Olympia College Malaysia
• Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus
• Malaysian Institute of Management
• University of Malaya Medical Center

Walau dimanapun kedudukan ranking universiti anda,apa yang penting, adalah ilmu yang anda belajar.

Ranking sesuatu universiti hanyalah satu faktor.

Bagaimana anda mengaplikasi ilmu yang anda pelajari,adalah lebih penting.

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