From Ewan McIntosh:

In the classrooms in which I work, students explore the twenty or so themes upon which our planet really depends, immerse themselves in the ideas and information their teachers, peers and whole communities can impart, find the problems they feel are worth solving, theorise which ones will work and then try them out in a prototype.

In their world, we don’t just write an essay or create yet another wiki or blog to describe what our idea is, but we actually build the solution to the problem with our own hands – in this case, these seven year olds built the world’s youngest TEDxKids event, and talked about their research and solutions to some of the world’s most pressing – or simply most interesting – problems. Do animals talk? Do babies have a secret language? Which cancer should we invest in curing first? Why do slugs needs slime?

• Excerpts from TEDxLondon: The Problem Finders
• Ewan McIntosh’s Education Blog
• TEDxSunderland
• Rhiannon | Do Animals Have a Secret Language?

Ewan McIntosh is a teacher, speaker and investor. He was Scotland’s first National Advisor on Learning and Technology Futures and a member of the Channel 4 New Media Education Advisory Board.

From Brain Pickings:

Creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came before, and that we create by taking existing pieces of inspiration, knowledge, skill and insight that we gather over the course of our lives and recombining them into incredible new creations…

In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles…

The more [LEGO] building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our castles will become. Because if we only have one color and one shape, it greatly limits how much we can create, even within our one area of expertise…

Much of Buddhist philosophy centers around [the] balance between what’s being phrased as “intention” and “attention” – our intentional curiosity about knowledge and growth, and our choice of where to focus our awareness, what to pay attention to.

So that, I think, is the role of information curators: They are our curiosity sherpas, who lead us to things we didn’t know we were interested in until we, well, until we are. Until we pay attention to them — because someone whose taste and opinion we trust points us to them, and we integrate them with our existing pool of resources, and they become a part of our networked knowledge and another LEGO piece in our combinatorial creativity.

• Excerpts from: Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity

“In the 1970s, DIY spread through the North American population of college- and recent-college-graduate age groups. In part, this movement involved the renovation of affordable, rundown older homes. But it also related to various projects expressing the social and environmental vision of the 1960s and early 1970s. The young visionary Stewart Brand, working with friends and family, and initially using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, published the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog (subtitled Access to Tools) in late 1968….

“The Catalog’s publication both emerged from and spurred the great wave of experimentalism, convention-breaking, and do-it-yourself attitude of the late 1960s. Often copied, the Catalog appealed to a wide cross-section of people in North America and had a broad influence. …

“In the 1970s, when home video (VCRs) came along, DIY instructors quickly grasped its potential for demonstrating processes by audio-visual means. In 1979, This Old House, starring Bob Vila, premiered on PBS and started the DIY television revolution. The show was immensely popular, educating people on how to improve their living conditions (and the value of their house) without the expense of paying someone to do it.”

• Excerpts from Wikipedia
• See also Autodidacticism and Edupunk

“Warriors … follows the adventures of four Clans of wild cats in their forest homes…. The New Forest in southern England was the base for the forest where the original series took place. Other influential locations include Loch Lomond, the Scottish Highlands and the Forest of Dean.

“Authors that [have inspired the series editors and writers include] Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, Shakespeare, J. K. Rowling, and Enid Blyton. Major themes in the series include forbidden love, nature versus nurture, the reactions of different faiths meeting each other, and characters being a mix of good and bad.”

Excerpts from Wikipedia